#1925Club: Collected Poems of H.D.

Here are two poems by H.D. neither of which were written in 1925 but both of which were included in her Collected Poems of that year. 

Storm

You crash over the trees,
you crack the live branch—
the branch is white,
the green crushed,
each leaf is rent like split wood.

You burden the trees
with black drops,
you swirl and crash—
you have broken off a weighted leaf
in the wind,
it is hurled out,
whirls up and sinks,
a green stone.

H.D.

Crash, crack, swirl – The poem addresses the storm directly as  the elements of Nature hurl themselves onto the page. Storm is like distilled H.D. – standing as a kind of manifesto of control amid chaos. The whirling fury of the storm lashes the tree branches with a power that is destructive but which also transforms. The weighted leaf battered from the tree is whipped up by the wind and then dropped like a green stone. 

Ezra Pound and H.D met as teenagers and they had complicated and often tempestuous relationship. There’s an anecdote of his amazement of her embrace of a wild storm. Whether this has any connection with this poem I have no idea. 

Other poems in the collection show her power sharp power and imagist control . There are some that seem to reflect her response to the devastation of the war and some that turn mythology upside down with a female perspective.   

Eurydice

The second poem I have picked out from the collection is Eurydice whch turns the traditional  telling of that myth upside down replacing the lament of Orpheus for his lost love  with a defiant Eurydice who angrily condemns her husband for his “arrogance and ruthlessness”.

H.D. retells the Greek myth from the viewpoint of the woman left in darkness and  transforms a tale of loss into a declaration of autonomy. Her Eurydice is angry and loud, bitter and exultant. She turns exile into self-assertion: “At least I have the flowers of myself” . 

Powerful stuff

Hilda Dolittle

H.D. was the pen name of Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) who made her name in London before and during the First World War as the leading figure of Imagism, the modernist movement that championed clarity, precision, and economy of language. Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she moved to London in 1911 and soon became part of the city’s avant-garde literary circle. 

There’s a great introduction to her life, work, and enduring influence here.

Fascinating stuff as it untangles her connections with many of the familiar literary figures of the era – Pound and Ellerman (Bryher) of course but also William Carlos Williams, T.S.Eliot,  Richard Aldington, D.H.Lawrence, Marianne Moore  and so many more.

Imagiste

An incident at the British Museum tea room in 1912 became legendary: Ezra Pound, reading her poems “Hermes of the Ways,” “Epigram,” and “Orchard,” struck through her lines with a pencil, declared “this is poetry,” and signed them “H.D. Imagiste.” That moment launched both her career and the Imagist movement itself.

Pound and others hailed her as “the perfect Imagist,” and her first collection, Sea Garden (1916), was well received. II established her as an accomplished and widely regarded poet whose poems  expressed profound feeling through tight, clear images drawn from nature and mythology. The wind, sea, and flowers serve as emblems of endurance and desire.

By 1925, when her Collected Poems appeared, H.D. had moved beyond the confines of strict Imagism. Her experiences during the war – loss, stillbirth, and the collapse of her marriage to Richard Aldington – had deepened her sense of fracture and renewal. Living with her partner, the writer and heiress Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), she travelled widely in Greece and Egypt, drawing inspiration from classical and ancient sources.

H.D. continued to be a prolific and influential writer until her death in 1961.

Here’s is the publisher’s blurb for that first edition in 1925.

This is my fourth  for the #1925Club hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.
The other three are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Still William.. and Witness for the Prosecution.