Heliodora and other poems

by H.D.

Excerpt from Heliodora, and Other Poems

The poem Lais has in italics a translation of the Plato epigram in the Greek Anthology. Heliodora has in italics the two Meleager epigrams from the Anthology. In Nossis is the translation of the opening lines of the Garland of Meleager and the poem of Nossis herself in the Greek Anthology. The four Sappho fragments are re-worked freely. The Odyssey is a translation of the opening of the first book. The Ion is a translation of the latter part of the first long choros of the Ion of Euripides.

Genres: Poetry

127 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a gorgeous first edition of this and it smells amazing. It is barely read as it still has the Jonathan Cape slip inside, but has a faint smell of very old cigars.

It has Oread in it (you know:

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.

)

which I remember reading in an anthology at school at the age of 14/15 and having one of those vertiginous moments of realisation about what words could do. The memory is so clear I can still see the textbook, the desk and the classroom.

That same lesson we read Wilfred Owen and I remember getting shivers down my spine at "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues"

Pretty good English lesson that one, in retrospect.

[quim · Rating 5 out of 5]

mi favorito de doolittle

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

H. D. (Hilda Doolitle) was one of the founding members of Imagism, a movement whose well-known and pithy manifesto was written by Ezra Pound. H. D.´s first book of verse ( Sea Garden , 1916) included several poems which vividly and imaginatively recreated the world of ancient Greek seafarers. In The God(1917) and Hymen (1921) she continued to write through her "Greek mask", as D. H. Lawrence rather critically called it, writing poems from the viewpoint of mythical Greek gods, goddesses, demigods, and other characters from Greek literature. Many of her more striking verses are written from the traditionally silent gender: Demeter, Circe, Leda, Thetis and so on. In Heliodora, she tries on some new masks: a satyr follower (Holy Satyr), the hetaira Lais of Corinth -said to be the most beautiful woman in the world at the time of the Peloponessian War-, an aged Helen:

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
[...]
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

Thetis -this time not as the carefree sea nymph but as the mother of Achilles-, Penelope(At Ithaca):

Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.

Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack[...]

Cassandra, Telesilla(Telesila) -a distinguished woman poet who also led Argos through a political and military crisis-, or the inspiration for the famous bronze statue of the Charioteer of Delphi. Reading this book right after H. D.´s previous work may not be a good idea; I found the new poems heavier going, less fresh, less surprising, less, well, poetic.

There are new conceits in this book, like expanding and reworking fragments of Sappho(Fragment Thirty-six, Fragment Forty, Fragment Forty-one, Fragment Sixty-eight) or Meleager epigrams (Heliodora). Heliodora in particular is a particularly successful example where H.D. inserts Meleager´s epigrams into a contest by two poets to come up with memorable lines. Some of these poems overtax themselves and become, in my opinion, far too long-winded and artificial(Fragment Thirty-six).

In short, in spite of some fine moments and some finer endings, such as the transfixing moment at the end of the hectic, eventful, crowded but ultimately overlong, prosy chariot race which so exactly catches the special quality of the archaic, bronze Charioteer of Delfos:

When death comes,
instead of a vision,
(I will catch it in bronze)
you will stand
as you stood at the end
(as the herald announced it,
proclaiming aloud,
"Achaea has won,")
in-reining them now,
so quiet,
not turning to answer
the shout of the crowd.

I found this book of poetry far less compelling than its predecessors.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is beauty to me?
had she not slain me enough,
have I not cried in agony of love,
birth, hate,
in pride crushed?

[Merinde]

I like H.D. but except for Artemis and The Pool I didn't care as much about these poems as I did about those in some of her other books.