One poem from H.D.’s 1924 volume, Heliodora, seems to have stuck in my imagination. In the week or so since I first read it in my long march through Ms. Doolittle’s oeuvre, I’ve come back to it more than once. There is something about its tone that is uniquely – and deliberately – unattractive:

 

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,

if only she were laid,

white ash amid funereal cypresses.

 

There is seething fury here that I have seen only in the poetry of Jack Spicer (and in his work only in the love poems of Language & Book of Magazine Verse), directed not at Helen, but toward Greece, a mass noun.

 

I’ve noted before that H.D. is perhaps the major modernist whose work I know least well, and my approach since I began reading Duncan’s H.D. Book (which turns out to be only incidentally and peripherally about H.D.) has been to read her words first, letting the critical materials come later. But it is interesting to note that this poem  was not one I came across when doing that superficial scan of modernism one gets in college, even at Cal, where the representative texts had invariably been the shorter imagist texts, such as “Oread.” Just by the number of commentaries posted for this one poem on Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry website, I can tell that the social history of the past 33 or so years has substantially revised upward the stock of “Helen.”

 

I’m not concerned – and not likely to become concerned, either – as to whether or not the figure of Helen here could be said to represent H.D.’s own mother or, more likely, her partner Bryher.* What concerns me instead is the tone, the how & why of it. I can’t think of any American poem that, by 1924, the year Heliodora was published in an edition of 520 copies, so thoroughly vilified a group of people. The closest might be some of Pound’s early work, which is rancorous enough, but lacks the absoluteness of “Helen.”

 

The absoluteness lies – & this is a rhetorical stroke of genius – not in what the speaker says but rather in the absoluteness of hatred ascribed to Greece: only death could modify its evident disgust & resentment. The structure of rhyme throughout the poem – there is a couplet in each stanza as well as other carefully placed rhymes & near-rhymes – is set up precisely to climax on the maid / laid pairing of the penultimate lines. Indeed, the last line prosodically makes a point of unsettling any possibility of closure – the final term cypresses contrasts aurally with virtually every previous word in the text, as does funereal also.

 

This degree of emotion in a poem is rare precisely because it borders on a taboo: the work of art as an act of violence. High modernism, of course, had its advocates of death & destruction, viz. Italian futurism, but that was an aestheticized mayhem, like explosions in slomo. “Helen” is personal. The anger is palpable but never directly expressed** – the combination renders it much more powerful. The contained fury of the text, accentuated by the very formality of its rhymes, feels like an energy that needs to go somewhere. Far from being a self-consuming artifact, “Helen” functions by acknowledging the tacit agreement of any author toward their reader – “do no harm” – and suggesting without saying so that this social contract could be put at risk.

 

“Classicism” serves a variety of functions for H.D. In some works, retelling old stories enables her to achieve a space that the Russian formalists would have characterized as “unmotivated” or plotless. Often, it provides a kind of buffer or privacy for Doolittle, enabling her to speak intimately & directly without having to address the issues implicit in being identified with the speaker – that’s part of its function here. Often too classical facades disguise the depth of her challenges to the received terrain of language. “Helen” is an immediate contemporary of Spring & All. In some ways, this short poem is just as extreme as any element of Williams’ work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Although, if the latter, it would be interesting to speculate on how much of the resentment this piece acknowledges toward “Helen” may have been based not on sexual orientation so much as on class. Great wealth is its own special curse.

 

** Consider, for the sake of contrast, Dylan’s antiwar anthem, Masters of War, no less eloquent in some ways, but far less subtle – and I’ll stand over your grave until I’m sure that you’re dead.