Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 387

she carries a book but it is not

the tome of the ancient wisdom,

the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages

of the unwritten volume of the new ...

she is Psyche, the butterfly,

out of the cocoon. (CP,570)

She is the creative consciousness of the prophetic voice, represented by this

poet, writing amid ruin, but reaching out toward the future, predicting its

redemption, exulting in the victory of life over death.

The redemptive quality of the female presence is continued in the third
part, The Flowering of the Rod(composed in 1944, published in 1945), where
the poet creates a new fable of redemption by her story of how Mary
Magdalen gained from Kaspar, one of the Magi, the alabaster jar from which
she anointed the feet of Christ. The fable places great emphasis upon the
radiance of “her extraordinary hair,” which, the reader knows, she used to
dry the feet of Christ. Thus the Magdalen stands forth as a figure that is both
sensuous and spiritual, with the fragrance from the ointment in the jar
suggesting the same combination of sensuous and spiritual experience.^21
This is a tale, as the opening sections make clear, that reaches out now to
cover all the “smouldering cities” of Europe—not only London, but other
“broken” cities that need renewal, in other lands. It is a universal myth of
forgiveness and healing, a parable like that of the grain of mustard seed:

the least of all seeds

that grows branches

where the birds rest;

it is that flowering balm,

it is heal-all,

everlasting;

it is the greatest among herbs

and becometh a tree.(CP,585)

This is told in a manner that in places resembles a children’s story—but then