Sea Garden

by H.D.

{ 12.7 x 19.05 cms} Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2013 with the help of original edition published long back [1916]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 55. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete - Sea garden 1916 [Leather Bound] by H. Doolittle

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 20th Century, American, School, Fiction, Womens

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1916

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

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 We find book, authors in many different ways. A common way is reading about the author in another book one is reading. This is how I found this author, lost, a woman of whom I had never heard. The book is Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars, and Hilda Doolittle, H.D as she was known, is the first woman discussed. This book of poems, Sea Garden, was specifically mentioned and the title attracted. Varying in length, these poems as the title suggests, all relate to the sea.

Here is one of the shorter poems,

SEA POPPIES

Amber husk
fluted with gold
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich
grain,

treasure
spilled near the
shrub-pines
to bleach on the
boulders:

your stalk has caught
root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the
sea
and grated shells,
and split conch-shells,

Beautiful, wide
spread
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading H.D. feels much the same now as it did when I was a teenager: like touching another world, one limned in magic, where beauty is hidden in ugliness, love in terror. Her words feel like those evenings when the coastal wind whips your hair into your eyes and instead of growing annoyed you relish the violence in the air and recognize its echoes in your heart. These poems feel like raising your hands and face to the rain without feeling self-conscious or silly. They feel like learning your way around the rhythm, the musicality, of ancient Greek's accents and finding yourself in the unknown.

Doolittle longs for us to hold back for once and just let the world be. In "Sheltered Garden," of pampered orchards, she asks,

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit —
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.

Instead she sings paeans to life unexpected, willfulness at the edge of oblivion. She favors blooms stunted by saltwater droplets and battering wind: the hardy seaside cousins of the rose, the lily, the poppy, the violet, the iris. Doolittle's words are resonant, carefully chosen and, I'd argue, unchangeable; she's the sort of writer who flourishes when constrained, and the limited vocabulary these poems employ comes across as both sufficient and strangely new and eternal in her capable hands.

She chants and invokes, renewing the withered and praising the forgotten: frost-tipped flowers, thrice-great Hermes, the wrecked, the lost. She offers to her beloved words instead of jewels in "The Gift," and turns her wind-beaten face toward sacred shores, whether home to man-made altars ("The Cliff Temple") or nature's catacombs ("The Shrine"). This time around, I was most taken with the latter, home to dead sailors and strident warnings:

But hail —
as the tide slackens,
as the wind beats out,
we hail this shore —
we sing to you,
spirit between the headlands
and the further rocks.

Though oak-beams split,
though boats and sea-men flounder,
and the strait grind sand with sand
and cut boulders to sand and drift —

your eyes have pardoned our faults,
your hands have touched us —
you have leaned forward a little
and the waves can never thrust us back
from the splendour of your ragged coast.

It's no surprise that when Doolittle shifts from asking to telling in "The Gift," informing us that she sends "no string of pearls, / no bracelet — accept this," we do. Her words are far more precious.

[Merinde · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this without knowing anything about H.D. or the Imaginists but simply fell in love.

Somehow "cities" especially struck me, this bit:
"he had crowded the city so full
that men could not grasp beauty,
beauty was over them,
through them, about them
no crevice unpacked with the honey,
rare, measureless"

is incredible. I want to read everything by H.D. now. I read Sea Garden as an ebook but this is one of the few books I really want in person. I loved it so much I just want to have it near me, physically. I'm going to read the rest of her work and some of the other Imaginists' now, and I hope it's just as amazing!

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I wonder if you knew how I watched, how I crowded / before the spearsmen—but the gods wanted you, the gods wanted you back" (17).

[Konstantin R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

[rating = A+]
What a brilliant first collection by Hilda Doolittle. She is an imagist and it certainly shows. No word does not carry a weight of thought and meaning, the flow is effortless and soft, though rough and hard at other purposeful times. This collection is very environmentally-conscious and the poems can be seen to represent love and the human body or just the relationship between the writer and her ecosystem (taken from an eco-critic standpoint). Every poem can somehow be connected to the last or next, through repetition and through vivid themes that circulate throughout the collection. An amazing read!

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The liminal zones are where we meaning-makers live, knowing well the fragility, wonderful diversity, and challenges of life. Hilda Doolittle's _Sea Garden_ poems draw the reader's attention to life's wonders and pain, with salt in our breathing and tendrils of seaweed infused fog wrapping around us.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this early and slim volume, you can see what will come in HD's later imagist writing. Here too often the diction of "high poetry" of the 19th Century appears. And too many poems are apostrophes to flowers and objects. But the irregular verse is free, the imagery true, and the language moving towards the modern.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

For alas,
he had crowded the city so full
that men could not grasp beauty,

This was gorgeous. Doolittle's poetry is so full of violence and liberation and desire for the chaos inherent in nature that it is staggering. A new favorite find! Sheltered Garden and The Huntress were my two favorites for their forceful wording, ecstasy in action, and evocative reminiscence of savagery.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, if slight, collection, with an enjoyable thematic touch. It has left me longing to read more of H.D.'s work.

[Acacia · Rating 5 out of 5]

first thing I read from H.D. a while ago. showed me a whole new world

[Beyza · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've been thinking imagism sounds great in theory, but it didn’t fully convince me just from reading manifestos or hearing pound talk like he invented poetry. i think for me, imagism only works when the image isn’t empty, when the emotion isn’t stripped away in the name of simplicity. i appreciate poems that make me feel something without drowning me in language. h.d. shows how that balance can actually exist. seriously, that’s how you do imagist poetry.

this collection really brings the movement to life. she proves that it wasn’t just a rebellious idea tossed around in the early 20th century. i've done a lot of research on the principles: "show don’t tell,” clear images, no unnecessary words; but hilda made me feel it. like, emotionally. there's something so refreshing about a poet who trusts a single image to do all the work, without trying to wrap it up in a neat little moral. that's what feels honest to me. that’s why her poems got under my skin.

i genuinely think she might be the best imagist poet out there. and honestly, she’s becoming one of my favorite poets because of that; because she can mix strong feeling and calm in the same line and and still make you feel a lot. i'm officially obsessed.

[iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are unsheltered / cut with the weight of the wind - / you shudder when it strikes, / then lift, swelled with the blast - / you sink as the tide sinks

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first imagist poems seem to have been published between 1912 and 1913 and Ezra Pound´s now famous manifesto on imagisme appeared in his essay published in 1913 and draws heavily on his discussions with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) -his previous fiancée- and Richard Aldington -her future husband- among others. When H. D.´s 1916 Sea Garden was published it was widely regarded as a model of imagism, and the label was stuck so firmly on her work. that it took years of determined and stubborn effort for her to break loose of it.

The manifesto indicated:

- Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome

These principles can be clearly seen in the following fragment of H. D.´s Evening

[...]
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf,
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf shadow are lost.

H. D. ´s more personal voice is especially prominent when she sets her poems in the sparse, violent, hardy world pinned between sea and land. This is the location for her sea flower variations including her stunning opening poem Sea Rose:

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf[..]
Stunted, with small leaf,

that is suddenly, erotically and brutally transfigured :

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?

This is also the world of Greece, not the marble-aloof Greece of faultless hexameters but that of intense rough-hewn sea-men struggling with waves and wind, sun-burnt necks, love, marsh and enemy spears, flint and goats, furies and bruised thighs, sand and awe-inspiring, growling god visitations riding poplars and splintering pines, desperately striving to reach niggardly, rock gnawn shelters before the pitiless sea claims them as her own. For example, in The Helmsman:

O be swift--
we have always known you wanted us.

We fled inland with our flocks,
we pastured them in hollows,
cut off from the wind
and the salt track of the marsh.
[...]
But now, our boat climbs-hesitates-drops-
climbs-hesitates-crawls back-
climbs-hesitate-
O be swift-
we have always known you wanted us.

or The shrine:

You are useless,
O grave, O beautiful,
the landsmen tell it -I have heard-
you are useless.
[...]
Flame passes under us
and sparks that unknot the flesh,
sorrow, splitting bone from bone,
splendour athwart our eyes
and rifts in the splendour, sparks and scattered lights.

Many warned of this,
men said:
there are wrecks on the fore-beach,
winds will beat your ship,
there is no shelter in that headland,
it is useless waste, that edge,
that front of rock-
sea gulls clang beyond breakers,
none venture to that spot.

IV
But hail-
as the tide slackens,
and the wind beats out,
we hail this shore-
we sing to you,
spirit between the headlands,
and the further rocks.

Though oak-beams split,
though boats and sea-men flounder,
and the strait grind sand with sand
and cut boulders to sand and drift-
Your eyes have pardoned our faults,
your hands have touched us-
you have leaned forward a little
and the waves can never thrust us back
from the splendour of your ragged coast.

In Loss the sea is in league with a faceless enemy.

The sea called-
you faced the estuary,
you were drowned as the tide passed.-
I am glad of this-
at least you have escaped.
[...]
One of us, pierced in the flank,
dragged himself across the marsh,
he tore at bay roots, lost hold on the crumbling bank-

Another crawled -too late-
for shelter under the cliffs.

Such murderous violence should remind us that, for all its Ancient Greek trappings, many of these poems can legitimately be read as war poetry, published in the midst of the senseless carnage of World War I.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is very 'Imagiste' - I can see why H.D. is not remembered as much as her more famous contemporaries like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound (who H.D. is very much like), but there is some real beauty in this very short book. Some personal highlights for me:

'Over me the wind swirls.
I have stood on your portal
and I know—
you are further than this,
still further on another cliff.'

From 'Cliff Temple'

'I wonder if you knew how I watched,
how I crowded before the spearsmen—
but the gods wanted you,
the gods wanted you back.'

From 'Loss'

'O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand,
but leave the stark core
of the rose
to perish on the branch.'

From 'Night'

'The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.'

From 'Hermes of the Ways'

[P.J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The BiblioLife facsimile print-on-demand (2009) is what a reprint should be, showing (as much as budget allows) respect to the typographic original with its slightly larger copy. OTOH the Kessinger Publishing reprint is a complete hack job, devoid of attention to proper layout, type, or even proofreading. It looks copied-and-pasted from a public-access Web source.

[M.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, incandescent, intelligent. Particularly liked 'Sea Rose', 'The Helmsman', 'Sea Lily', 'The Wind Sleepers', 'Orchard', 'Sea Gods', 'Hermes of the Ways' and 'Cities'. Favourite lines:

Hermes, Hermes,
the great sea foamed,
gnashed its teeth about me;
but you have waited,
where sea-grass tangled with
shore-grass.

[Vuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection made H.D. one of my favourites. There's something so wonderful about her style - it's almost as if it has this sensory flow to it, and your mind is just another element floating through the world she guides you through. Yes, that is a really silly and flowery description, but nonetheless....READ THIS!

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hated poetry until I read H.D. Amazing stuff. Written in the 1900's, she's powerful and feminine. She makes you wonder, "What has the feminist movement done in the last 100 years that has topped this?"

[Kat]

lent to me from megan. 'the helmsman': "we have always known you wanted us." re. calvino: 'aquatic uncle,' "the sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now encloed within their bodies." natical awful.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reason:
another life holds what this lacks,
a sea, unmoving, quiet—
not forcing our strength
to rise to it, beat on beat—

Sparse, solitary, and not one thing superfluous.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simple, straightforward, strong, and in love with contradictions.

[Rory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. HD re-envisions the mutilated as the magnificent in this collection.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

stark and beautiful poems about the sea, plants, and gods.

[Belinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little anthology of poetry. It took me a while to get into it, but I got used to H.D.'s familiar style. It's like talking to an old friend now.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sea, sand, wind, rock, flower--like Homer, H.D. need only name a thing for it to become poetry.

[addie · Rating 4 out of 5]

definitely one that gets better once you've studied it alsoooo shirley jackson fans get on this!

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems of Sea Garden, H.D.'s first collection of poetry, were written during the First World War, and is thoroughly infused with the influence of Imagism (the movement H.D. founded with Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington). The characteristics of Imagism can be found in an essay written by Ezra Pound, in which the poet clarified the group's position...

1. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Whether subjective or objective, the "things" treated by H.D., her imagery, often favored the beautiful or scenic (albeit not written in the same "flowery language" of H.D.'s predecessors, however many flowers appear in her work). The poet and critic Harold Monro called H.D.'s early work "pretty poetry" (which he intended as a derogatory statement). And while it is true that many of H.D.'s poems can be called "pretty" (such as "Evening") she simultaneously rallies against what is "pretty" and calls for a new definition, a new standard of beauty (in "Sheltered Garden")...

The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower -
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint -
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
- Evening

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about the dead leaves -
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince -
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
- Sheltered Garden

Otherwise, H.D. makes statement pertaining to her world or the natural world, statements that encapsulate her conditions, her observations...

You stand rigid and mighty -
granite and the ore in rocks;
a great band clasps your forehead
and its heavy twists of gold.

You are white - a limb of cypress
bent under a weight of snow.

You are splendid,
your arms are fire;
you have entered the hill-straits -
a sea treads upon the hill slopes.
- The Contest, II

Perhaps that other life
is contrast always to this.
I reason:
I have lived as they
in their inmost rites -
they endure the tense nerves
through the moment of ritual.
I endure from moment the moment -
days pass all alike,
tortured, intense.
- The Gift

H.D. creates rhythm ("of the musical phrase") in many ways, the most prominent of which is the poet's use of repetition (as in "The Helmsman", "Huntress", "Garden, I" "The Cliff Temple, III", and "Sea Gods, III")...

We forgot - we worshipped,
we parted green from green,
we sought further thickets,
we dipped our ankles
through leaf-mould and earth,
and wood and wood-bank enchanted us -

and the feel of the clefts in the bark,
and the slope between tree and tree -
and a slender path strung field to field
and wood to wood
and hill to hill
and forest after it.
- The Helmsman

Can you come,
can you come,
can you follow the hound trail,
can you trample the hot froth?
- Huntress

If I could break you
I could break a tree.
If I could stir
I could break a tree -
I could break you.
- Garden, I

Shall I hurl myself from here,
shall I leap and be nearer you?
Shall I drop, beloved, beloved,
ankle against ankle?
- The Cliff Temple, III

For you will come,
you will come,
you will answer our taut hearts,
you will break the lie of men's thoughts,
and cherish and shelter us.
- Sea Gods, III

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a sense, it is impossible to appreciate these poems fully unless you have lived on the shores of the Mediterranean, so thoroughly are they imbued with the spirit of the place. To me, who has lived in the region for the last 5 years, is unbelievable that at the time of writing the author had not spent any significant period of time here at all. The power of imagination this reveals is truly uncanny.

HD has probably been compared to Sappho far too many times, and though her poems possess certain qualities in common with the fragments that come down to us from the original Lesbian -- the startlingly forthright personal address, the limpid intensity of feeling; the vivid crystalline organisation of image, rhythm, melody, and texture at once tight, precise and clear as well as open, organic, animal, refreshing as the salt spray of the breakers that so infuse these lines -- qualities that in general harken back to the classic period of the Hellenic lyric, from the Choruses of Euripides to the Greek Anthology -- in fact she harkens back to a sensibility even older than this, of which little has come down to us in the history of western literature: the animist attitude expressed in the oral poetry of tribal peoples around the world, the chthonic folk mythology of local earth deities -- spirits and demons, sprites and fauns, satyrs and nymphs, sea naiads and tree dryads -- going back to the prehistory of neolithic Old Europe that was replaced by the pantheon of the patriarchal Indo-European pastoralists of Eastern Europe who swept across the continent at the start of the Bronze age.

"The main theme of Old European goddess symbolism is the cyclic mystery of birth, death, and the renewal of life, involving not only human life but all life on earth. Symbols and images cluster around the parthenogenetic (self-generating) Goddess who is the single source of all life. Her energy is manifest in springs and wells, in the moon, sun, and earth, and in all animals and plants.

She is the Giver-of-Life, Wielder-of-Death, Regeneratrix, and the Earth Fertility Goddess, rising and dying with the plants. Male gods also exist, not as creators but as guardians of wild nature, or as metaphors of life energy and the spirits of seasonal vegetation. The proto-Indo-European pantheon of gods was a socially and economically oriented ideology. This system was well suited to a pastoralist/mixed farming economy with prominent sovereign and warrior classes which had mastered the horse and weapons of war...

The Indo-European religion became official, but the Old European Goddess religion was carried on to the present day through fragments, of Old European culture." (The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas)

The closest equivalent to such poetry in literate societies might be the Book of Odes compiled by Confucius, although even in that example the epoch is one in which the norms and ambitions of kingdoms and conquest competed with an older, wilder state of mind. In this sense, she is perhaps the most authentic "primitivist" in English literature, as her style derives not from an imitation of the form and content of any existing corpus (as was the case with Ezra Pound and the other Imagists), but emerges as an original expression of an individual entirely possessed by an utterly concrete worldview. In the history of 20th century literature the influence of this sensibility, and the way in which her work formed a fiercely authentic realisation of it, cannot be over-stated.

As a collection of early poems by a master of high Modernism this certainly holds its own alongside anything by from the same period Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens or Ezra Pound.

[Ela M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn’t heard of H.D. before, but I came across her while researching early 1900s poets and was surprised to find she’s originally from Bethlehem, PA. I can definitely see how her work paved the way for early feminist modernist poetry, especially with its strong natural imagery. This particular collection leans heavily into harsh ocean scenes, deep woods, florals…but they felt very repetitive to me.

That said, her writing has a very lyrical quality and these poems sound nice when read aloud. I wouldn’t say I’m a new fan, but I’m always happy to give a new poet a try. My two favorite poems from this collection were Sheltered Garden and Cities.

“Perhaps that other life is contrast always to this.” - from The Gift

“I reason: another life holds what this lacks” -from The Gift

“Let them cling, ripen themselves, test their own worth, nipped shriveled by the frost, to fall at last but fair with a russet coat.” -from Sheltered Garden

“Leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant.” -from Sheltered Garden

“But the gods wanted you, the gods wanted you back.” -from Loss

“You are useless. We live. We await great events.” -from Cities

“The city is peopled with spirits, not ghosts, O my love: / Though they crowded between and usurped the kiss of my mouth their / breath was your gift, their beauty, your life.” -from Cities

[hjh]

“What do I care/ that the stream is trampled,/ the sand on the stream-bank/ still holds the print of your foot” (10)

"I reason:/ another life holds what this lacks,/ a sea, unmoving, quiet--" (16)

"Only a still place/ and perhaps some outer horror/ some hideousness to stamp beauty" (16)

"blue tips bend/ toward the bluer heart/and the flowers are lost" (17)

"O to blot out this garden/ to forget, to find a new beauty/ in some terrible/ wind-tortured place" (19)

"The sea called--/ you faced the estuary,/ you were drowned as the tide passed.--/ I am glad of this--at least you have escaped./ The heavy sea-mist stifles me./ I choke with each breath--/ a curious peril, this--" (19)

"Violet/ your grasp is frail/ on the edge of the sand-hill,/ but you catch the light--/ frost, a star edges with its fire" (23)

“I said:/ for ever and for ever, must I follow you/ through the stones?” (24)

"Weed, moss weed,/ root tangled in sand,/ sea-iris, brittle flower,/ one petal like a shell/ is broken,/ and you print a shadow/ like a thin twig./ Fortunate one,/ scented and stinging,/ rigid myrrh-bud,/ camphor-flower,/ sweet and salt-- you are wind/ in our nostrils" (32)

"No flower ever parted silver/from such rare silver;/ O white pear,/ your flower-tufts/ thick on the branch/bring summer and ripe fruits/ in their purple hearts" (35)