Modern American Poetry

(^388) Louis L. Martz
one remembers that it is a Christmas tale, as the date at the end reminds us:
“December 18–31, 1944.”
Her use of the myth of Isis in the Trilogyleads on to the central image
(or Eidolon,as she calls it) of her longest and most difficult poem, Helen in
Egypt,published in the year of her death, 1961, but completed during the
early 1950s. It is a work of intermingled prose and poetry, like her version of
the Ionof Euripides. But here the prose sometimes presents a special
problem, for it often does not so much interpret the action of the poetry as
question and trouble it.
Feeling this effect, I once searched in H.D.’s manuscripts and
correspondence to find some evidence that the placing of these prose
“captions” at the head of each poem was not H.D.’s conception. But it was.
After the poetical sequence was complete, H.D. deliberately composed them
to go with each poem, and she directed their placement. In a letter to
Norman Pearson from Lugano on November 26, 1955, she says:
I have the captions, the captions for the recording gave me this
idea—and I think you will find that this whole set (no repeats
from recording-captions) does hold the poems together, explain
the at-times difficult ‘philosophy’ and put some of the
mythological matter on the map. I am sure that you will like the
set. I have asked Miss Woolford to leave broad white space
between each numbered caption, so that the pages can be cut and
each caption mounted BEFORE the poem, on a page facing the
same, as for later printer.^22
So there the captions are, and their presence creates a different work
from the purely poetical sequence that she originally composed. We are not
at liberty to ignore them. The question is: how do they function?
We may find an answer by remembering how often the prophetic
writings of the Bible, as in the Books of Isaiah or Jeremiah, intermingle
poetry and prose, with the effect that the prose creates a setting, or an
explanation, for the poem that follows. I do not mean to say that H.D.
consciously modeled her work on the writings of the biblical prophets,
although she knew those writings well. I mean only to suggest that this
analogy offers perhaps a key to the kindof work she was writing, and thus a
key to the way in which we might deal with her intermingling of poetry and
prose, here as well as in Ion.
First of all, we might regard Helen in Egyptas belonging to the genre of
prophecy. If we grant this we can perhaps see more clearly how the various