Modern American Poetry

H.D.: Set Free to Prophesy 391

All this is quite in accord with the dual meaning of the work that H.D.
suggested later on in the letter to Norman Pearson just cited. There she says
that her poem has both “exoteric” meaning related to “all war-problems ... as
well as being strictly INNER and esoteric and personal.” That is to say, the
imagery of war suggests the problems raised by war for all mankind down
through the ages, along with the personal problems that such wars inevitably
cause for individual lives, and caused, as we know, for H.D. herself, witness
of two wars. Helen has taken within herself the sufferings of the whole war-
stricken world:

mine, the great spread of wings,

the thousand sails,

the thousand feathered darts

that sped them home,

mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,

the thousand-and-one, mine. (H,25)

To say that Helen speaks throughout as the prophet or priestess of Isis would
be to sum up the meaning of the work; for Isis, that benevolent, creative
goddess, was known throughout the Mediterranean world as the “Goddess
of many names.” For H.D., in this poem, her name is Helen.^24

NOTES

1. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska,21.


2. See Cyrena N. Pondrom, “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism.”


3. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.,esp. 74–75. Like everyone who has written
   on H.D. in recent years, I am deeply indebted to the insights contained in this book,
   especially with regard to Trilogyand Helen in Egypt.For an account of H.D. as a poet
   pursuing a quest for transcendence and redemption throughout her career, see the
   important but neglected study by Angela DiPace Fritz, Thought and Vision: A Critical
   Reading of H.D.’s Poetry.For H.D. as “a visionary poet” see Alicia Ostriker, “The Poet as
   Heroine: Learning to Read H.D.” At a June 1996 conference in Orono, Maine, Ostriker
   demonstrated the continuance of the tradition of Hebrew prophecy by drawing a parallel
   between Allen Ginsberg and the prophet Jeremiah.


4. H.D., Collected Poems 1912–1944,ed. Louis L. Martz, 29–31. Quotations from
   H.D.’s poetry up through Trilogyare taken from this edition, hereafter cited as CP.


5. Pound, Literary Essays,3–5.


6. The typescript is in the H.D. Archive of the Beinecke Library, Yale University; see
   the introduction to CP,xiv.


7. For an account of these changes see the introduction and notes to CP,xiv–xviii,