Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 383

This is all preliminary: the secret is not yet found; the quest must
continue, as the wordplay upon the name Osirisin sections 40–42 makes
plain. “Osiris equates O-sir-is or O Sire is”:

O Sire, is this the path?

over sedge, over dune grass,

silently

sledge-runners pass.

O Sire, is this the waste?...

drawn to the temple gate, O, Sire,

is this union at last? (CP,540, 542)

The answer now comes in the second part, Tribute to the Angels(composed in
1944, published in 1945), a sequence wholly unified and sustained, moving
forward confidently under the guidance of Hermes Trismegistus, inventor of
language, father of alchemy, founder of Egyptian culture; and with the
support of the Book of Revelation, in which she boldly and wittily finds her
role as prophet justified:

I John saw. I testify;

if any man shall add

God shall add unto him the plagues,

but he that sat upon the thronesaid,

I make all things new.(CP,548–49)

H.D. is remembering how the author of the Book of Revelation emerges in
his own voice at the very end: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the
words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things,
God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book”—thus
denying future prophets any function. But the poet prefers to take her stand
upon the words of Jesus himself, earlier in the book: “And he that sat upon
the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write:
for these words are true and faithful” (Rev. 21:5). And so, with this
encouragement, she writes her own prophecy. But, as Susan Gubar points
out, her prophecy of hope and redemption is utterly different from “the
severity and punishing cruelty of John’s apocalypse.” “While John sings the