Modern American Poetry

(^376) Louis L. Martz
god of poetry and the goddess of wisdom combine to ensure the future of
Athens, city of Ion, son of Kreousa by Apollo, and thus ensure the beginning of
a great new era, Ionian culture, after a time of sterility, doubt, hatred, and
attempted murder. The message to the modern world is this: it can happen
again, as H.D. explains when she writes here of “the woman who is queen
[Kreousa] and almost goddess, who now in her joy wishes to be nothing but the
mother of Ion; the mother, if she but knew it, of a new culture, of an aesthetic
drive and concentrated spiritual force, not to be reckoned with, in terms of any
then known values; hardly, even to-day, to be estimated at its true worth.”^14 She
then makes explicit the application to the world of the present time, 1937:
Let not our hearts break before the beauty of Pallas Athené.
No; she makes all things possible for us. The human mind today
pleads for all; nothing is misplaced that in the end may be
illuminated by the inner fire of abstract understanding; hate, love,
degradation, humiliation, all, all may be examined, given due
proportion and dismissed finally, in the light of the mind’s vision.
Today, again at a turning-point in the history of the world, the
mind stands, to plead, to condone, to explain, to clarify, to
illuminate; and, in the name of our magnificent heritage of that
Hellenic past, each one of us is responsible to that abstract reality;
silver and unattainable yet always present, that spirit again stands
holding the balance between the past and the future. What now
will we make of it? (Ion,113)
She adds a parable: the story of how, after the Persians had burned Athene’s
temple on the Acropolis and reduced her sacred olive tree to a charred
stump, one devotee had climbed the Acropolis and found this:
Close to the root of the blackened, ancient stump, a frail silver
shoot was clearly discernible, chiselled as it were, against that
blackened wood; incredibly frail, incredibly silver, it reached
toward the light. Pallas Athené, then, was not dead. Her spirit
spoke quietly, a very simple message....
Today? Yesterday? Greek time is like all Greek miracles. Years
gain no permanence nor impermanence by a line of curious
numbers; numerically 1920, 1922 and again (each time, spring)
1932, we touched the stem of a frail sapling, an olive-tree, growing
against the egg-shell marble walls of the Erechtheum. (Ion,115)