H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 371continues with allusions to the Gospels, especially to the parables, combining
these with allusions to the pagan mystery cults as the “voice” concludes:
The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass
I multiply,
renew and bless
Iacchus in the vine....I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.(CP,305)This concluding poem of 1931 is closely linked, both in style and in
subject, with the poem “Magician” (Christ is called a “magician” in the
second section of “The Mysteries”), published in an obscure magazine (Seed)
in January 1933, two months before H.D. began her treatments with Freud.
This poem is spoken in the person of a disciple of Christ who has heard his
words and witnessed his miracles, and who now places reliance, not upon the
symbols of the Crucifixion, but upon the images of nature that appear in the
parables: nature as a channel toward the divine. Both the ending of Red Roses
for Bronzeand “Magician” show that H.D. had not utterly lost her creative
powers when she sought help from Freud. She was capable of writing well,
and Freud seems to have realized that her condition did not require the sort
of deep analysis that would occupy years. A few months of advice would, and
did, suffice to bring forth an immense surge of creative power, represented
in “The Dancer” triad and in the completion of her long-contemplated
version of the Ionof Euripides, published in 1937.
What was it that Freud helped her to discover? The first part of her
Tribute to Freud, Writing on the Wall,provides the clue in the vision, or
hallucination, that gives this part its title. The vision consists of three
pictures.
The first was head and shoulders, three-quarter face, no marked
features, a stencil or stamp of a soldier or airman.... It was a