Modern American Poetry

(^364) Louis L. Martz
Why, then, did the term cling to her poetry? Partly because H.D.
continued to support the movement after Pound had given it over to Amy
Lowell; partly too because the critical and poetical currents of the 1920s and
1930s, under the influence of Eliot and Pound and T.E. Hulme, were
violently reacting against romanticism and were insisting upon the need for
terse, compact poetry, rich in imagistic inference but spare in abstraction and
exclamation. Thus the concentrated imagery of poems such as “Pear Tree”
or “Sea Rose” seemed to represent her essence, and her passionate protest
against the “Sheltered Garden” could be overlooked, along with some of the
longer poems in her first volume, Sea Garden(1916), that show her reaching
beyond Imagism toward the development of a prophetic voice more akin to
Shelley than to Pound or Eliot. Her stance as prophetess has of course been
widely recognized, especially by Susan Stanford Friedman in her classic book
of 1981.^3 Here I wish to explore the development of this prophetic voice
throughout her career.
Her early poem “Sea Gods,” for example, protests against
contemporary tendencies to deny the supernatural:
They say you are twisted by the sea,
you are cut apart
by wave-break upon wave-break,
that you are misshapen by the sharp rocks,
broken by the rasp and after-rasp.
But in the second section of the poem she pays tribute to the sea gods by gifts
of violets of every kind, violets as the symbols of love. And then the third
section concludes in a style of ritual, liturgical repetition that foreshadows
the style of “The Dancer” in the 1930s:
For you will come,
you will yet haunt men in ships,
you will trail across the fringe of strait
and circle the jagged rocks.
You will trail across the rocks
and wash them with your salt ...
For you will come,
you will come,
you will answer our taut hearts,