In Honor of Poetry Month: H.D.

Hilda Doolittle, who went by H.D., was a poet, novelist and memoirist in the early 20th century. Born into a Moravian family in Pennsylvania in 1886, her father was a professor of astronomy and her mother loved music. She attended Bryn Mawr in 1905, but left after three terms. She knew Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud, among others. She had a very interesting life that spanned two World Wars and a host of friends, lovers and experiences.

With Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington she became one of the “original imagist poets.” Their three tenets for writing poetry were:

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 the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

The book Hermetic Definition, by H.D. has three long poems of several parts: “Hermetic Definition,” “Sagesse” and “Winter Love.” “Winter Love,” which is titled in parentheses “Esperance,” was written in 1959 and is a set of short “Helen” poems. According to her editor, Norman Holmes Pearson, they were meant to be a “coda” to her Helen in Egypt poems, but she decided later not to publish them together. Below is the first part of “Winter Love.”

[1]
. . . ten years?
it was more than that, more than that;
your hand grips mine — masterless?

I was masterless while men fought,
and I only found Spirit to match my Spirit,
when I met Achilles in a trance, a dream,

a life out-lived,
another life re-lived,
till I came back, came back . . .

You can read more about H.D. here.