Modern American Poetry

(^380) Louis L. Martz
my bride
Delia of Miletus. (CP,376)
They do not know the prophet within the priestess, for this lover, though no
doubt he had his human counterparts, is surely here the god of poetry and
prophecy—Apollo.
Gary Burnett has argued that this poem represents an answer to D.H.
Lawrence,^16 and in a sense this may be so, for Lawrence had spoken sarcastically
of her “virtue” and her “spiritual” being.^17 But this poem, and others, such as
“Eurydice,” “Toward the Piraeus,” and the “Amaranth” triad, do not derive their
power from the identification of any single person who may have been the
poem’s point of origin. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar say, such poems as
these transcend their local origins by showing how the speakers “struggle with
roles to which they have been consigned because of the male poet’s ‘glance.’”
“While H.D. brooded upon Pound’s or Lawrence’s mastery in the first two
decades of her long career, she confronted the empowering glamour and the
painful frigidity brought about by her absorption with her male peers and by her
dread that artistry itself somehow required ruthless strategies of
objectification.”^18 The struggle of woman to assert her independent integrity in
the face of male misunderstanding, betrayal, or demand for submission underlies
her entire career, reaching a climax in Trilogyand Helen in Egypt.
Freud and her poems of the 1930s thus led the way toward Trilogy,her
long wartime work completed in December 1944—the best original poetry
of her career.^19 Trilogyis sometimes called epic, but I wonder whether this is
the right term. This work, like the later Helen in Egypt,seems rather to
belong to the genre of prophecy, because it consists of a sequence of short
lyric or meditative utterances, presenting a series of voices and visions amid
the ruins of bombed London, where H.D. spent those wartime years. The
first part, The Walls Do Not Fall(composed in 1942, published in 1944),
presents a series of experiments in responding to the danger and the bravery
of the scene, a sequence firmly grounded at beginning and end in the actual
experience of the bombing:
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case ...
the bone-frame was made for
no such shock knit within terror,
yet the skeleton stood up to it ...