Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 385

prepared to realize the miracle happening in the outer world, which now in
May (Maia) is re-creating itself in the same subtle hues:

tell me, in what other place

will you find the may flowering

mulberry and rose-purple?

tell me, in what other city

will you find the may-tree

so delicate, green-white, opalescent

like our jewel in the crucible?

....
the outer precincts and the squares
are fragrant ... (CP,557)

Thus inner world and outer world share in this power of re-creation.
In this spirit of discovery the first half of the sequence reaches a climax
as she crosses a “charred portico,” enters “a house through a wall,” and then
sees “the tree flowering; / it was an ordinary tree / in an old garden-
square”—a tree “burnt and stricken to the heart,” yet flowering. This was
actual, “it was not a dream / yet it was vision, / it was a sign”:

a half-burnt-out apple-tree

blossoming;

this is the flowering of the rood,

this is the flowering of the wood ... (CP,558–61)

But now the dream follows, to create a higher climax, out of a dream
interpreted in ways that she had learned from Freud to trust. Instead of one
of the seven angels of the poem, “the Lady herself” has appeared (CP,564).
But who was this Lady? Was she the Virgin Mary, as painted in the
Renaissance with all her grace and glory and “damask and figured
brocade”?

We have seen her

the world over