Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 375

the Pythian strings

to slay sorrow. (CP,446)

The assertion of female integrity is closely related to her sessions with Freud,
as she makes clear by including an even more fervent celebration of the
Dancer in the middle of her poem to “The Master,” with its erotic allusion
to “red” and “rose’’:

there is purple flower

between her marble, her birch-tree white

thighs,

or there is a red flower

there is a rose flower

parted wide,

as her limbs fling wide in dance

ecstatic

Aphrodite,

there is a frail lavender flower

hidden in grass;

O God, what is it,

this flower

that in itself had power over the whole earth?

for she needs no man,

herself

is that dart and pulse of the male,

hands, feet, thighs,

herself perfect. (CP,456)

This, then, is yet another element in her “new religion.” But there is a
more inclusive message in her prophecy, as set forth in the one volume of
poetry that H.D. published between 1931 and 1944: her version of the Ionof
Euripides, published at last in 1937, after years of pondering the play. Here
the poetry is constantly interspersed with a prose commentary that is indeed
inseparable from the verse, for the prose makes plain the prophetic purpose
behind her choice of this particular drama—one she had worked with even
during the years of World War I.
Ionis a drama that deals with the reconciliation of Apollo with Athene: the