Wash of Cold River -- H D

(Poem #893) Wash of Cold River Wash of cold river in a glacial land, Ionian water, chill, snow-ribbed sand, drift of rare flowers, clear, with delicate shell- like leaf enclosing frozen lily-leaf, camellia texture, older than a rose; wind-flower that keeps the breath of the north-wind -- these and none other; intimate thoughts and kind reach out to share the treasure of my mind, intimate hands and dear drawn garden-ward and sea-ward all the sheer rapture that I would take to mould a clear and frigid statue; rare, of pure texture, beautiful space and line, marble to grace your inaccessible shrine. -- H D

Notes:

Ionian: the Ionian Sea, an extension of the Mediterranean between Italy and
  Greece.
camellia: ornamental shrub with shiny leaves and bright flowers.
        -- http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hd7.html

Today's poem is, even for HD, an unusually beautiful one. The delicate,
crystalline images create an impression that is *clean* in every sense of
the word - pure, elegant, uncluttered, and, as the poet suggests,
fundamentally cold and lifeless - 'marble to grace your inaccessible shrine'.

The choice of imagery is interesting - the pellucid tones of wind and water
play against the living tints of camellia and rose, but the overall
impression is one of colourlessness. Looking closer, this is deliberate -
'camellia texture' draws attention away from its visual properties; 'older
than a rose' evokes images of pale, faded petals, so that, ultimately, the
impression is of colour being not merely absent but actually drained from a
scene in which it might otherwise have been expected.

Again, there is an overwhelming impression of *silence* - sound, like
colour, is an attribute of life, and one that has likewise been drained from
the scene, though more subtly. What is left is a vision of rare but frigid
beauty, almost dreamlike in its ethereal remoteness, and capturing perfectly
the twin attributes of attractiveness and inaccessibility.

-martin

Helen in Egypt -- H D

Guest poem submitted by David Wright, an excerpt
from:

(Poem #689) Helen in Egypt This is the spread of wings, whether the Straits claimed them or the Cyclades, whether they floundered on the Pontic seas or ran aground before the Hellespont, whether they shouted Victory at the gate, whether the bowmen shot them from the Walls, whether they crowded surging through the breach, or died of fever on the smitten plain, whether they rallied and came home again, in the worn hulks, half-rotted from the salt or sun-warped on the beach, whether they scattered or in companies, or three or two sought the old ways of home, whether they wandered as Odysseus did, encountering new adventure, they are one; no, I was not instructed, but I "read" the script, I read the writing when he seized my throat, this was his anger, they were mine, not his, the unnumbered host; mine, all the ships, mine, all the thousand petals of the rose, mine, all the lily-petals, 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 D

Lately I've been reading H.D.'s Helen in Egypt and very much enjoying it,
although I'm hard pressed to express why.  The book-length poem takes as its
subject a story that dates back at least as far as the sixth century Greek
lyric poet Stesichorus, and was the subject of a play by Euripides as well.
The story is an alternate version of the Troy legend in which Zeus placed a
phantom Helen upon the ramparts of Troy and kept the faithful wife safe in
Egypt until Menelaus retrieved her.  In H.D.'s version she has encounters
with the spirit of Achilles who comes limping onto the shore, (it is he that
seizes her throat in the passage above, although that is not where their
story ends), as well as with Theseus and Paris, who she does after all seem
to have run off with.

I'm sure there is much interesting matter to be found in the author's
biography, the effect of the post-war years, the relationship of the poem to
Pound's Cantos -- it is supposed to be something of a feminist response --
the layers of Woolf-y psychology or the author's symbols, and I expect it
would be easy to find all sorts of explication of the piece. H.D. has
provided her own explanation in short prose passages before each verse,
originally composed to aid in a recording of the piece, and making this a
very accessible poem to read, I think.

What has captured me is the language, which shares with much ancient Greek
lyric a spare directness combined with this enchanting, at times incantatory
power.  (I guess enchanting and incantatory are just French and Latin for
the same thing, eh?)  And her feel for rhythm, her respect for the pulse,
make this a pleasure to read aloud.  I don't read Greek myself, but I
understand ancient Greek is very plain and unadorned in comparison with
English, or English poetry, anyway.  The whole poem is suffused with mystic
longing and with Love-Death.  If you enjoy reading Homer, this is a
fascinating counterpart to it.

(I'll insert a plug for one of my other favorite modern poetic treatments of
an ancient epic, although it is an altogether different sort of thing, very
prosy and sardonic.  This is Jason & Medeia, by John Gardner, a wonderful
author who hardly anybody seems to read anymore.)

David Wright.

PS. Other poems by H. D. on the Minstrels:
"Oread" poem #310
"Helen" poem #449
The first of these has a biography, critical analysis, and links to other
Imagist poetry. The second kicks off a set of poems on the Trojan War, which
might be of interest read in conjunction which today's poem. - t.

Helen -- H D

This week's theme: the Trojan War.

(Poem #449) Helen All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles, hating it deeper still when it grows wan and white, remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees unmoved, God's daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feet and slenderest knees, could love indeed the maid, only if she were laid, white ash amid funereal cypresses. -- H D

Sometimes I think the true tragedy of the Iliad is not that of Hector,
an honourable man ensnared (by his own loyalty) on the wrong
side, but that of Helen - caught up in a conflict not of her own
making, both sides treating her as a pawn or a prize to be won, all
because of her (unasked-for) beauty...

Any number of poems have been written about the aforementioned
beauty (see the links section below, and, indeed, the remaining
poems for this week); HD, though, presents another perspective on
the matter. And like a good Imagist poem should, this poem
suggests far more than it says - it provokes pity as much as it
does awe, and it does both in a beautifully understated manner.
Nice.

thomas.

[Note on Construction]

This is not a completely irregular poem; there are rhymes, half-
rhymes and assonances, internal resonances, the glimmerings of a
stress pattern... through these, HD maintains a 'poetic' (no other
word fits) lightness and ease of expression, while steering clear of
the strict prosody which constrained most of her contemporaries.
And this lightness is (despite the seriousness of the poem)
perfectly suited to describing the greatest beauty of antiquity...
form and content meet once again.

Notice also the harshness of the first line of each stanza - 'All
Greece hates', 'All Greece reviles', 'Greece sees unmoved' - these
set the tone for the entire poem, and ensure that the descriptions
of Helen's beauty in the ensuing lines evoke pity rather than desire
or admiration. Again, skilfully done.

[Links]

The definitive poetic description of Helen of Troy is surely Marlowe's
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships" speech from Dr
Faustus; you can read it at poem #75

Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is another
famous evocation of time, distance and beauty (and a host of other
things beside; no amount of prose can do justice to the sheer
perfection of this poem); you can read it at poem #12

Yet another utterly wonderful poem on the same subject is
Tennyson's "Ulysses", which is archived at poem #121.
Tennyson's stock has gone down considerably since the 19th
century, but there's no question that for the sheer music of his
verse he has few rivals. And "Ulysses" is one of my favourite
poems, think what I may of Tennyson.

[Note on the Trojan War]

At first blush this would seem a remarkably abstruse theme - one
unlikely to supply even a single title, let alone three or four. But
such is Homer's place at the wellspring of Western culture that
there's no shortage of poems celebrating (or otherwise) this
seminal event. Enjoy!

Oread -- H D

Back after a much-needed vacation...

(Poem #310) Oread Whirl up, sea -- Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks; Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. -- H D

Hilda Doolittle published her first poems under the name H. D. Imagiste (the 'e'
was meant to suggest the French poets to whom Imagism owed such a debt). Later,
she dropped the artificial surname and wrote as just plain 'H. D.'.

'Oread' is probably H. D.'s most famous poem; it's certainly her most-quoted
work. I need hardly comment on the energy and intensity (bordering on violence,
sometimes) of the lines; what I find equally noteworthy is the simplicity of the
vocabulary - out of twenty-odd words, only two have more than one syllable.
This, of course, is perfectly in sync with the Imagist mantra "show, don't tell"
- it's no wonder that Pound and others considered 'Oread' to be among the purest
embodiments of their poetic ethos.

In later life, H. D. discarded (some would say 'grew out of') the Imagist mantle
she wore in her youth. Sometimes I wish she hadn't.

thomas.

[About 'Oread']

It is time to consider the poem [Ezra] Pound selected as the exemplar of
Vorticist poetry. "In painting - Kandinsky, Picasso," he wrote, in the first
issue of Blast, "In poetry this by `H.D.'" In Blast the poem is untitled. When
it appeared in Some Imagist Poets (1915) it was called "Oread," and this is the
title under which appears in H. D.'s Collected Poems. F. S. Flint in the Egoist
referred to the poem as "Pines," clearly believing that it speaks of pines,
imaged as a green sea. Pound, however, appears to have read the poem differently
... "`H.D.'s waves like pine tops." ... This confusion is, paradoxically,
illuminating, for all such formulations misrepresent the poem. The poem is not
about pines or the sea. It ... functions in a non-discursive mode and cannot be
"unfolded" or explained; for [as Pound stated] "the Image is more than an idea.
It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."

And indeed the most immediately striking quality of "Oread" is perhaps its
projection of a contained energy: it is vibrant, yet reaches stasis. The stasis
is achieved in part by the poet's refusal to extend her compass... The energy is
a product of the intensity of the poet's vision. It is bodied forth in the
centering of the poem on forceful verbs. In six short lines we find five violent
verbs: "whirl" (twice), "splash," "hurl" (strengthened by the assonantal
relationship with "whirl"), and "cover." All are in the imperative mood; each is
placed at the beginning of a line; and only commas are allowed to articulate
this avalanche of energy. Thus we have a movement of breathless crescendo, or
rather of repeated climax, suggestive of the surging of sea and forest alike.
And thus the poem is a worthy model of authentic imagism, of Pound's vorticist
ideal - the five clauses really offer alternative expressions of a single idea.

    -- Brendan Jackson, from "'The Fulsomeness of her Prolixity': Reflections on
H.D. Imagiste". The South Atlantic Quarterly 83:1 (Winter 1984): 99-100.

[About H. D. ]

Her work is characterized by the intense strength of her images, economy of
language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread
appreciation and acclaim during her lifetime, in part because her name was
associated with the Imagist movement even as her voice had outgrown its
boundaries, as evidenced by her book-length works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt.
Neglect of H. D. can also be attributed to her times, as many of her poems spoke
to an audience which was unready to respond to the strong feminist principles
articulated in her work. She died in 1961.

    -- from the Academy of American Poets,
[broken link] http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/hdoolfst.htm

[About the Imagists]

A group of American and English poets whose poetic program was formulated about
1912 by Ezra Pound -- in conjunction with fellow poets Hilda Doolittle (H.D.),
Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint -- inspired by the critical views of T.E.
Hulme, in revolt against the careless thinking and Romantic optimism he saw
prevailing.

The Imagists wrote succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an
exact visual image made a total poetic statement. Imagism was a successor to the
French Symbolist movement, but whereas Symbolism had an affinity with music,
Imagism sought analogy with sculpture. In 1914 Pound turned to Vorticism, and
Amy Lowell largely took over leadership of the group. Among others who wrote
Imagist poetry were John Gould Fletcher and Harriet Monroe; Conrad Aiken,
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot were influenced
by it in their own poetry.

    -- English 88, at UPenn -
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/imagism-def.html

[Links]

A biography of H. D. can be found at [broken link] http://www.well.com/user/heddy/hdbio.html

A nice introduction to Imagism (including definitions, poems and commentaries)
can be found at  [broken link] http://monte.mvhs.srvusd.k12.ca.us/~katlee/imagism2.html

'Oread' is the first poem by H. D. to be featured on the Minstrels, but we've
covered lots of Imagists. Some of my favourites:

'The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter' by Ezra Pound is one of the most
heart-breakingly beautiful poems I know - poem #70

'The Red Wheelbarrow' by William Carlos Williams is possibly the most famous
Imagist poem of them all) - poem #83

'Whitman' by Alfred Kreymborg is dazzling in its simplicity - poem #245

Carl Sandburg's 'Crucible' is quite possibly my favourite poem of all time -
poem #205

[Glossary]

Main Entry: oread
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English oreades, plural, from Latin oread-, oreas, from Greek
oreiad-, areias, from oreios of a mountain, from oros mountain
Date: 14th century
: any of the nymphs of mountains and hills in Greek mythology

    -- Merriam-Webster Online, http://www.m-w.com/