H.D.

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. (Hilda Doolittle), “Helen” from Collected Poems 1912-1944. Copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175877#poem


All of Hilda Doolittle's poetry gets at the heart of Modernism. In fact, she and Ezra Pound founded a new strand of Modernism known as the Imagist movement. A reaction against Gregorian Romanticism, the first line of the Imagist manifesto, "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word," sought out the economy of the word. The ideas of the Imagest movement added to the elements of Modernism in H.D.'s poetry. A champion of women's rights and lover of mythology, H.D. wrote often of Helen of Troy. Although this poem is written in the perspective of the Greeks, a longer poem by H.D., Helen of Egypt,  is written in Helen's own perspective. She tackles two of the modernist traits in this poem by taking on allusions, to the Greeks and the woman who started the Trojan War, as well as the idea of seeing the world in as many ways as possible. It is evident after reading the poem that the Greeks feel no love for "the face that launched a thousand ships", however as it explains to us that hate, the reader, feel for her. She is hated by her own country, only to be loved if she is dead, despite any remorse she may feel. The language is spare, as is the meter, as H.D. stays true to her imagist form.

A picture of H.D.

"To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658#sthash.JXqkHpJc.dpuf

"To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658#sthash.JXqkHpJc.dpuf