22 September 1957

55 Cholmley Gardens, N.W.6

Dear H.D.,

On my return from Ireland I found your *Selected Poems* awaiting me - a wonderful birthday gift. With the greatest pleasure I sat down to renew my friendship with some of your old poems, and also to meet for the first time a number that turned out to be new to me. Among the latter are

Erige Cor Tuum ad Me in Caelum And Pergamos
Callypso Speaks Fair the Thread Hymn Fire, Flood & Olive-Tree O Love Cease
The Moon in Your Hands Georgius Sanctus Scribe Sigil

Have any of these appeared in volume form before? I especially like *Scribe* and *Sigil* (though I don't think I understand the significance of the titles).

Some years ago I made my own selection of your poems from the Collected Edition of 1925. This list may perhaps interest you. In many cases, as you will see, my choice is the same as in the published selection.

Midday The Contest
Evening Sheltered Garden
Loss Garden (II)
Sea Violet Storm
The Pool Chorus of the Women of Chalkis
Leda The Islands
Centaur Song At Ithaca
Lethe Charioteer
The Bird Chorus from Ion

I see that I've also marked excerpts from She Rebukes Hippolyta and Towards the Piraeus. This raises a difficult point - how far is one justified in making extracts from a long poem?

In the case of your published selection, this problem is intensified by the comparatively generous space given to excerpts from *The Walls Do Not Fall*, *Tribute to the Angels*, and *The Flowering of the Rod* and *Rosemary*. Insofar as these may lead new readers to decide they must acquaint themselves with the complete poems I think they are justified. But, nevertheless,

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I have the feeling that to accept these excerpts is to condone
a principle of mutilation.

I speak with some hesitation because, except
in the case of _Good Frend_, I've never been able to satisfy my-
self that I really understand the organisation of your
full-length poems (i.e. the three O.U.P. war volumes).
I realise from the way you've numbered the sections that
you've built them up, not like Eliot's Quartets according to
a kind of symphonic form, but on the analogy of the suite or
the cycle with its different numbers, sometimes juxtaposed
for reasons of variety and contrast, and sometimes following
each other according to some cyclic principle. It's my own
fault that I've failed to understand the full compulsion and
significance of these three long poems; but at least I have
an inkling of the way in which they are dovetailed together
and each single one exploits and develops its counterpoint
series of images. In this connection I'd like to say that
I think the last few lines of _The Walls Do Not Fall_ are among
the finest you've written, and I was indeed sorry to find them
missing from the published selection.

Here are a few small typographical points
that I've noticed:-(a) Misprints - Ithica for Ithaca on
pp. 6 & 49. Euripides for Euripides on p. 62. (b) Omission(?)
On p. 62 I miss two lines from the end of Ion's first period

back, back to your nest
on Parnassus

Have you decided to cut them? I hope not!

On rereading this letter I feel it implies a
somewhat carping spirit. It's not meant to, my dear H.D., at
all. I'm a true devotee of your poems, and whether I read
them in the original volumes or in selection they give me
increasing pleasure. And for that I thank you - now and always.

Yours ever

P.S. I hope the '22 Keys of the Tarot' has arrived safely.

Mrs H. D. Aldnigton
Villa Vérona
Küsnacht - bei Zürich
Seeshasse 174

Switzerland

3 January 1960

Telephone: Hampstead 2855

55 CHOLMLEY GARDENS, N.W.6.

Dear H.D.,

A happy New Year to you! This has been a particularly enjoyable Christmas from my point of view. Quite apart from the pleasure of being with Dodo and Sarah - Sarah now in her first year at Leeds University, reading chemistry, mathematics, and keeping Russian in reserve - I've laid out a rather special gift of money on books for myself. Rather extravagantly, I bought a first edition of the 1678 quarto of Nahum Tate's *Brutus of Alba*, which is specially interesting to me as this tragedy is the forerunner of the *Dido & Aeneas* libretto he wrote for Purcell about 12 years later. And then, on a chance visit to the Bodley Head (now a bookshop) a few days ago, I was lucky enough to capture several of your earlier volumes - the 1919 Egoist edition of your translations from *Iphigeneia in Aulis* and the *Hippolytus*, the Cape 1924 edition of *Heliodora*, the 1926 Contact edition

of *Palimpsest* neatly bound in gaily patterned boards, and
the 1946 OUP edition of *The Flowering of the Rod*, which
for some reason or other I'd missed when it was first pub-
lished.

I've not read *Palimpsest* yet. *Heliodora* and the Greek translations I already know from the 1925 American edition of your *Collected Poems*, which you gave me years ago in Burier. *The Flowering of the Rod* I've read for the first time with mounting excitement. It's most extraordinary how after the broken lyrical soliloquies of the first eleven sections, the Mary narrative and the Kaspar narrative take over and carry the reader through the rest of the poem at quite a different speed - *molto piu allegro*, almost *con slancio*!

Having read *The Flowering of the Rod*, I've turned back and reread *The Walls Do Not Fall* and *Tribute to the Angels*; and now I can appreciate much better the way one poem grows out of the other and, while interlocking, each manages to preserve a distinct character of its own.

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archives. "Musical archives?" said I. "What exactly do
you mean?" So they explained further that the Moravians
were great musicians, and the archives consisted of about
10,000 musical autograph MSS divided between Bethlehem and
Salem, some of them original works, and others copies of
contemporary European compositions.

I was so fascinated that I said I must go
the next morning to visit the Moravian Music Foundation,
which I did, and there I met the Director, a most interesting
person called Donald Mc Corkle. He told me the full story
of the Moravians and their music and the archives, and gave
me a lot of very interesting printed literature that I brought
away with me. What particularly caught my imagination,
however, was the story of the first American composer, a man
called John Antes.

John Antes was born in Frederick, Montgomery
County, Pennsylvania in 1740. (The surname is a Greek
translation of "von Blume", the correct name of the family
until it was changed by an ancestor to avoid persecution
during the Thirty Years War.) John's father Heinrich was
largely responsible for the establishment of the Moravians
(Unitas Fratrum) in Pennsylvania. In 1752 John entered
the boys' school in Bethlehem; and the same year his father
journeyed with a group of Moravians to choose a site for
the settlement in North Carolina. (This ultimately became
Salem.)

When he was 24, John went to Herrnhut in
Saxony, the international centre of the Moravians, and
from there to Neuwied to undertake a four-years apprentice-
ship in watch-making. He was ordained into the Moravian
ministry in 1769; and then went to Egypt (Cairo) as a
missionary. In 1779 he was captured by the henchmen of
Osman Bey and when he refused to comply with the Bey's
demands for gold he was subjected to a ruthless and merciless

13 November 1960

55 Cholmley Gardens, N.W.6

Dear H.D.,

I know I wrote to you shortly after meeting
Perdita and John in New York and Norman Holmes Pearson in
New Haven: but did I tell you about my contact with the
Moravians in North Carolina? I can't remember; and in case
I didn't, I would like to now.

A fortnight of my trip in the United States was
under the auspices of the State Department, as they agreed
to look on me as a distinguished foreign visitor, and of
this period my first week was based on Washington, D.C.,
and my second on New York City. From Washington, I made a
brief excursion to North Carolina, because I wanted to see
something of the local Arts Council's activities in
Winston-Salem, and also their newly built Arts Community
Center. I won't bother you with details of that part of
the visit, although I met the most charming people and was
made the recipient of splendid hospitality. But in the course
of my brief 28 hours visit to Winston-Salem I made the sort
of stupid remark that every English visitor makes sooner or
later - I said "Tell me about your Salem witches". They
answered pityingly that _that_ Salem was in New England about
1000 miles north and that _their_ Salem was an 18th century
Moravian foundation.

"What does that mean?" I asked; and they explained
that in the mid 18th century a number of Moravian settlers
had moved south from Bethlehem to North Carolina and founded
a new town.

"Bethlehem" of course rang an H.D. bell with me:
so I said "Tell me more", and they explained that they could
show me the original Moravian houses in Salem carefully
preserved, and they added by way of afterthought that there
was a Moravian Musical Foundation with important musical

19 March 1961

55 Cholmley Gardens, N.W.6

Dear H.D.,

What a very remarkable story Delia Alton's *The Mystery* is -- with its Jesuitical, Moravian, Bohemian, Gypsy, political and alchemical threads all snarled up in a wonderfully tangled ball! I found it extremely difficult to read as a connected narration in time sequence, but fascinating to follow the different threads as they tease the reader by appearing for a moment -- promptly to disappear just as he thinks he has caught one and is about to unravel it!

It was the Moravian thread that naturally interested me most closely. I was fascinated by the *marry* references to Goethe early in the story -- I knew that Goethe had written about the Moravians, but I've not yet read the various passages in *Werther*, or *Wilhelm Meister*, or wherever it is they occur -- and I was equally interested in the references to the Moravian settlers in America (Pennsylvania) and their Indian converts. Delia Alton must have done a great deal of research into Moravian customs and missionary endeavour before she wrote the story. Did she go to Prague to pursue the various Bohemian clues, I wonder? and did she have access to some of the early Moravian records of settlement in North America?

I was interested by the names in the story. Some of the characters, like Count Zinzendorf, seemed to be historical. I wondered whether the others were fictional.

And then three days ago I found myself in Yorkshire. Having a free morning last Thursday, I took the bus from Leeds to Pudsey and visited the Moravian Church and School (separate buildings for boys and girls) at Fulneck. I was shown some old letters and papers referring to the School (18th and 19th centuries) stuffed in a cupboard together with Victorian penny tracts and more recent cricket score books in the headmaster's study, and given a copy of a history of the School published in 1953 to celebrate its bicentenary. There I read how in 1743 Count Zinzendorf visited Pudsey and fixed on Fulneck as the site for the new Moravian settlement in England. He commissioned a local Church of England preacher to buy the estate; and in a few years time the Chapel, School, a cloth 'manufactory' and several houses for the brethren were built. The first headmaster was George Traneker, the second Benjamin LaTrobe, and the third -- and doubtless Delia Alton knew all about this! -- was Count Dohna (1768-76).

Well, my dear H.D., I've read *The Mystery* with

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great enjoyment: but Dodo hasn't had time to yet. Would
you allow me to keep the TS a little longer so that Dodo
can read it too, or would you rather I returned it to you
without delay?

I have the feeling that my Swiss visit is
off this spring. The Hurlimanns are both flying to Japan
for the big Book Exhibition at Tokio, and I think they
are about to leave at any moment now. Monsieur Daniel
Simond of Lausanne with whom I've been corresponding (on
Bryher's introduction) about C.F. Ramuz and Stravinsky
has gone away for the Easter holidays -- possibly to
Sardinia, as he seems to be writing a book about the island.
And I have the feeling that you may take flight at any
moment for New York. So, even if I could get away, it
looks as if hardly any of the people I want to see will
be in Switzerland.

And in any case, I don't think I can get
away from the office at the moment, as Dodo and I have
made plans to go to Greece for three weeks in May. We're
flying to Athens on May 18th, and we're going to spend
three weeks there altogether -- a week on Mykonos, and
the rest of the time in Athens, or touring the mainland
to Mycenae, Olympia, Delphi and the usual sites. Isn't
it exciting? I've not been there since 1938. Have you been
to Mykonos yourself -- and Delos? You probably know all
the isles, all the isles of Greece.

Best love to you from us all -- and give
my love to Bryher if you see her.

Yours ever,

Light like a portent in the sky
And shadows in the hollow of the skull;
Images that flicker
On the walls of bone;
Fragments of shattered wisdom, scattered
From the heights of Sinai,
Or the oracle of Delphos,
Or by the lowly banks of Avon—
Who shall collect and recollect
Those ancient images,
Those ideas that once were living flesh
Clothing their skeletons of words?
Who shall claim and reclaim
Those flowers,

Those lost and lovely names that
course like chimes,
*Rosemary, Claribel, Perdita,
Claribel, Rosemary...*
The mystic unity of the brethren?

Your finger-tips have touched the tesserae;
Your fingers have arranged them in a new mosaic;
You have brought wisdom and beauty
Out of the old disorder.

And the unusual light that once
Shone over Moravian Bethlehem
Has now become our usual star.

E.W.W.