Modern American Poetry

(^370) Louis L. Martz
but once awake,
hard,
hard,
hard is the lot
of the ignorant man ... (CP,227)
This effort to achieve something like the ritual effect of a Greek chorus
apparently led to the same technique in her own independent “Choros
Sequence: from Morpheus”:
I live,
I live,
I live,
you give me that:
this gift of ecstasy
is rarer,
dearer
than any monstrous pearl
from tropic water;
I live,
I live,
I live ... (CP,263)
In an earlier essay I said, “This is pitiful, grasping for a response the words
cannot command.” But I agree with Gary Burnett’s view that this “pattern is
so pervasive and so carefully pursued” that the above “characterization of it
seems inadequate.”^8 It would be better to say that this pervasive technique is
a manifestation of H.D.’s effort to create the effect of “the Pythoness”
standing by the altar, intense and trembling, waiting for a message from
below the temple floor. The technique is not successful in many poems in
this volume because it is simply too obvious; but where it is restrained, as in
“In the Rain,” “Chance Meeting,” or, significantly, “Trance,” the poems
work. Perhaps it was H.D.’s own dissatisfaction with Red Roses for Bronzethat
led her to include near the close her “Epitaph”; but we must note that this is
immediately followed by a concluding poem, “The Mysteries: Renaissance
Choros,” a controlled and successful poem, with the word Renaissance
suggesting both a new era of culture and a time for personal rebirth under
the power of the religious faith and figure represented in the “voice” that
speaks out of the dark turbulence of the opening section: “peace / be still”—
the words of Christ that calm the storm at sea (Mark 4:39). The poem