Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 389

voices in the poem work—including the prose voices. As the example of the
Hebrew prophets indicates, it is the role of the prophet to hear voices and to
speak forth the words of those voices. The very word prophet,in Greek (as I
have noted earlier), means “one who speaks for another”—for God, for the
gods, or for other human beings.
From the opening poem in Helen in Egypt,H.D.’s Helen speaks with
the voice of a prophet, saying “in this Amen-temple” (the temple of Amen-
Ra, or Zeus-Ammon, in Egypt) she hears the “voices” of “the hosts / surging
beneath the Walls” of Troy, voices that cry

O Helen, Helen, Daemon that thou art,

we will be done forever

with this charm, this evil philtre,

this curse of Aphrodite;

so they fought, forgetting women,

hero to hero, sworn brother and lover,

and cursing Helen through eternity^23

But the next poem presents a voice of redemption, as Helen says,

Alas, my brothers,

Helen did not walk

upon the ramparts,

she whom you cursed

was but the phantom and the shadow thrown

of a reflection;

you are forgiven for I know my own,

and God for his own purpose

wills it so, that I

stricken, forsaken draw to me,

through magic greater than the trial of arms,

your own invincible, unchallenged Sire ... (H,5)

The poem is based on the alternate myth of Helen that Euripides used
in his play on this subject and that Richard Strauss used for his opera The