Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 365

you will break the lie of men’s thoughts,

and cherish and shelter us.^4

Such a style is far removed from the terse style recommended by Pound in his
famous “Don’ts” for Imagists.^5 Other longer poems in Sea Gardenseem to defy
Pound’s demand for “economy of words” and his warning, “Go in fear of
abstractions.” In poems such as “The Cliff Temple” and the poem that
concludes the volume, “Cities,” we can feel the poet reaching toward some sort
of prophetic vision that needs a style of exhortation and exclamation, where
repetition of phrases serves to enforce the expression of a need or a hope:

Is our task the less sweet

that the larvae still sleep in their cells?

Or crawl out to attack our frail strength ...

Though they sleep or wake to torment

and wish to displace our old cells—

thin rare gold—

that their larvae grow fat—

is our task the less sweet—

Though we wander about,

find no honey of flowers in this waste,

is our task the less sweet—

who recall the old splendour,

await the new beauty of cities? (CP,41)

This prophetic sense of the decline of civilization along with a mission

to redeem is more strongly enforced in the ten-page poem “The Tribute,”

published in the Egoist in 1916—the same year in which Sea Garden

appeared. Using a Greek setting, the poem fiercely attacks the decay of

values in contemporary society in time of war, using throughout a technique

of repeating whole lines and phrases with liturgical, ritual effect:

Squalor spreads its hideous length

through the carts and the asses’ feet,

squalor coils and reopens

and creeps under barrow

and heap of refuse ...