Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 369

so slight, so sweet,

so simple a word as love.

Something deeper, something more mysterious than this love sustains her: a
sense that some greater destiny awaits her. And so at the close she is able to
utter a fair and balanced judgment of their troubles, with the perception that
the cause of the disaster might be found in her own nature, which had to
guard her poetical and her sexual qualities against the power of a soldier-
husband and a fellow poet:

It was not chastity that made me wild, but fear

that my weapon, tempered in different heat,

was over-matched by yours, and your hand

skilled to wield death-blows, might break

With the slightest turn—no ill will meant—

my own lesser, yet still somewhat fine-wrought,

fiery-tempered, delicate, over-passionate steel. (CP,175–79)

The prophetic stance of the Pythoness is not often found again in the
poems that H.D. published during the 1920s, though sometimes, as in “Demeter”
or “Cassandra,” it powerfully appears. It is not until Red Roses for Bronze(1931)
that H.D. showed persistent attempts to strike the prophetic stance, in poems that
carry the technique of repetition to an extreme, first in translations from the
choruses of Greek tragedy, as in this version from The Bacchae:

O which of the gifts of the gods

is the best gift?

this,

this,

this,

this;

escape from the power of the hunting pack,

and to know that wisdom is best

and beauty

sheer holiness.

Hard,

hard it is to wake the gods,