Today’s Poem: After Troy

H.D.’s fated war

Detail from an Attic black-figure neck amphora, depicting two warriors fighting over a corpse (Wikimedia Commons)

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After Troy

by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

We flung against their gods,
invincible, clear hate;
we fought;
frantic, we flung the last
imperious, desperate shaft

and lost:
we knew the loss
before they ever guessed
fortune had tossed to them
her favor and her whim;
but how were we depressed?
we lost yet as we pressed
our spearsmen on their best,
we knew their line invincible
because there fell
on them no shiverings
of the white enchantress,
radiant Aphrodite’s spell:

we hurled our shafts of passion,
noblest hate,
and knew their cause was blest,
and knew their gods were nobler,
better taught in skill,
subtler with wit of thought,
yet had it been God’s will
that they not we should fall,
we know those fields had bled
with roses lesser red.

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The Modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who took her initials, “H.D.,” as a pen name, is remembered today chiefly for the spare, classically themed poems of her early career. Readers here will remember her brief poem, “The Pool,” which appeared here in May, with an introduction by guest columnist Steve Knepper, who returns this Thursday to discuss a poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay. Today, H.D.’s 138th birthday, seems an opportune time to look again at her work. 

H.D. rose to prominence as a co-founder, with Ezra Pound, of the avant-garde Imagist movement of the early nineteen-teens. Fermented in the same cultural cauldron that produced Cubism, for example, as a development in visual art, Imagism proposed to strip away what its proponents considered the discursive excesses of Romantic and Victorian poetry: its rhetorical overflows, its utter talkiness. Instead, said the Imagists, let us simply present vivid, direct scenes, and trust that the images we present are invested with, and will convey, all the meaning they need to. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams would write, more than a decade after all the initial literary ferment, in his long poem, “Paterson.” 

The Imagists  proposed as well, if not an outright revolt against traditional poetic forms, then at least a looser relationship with those forms. But while some movement members, notably Williams, focused their concerns on creating a distinct American poetry, inscribing American scenes and experiences as literary subject matter in a unique American language, others — including both Pound and Doolittle — found their subjects and influences in the narratives of the classical world, in Dante, and in the poetry of ancient China and Japan. For them, a break with the immediate past did not necessarily mean a break with all the past, but a shift in the terms of the conversation. 

Man Ray, Hilda Doolittle, circa 1917 (Wikimedia Commons)

In Today’s Poem, “After Troy,” the predominantly trimeter lines and the movement in and out of rhyme recall a prescription of T.S. Eliot’s, in his 1917 essay, “Reflections on Vers Libre.” Eliot says that “the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the ‘freest’ verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse,” adding that “freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.”

We might understand the “background” of trimeter here as a setting in which such lines as “noblest hate” show up brilliantly as departures from that pattern. Rhymes and half-rhymes, too, call starker attention to themselves as they feint with, but fall short of adhering to, a consistent pattern. In addition to these metrical flows and ebbs, bursts of rhyme — “last/lost,” followed by “guessed/depressed/pressed/best,” and the run of liquid end-sounds, “fell/spell/skill/will/fall” — also contribute to the poem’s forward momentum, as it gathers itself for a spring at its conclusion, in a final couplet.  

In her later career, H.D. would write experimental drama; her poem here gives us a dramatic monologue, after the manner of Robert Browning, yet emphatically not in the voluble manner of Robert Browning. In H.D.’s austere poem, an anonymous defeated Trojan speaks of the fated-ness of Troy’s defeat, its rightness in the great schemes of the gods. As the last line implies, the fields outside Troy have “bled / with roses” more red. The carnage, the sacrifice of lives, willed by “nobler” gods, is the nobler carnage. That sacrifice: the higher sacrifice. The poem never explains as much, let alone belabors its point. Yet we know that this is how its world is ordered. In the unsparing world its austere lines evoke, the unspoken fact is both a truth and a grim consolation. 

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