Book Chapter 5 MARCH 14, Tuesday. 1961 (1963) 1. Without thought, inventionyou would not have been, O Sword. “Rails gone (for guns),” the poem begins, with the officers of the State, in the name of the War Effort, taking over all the conditions of personal reality into their own use, “from your (and my) old town square.” With the declaration of war in the modern state, which claims to represent the authority of the people, the means and ends of the war become the ultimate reality (as in the interim between wars, which we call “Peace,” to face reality means to accept and work with the terms of the dominant mercantile capitalistic and usurious system). The critical contempt that met H.D.’s War Trilogy was in part the contempt of the Protestant ethic for womanish ways, and back of that the old war between the Father and his hero-sons and the heathen realm of the Mothers, anticipated by H.D. in the “they snatched off our amulets, / charms are not, they said, grace” theme introduced in The Walls Do Not Fall, ii.
