This Sunday night’s poet was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem (Pennsylvania), was dubbed “H.D.” by her mentor and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound, and like T.S. Eliot left the US to live in England (and eventually other countries as well, including France and Switzerland). She was very influenced by classic Greek literature, publishing translations of Greek plays and writing a book-length poem (Helen in Egypt) riffing on an ancient fanfic about Helen of Troy. From her early “Imagist” period, here is her short poem "Oread" (in Greek mythology the oreads were mountain nymphs):
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. lived in London while it was under German bombardment, an experience that inspired her to write three poetry collections, later published together as Trilogy. They are steeped in Egyptian, Greek, and (unorthodox) Christian symbolism and mythology; here’s the second poem from the third book (written in December 1944), the theme of which is resurrection and rebirth:
I go where I love and where I am loved, into the snow; I go to the things I love with no thought of duty or pity; I go where I belong, inexorably, as the rain that has lain long in the furrow; I have given or would have given life to the grain; but if it will not grow or ripen with the rain of beauty, the rain will return to the cloud; the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone; but this is not our field, we have not sown this; pitiless, pitiless, let us leave The-place-of-a-skull to those who have fashioned it.
“The-place-of-a-skull” is simultaneously the bombed-out ruins of London and the place where Christ was crucified. (John 19:17-18: “And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: Where they crucified him, and two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst.”)
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by H.D..
- Internet Archive:
- Selected Poems, by H.D. Unfortunately the Internet Archive doesn’t appear to have the 1988 New Directions edition of Selected Poems (the one I have); this is the 1957 Grove Press edition.
- Collected Poems of H.D. This collection is from 1925; it has H.D.’s early Imagist poems but not her later work.
- Bookshop.org (indexed under “Hilda Doolittle,” not “H.D.”):
- Selected Poems, by H.D. This is a more recent “selected poems” collection than the one on the Internet Archive, and the best entry point to H.D.’s poetry.
- Collected Poems (1912-1944), by H.D. This covers more poems than the 1925 edition on the Internet Archive, but still omits much of her late poetry.
- Trilogy (The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod, by H.D., with readers’ notes by Aliki Barnstone. I have an earlier edition of this, which does not include readers’ notes (sigh).
- Helen in Egypt, by H.D. Her last major poetic work, it too would benefit from having readers’ notes (sigh).
- Other:
- This H.D. fan page has links to lots of interesting links to H.D.-related resources.