Reading H.D.'s "Helios and Athene"

Abstract

H.D.'S SIGNATURE, like her poems, is an energy bundle: a seed, a co coon, a wrapped mystery. The initials condense the birthname, Hilda Doolittle, which in 1886 anchored her as daughter of Helen Wolle Doo little, member of a prominent mystic Moravian family, and Charles Lean der Doolittle, Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Lehigh Uni versity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her writings construct from history and mythology a series of selves which successively extend the figure of her initials: Helmsman, Huntress, Hippolytus, Hippolyta, Hermes, Her mione, Helios, Heliodora, and, throughout, her mother's namesource, Helen: Helen Dentritis (of the Trees), Helen of Sparta, Helen of Troy, and, at the center of her most complex and extended identification, Helen of Egypt. Each Hermetic Definition, as the initial-bearing title of a late poem suggests, is a momentary manifestation of the mystery of iden tity, a butterfly released from the anagram, cryptogram, little box of her signature. The signature was at first qualified by a poetic affiliation: H.D., Ima giste. The poems it signed were until recently H.D.'s best known work, the brilliant imagist poems which began appearing in 1913. Cited by movement theorists as representing quintessential imagist qualities, these poems filled her first volume, Sea Garden (1916), and appeared promi nently in each of the four successive movement anthologies. The imagists' resolve to strip poetry of what Ezra Pound called slush left their work laconic: hard, dry, factual, accurate, freshly recorded perceptions. H.D.'s imagist work has a radiant spareness. In these poems, pools quiver like sea-fish, sea-grass tangles with shore-grass, and wind-driven flowers drag up from the sand a bright and acrid fragrance. In 1920, when she wrote Helios and Athene, H.D.'s imagist period was over. The harsh years just preceding provided material which eluded imagist formulations and compressions, material she would work and re work throughout her life. In London through most of World War I, H.D. had suffered a series of losses: in 1915, she gave birth to a stillborn child, the miscarriage caused, she felt, by the shock of the Lusitania's sinking; in 1916, her husband, Richard Aldington, entered the war with