Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 367

And then the poem abruptly ends with what seems to be a tribute to the creative
achievement of the “boys” before they were sent to their destruction:

Could beauty be beaten out,—

O youth the cities have sent

to strike at each other’s strength,

it is you who have kept her alight. (CP,68)

The poem is hardly successful, although it shows a prophetic spirit
struggling for release into larger forms of poetry, such as the choruses from
Greek tragedy that H.D. was at this time publishing—examples that
encouraged her to pursue this ritual mode of utterance in her own verse.
H.D. was in fact at this very time writing long, much more powerful
poems: the sequence that in her typescript she calls “poems of The Islands
series”—dating from 1916 or 1917.^6 These poems all deal with the anguish
of a deserted woman, an Ariadne on Naxos, as in “The Islands”:

What are the islands to me

if you are lost,

what is Paros to me

if your eyes draw back,

what is Milos

if you take fright of beauty,

terrible, tortuous, isolated,

a barren rock? (CP,127)

The story is told at length in the triad preserved in her typescript: “Amaranth,”
“Eros,” and “Envy,” poems that leave no doubt that the sequence arises from
the infidelities of her husband, Richard Aldington. “The Islands” was published
in 1920, but the triad was never published complete during H.D.’s lifetime,
although in Heliodora(1924) she published truncated versions of these poems
under the guise of adaptations of fragments from Sappho—but carefully
separated and with all references to a male lover removed.^7 In her volume of
1924, following the truncated version of “Eros” she placed a poem that might
be taken to conclude “The Islands” series: “Toward the Piraeus.” The title,
referring to the port of Athens, suggests a poem written or conceived during the
curative voyage to Greece in 1920, as the poet ponders the disaster recorded in
the “Amaranth” triad. The poem opens with a prologue that fiercely denounces
the weakness of modern men, compared with the heroic Greeks: