Elemental Poetics: Shores, Seascapes, and Erosion in H.D.’s Early Poetry

Abstract

The elemental is implied already in the title of H.D.’s first poetry collection, Sea Garden (1916), with its collocation of two of the four classical elements that have informed humans’ relationship with nature ever since antiquity: water and earth. Air is repeatedly invoked as well, with the many harsh winds and storms that populate the poems, orchestrating the waves, or bending the plants.1 Even fire, albeit to a much lesser degree than the others, appears in Sea Garden. Rather than remaining static in spaces like inland woods or hollows, our attention is frequently directed toward the interplay between earth and water, the interstitial space where they meet, this “most fleeting and transitory feature of the earth,” as Rachel Carson termed it (144). Such an interstitial space, or “borderland,” foregrounds the flux and composite nature of the seemingly discrete, separate elements, which often appear together, just as it forms an important analogue to the overall fluidity displayed in Sea Garden, with its recurring enmeshing of the spiritual and natural, the present and historical, and the singular and the plural (Kusch 64).