Modern American Poetry

(^374) Louis L. Martz
“Rhododendron” and “Rhodocleia” may relate to the well-known
reputation of Isadora as a “Red” after her stay in Moscow in 1920. In
American performances after this visit, in defiance of those who
denounced her, “Red” sympathies, she wore a red tunic and flourished a
red scarf.^12 It was perhaps her return from Moscow that led H.D. to open
the poem thus:
I came far,
you came far,
both from strange cities,
I from the west,
You from the east ... (CP,440)^13
Isadora’s revolutionary spirit and her free forms of dancing (“I worship
nature, / you are nature” H.D. says at the end of the poem’s first strophe)
seem to express what H.D. celebrates in this poem, seeing the dancer as a
true messenger of Apollo, who says to her:
“you are my arrow,
my flame;
I have sent you into the world;
beside you,
men may name
no other;
you will never die;
nor this one,
whom you see not,
sitting, sullen and silent,
this poet.” (CP,445)
But the poet does not remain silent: in the next strophe she flings forth
her plea:
O chaste Aphrodite,
let us-be wild and free.
let us retain integrity,
intensity,
taut as the bow