On H.D.'s Imagist Poems and Ancient Greece

Cassandra Laity

I hope to demonstrate that H.D.'s Imagism undermines masculinist theories of impersonality by way of the metaphoric landscape/bodies and language for transgressive desire she gleaned from the sexually diverse "Greece" of Victorian Hellenists such as [Walter] Pater, [Oscar] Wilde, and [A. C.] Swinburne. Sea Garden's white, chiseled, or brazenly colored and marred sea flowers, its decadent overflowered Venusbergs, and evasive (Swinburnian) linguistic practices thus forma narrative of competing sexualities and "unnatural" desires that deliberately implicate the authorial "I" behind the volume. Indeed, much later, Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Romantic Tradition lambasted H.D.'s Imagism for its Decadent Aestheticism. . . . Bush concludes that H.D. was more "escapist" than the Pre-Raphaelites, "who testify their consciousness . . . of a world outside themselves," and relegates H.D.'s "paradise" to the Greece of "Pater and Wilde."

The "Greece" constructed by the Victorian Hellenists as a haven for male-male desire and associated with the image complex of "light," "whiteness," and sculpture . . . resembles the "crystalline" Imagism for which H.D. gained early fame. H.D. herself would make casual comparisons between her early style and the play of light on marble statuary at the Louvre (where she first saw the statue of the Hermaphrodite): "My idea of Paris," she wrote in 1936, "is a sort of holy, holy pilgrimage to the Louvre to see the lights and shadows on the marbles and wings of marble. All very early H.D." And Louis Untermeyer is among those critics who praised H.D. for her possession of "the sculptor's power" to both animate and fix the image. Unintentionally evoking the Aesthete's sculptured emblem for male transgressive desire . . . Untermeyer remarked H.D.'s fusion of "warm blood and chill stone." "Her marble palpitates," he comments. Others, perhaps reacting subliminally to H.D.'s use of Aesthetes' "unnatural" imagery, attacked H.D.'s Imagism for its cold artificiality and perversion-some describing Sea Garden as the work of a "frozen Lesbian."

from H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Sičcle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996. 42-43. Š Cambridge University Press 1996

Cheryl Walker

Though H.D. was not consistent in her commitment to the Greek persona, sometimes relinquishing it in favor of others and at no time limiting it absolutely to a certain set of qualities, we can, with reasonable accuracy, pinpoint the aspects of the Greek persona which typically appealed to H.D. From the early days in London, when the poet thought of herself as a Greek statue come to life, to her epitaph-"Greek flower; Greek ecstasy"-the Greek persona represented qualities she desired: aloofness, inner strength, mental superiority, physical boyishness, courage, freedom, and wildness; a psychological landscape comparable to the physical landscape of the New England coastline which she . . . would forever remember and admire.

Roughly, the figure of Artemis emerges as her preferred version of the Greek persona. . . . Hippolyta, whom H.D. would use as a mask for her own struggles, is a follower of Artemis. At the end of her life, the poet would once again imagine herself as Artemis in her writing of Tribute to Freud, Artemis who is strong enough to take on the Professor. . . .

It is easy to see the particular attraction of the Greek persona for a woman like H.D. . . . Like Amy Lowell's androgynous persona, it blended "male" and "female" characteristics, helping to free the poet from derogatory assumptions about sentimental women poets. Like Sara Teasdale's passionate virgin, which also had connections to Greek culture, H.D.'s Artemis persona was associated with chastity and personal autonomy as well as passion. In fact, according to Barbara Guest [Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World], John Gould Fletcher remarked "that Teasdale's fragile appearance and her tendency to seclude herself from society reminded him of H.D." (43). Like Elinor Wylie, who also dressed in Greek fashions and identified herself with Artemis, H.D.'s Greek self was a woman warrior of sorts, both vulnerable and aggressive, the kind of woman who never forgot a slight.

from Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991. 111-12. Š 1991 by Cheryl Walker

Susan Stanford Friedman

Permeating H.D.'s early revisionary exploration of female identity is an austere sensuality, an erotic dimension of repressed yet explosive sexuality that is nonreferential in nature. Like the potent flowers in Lawrence's early novels and Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, H.D.'s flowers indirectly suggest an intense eroticism, whose power comes precisely from its elusive, nonhuman expression. Related to her animistic sense of the scared, H.D.'s objective correlatives for the self often radiate erotic energy and rhythms. In particular, the five flower poems of Sea Garden . . . structure that volume and underline its revisionary treatment of the sentimental Victorian language of flowers. . . .

H.D. repeatedly established dualisms that paralleled the fundamental polarity of male and female, masculine and feminine, another aspect of her imagist poems that is both unique to her work and continuous with her later development. Her imagist poems are often linguistically and thematically structured on polarities such as land and sea, hard and soft, ripe and unripe, wild and sheltered, swift and slow, stunted and lush, torn and whole, pointed and round, positive and negative, salt and sweet, and so forth. . . . Reflecting in part her pride in her difference, and her separation from the conventional or sentimental, H.D. always rejected the ripe for the unripe, the lovely for the harsh, the soft for the hard. At the same time, however, her representation of polarity became the first step in a dialectical process moving toward synthesis.

From "Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)" Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets, 1880-1845. Vol. 45. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983. 125-26. Copyright Š 1983 by Susan Stanford Friedman

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"The minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms of one and another." This, from Julia Kristeva [Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art], confronts us with the I/you relationship, resonant for H.D.'s work throughout, but peculiarly isolated in her intense, ritualistic early poems. Where to "put" erotic energy, how to negotiate "one and another" changes during the early works. Sea Garden (1916) as a title is already oxymoronic for vast/containment or uncontained cultivation, one suggestive of the "scrutiny of dualisms" which [Margaret] Homans postulates as necessary to establish the female poetic voice [see Women Writers and Poetic Identity]. In the flower poems repeated through the manuscript, H.D. implies an argument with conventions of depiction. These flowers of the sea gardens are of a harsh surprising beauty, slashed, torn, dashed yet still triumphant and powerful, despite being wounded, hardened, tested by exposure. These flowers propose an almost contemptuous defiance of ease, of simple fashions of ripening. H.D. constructs flowers admired in ways and for motives far different from the view of lush ripeness in carpe diem roses.

In Sea Garden, however, an erotic plot is essayed, in which "I" occurs in awed breathless yearning for an elusive "you." The "you" might be a god or a person, spiritual traces or erotic pressures: significantly H.D. catches these forces just at the cusp of their disappearance, when they leave a sense of their energy and her yearning, their immanence and her half-answered desire, their power and her tribute, their spirit and her supplicating yet powerful ardour. . . . Whatever else might be said, this tactic prevents speaking or narrating being a form of possession of the "you": it is precisely the opposite.

From H.D.: The Career of That Struggle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 12-13. Copyright Š 1986 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Eileen Gregory

The figure of the poet, too, has distinct encounters, which take place in the "private space" of imagination, the cultivated garden or orchard. Within the "sea garden" itself are two other gardens, both of which taken together define clearly the exigencles of creation in this marginal world.

[....]

"Garden" (CP 24-25), a poem in two parts, does not describe a place antithetical to life and creation but one essential to it. In a sense it defines the "aesthetic" of creative apprehension and suffering within the sea garden. In the first part of the poem, a rose is again an image of beauty, but here it carries a sense of power as the untouchable, inaccessible thing that the poet desires, like the adamantine "rock roses" in H.D.'s essay on Sappho: "You are clear / O rose, cut in rock, / hard as the descent of hail." The rose "cut in rock" (growing in the crevice of a rock, or made precise by the background of rock) is clear and "hard as the descent of hail" (sharp, cold, relentless). The austerity and clarity of the image is compelling, and the speaker is drawn to its force. She imagines what she "could" do, what her power could be before this image, with increasingly conditional claims, until she admits her powerlessness before it. She "could scrape the colour / from the petals," seize the image directly and violently, but to do so would destroy and denature the rose; to do so would be to have it only as "spilt dye from a rock." The speaker cannot possess the rose, and cannot break its crystal, because this would involve superhuman strength ("If I could break you / I could break a tree"). She ends with the strange conditional statement: "If I could stir / I could break a tree— / I could break you." Before the image of the rose she cannot even stir; so much less can she break a tree, or, indeed, assert her mastery at all.

In this poem the rose is image, the object of the poet's desire; yet she cannot touch or possess it, cannot shatter its ice, but only witness to its radiance. Thus the poem dramatizes the aesthetic of H.D.'s early work: poetry is the evocation and reenactment of the experienced power of the image. The knowledge of her weakness before the image is a refined salt experience—the consciousness of longing in the presence of a beautiful but unyielding object. A similar though more satisfying longing is shown in "The Contest" (CP 12), where the human athlete also represents the image—but here one that is humanly crafted. As image, the male figure is highly liminal; his aspects of grace and power , as experienced by the poet, reside between nature and human artifice. This image has the "rare silver" of a resolved epiphany.

The second part of "Garden" is the familiar poem "Heat." It is tied to the first enigmatic part by the common theme of longing within the process of creation, and by the sense of stasis and need for release. In both poems, too, the endurance of the moment is part of the necessary process of insight and making. The speaker asks the wind to "rend open the heat," cut it, plough through it, so that ripe fruit can drop. The heat is a palpable force that "presses up and blunts / the points of pears." In this imagined oppression of unbearable pregnancy she prays for a deliverance from the process of gestation and ripening, though even her own metaphor acknowledges that without the force of heat the growing and ripening fruit would not assume its proper shape. Thus in this essential garden both poems speak of salt suffering in terms of creative process, within which it is hard to bear attention to the potency of specific image and to be patient in the heated forging of the destined shape.

from "Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.'s 'Sea Garden.'" Contemporary Literature 27:4 (Winter 1986).

Gary Burnett

The two parts of another poem�appropriately given the simple title "Garden"�makes it clear that for H.D., Imagism itself is, in every sense, a matter of identity; this small poem, paradigmatically Imagist and, like "Oread," an anthology piece, makes its claims for possible identity precisely in the terms of Imagism, literalizing the sculptural and poems-like-granite metaphors of Hulme and Pound. This poem's first part reverses the unstable imagery of "Sea Rose," turning the rose into that ultimate Imagist form, rock:

You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.

I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break you
I could break a tree.

If I could stir
I could break a tree�
I could break you.

The exact outlines of the rose here must endure an extreme solidity, trapping both the rose and the poet�clearly a Dryad imprisoned within her tree�within the clearly cut outlines of the image. The dripping fragrance of "Sea Rose" has here solidified into the color which can only be scraped from the surface of the rock. Nothing shifts, nothing grows, in this garden.

The negative solidity carries over into the poem's second section:

O Wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air�
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat�
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

Here, the hardness of the rock/rose becomes a stifling solidification of the very atmosphere through which neither the pears nor the poet can move. All that remains is a desperate invocation to the wind which elsewhere in the volume whips the sea garden, transforming the dangers of that landscape. "Garden" makes over the Imagist metaphor of the sculptural poem into a stultifying solidification of image and, thus, of possible identity; in the second half of the poem, the implied Dryad of the first half does not appear even in spectral guise.

Ultimately, "Garden" is a poem about the terrible limitations H.D. finds herself subject to in the Imagist doctrine, a poem about why she must�in George Oppen's words�"give advice to the sea." Such a doctrine, strictly followed, would turn her into nothing more than a set of initials, emptied of possibility and limited to the production of the "few but perfect" poems of Pound's programmatic poetics. "Garden" situates itself firmly within Imagist definitions and finds itself stuck there: What allows her to escape is, ironically , that very set of initials, "stunted," cut down to almost nothing, but alive with potential, with room to play and to discover the variety of possible identities in such a hermetic space. With typical indirection, H.D. herself suggested such a function for Imagism in her 1916 review of John Gould Fletcher's Goblins and Pagodas:

And through it all, it is the soul or mind of the poet, knowing within itself its problems, unanswerable; its Visions, cramped and stifled; the bitterness of its own insufficiency. Knowing indeed not whence it cometh and whither it goeth, but flaunting in the face of its own ignorance, its own undaunted quest. (184)

Writing about Fletcher she is, of course, also writing about herself, about her own "undaunted quest" for identity in poetry.

from "The Identity of 'H.': Imagism and H.D.'s Sea Garden." SAGETRIEB 8.3

Michael Boughn

Yet for H.D. herself, the issue of writing was clearly tied to the issue of vision, or rather writing was the issue of vision. Her first book of verse, Sea Garden, opens with a poem called "Sea Rose." An exemplary Imagist poem, its very particularity resonates with rich, multiple correspondences:

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

can the spice rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf? (CP 5)

The rose is a rose but an unusual type. Compared to the wet rose, the sea rose carries a "complex of emotion, as Pound put it, suggesting a new, or more precisely a renewed way of being, free from the accumulations of sentimentality, a sparse, hardened, "pagan" renewal of spirit.

At the same time, like Pound's rose in the steel dust, Williams' obsolete rose and Stein's rose rose, H.D.'s sea rose (which precedes them all) also speaks to a tradition of writing. The rose is not only a rose; it is an inescapable convention of writing that even a proposition such as "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" necessarily invokes, if only in its attempt to negate it. The sea rose proposes a new imagination of that convention, one that resonates with the renewed spirit. The poem itself is the rose, and the acrid fragrance is literally "hardened in a leaf, " a leaf made of pulp.

This "fragrance" issues from the prosodic structure of the poem, its sonal field. Understanding of H.D.'s prosodic techniques has remained consistently underdeveloped since critics first wrote in generalities about her "chiselled form" and "delicate cadences." To a certain extent, this lack of understanding is due to the over-exaggerated importance placed on Ezra Pound's perceptions and analysis of H.D.'s work and imagism in general. While Pound's observations are acute and essential, they are neither complete nor unbiased, reflecting his specific concerns and limitations at the time, including his involvement with T. E. Hulme's philosophy. The philosophical dimension of Imagism continues to be the focus of most critical attention. Pound's adoption of Hulme's ideas and his adaptation of them in his own Doctrine of the Image have been recounted, analyzed and reanalyzed numerous times, while technical discussions of the actual poetic innovations remain confined to observations of the correlation between the poetry and the "Dont's" of the manifestos.

Yet as Charles Hartman points out, it is not content that makes a "poetic fact" poetic, but shape (132). A list of objects in "Sea Rose" does not necessarily mean anything, much less inspire vision. The "complex of emotion" that corresponds to the "poetic fact" only occurs when the language is organized in an adequate form. Just as the Image arises from the perception of a dynamic, generative relation among things, form arises from the perception of a dynamic, generative relation among the basic units of language in the poem: At the center of both relations is the activity of correspondence or equivalence, to use Jakobson's term (360). To simply talk of H.D.'s powerful images begs the question. The issue is how she organized language so that it continues to be "endowed with energy."

from "Elements of the Sounding: H. D. and the Origins of Modernist Prosodies." Sagetrieb Vol. 6, No. 2.

Gary Burnett

In the standard Imagist terms of crystalline beauty and hard outlines, a sea garden would be such a collection, with each poem an object, an identifiable and discrete plant in the garden which is the book. The first poem of the book, "Sea Rose," initially appears to reinforce such classically Imagist assumptions in its clear exposition of a single flower from the garden:

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
You are caught in the drift. (5)

The short, carefully measured free verse lines, together with the slightly archaic (though still direct) diction and the insistence on the sparseness of the flower tend to give the poem a simplicity and solidity, a feeling of the visual or sculptural realness of the sea rose—"Sea Rose" could almost be a poem of image and little more. But the initially stable flower is "caught in the drift" of the shoreline which is the sea garden and is thus implicated in the complications which inhere for H.D. in that shoreline. Like "Hermes of the Ways," "Sea Rose" inhabits a land which is distinctively H.D.'s, a land of boundaries and difficult juxtapositions:

Stunted, with small leaf,
You are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf? (5)

The Sea Rose is a flower for Hermes—a creative growth in a perilous landscape—and thus a "Stunted" figure for the effaced "H.D.," a complex image holding its ground against a force which would limit it to a denial of identity as well as to the sculptural and static terms of Imagism. The "you" of the poem—the sparse rose—is implicitly an "I," an "H.D."

from "The Identity of 'H.': Imagism and H.D.'s Sea Garden." Sagetrieb 8.3.

Eileen Gregory

The title of the collection points to the governing experience in all its poems. The garden is traditionally the place of consummation of love. In H.D.'s poems the garden is still the place of love, but love washed with salt. It is a sea garden, inimical to all but the most enduring. The sea represents here the harsh power of elemental life, to which the soul must open itself, and by which it must be transformed or die. H.D. need not have known, but probably did, that sea/salt is the arcane alchemical substance linked to the mysterious bitterness and wisdom essential to spiritual life. "Without salt," it is said, "the work [the alchemical opus of transformation] has no success" (Jung par. 329). To experience sea/salt is to be within the visceral elements of bodily life, the "common salts" (Hillman, "Salt" 117). It is to feel open wounds, to suffer desire without fulfillment, to be made aware of vulnerability and fear. More importantly, the psychological experience of salt specifies and clarifies pain: "No salt, no experiencing—merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body. Thus salt makes events sensed and felt, giving us each a sense of the personal—my tears, my sweat and blood, my taste and value" (Hillman, "Salt" 117). It gives ground and substance to subjectivity, to feeling and desire.

This salt experience and the wisdom and beauty born of it are the central mysteries to which H.D.'s Sea Garden allows access. C. G. Jung associates alchemical salt with the sea, thus with Luna and with the "feminine," with Eros and feeling (par. 330). One need not fix its mysterious character in Jung's terms. But nevertheless it is clear that for H.D. these associations—marah ("bitter"), mar, mer, mater, Maia, Mary—to some degree pertain. Indeed, they are at the heart of the network of imagery informing her longer works and centering in the Goddess, who is both hetaira and mother, who is "sea, brine, breaker , seducer, / giver of life, giver of tears" (CP 552). Working the mystery of salt, H.D. in Sea Garden explores in a deeply interiorized and careful way the very matter of subjectivity.

In the opening three poems we move from an intense, static focus upon a mysterious icon ("Sea Rose"), to a choice for movement and engagement with the sea ("The Helmsman"), and, finally, to a ritual passage of entrance into the sacred mysteries of the sea garden ("The Shrine").

H.D.'s flowers, like Sappho's, represent a moment when a certain poignant beauty takes on "the stature of an eternal condition in the spirit" (McEvilley, "Sapphic Imagery" 269). "Sea Rose" (CP 5) immediately reveals to the reader the necessity to look through the image to read that eternal condition. The initiate's work begins with learning clairvoyance. This "harsh" rose, "marred and with stint of petals, / meager . . . thin, / sparse of leaf ," has no conventional worth, but, marked by the inimical elements, is altogether poor. Yet it is "more precious / than a wet rose / single on a stem." Here the typical standards of beauty are reversed, and in the last stanza the "spice-rose" is deficient for not possessing the "acrid fragrance" of this harsh flower. The relentless elements in action are annihilating ("you are caught in the drift . . . you are flung on the sand"); yet they exalt ("you are lifted / in the crisp sand / that drives in the wind"). The beauty is in the mark of sea-torture.

from "Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.'s 'Sea Garden.'" Contemporary Literature 27:4 (Winter 1986).

On "Oread"

Gary Burnett

Certainly "Oread" is a good poem for Oppen to have chosen for his critique, as perhaps the single most anthologized H.D. poem as well as one which Pound singled out as an exemplum of Imagism. And it is such an exemplum; it is short, direct, definitely without "slither." And yet it seems ultimately to revolve around something other than either Oppen's ideal of accurate perception or Pound's demand for "objectivity" as a poetic ideal:

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.

Of course, in the terms Oppen establishes, this poem does depend on a fallacy; the speaker given by the title, the Oread, a mountain nymph, by her very act of speech—by giving "advice" to the sea—projects a consciousness into something which must otherwise remain outside of the terms of the human. Still, H.D.'s distance here from rigorous vision is not exactly the failure of accuracy implied by Oppen's critique, but the sign of a fundamentally different poetics. As Susan Stanford Friedman has pointed out, ". . . 'Oread' and most of H.D.'s imagist poems are phenomenological in emphasis; they are poems about consciousness, not the world of objects external to consciousness" (Psyche Reborn 56). More radically, I would suggest, it is not concerned at all with either the sea or the fir trees as such, but with a complex set of identifications of the self with the activities and objects of the poem. It simply is not the poem Oppen—or, for that matter, classical Imagism—assumes it to be.

As titular figure, the Oread is necessarily the prime locus of the poem's consciousness and activities, placing the words spoken not only within a consciousness but within a consciousness inseparable from her material surroundings. Her projection of consciousness into the world around her—her act of Imagist "weakness" in giving advice to the sea—Is less a mistake or failure of poetic nerve than an acknowledgement of the potentials of the poem, a discovery, as it were, of potential identities at work within the images of the poem. In the image complex of "Oread," it is clear that consciousness inheres not only within the Oread herself but also within the pines surrounding her and the sea beneath her. This spreading of consciousness out from the poem's center—and not the accurate perception of any actual seacoast—is the basic activity of the poem: the sea, pines, and rocks are, so to speak, entities and not things—they are beings in their own right rather than mere items in an Imagist poetic inventory. In this context, it is significant that "Dryad"—a tree nymph to go with the pines of "Oread"—is one of the several names used by H.D. and one of the names identifying the autobiographical heroines of her novels; though never quite present, this Dryad gives to the poem a second locus of consciousness, one belonging both to the author and to the speechless pines, forming a complex figure by means of which the poem can take on more importance than it may initially seem to possess. And since such a Dryad, absent and yet present in the figural pines, is a figure for H.D. herself, she functions strongly as a literally missing—and yet determining—factor of the poem's meaning. "Oread," that is, is not only "phenomenological in emphasis," but is a poem about nothing less than the very creation or discovery of an identity within and through poetry.

The Dryad, precisely because she is missing from the poem, gives it resonance as a poem of this kind—a poem about the identity of a poet named "H.D.," a poet whose very name—a set of initials—is emptied of any firm demarcation of identity; as Susan Friedman has pointed out, too many people respond to the name with the question "H.D.—who's he?" ("Who Buried H.D. ?"801). At the same time, however, the very emptiness of the initials makes possible—indeed, demands—an ongoing play of the multiple possibilities of what such an identity might be, both as a simple demarcation, a name, and as a complex engagement with the permutations of gender and identity itself.

In this regard, the publishing history of "Oread" is of some importance. It is an early, "Imagist" poem, and yet was not collected until 1924 in Heliodora, a volume which in its title explicitly plays on the poet's enigmatic name. This is not to imply that her two earlier volumes—Sea Garden of 1916 and Hymen of 1921—are not concerned with the relationship between image and identity, but only that "Oread" becomes part of the collection in which this concern is for the first time explicitly foregrounded. In the 1925 Collected Poems, "Oread"—along with several other early poems—was removed from its place in Heliodora and placed in an earlier section under the title "The God." The reason for such a move is unclear; perhaps intended to restore a more accurate chronology, the shift of this poem in particular suggests a more significant concern. Though "Oread" is not actually a part of Sea Garden, it constitutes a central statement of the ground which that first gathering takes as its own: the ground which is the line of the surf, neither actual shore nor actual sea, but a complex and interactive meeting line, an interplay of both. And this ground—precise yet somehow double, an Imagist "outline" of sorts yet an outline built up out of its own intense shifts—is the guiding metaphor for H.D.'s earliest poetry.

from "The Identity of 'H.': Imagism and H.D.'s Sea Garden." Sagetrieb 8.3.

Brendan Jackson

It is time to consider the poem [Ezra] Pound selected as the exemplar of Vorticist poetry. "In painting Kadinsky, Picasso," he wrote, in the first issue of Blast, "In poetry this by `H.D.'" In Blast the poem is untitled. What it appeared in Some Imagist Poets 1915 it was called "Oread," and this is the title which appears in the Collected Poems [by H.D.]. 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 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.

From "`The Fulsomeness of her Prolixity": Reflections on "H.D., `Imagiste.'" The South Atlantic Quarterly 83:1 (Winter 1984): 99-100.  Copyright Š 1984 by Duke University Press

Susan Stanford Friedman

One of H.D.'s earliest and best-known poems, "Oread," illustrates how the visual language of imagism parallels the mechanisms of the dream-work as Freud described them. This important similarity helps to establish how the poetic epistemology of imagism laid a foundation that made H.D. particularly receptive to psychoanalytic; influence.

[. . . .]

Since most imagist poems present images from nature, it is easy to assume that imagist poetry is about nature. But "Oread" and most of H.D.'s imagist poems are phenomenological in emphasis; they are poems about consciousness, not the world of objects external to consciousness. The center of "Oread," as the title indicates, is not the sea; it is instead the perceptions and emotions of an oread, a nymph of the mountains, as she regards the sea aroused in a whirling passion of intensity. Analogous to the manifest and latent content of the dream, the poem presents images of the sea in order to embody an "intellectual and emotional complex," which is the real subject of the poem.

The images that simultaneously obscure and reveal the emotions of the oread are not surrealist images emerging from the unconscious. "Oread" is a controlled poem, not the achievement of the dream-work. But the waves made of pine trees and the trees made of water have a quality analogous to the dream. The rational eye of the conscious mind would not see pine-tree waves, splashing pines, or "pools of fir." Such vision belongs to the "Kingdom of the Illogical." If H.D. were to report such dream-images to Freud, he might well have called them an illustration of "dream-distortion." Through "condensation," the poem presents a distortion of reality that suggests a whole range of interrelated ideas and emotions encoded in a few images. Decoding these condensed distortions would have to begin with the recognition that they result from a picture-making mode of thought, rather than an analytic mode. The poem significantly does not rely upon similes, which by definition remind the reader that the images only make comparisons, not equivalences. The speaker does not say that a rough sea looks like pointed trees; she sees tree-waves. just as the dream-work gives the dreamer a visual representation of unconscious impulses, so the poem conjures an illustration of nonrational reality that conveys an "intellectual and emotional complex" in a highly condensed form.

"Condensation," Freud believed, also allowed the dream-work to express "contraries" and outright "contradictions" in a single dream-picture. The condensation of imagist technique accomplishes just that fusion of opposites in "Oread." The poem's pronouns--"us" and "you"--establish the oppositions in the poem imaged in the land and the sea. The oread is the land and consequently identifies with the shore and addresses the waves as "you," As the spirit of the land, she understandably perceives her fluid opposite in her own terms: waves are pointed pines that whirl up, crash, and make pools of fir. This nonrational mode of thought gives motion, fury, and a watery stillness to the land; conversely, it gives stature and stability to the sea. But these images condense opposites into a contradictory whole; they simultaneously affirm and deny the division of land and sea.

The fusion of land and sea in "Oread" does not in itself explain the emotional intensity of the poem. The parallel verbs of the poem--"whirl … crash," "hurl," and "cover"--create the oread's sensation of being submerged in the violence and then stillness of the waves. Robert Duncan wrote perceptively that many of H.D.'s "nature poems" have a sexual dimension: they "betray in their troubled ardor processes of psychological and even sexual identification.... [there is a] poetic magic in which the natural environment and the sexual experience are fused." The imagery and rhythm of "Oread" suggest that Duncan is correct. The waves whirl up to become phallic pines that crash down "on our rocks . . . over us." The poem ends on a final note of protectiveness as the waves "cover us" in quiet pools. The oread's commands throughout the poem emphasize that the sea acts while the land is acted upon. H.D.'s images may be identifying a traditional masculinity with the waves (movement; sexual assault) and a traditional femininity with the land (passivity; sexual receptivity). The action of the waves on the shore combined with the emotion intensity suggest that the poem can be read as a correlative of sexual experience or emotion. Since the synthesizing "logic" of the image has already created a fusion of land and sea, the poem additionally may be suggesting an androgynous identity for the oread. The experiential reality of the poem illustrates that externally opposite qualities such as active/passive or masculine/feminine coexist within single individual.

Freud's syntax of the dream-work includes the important technique he called "displacement," by which intense feelings are projected onto a relatively unimportant person or set of events. "Oread," the oread's identity and sexual emotions are "displaced" onto a natural event, the meeting of the land and sea on the shore line. More significantly, the poet's relationship to her speaker is analogous to the dream-work's displacement of emotion. The oread is persona for the poet herself as well as an anthropomorphic embodiment of the land. She is a personal metaphor whose experience gave indirect, and therefore permissible, expression to the intense passion that characterizes much of H.D.'s early poetry. To give form and expression to her own experience, H.D. displaced her voice into that of the oread and substituted the oread's emotion for her own. Norm Holmes Pearson warned that H.D.'s use of Greek masks as a distancing device has all too often been ignored by her critics. He told his interviewer, L S. Dembo: "When you said that she used Greek myth to find her own identity, you hit upon an aspect of H.D.'s poetry which, rather surprisingly, has gone unrecognized. She has been so praised as a kind of Greek publicity girl that people have forgotten that she writes the most intensely personal poems using Greek myth as a metaphor." The oread may be Greek, but the setting for "Oread" comes from a past not more remote than her visits to the Cornwall seacoast and her childhood summers on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The ultimate subject of the poem is the consciousness of the poet herself, the intellectual and emotional complex of perception that finds its clearest expression in the picture-making mode of imagist epistemology. H.D.'s poetic apprenticeship with imagism laid the groundwork for her rapid absorption of Freud's related theories of the encoding and decoding of the unconscious.

from Pysche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Copyright Š 1981 by Susan Stanford Friedman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeanne Kammer

As in many of H.D.'s poems, voice, action, and objects here are treated as equal elements in a system, rather than as subordinate in syntactic or philosophical relation to one another. The oread, a nymph of the forest, demands of the sea an action which rises in crescendo from "whirl" to "splash" to "hurl," then settles into senescence with "cover." It is sexual, suicidal, and it connects the speaker to the sea in an intense, intimate manner.

The remaining images of the poem--the waves, the rocks, the pines--interact diaphorically with voice and action, superimposing one upon the other, creating ambiguity. The great pointed pines of the forest, for example, in a violent transference beyond simple juxtaposition, become the crashing waves of the sea; the "green . . . pools of fir" raise conflicting associations of warmth and coolness, safety and peril, life and death. "Our" and "us" are cloudy referents which both tighten and obscure relationships: the sea and the oread? The pines and the nymph? The speaker and some unnamed other? all of these? We read again, trying to feel our way through the poem, trying out combinations of terms--just as we must do with the work of Dickinson and Moore.

From Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essay on Women Poets. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Copyright Š 1979 by Indiana University Press.

Thomas Burnett Swann

When it was first published, another poem in which the sea is personified, "Oread," was attacked by the enemies of Imagism. They objected to its irregular pattern, and thought that because its single image was devoid of ethical significance it was suitable only to begin a poem and was not a poem in itself. But as Imagism triumphed, "Oread" became one of its showpieces. Critics agreed that in its six short lines H. D. had suggested the sea's thunder and its cleansing powers. The sea here is equated with an immense oread, a nymph of the mountains, whose violence is a purification. (According to one interpretation, the poem compares mountains to sea, rather than the other way around.)

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.

Verbs which are also trochees, or the first syllables of trochees, begin all but one line. Placed as they are in a position of prominence and stress, with their sound alone they convey the surge of waves, and they also denote a surging movement of water. Images reinforce the work of the verbs: the sea not only splashes, it splashes waves like "great pines" and scatters "pools of fir."

From The Classical World of H.D. Copyright Š 1962 by University of Nebraska Press.

Richard Gray

Perhaps the first thing that strikes a reader about a poem like this is the absence of certain familiar elements. There are no similes, no symbols, no generalised reflections or didacticism, no rhymes, no regular metre, no narrative. One might well ask what there is, then and the answer would be a great deal. There is a pellucid clarity a diction, and a rhythm that is organic, intrinsic to the mood of the poem; there is a vivid economy of language, in which each word seems to have been carefully chiselled out of other contexts, and there is a subtle technique of intensification by repetition -- no phrase is remarkable in itself, perhaps, but there is a sense of rapt incantation, an enthralled dwelling on particular cadences that gives a hermetic quality, a prophetic power, to the whole. It is the entire poem that is experienced, not a striking line, a felicitous comparison, or an ingenious rhyme; the poem has become the unit of meaning and not the word, so each single word can remain stark, simple, and unpretentious. In 'Oread', the image that constitutes the poem becomes not merely a medium for describing a sensation but the sensation itself. The sea is the pinewood, the pinewood is the sea, the wind surrounds and inhabits both; and the Greek mountain-nymph of the title comprehends and becomes identified with all three elements. There is a dynamic and unified complex, an ecstatic fusion of natural and human energies; and the image represents the point of fusion, 'the precise instant' (to quote that remark of Pound's again) 'when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and, subjective'.

'Oread' is typical of H.D.'s work in many ways. 'I would be lonely', she once admitted, while living at the heart of literary London, 'but for the intensity of my . . . inner life'. And this became the subject of her work, from the early Imagist verse to the later, more oracular poems: the secret existence that cast her, in the midst of company, into permanent but willing exile, the ecstatic sense of inhabiting a borderline between land and ocean, outer world and inner, time and eternity. The earlier work (of which, of course, 'Oread' is an example) is what she is, perhaps, most well known for. Here, greatly influenced by classical Greek poetry, H.D. speaks in a taut and suggestive manner, emitting everything that is inessential, structurally or emotionally unimportant.

From American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Copyright Š 1990 by Longman Group UK Limited.

Shawn Alfrey

Conversely, in H.D.'s poem, the speaker is not a removed craftsman, but is herself a part of the experience of the poem. While she, too, transforms her object, the emphasis is not so much on the power of her virtuosic perceptions. Rather, the poem is an attempt to describe the speaker�s experience in terms of the other being she encounters.

Pound's direct treatment of the thing requires a hierarchical division between the viewer and his object where the viewer's "apparition" becomes a stabilizing truth. But H.D.'s Imagism is marked by an active, even dangerous, balancing of two forces. Indeed, her poem suggests that there can be no direct treatment of the thing except through such confrontations. "Oread" is not a description, but one part of a desired dialogue between two subjects, a wood nymph and a sea nymph or god. Articulating the energy of exchange, not the stasis of superposition, the poem evokes a dialogic encounter between the two.

from "Toward Intersubjective Knowledge: H.D.'s Liminal Poetics." SAGETRIEB 11.3

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