H.D. and Eurydice - woman author Hilda Doolittle; mythologic character

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Margaret Bruzelius

But in the last part of this section, Eurydice's paradox is made even more powerfully apparent, as she asserts that in her face the poet sees only the "reflex of the earth / hyacinth color / caught from the raw fissure in the rock / where the light struck, and the color of azure crocuses." Eurydice is lost, not because Orpheus wanted to see her in her "diurnal presence" but because she exists for him only as the reflection of the earth that she has now irrevocably lost in being seen. His gaze is a reflex, with all that word implies of mirroring and of uncontrollable movement, and betrays his relation to her as one based entirely and inevitably on woman-as-mirror - a relation in which Eurydice exists only as the fulfillment of his existence.

In the middle sections of the poem, Eurydice laments her inability to incorporate within herself the world of light. In a series of statements beginning with if - "if I could have taken . . . if I could have caught up . . . if once I could have breathed into myself" - Eurydice imagines that she might have incorporated enough of the "golden mass . . . the great fragrance" to have "dared the loss" - to have herself offered the sacrifice that Orpheus has ruthlessly exacted from her. She construes herself as an impossibly full object, overflowing with the light she has garnered from the lost surface of the earth: "if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, / if once I could have breathed into myself/the very golden crocuses / and the red . . . ." But implicit in this longing is its impossibility: the essence of the underworld is the absence of light. These two movements form an elegy for the lost possibility of Eurydice as herself actively incorporating - "breathing into [her]self" - the same nature that she reflects for Orpheus.(11)

The fifth and sixth sections return to the theme of the gaze and its fatal consequences. Orpheus is seen as entirely autonomous and as a bar to Eurydice's own perception of the light. In their progress up from the underworld, Orpheus has walked before her; at the end of the journey he finally "passes across the light," and it is this passage that prevents the light from reaching Eurydice. This idea of the artist - who controls the light and has, unlike the woman/object, a completely autonomous presence - is a model of hell. Eurydice asserts not only that living in a world in which she can be a victim of Orpheus's gaze is the same as being in hell - "such loss is no loss,/ . . . / such terror / is no loss; / hell is no worse than your earth" - but also that the world in which Orpheus is condemned to stray without her is also hell, even "though you pass among the flowers and speak / with the spirits above the earth." While Eurydice is the obvious victim of the false economy of the gaze, Orpheus is also sacrificed because he can only be Orpheus insofar as he and Eurydice collaborate on the work of art. In gazing at her, he has created himself in her image as a permanently alienated being.