H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 373poems? “The Pythian pronounces,” she declares in the opening poem of the
Trilogy, the prologue written in tercets, after which all is written in
couplets.)^10
Now in section 36 we come to the most revealing utterance:
We can read my writing,^11 the fact that there was writing, in
two ways or in more than two ways. We can read or translate it as
a suppressed desire for forbidden ‘signs and wonders,’ breaking
bounds, a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important
anyway, megalomania they call it—a hidden desire to ‘found a
new religion’ which the Professor ferreted out in the later Moses
picture. Or this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the
artist’s mind, a pictureor an illustrated poem, taken out of the
actual dream or daydream content and projected from within ...
(TTF,51)The “Moses picture” is the vision dealt with in section 25, the dream of “the
Princess” who descends the stairs to find a baby “in the water beside me,” in
a “shallow basket or ark or box or boat.” It is an image drawn from the Doré
Bible, an illustration of the finding of Moses.
The Professor and I discuss this picture. He asks if it is I, the
Dreamer, who am the baby in the reed basket? I don’t think I
am.... The Professor thinks there is a child Miriam, half concealed
in the rushes; do I remember? I half remember. Am I, perhaps, the
child Miriam? Or am I, after all, in my fantasy, the baby? Do I
wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of
my being, to be the founder of a new religion? (TTF,37)Is it this “new religion” that, as she says in her poem to “The
Master,” Freud has “set me free / to prophesy?” If so, of what does this
“religion” consist? It would include, first of all, the Greek elements
represented in her earlier poems and also in some of the poems that
apparently derive from the 1930s, “Delphi” and “Dodona,” where she
seeks the elusive presences of Apollo and Zeus. It would include,
eminently, the declaration of female equality and power represented in
her eloquent poem “The Dancer,” published in 1935 and perhaps based
on her memories of a performance by Isadora Duncan, whose Greek and
erotic modes of dancing seem to lie behind the poem. The use of the
Greek term for “rose” or “red”—rhodo—in repeated addresses to