“Link up, where I can”: H.D., the Scholar

HiE was written over three consecutive falls (1952–54), one long section per year, with the accompanying prose captions completed during 1955. Before delving into its details, I would like to first discuss the circumstances and, more specifically, the readings, that led to its genesis. Norman Holmes Pearson referred to HiE as H.D.’s “cantos,” and it is easy to see the poem as H.D.’s response to Pound’s work (ET 32). But much like Pound in the Cantos, so H.D. here is more broadly engaged with the epic tradition, revisiting the Iliad, Dante’s Commedia, and Goethe’s Faust. She is, like Hipparchia, and in some ways like her conception of both Euripides and Meleager, a poet-scholar. If for H.D. Euripides is engaged in a translation project – and nowhere more so than in Helen itself – so is H.D. Her “original,” though, is not only the Helen (and thus also Homer); in repeating Euripides’ gesture – much as her Hipparchia enacts Sappho’s – and translating her world back into the world of the epic tradition, she must also enter works that have intervened between his time and hers. As already in the Ion, H.D. is deeply engaged with Euripidean reception, working through Goethe, for example, as much as Pound does through Divus in his first Canto or Browning in his treatment of the Agamemnon. The apparent smoothness and lyricism of her verse in HiE belies the intensity of the reading that produced it, which is what I would like to retrace here.

H.D. too goes “back to 1912” in HiE, both in terms of re-engaging with her own translation work of the 1910s, and of her reading. For one, Gregory has highlighted how early H.D.’s exposure to and fascination with Helen and her relationship to Achilles was, citing her reading of May Sinclair’s Divine Fire in 1911, a novel whose male protagonist is translating Helen and writing a play inspired by Helen called Helen in Leuce, about Helen and Achilles.Footnote ¹¹ In End to Torment, H.D. makes a point of having said, in the early teens, to Pound – who was at that point presumptuously attempting to order Sinclair’s writing life – that she had read the novel already in America, before her first trip to Europe and before even imagining she might meet Sinclair (9). Upon her death in 1946, Sinclair left part of her library to Pound, Aldington, and H.D., who inherited specifically her Euripides volumes.Footnote ¹² By 1948, H.D. has also become re-engaged with Pound’s work. She defends the Pisan Cantos to Aldington – “I felt, almost for the first time, that E. had really genius” – and reads, and takes notes on, Pound’s Spirit of Romance (SR), using it to approach Dante, whose Commedia she is immersed in at the time (HD/RA 299).Footnote ¹³ Pound, the poet-scholar writing of Dante as a poet-scholar and attempting to sum up a medieval poetic tradition, prepares the ground for E. M. Butler, another poetically inclined scholar, whose expansive book on the Faust legend was the catalyst for H.D.’s Helen project. “I caught fire from her Fortunes of Faust that I read in Lugano, summer 1952 – then, started the Helen,” H.D. would later tell Pearson, and she would correspond with Butler frequently thereafter, until Butler’s death in 1959 (HD/NHP 190–91). Goethe’s use of Helen especially, reliant as it is on Euripides – with multiple thematic, structural, and metrical allusions, as Butler notes – is pointed because he goes beyond the mythical story and uses her self-consciously in order to probe and forge a relationship between the hellenic and the German, the classical and the modern. Both Pound and Butler’s books, and the epic works on which they focus, shape H.D.’s own approach as well as her ambitions for HiE more broadly.

There are four themes that recur in H.D.’s readings of the late 1940s and early 1950s that all feed into HiE and illuminate her perspective and procedure: the confluence between scholar, poet, and translator; the resulting cross-fertilization of traditions that nonetheless allows for poets’ individual stamp on them; the creation of a new, hybrid genre of quest narrative as drama (with a tripartite structure); and the link between the apparently obscure or mystical and the actual, between art and the world.

“Great poets … pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain,” Pound had written in SR (162). When H.D. copied the sentence into her notebook, she jotted down supporting facts (also taken from SR), underlining them in blue, all examples of such poetic hatching: Shakespeare “knew of Gower, and Gower and Chaucer knew of Dante” (SR 162, H.D. p. 13).Footnote ¹⁴ Pound adds, “Our knowledge of Dante and Shakespear [sic] interacts; intimate acquaintance with either breeds that discrimination which makes us more keenly appreciate the other” (SR 162). It is such an interactive knowledge – to “link up, where I can” (as H.D. writes Aldington in 1953) – that HiE aims to bring about (HD/RA 369). Like Pound, Butler traces a cross-linguistic, transcultural tradition – still, a tradition that individual poets can and do put their mark on. The story she tells highlights translation, making English the catalyst. Though she spends most of her book on the German trajectory of Faust, that trajectory, she claims, would not have been possible without the legend’s transformation in England.Footnote ¹⁵ Butler notes that in the 1592 English translation of the first German Faustbook “many slight omissions and alterations contribute to a total effect of greater spiritual proportions,” and that the translator’s “personality emerges more vividly than that of the original author” – an account that tracks so closely H.D.’s own earlier work with Greek that it is no wonder that H.D. thought Butler’s work pulled her back “to poetry, to the old Greek scene.”Footnote ¹⁶ Christopher Marlowe’s contribution through Doctor Faustus (1592), meanwhile, is the elevation and allegorization of Helen; identifying her with classical beauty, and making the danger she represents comparable to that of Faust’s other dangerous pursuits of knowledge and truth, Marlowe separates Helen from Faust’s sexual appetite and turns her from an incidental into a central element of his quests.Footnote ¹⁷ H.D. “completes” both Pound and Butler’s work: She extends the poetic links Pound traces both backwards to Euripides and forwards to her own work, and provides a counterpart to Butler’s meticulously traced series of Fausts (e.g., “Lutheran Fausts,” “English Fausts,” “Anti-Goethean Fausts,” etc.) with her examination of Helens, no longer as accessories to the male hero but “vital to the action.”Footnote ¹⁸

Both Pound and Butler present Dante and Goethe as the inheritors and transformers of their respective traditions. Their work far outpaces that of their predecessors and sets a new standard, essentially by inventing a new and inimitable form that is in some ways epic in scope, often lyrical in execution, and more or less dramatic in form. So Marlowe “immortalizes” the Faust legend because he “disengaged the essentially dramatic nature of the story of Faust,” which Goethe would then push to the limits of drama as a genre in Faust ii.Footnote ¹⁹ Pound dismisses “epic” as a genre for the Commedia. Though conceding that it is “in a sense lyric” (SR 153), he in the end argues for its dramatic conception:

HiE is also difficult to categorize, as is, in different ways, Euripides’ Helen: Both begin “admirably and tranquilly,” introduce “harsh complications,” but find their way to a “prosperous end” (maybe). Certainly H.D.’s poem ends in the recording of some kind of mystery, the “significance” of whose “Message” neither Helen nor “we” “wholly understand” (HiE 303). As suggested by its engagement with other epics and by its scope, HiE has epic ambitions, but, much like Sappho in Fragment 16 (see below), is invested in resisting some of epic’s connotations (see, e.g., HiE 289). The poem is also highly lyrical insofar as there is mostly a “single” speaker, and it is written in a Dantescan tercet form. We are invited to read H.D.’s tercets in the light of Dante, as her very first stanzas follow a loose terza rima scheme: hosts–Walls–ghosts, Fall–alone–temple. Though she doesn’t maintain this,Footnote ²⁰ it “link[s] up.” But through its prose captions – a version of the Benjaminian chemist’s running commentary used in Ion –HiE becomes both a work of sometimes deceptive scholarship, and a dramatic work. It is dramatic because it contains other voices (Thetis, Theseus, Achilles, Paris), sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, and those voices often speak in further “borrowed” voices. It is primarily dramatic, though, in the relation between its constituent parts: The captions often disagree with or misrepresent the poem that follows them, and increasingly acquire their own agenda.

H.D.’s captions are also partly owed to Dante, or rather to the Dantescan scholarly legacy. H.D. connects them to The Portable Dante, which included a translation of The Divine Comedy by Laurence Binyon. Binyon had been Assistant Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum in the early 1910s and part of the Pound–H.D. circle; Pound held his translation of the Inferno in high esteem, and line-edited his Purgatorio in the 1930s. The captions in The Portable Dante (actually not by Binyon but by the scholar C. H. Grandgent) offer not only a brief summary of the canto that follows, but an account of it; they give a sense of the prevailing critical opinion and a dash of interpretation. They thus exceed the “factual” and are more subjective than one might expect in such a tome.Footnote ²¹ Through the interaction between captions and poems in her own work, H.D. makes the reader constantly acknowledge both the production of and attachment to belief/story/interpretation, and thus explores the very notion of the foundational myth as she herself had presented it in the Ion. There are, moreover, unexpected shifts in perspective involving both dramatic elements. In “Eidolon” 3.3, for example, we are told by the caption that “we see with the eyes of Helen,” yet the poem is revealed at the very end to be from Achilles’ perspective (and perhaps it’s his perspective seen through the eyes of Helen) (243).

Though the poem was not initially composed with a tripartite structure in mind, HiE’s three parts echo broadly H.D.’s Dantescan and Goethean models. “Pallinode” opens with Helen in an uncertain state, and in a kind of “selva oscura,” surrounded by violence and war, as well as by wronged yet “guilty” characters (such as Klytemnestra). “Leuké” involves the revisiting of past friends or lovers, whose guilt is now seen in a more nuanced way since all the speakers are engaged in a still painful, purgatorial self-examination of their choices. Astral imagery begins to accumulate at the end of “Leuké,” leading into the often more allegorical “Eidolon,” which offers a deeper and more self-aware understanding of the past and the self and ends with an invocation of “someone greater than Helen” and with an intuition of “the infinite rhythm / of the heart and of heaven” (303, 304) that recalls the ending of Paradiso, especially in Binyon’s translation. The Goethean structural echo is even more precise. Goethe’s Helena-Akt, the third in Faust ii, is itself partitioned into three scenes. The first is mapped onto “pure” Greek tragedy (“stately, slow-moving, almost statuesque; it aims deliberately at producing a feeling of unreality,” per Butler) and imitates tragic meters.Footnote ²² H.D.’s “Pallinode,” as I will argue below, follows the Euripidean Helen very closely and replaces the almost-murder of Helen by Menelaus in Goethe with an attack by Achilles. Goethe’s second scene brings Helen into a Germanic medieval setting and explores the possibility of communion between Helen and Faust given their temporal and thus temperamental difference. In “Leuké” H.D. places Helen between Paris and Theseus, hitting a more contemporary note by turning Helen’s interactions with the latter into a psychoanalytic session of sorts. Goethe’s third scene is focused on both poetry per se and, moving the temporal story forward, on neoclassicism and on more recent, romantic appropriations of Greece. Helen and Faust are in an Arcadian landscape and observe the ascent and death of their child Euphorion, identified with Lord Byron, before Bacchic revelry ensues and Helen disappears, followed temporarily by Faust. In Butler’s view, the scene is “as deliberately unreal as the first” but “it has none of that haunting quality of sorrow for an irreparable loss.”Footnote ²³ The same could be said of “Eidolon”; on the one hand, we are back in Egypt, but on the other, the poem’s energies are more recuperative than those of “Pallinode.” “Eidolon” is, moreover, as its title indicates, intensely self-reflective and conscious of its own production of artifacts. Though in Goethe the exciting promise of the union between the modern world and Greece fails with the catastrophic death of Euphorion, the children H.D. envisions in “Eidolon” (Euphorion himself mentioned in the captions) are imbued with a qualified but greater hope for the possibility of such a translation. This is the challenge that fires up H.D.’s imagination: how not to let Helen, and through Helen Greek antiquity, fade back into the cloud.

Pound and Butler, finally, help H.D. articulate her ambitions for HiE, and they do so by offering models and answers for the questions she had always asked in her Greek work regarding the use, value, and ethics of artistic work, and especially work that looks to the past. “Dante’s work: keys or passwords,” H.D. jots down in her notebook (p. 12), referring to this sentence in SR: “there are works of art which are beautiful objects [that cause immediate delight] and works of art which are keys or passwords admitting one to a deeper knowledge, to a finer perception of beauty; Dante’s work is of the second sort” (154). Whistler’s paintings offer another example of “the second sort”: They are initially puzzling but “on leaving [them], and going from the gallery one finds new beauty in natural things” (SR 154). Pound points to that crucial connection between art and world, phrased here in mostly aestheticist terms: art as a flashlight or “new eyes,” which H.D. will discover again a few years later in her reading about Helen. Her most prominent Euripidean scholarly intertext, Henri Grégoire’s lengthy and nuanced introduction to the play, argues for “la grande actualité de l’Hélène,” and H.D. would explicitly mark Helen’s political context both in “Compassionate Friendship” and in a late appended note to her early Helen essay.Footnote ²⁴ Grégoire sees the political relevance and commentary of Helen not only in the larger plot (war is futile, etc.), but as recorded in its most apparently fanciful and “obscure” details – for example, the offhand mentions of the metamorphosis of Callisto or of Cos.Footnote ²⁵ He thus gives license to H.D. to embed a contemporary critique in an apparently ahistorical or timeless drama.

Butler similarly connects textual complexity and self-consciousness with political relevance. Her book ends on Faust’s most recent transformation in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). Though she finds Mann’s gesturing towards Nazi Germany forced, she identifies as the novel’s greatest contribution another moment that intertwines the creative and the critical: the Faustian protagonist Adrian Leverkuhn’s description of his final oratorio, which Butler deems “the most profound and imaginative commentary and interpretation the first Faustbook has ever received” in German.Footnote ²⁶ It is as if the first Faustbook has finally “come home,” to quote H.D.’s Thetis (HiE 108), since “all the most moving and poetical passages” in Mann “derive directly” from this first recorded telling of the Faust story and “are closely modelled on it textually.”Footnote ²⁷ Butler calls this an “extraordinary case of dynamic inspiration” by a “long-forgotten archaic text,” and again, she may well have been talking of H.D.’s HiE, and its return to the forgotten story of the Euripidean Helen.Footnote ²⁸ But in taking up Helen, H.D. also revisits her own understanding of and writing on the play thirty years earlier – in a short poem, in the essay “Helen in Egypt,” and in Palimpsest – which downplayed its political and ethical critiques, a topic to which I now turn.

“Again, a Pallinode”: H.D.’s early Helens

We plunge into the text, as if into an open secret:

“We all know,” the context is a shared tradition shaped by “the story of Helen of Troy.” Helen is undoubtedly a much-discussed figure, as evidenced by the spate of books that have taken her as their theme in the last forty years, each picking up different threads of her reception and story.Footnote ³⁰ Helen in this respect is the opposite of Shakespeare’s Claribel, whose unknown and neglected fate in The Tempest had prompted H.D.’s last poem before HiE. Written after Trilogy, “Good Frend” was included in By Avon River (wr. 1945–46, pub. 1949), H.D.’s tribute to Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry more broadly. Like the poem, the prose section of that book – originally intended as lecture notes for an American lecture tour – aims both to record Elizabethan figures, poets, and poems “lost” to or forgotten by us (like Claribel), and at the same time to imaginatively fill in the gaps in the biography of the least forgotten, William Shakespeare. It is perhaps this latter-day, prose version of Meleager’s anthological project that has H.D. weaving the garland of Elizabethan poetry, that primes her for her “return to the Greek scene,” while at the same time suggesting to her that even the most discussed can be most unknown. As a mixed scholarly and poetic work, moreover, By Avon River is a transitional point between the Ion and HiE. Sharing the larger scope and “anthological” procedure of the latter, it also, like the former, constantly enmeshes poetry with a world presumed to be outside it: Claribel is read through Elizabethan travel chronicles, poems are read against political circumstances. External context is more tenuously present in HiE, though, like The Cantos, the work is performatively, densely con-textual – and indeed, that balance between world and word, “exoteric” and “esoteric,” is what H.D. was most proud of (HD/NHP 180).

“We all know,” HiE’s prose voice begins, then proceeds to tell us that we don’t. We are offered an alternative story, yet it too is “known,” not unique, something less than an apocryphon, already “repeated” (as H.D. here quotes herself: “‘restored to sight’”). This performative gap or tension between statement or tone and actual, performed “meaning,” between manifest and latent content, guides the entire caption. The firm opening, the torrent of “facts” that follows, the sure tone belie H.D.’s interventions, her shaping of the story that appears to privilege poetry as a genre, redemption or restoration for Helen, and English (or error) over Greek.

Stesichorus was indeed the first to begin to tell us the story of Helen’s absence from Troy, but in the few lines that remain of his poem, there is no mention of Egypt.Footnote ³¹ It was a historian – Herodotus – not a poet who first placed her there and used her absence from Troy as a means of rationalizing the duration of the Trojan War (the Trojans would have just given up Helen had she been there).Footnote ³² It is possible that H.D. did not know this, but it is mentioned by two of her heavily relied-upon sources, Grégoire and Robert Graves’s Greek Myths, and these captions were written last, with reference books. She definitely does know, however, that Euripides followed his palinode in Helen with another invective in Orestes. H.D. is obsessed with chronologies and dating in her notebooks – a chronological list of Euripides’ plays is copied there – and references to the Orestes appear throughout HiE. And finally, she knows that someone else has shaped this story, and in the particular way she intends to tell it – a contribution silenced here. For it is Pausanias who connected the three alternative Helen myths that feature most prominently in H.D.’s poem: the blinding of Stesichorus, the phantom Helen in Egypt, and the marriage between Helen and Achilles after their death on the island of Leuké. Pausanias reports a legend that Leonymus of Crotona visited Leuké and, upon his return, said that “Helen was living with Achilles [in wedlock], and commanded him to sail to Himera and tell Stesichoros the loss of his eyes was caused because of her wrath: that was how Stesichoros wrote his Recantation [palinōdian].”Footnote ³³ The meeting between Achilles and Helen is thus placed at the origins of the palinode tradition, and it is what the first section of H.D.’s own poem will focus on. In this first paragraph of “facts,” then, in the work’s very opening, H.D. is already performing a kind of palinode, a correction and editing, of the very palinode tradition.

In H.D.’s telling, a “Pal(l)inode” encodes not simply the first gesture of retraction, but also the subsequent repetitions or revisions of that gesture that blend with each other – so much so that when we get to “The later, little understood Helen in Egypt,” we are not sure whether she is referring to her own work, just now beginning, or to Euripides’ play Helen, which she elsewhere (and previous to the writing of this poem) consistently calls “Helen in Egypt.”Footnote ³⁴ Just as the question of translation or influence rears its head, and just as pal(l)inode itself is multiply translated (“a defence, explanation or apology”) in avoidance of the usual “recantation,” so Helen, the subject of these odes and palinodes, becomes slippery – “transposed or translated” herself from Sparta to Troy or Egypt – and in moving from origin to destination releases a ghost located in neither place.

“Pallinode” is similarly a ghost term, neither the Greek παλινῳδία nor, quite consciously on H.D.’s part,Footnote ³⁵ the English palinode. “Pallinode” enacts the Greek palin ‘again’ ‘back’ through a literal doubling of the liquid l, while also clarifying the English pronunciation of the word. Yet it neither repeats nor retracts it nor even creates it anew, but makes space within an old word for an additional letter, a new vibration: not palin again, but pallin. Not a retraction reliant on the distinction between truth and error, nor a recantation similarly reliant on a conversion from guilt to innocence, both processes with a clear sense of direction, but a reverberation – is that what a pal(l)inode is? You can’t simply unsay or un-sing, move from origin (error) to destination (correctness); the “deleted” remains, and the energy released in the movement may end up in a different place altogether. This new “pallin” accentuates a visual rhyme with “all” and “illusion” – the words that (almost) start and end this first caption – while maintaining the echo with “alike,” a word that alerts us to the crucial question of similarity and identity that is raised by Euripides’ play and by this poem.

H.D. referred to the first part of HiE as “Helen in Egypt” even after the following two had been composed and the captions written, suggesting that she thought of it as directly related to the Euripidean play; she didn’t decide upon the title of “Pallinode” until late in the editing process.Footnote ³⁶ It is thus worth thinking about the degree to which this first section, or even the whole poem itself, is one. In this section I retrace H.D.’s earlier work involving Helen especially in her Euripidean guise, in order to determine the kind of relation that exists between H.D.’s earlier perceptions of the myth and HiE, as well as the kind of work that HiE is: a defense, explanation, or apology? A recantation? A mirror image? A translation?

Where has H.D. treated Helen less fairly? Perhaps in her early poem “Helen,” which was inspired by Teucer’s line in Euripides’ play that “all Greece hates” Helen,Footnote ³⁷ and in which she presents Helen (seen through the eyes of hateful Greece) as a wan, speechless statue. Indeed, that’s the image on which “Pallinode” 1.1 ends and which it retracts: “the old enchantment holds, / here there is peace / for Helena, Helen hated of all Greece” (2). Surely, too, HiE is a palinode more broadly against the Western epic (and dramatic) tradition, with its masculine bent, to which even Euripides belongs, turning as he does his Helen into a paragon of chastity and “that most insipid of fancies,”Footnote ³⁸ as if that was the only option. H.D.’s poem has been read as a “matriarchal” epic or as advocating for a renewal in both male and female gender roles.Footnote ³⁹ After all, Helen is its speaker but one of her self-appointed tasks, it seems, is to help Achilles with his “labours” – not an accidentally chosen word – so that a “new mortal” may be born. In this respect, it is an exemplary poem of “hatching”:Footnote ⁴⁰ a new epic and a new hero out of the shell of the old.

Integral to this renewal is “love,” proposed as an antithesis to the epic itself, to the martial rhetoric of allegiance (with its “Command,” “campaign,” and “dictator,” as H.D. puts it), to a world-war-ravaged Europe newly under nuclear threat (HiE 51).Footnote ⁴¹ Of course the question of eris–eros, or, as H.D. increasingly puts it in HiE, of mort–amour, is not a new one: not for H.D., who as we have seen was intensely preoccupied with it in her early Greek translations, and not for “Western” tradition. Indeed, as H.D. surely knew, it was Sappho who first proposed this alternative to war, who first repeated Paris’s judgment, choosing like him love or desire over, in her case, explicitly martial alternatives, and who (partly) identified with Helen for following her heart. “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves,” Sappho proclaims in Fragment 16, and then offers Helen going to Troy as an example.Footnote ⁴² Whether Fr. 16 is itself a palinode on the Helen story is a much-debated question,Footnote ⁴³ but it does explicitly propose the alternatives that H.D. is considering. Moreover, Sappho had since antiquity been considered a female Homer,Footnote ⁴⁴ an idea which would be reinforced by the Oxyrhynchus discovery of this particular poem, with its eschewing of war for a private love, of the marching feet of soldiers for the more delicate feet of Helen (implicitly) and of the speaker’s own beloved Anactoria. In translating towards the future, H.D. is still turning back to the past, and also to her own literary past, which includes Sappho: “Eidolon” will catch Helen at exactly this moment of sailing away to Troy.

HiE can be construed more specifically as a palinode or defense against the appropriation of the epic tradition by H.D.’s own male contemporaries, including Pound; recall Helen as the sound of “doom” in Pound’s early Cantos.Footnote ⁴⁵ Euripides had the Oresteia in mind when writing the Helen, and the situation in this play can be seen as exactly the opposite of that in the Eumenides.Footnote ⁴⁶ Certainly H.D.’s lengthy treatment of Klytemnestra can be read against Pound’s vision of her murderous, unjust, and all-too-glad hand and his symbolic use of her as the corrupting usurious cultural force bringing down heroic generals, seen most recently by H.D. in the Pisan Cantos. The penultimate stanza of HiE’s opening section ends with Klytemnestra, signaling her important role in the work; she is portrayed not as the evil other, but as Helen’s “twin-sister” and also as the “shadow of us all” (2). “Shadow,” another version of the eidolon, suggests the revisionary work H.D. will be doing and implies that Klytemnestra’s actions were only the necessary counterpart of all of our actions. That Klytemnestra’s role was altered in late revisions of “Pallinode,” to better and more negatively characterize Helen, may also be indicative of H.D.’s focused ambition.Footnote ⁴⁷ On a larger scale, she is very much taking up the concerns that Pound seems to have abandoned as his work became more and more politically and economically dense and rigid: the spirit of romance (literally Pound’s own book, but also filtered through her reading of Denis de Rougemont), Dante, and of course Homer.Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet H.D.’s intervention is more specific than that, in both the cases of the classical tradition writ large and of that tradition as appropriated by Pound. Going well beyond the “Helen” poem, H.D.’s early engagement with Helen is multifarious and thoroughly informs her choices in HiE. It is her single sustained early work on Helen – the essay “Helen in Egypt” – that the late H.D. revises, by returning as she does to the Euripidean play. The essay contains important early statements illuminating H.D.’s conception of her poetics that we have already discussed in previous chapters. However, when it comes to the Helen itself, the pretext for the essay, H.D.’s interpretation of Euripides falters and splits up. In this essay, “seeing through the words” means emphasizing the imagistically evocative setting, the figure of Helen as she initially appears, and the role of the chorus – all of which are aligned in her reading – but not really thinking through the play philosophically. While she “externalizes,” makes physically present onstage through her prose description the Nile, the sea, and the various birds mentioned in several of the play’s lyrical passages, she seems acutely aware of the play’s difficulties yet eager to dismiss them.

H.D.’s visionary and rhythmic outlook on the Euripidean play is tempered by her acknowledgment that “certainly this play is bad” (13). But focusing on the image of Helen and the chorus, she dismisses the “artificialities” without taking too seriously the critique they may represent. Though she tracks Helen’s transformation from the initial image (“phantom”) of the wronged, different yet still recognizable Helen on the foreign beach into a “now articulate, definite, a Greek woman” in her interactions with Teucer and Menelaus, and finally, though not explicitly, into one of the play’s “Clap-trap, dull, tinsel, ball-room Hellenes,” she doesn’t explore that apparent multiplicity (10, 13). Similarly, though she sees the chorus as representing an ancient ritual (“a survival of some old religious ceremony”; 10) and though she notes of Helen’s elaborate fake mourning ritual for Menelaus that “[Helen’s] love of ceremony interests [Theoclymenus]” (17), she doesn’t connect the two. She stops short of considering what this trick ceremony may suggest about ceremony in general, including the one she seems so drawn to. The play’s evocative choral songs, where the chorus “answer Helen … woe for woe” (12), make one forget, she claims, “the external trivialities of the play” (14), the plot that shows the main characters doomed to repeat the same mistakes that led to war in the first place, and that suggests the deceptive potential of ritual.Footnote ⁴⁹

There is a single suggestion in the essay that H.D. finds the play unsettling despite her being, as she admits, “intoxicated a little with my own idea” (9). The beginning of “Helen in Egypt” constructs the analogy between Helen and “the white waves” that is picked up in the passage cited above. It imagines an extensive correspondence between Helen’s prologue in the Euripidean play and features of the sea: They share a structure of concealment and revelation, they are both familiar but capable of surprise. The prologue, weaving known and unknown stories, is a sea on which we sail, and it is our task, H.D. claims, to use its words as “port-holes” in order to “look out from our ship, our world … on to a sea that moves and changes and bears us up” (9). She literally does so herself: Identifying speech with speaker, H.D. turns Helen into water. In Euripides, Helen points to the Nile and tells us that “Fed by the melting of pale snow it drenches Egypt’s fields with moisture.”Footnote ⁵⁰ H.D., however, detects a deeper analogy: “As the white snow that melts upon the desert is still the snow though it rushes, a river toward the sea, this is not Helen, yet still Helen” (4). The essay’s end, which does not coincide with the play’s, zooms back out and focuses on landscape and chorus, image and meters, relying on imagery from Helen’s third stasimon:

We might be tempted to say that Egypt, symbolizing the pre-Hellenic, “wins”; it is what remains when the Hellenes are gone, erasing their traces from its land. Yet “there is the circle of Greeks again,” surprisingly left behind in a foreign place after the ship of “tinsel…. Hellenes” has departed. This may be H.D.’s tacit acknowledgment that their ritual is the authentic one – a callback to the mourning women in IA’s third stasimon whose pain remains the same regardless of whether the stories about Helen are true. Representing the “impersonal” essence of “Greekness,” the permanence of the sea rather than the transformational and potentially duplicitous qualities of the water that comprises it, they exceed the machinations of Helen and Menelaus and are what is worth paying attention to.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, though H.D. doesn’t dwell on it, the alignment of the chorus with Helen – lyrically indicated when the chorus unexpectedly join Helen in her lament in the parodosFootnote ⁵² – is broken as the chorus continues to sing of the Trojan widows cutting their hair in mourning, while Helen does the same only in imitation, as part of a ruse since her husband is now found to be alive.Footnote ⁵³

Helen and Euripides’ Hecuba are major intertexts for Palimpsest (1926), so the way they are treated and not treated there helps us see part of what H.D. is recuperating in HiE. “Hipparchia” picks up right where the Helen essay leaves off, continuing the contemplation of the chorus. Marius doesn’t identify his sleeping lover Hipparchia – Greek woman exiled in Rome – with Helen (who after all escaped from Egypt) but with the female community of exiled Greek women. Much as the Hippolytus chorus wishes to fly off to the Hesperides, this chorus too at play’s end yearn to be like birds that would follow the syrinx of their leader (aligned with Helen, who is in fact sailing away).Footnote ⁵⁴ So Hipparchia:

It is Helen who calls upon the “winged” Sirens to help her lament her fate just as the chorus are about to make their entrance (lines 167–69). The Sirens are tied to Persephone’s abduction,Footnote ⁵⁵ a myth which will form the basis of the Helen’s second stasimon; indeed, here already Helen asks them to convey her lamentations to “Persephone / in her halls of night” (lines 175, 177). H.D. links the Sirens to the end of the play too, and, unlike in the essay, emphasizes their lament. In “Hipparchia,” that is, she creates the perfect mirror image of beginning and end, elided in the essay, suggesting both circularity and, perhaps, the eternal continuation of this Siren call. That she remembers the women here, even has Marius do it, suggests she is unsatisfied, still thinking about the play and its difficulties for interpretation if one is equally attached to Helen and to the chorus. Though H.D. will have Helen leave Egypt for Leuké in HiE, she returns her to the Egyptian shore for the work’s third part and explicitly addresses her relationship with the chorus there.

In “Hipparchia” Marius thinks of Helen – even more ambivalent about its value than the H.D. of the essay – while Hipparchia is caught by its metrical sea (Palimpsest 39). She does not name it, however, choosing instead to focus on Hecuba’s “sea choros” (the play’s first stasimon, whose translation H.D. would eventually publish). Connecting the Greek women’s bird song in Helen, muted in its disappointment, to the Trojan women’s fearful evocation in Hecuba of the seas on which they will travel after the destruction of their homeland allows H.D. to focus on the story of loss that Helen, with its mostly recuperative ‘happy’ ending, occludes. Hipparchia herself functions in a space of loss; her obsession with the plunder of Corinth – equated with the plunder of Troy – and her exile in Rome make her identify with the Trojan Women in Hecuba because she feels she has nowhere to go back to. She is also haunted by her dead brother’s ghost, though she does not acknowledge him right away, just as Hecuba begins with the ghost of Polydorus though Hecuba herself does not yet know of his death. The play depicts Hecuba’s debasement by the Greek heroes, especially Odysseus, and her betrayal even by her allies, just as Hipparchia feels used by her various lovers. Hecuba’s answer to loss and violence is more of it; so Hipparchia “triumphs” over her Greek original in her translation (discussed in Chapter 1) and courts madness.

Also embedded in “Hipparchia” is a third Euripidean play, Andromache, which focuses on the exiled life of a single Trojan woman. Its ending offers H.D. a way to mediate between the unsatisfactory conclusion of Helen and the too-dark ending of Hecuba. In Andromache Thetis appears as the dea ex machina and sets aright the conflicts of the play, rescuing Andromache; crucially, for HiE, Thetis gives an update on her son Achilles, whose ghost would demand the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena in the later Hecuba: He is “dwelling in his island home on the strand of Leuke in the Sea Inhospitable,” presumably purified of his wartime deeds.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the middle of the novella, Hipparchia begins composing a poem ostensibly about Achilles that actually turns out to be about Thetis bearing “a god” (Palimpsest 40). Soon Hipparchia herself has become “a giant Thetis among islands” who would “re-sanctify” those islands, “string them, thread them, irregular jagged, rough-jewel on a massive necklet, no frail woman-ornament, nor one to be bartered for fresh continents” (41). H.D. is again using the imagery from her “Helen” essay and merging Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen in order to describe what Hipparchia calls a “trance-state” (41). The “priestess” response to the loss of Greece is its aestheticization in a sense – what is gone petrifies into a jewel and is offered to the gods as sacrifice, so that something may come out of the loss (Greece resanctified might be Greece revived, reassembled, though not bartered like the Trojan women). Whereas Hecuba is all about loss, and Helen in its main plot appears to be about total recuperation, Andromache allows at least Hipparchia a brief respite through ritual viewed as preservation rather than lament. Its Thetis, as reimagined here, will recur at the end of “Pallinode” and will be treated more skeptically.

The Helen continues to be present but elided in the rest of Palimpsest. Raymonde in “Murex,” we recall, exits her trance through a “translation” or hatching of Poe’s “To Helen.” The triptych’s last novella is H.D.’s first Helen in Egypt, “Secret Name.” It takes place in the interim of the “Murex” timeline, 1923, but its protagonist Helen Fairwood seems less haunted.Footnote ⁵⁷ While H.D. later said that she was working “on a translation of Euripides’ Helen in Egypt, which I never finally assembled” at the time of her own trip to Egypt in 1923, she repudiated the presence of the name “Helen” in the story since “the Helen is only twice mentioned,” and wished for the character’s renaming (“H.D. by Delia Alton,” 218–19). It is this evasion of the full Helen that HiE returns to and “corrects” – much as Pound in his Elektra brings to fruition his earlier haunted preoccupation with the Aeschylean Agamemnon. H.D. also seems to realize in her return to this play – and to Helen’s other appearances in Euripides and Homer – that by eliding the “plot,” she had also elided Helen’s own “role as a manipulator of technê and mêchanê, of deception and the double vision which confuses the more prosaic every-day mentalities of Menelaus and Theoclymenus, [and] also signifies the restorative force of art itself.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The play thus offers her an opportunity to more fully explore the tensions she had broached in her IA choruses and through Hippolytus, but also in the Ion – which ends Kreousa’s story with the assertion of her author-ity but doesn’t show us what that means. That is what HiE returns to and adds: the rapprochement of the Hellenes and the Helens.

Helen and the eidolon

As H.D. partially intuited in her early essay on the play, besides or beneath its “romance” plot,Footnote ⁵⁹ Euripides’ Helen raises serious philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and reality;Footnote ⁶⁰ the power of divinity and oracles;Footnote ⁶¹ mythmaking and language;Footnote ⁶² the nature of art or drama;Footnote ⁶³ and the origin of song.Footnote ⁶⁴ The major omission in H.D.’s essay, and one that can function as a synecdoche for the rest as the nexus of neglected interrelated questions, is the consideration of the eidolon. H.D. is too invested in the idea of the new, blameless Helen and intrigued by the play’s imagery and its meditations on song to think about the eidolon’s implications. But it is the eidolon and associated terms (ἄγαλμα [agalma] ‘statue, image’ and νεφέλη [nephelē] ‘cloud’) that stand out when H.D. returns to the play in the 1950s, and are indeed marked in her reading notebook.Footnote ⁶⁵

The eidolon in Euripides’ Helen remains offstage. All we know about it is that it is indistinguishable from Helen: Paris was fooled, Menelaus was fooled – and in case we think of those two as fools already, the sober, humbled Teucer and the skeptical messenger were also fooled. Euripides aims to create the same unsettling confusion in his audience. Most brazenly, shadow-Helen’s parting words (reported by the messenger) before she disappears echo closely those the real Helen has earlier uttered onstage.Footnote ⁶⁶ The tragedian also blurs the two more inconspicuously throughout the play. When the eidolon disappears, it goes “towards the folds of the ether” (πρὸς αἰθέρος πτυχάς [l. 605, my translation]). Helen has told us of her translation to Egypt in the exact same terms: Hermes took her “in the folds of the ether” (ἐν πτυχαῖσιν αἰθέρος [l. 44, my translation]). Moreover, “the ether” is where her brothers, the Dioscuri, come from at the end of the play (δι᾽ αἰθέρος [l. 1496]). The cloud (νεφέλῃ [l. 45]) in which Helen is hidden during the journey to Egypt is what the eidolon is made of; Menelaus calls it νεφέλης ἄγαλμ᾽ ‘image made of cloud’ (l. 705), a formulation which Helen repeats (l. 1219). Menelaus’s strange use of ἄγαλμα, usually meaning “statue,” also has a precedent in Helen’s own words: Early in the play she wishes her face could be rubbed off, as if she were a painting or a statue (ἄγαλμα [l. 262]).Footnote ⁶⁷ What Euripides is getting at with the formulation νεφέλης ἄγαλμα is precisely that making-into-statue, that solidification of air. The eidolon doesn’t betray its nebulousness; it isn’t an image of a cloud or a cloudy image – it is precisely not that – but an image of Helen, and that is what is so deceptive about it. The eidolon is an image or form composed (ξυνθεῖσ᾽) of air, much like the words coming out of the Euripidean Helen’s mouth.

Euripides’ Helen is very much about such statues made of clouds, about the way in which rumor becomes fact, and desired belief truth – about what “we all know,” and our desire to confirm it, against better evidence. That is, the play is as much concerned with the newly chaste Helen’s reunion with Menelaus as it is with the reunion between name and thing or name and person.Footnote ⁶⁸ Helen’s prologue introduces this motif: “And for the fight against the Trojans I was put forward for the Greeks as a prize of war (though it was not me but only my name),” she claims, adding that “even if my name is reviled in Greece, my body shall not here be put to shame” (lines 42–43, 66–67). This separation between name and body is amplified by the gods’ production of an additional body: Helen’s eidolon fashioned by Hera and given to Paris. But as the play unfolds, and especially after the phantom’s disappearance into the thin air whence it originated, Helen and her name come ever closer – not because her name is rehabilitated but because she comes to embody what she said (in the beginning of the play) was only said of “Helen” but was not true. She tries to charm Menelaus and the Egyptian king Theoclymenus when each is skeptical of her; she manipulates situations by using a woman’s way (e.g., line 1049); she deceives the husband she has (deceptively) promised herself to in order to escape Egypt with her former husband and thus becomes Theoclymenus’s ravished wife;Footnote ⁶⁹ and, finally, she seeks the glory of Troy – or so we are told by the messenger. In the battle that erupts offstage as the Greeks are escaping from Egypt, Menelaus calls on his “picked fighting men of Greece” to “kill, cut down the barbarians”; one of the voices amplifying his message in the bloody battle is Helen, who exhorts from the stern, “Where is the glory [kleos] you won at Troy? Show these barbarians” (lines 1593–94, 1603–4). Even if, according to the play’s premise, Helen hasn’t been as involved in the Trojan War as she seemed to have been, she is fated to spearhead its re-enactment.

The ending enacts in miniature what the whole play shows. Despite all the powerful laments against the war from Helen and her chorus of women; despite Menelaus’s ridiculous behavior when we first see him in Egypt,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the biting revelation of the unreason/futility of war; despite the thematized and constantly displayed unreliability of reports and reputations, once the two-Helens problem is cleared up as magically as it came about, all the main characters, including even the theoretically pure Egyptian prophetess Theonoe (daughter of the dead Proteus), continue to strive for kleos while we the audience continue to look out for and listen to messengers’ reports.Footnote ⁷¹ The play’s conclusion is “a successful replay of the Trojan War,”Footnote ⁷² with a reversal of its players, where the deluded “loser” is not the Greeks who went to Troy for a phantom, but Theoclymenus the “barbarian” who foolishly believed in Helen’s phantom ritual. Grégoire, whose edition of the play H.D. consulted, speaks of Euripides’ Helen as a “prétendue rehabilitation”: not a full “palinodie mythologique,” but a politically expedient “demi-sympathie” for Sparta.Footnote ⁷³ This large-scale undeceiving (everyone’s illusions about reality and war shattered because of the eidolon) followed by a “re-deceiving” – in a way a palinode of its own – is mirrored in the play’s many local, unexplained reversals and contradictions, and is at the heart of Euripides’ critiqueFootnote ⁷⁴ – and the early H.D.’s blind spot. As Segal puts it in his monumental study of Helen’s deployment of pairs of opposites, the play never “completely resolves the question of which aspect of reality is the ‘true’ one.”Footnote ⁷⁵ But if a positive lesson is to be drawn from the play, it may be that a consideration of art – whatever form its image made of cloud may take (the eidolon of Helen, the mournful songs of the chorus, the play Helen puts on for Theoclymenus, Euripides’ own play) – is central for engaging with the complex epistemological, theological, and moral questions that Helen poses.

Voices from Elsewhere

Positioning the work as a large-scale translation, H.D. in “Eidolon” tries for the first time to see what Euripides was “looking at” or translating – namely, Homer – as the final step in their now joint transposition into “that world.” The section, especially in Books 3 and 4, spends more time with Helen and Achilles at Troy, a feature of Euripidean plays also to be sure, but with Homeric resonances highlighted. Book 1, with its tracing of eidolon as voice, prepares the ground. While, throughout HiE, there is a strong sense of voice coming from elsewhere,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Eidolon begins from this “derivative,” reflective position, and even identifies it as such. Unlike in “Pallinode” or “Leuké,” where we were told that Achilles, Paris, or Theseus spoke, in “Eidolon” such identifications are put into question. Already in the very first poem the caption broaches the question of the eidolon explicitly: “Helen is called back to Egypt. It is Achilles who calls her – or is it the image or eidolon of Achilles who is ‘commanded to say, Theseus commands me’” (208). Similarly, in 1.4, when Paris comes in, the caption tells us “Paris, or the voice or image of Paris, would call Helen back to ‘my small room’” (213). Achilles’ and Paris’s sections (1.1–1.4 and 1.5–1.7 respectively) are full of quotations or echoes from earlier poems spoken by Theseus and Helen in “Leuké,” while Helen’s concluding poem in 1.8 weaves in phrases from all the preceding sections in “Eidolon” Book 1 which had been supposedly spoken by other characters. As H.D. would have known,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Menelaus presents Helen in Odyssey 4.279 as a skillful imitator of voices, adding to her characterization as a weaver of images in Iliad 3: Standing next to the Trojan Horse, she “made [her] voice sound like the voice of the wife of each of the Argives” hidden in it, almost successfully tempting them all to reveal their presence and thus the ruse. Here H.D. goes one step further. Helen imitates the voices not only of wives, but of the heroes themselves. In an even more obvious gesture of self-reflexivity, the many direct quotations from previous sections of HiE are put in the same italic font as the captions. The two apparently separate domains bleed into each other now (as eidolon and “reality” do), until the very last segment of this long work: a final poem, outside of the book structure, placed in italics itself.

Having revisited the idea of writing as transmission of a voice from elsewhere that blends into one’s own, H.D. then applies it to her own work, her own sense of writing within a tradition, in the second book of “Eidolon”:

While the “harpers will sing forever” motif has been present in the poem – a nod perhaps to the self-consciousness with which Homer presents specifically Achilles and Helen in this respectFootnote ¹¹¹ – the explicit reference to characters “play[ing] their parts well” is first introduced here; a few pages later too, Helen speaks “by rote” (234). The matter-of-fact, distant tone of the prose contrasts with the urgency of the questioning in the poem that follows:

Going beyond the return to an old story as yet another iteration of the same pattern, a normative tale in which everyone behaves (or the poet has everyone behave) as they should to gain the glory of song, H.D. presents the “known text” as the source of further questions. She offers a brief list of modern and ancient interpretations: Helen as daemon or goddess is already in the Iliad and in the famous Agamemnon chorus, while the symbolic readings gesture to more recent views. How “the story” ends is still an open question – or rather, H.D.’s asking it here and now performs that very opening. The use of the first-person plural in “inspire us” – like the question format, a late addition and an anomaly in this textFootnote ¹¹² – only drives the point home. The juxtaposition of the prose and lyric passages further enacts the possible polysemy. The lyric diverges from the story foretold, as indeed H.D. will eventually want to argue that the “new Helen” can truly diverge from, be hatched out of the old, rather than simply return to it (“Pallinode”) or erase it (“Leuké”). Neither an opposition, nor a retraction, nor an empty repetition, but a pallinode, an eidolon.

H.D. first hears the voices of her own older Greek works; such allusions become more frequent in “Eidolon” than they were in the previous two sections. The debate between Achilles and Paris in Book 1 recalls that between Artemis and Apollo at the end of Hippolytus Temporizes; Achilles is aligned with a cult of death, while Paris, who accuses Achilles of hunting “man,” focuses on mankind. Unlike in HT, where Artemis “wins” the debate, and unlike in Hippolytus, where she intervenes with Theseus – we saw a combination of those two scenes at the end of “Leuké” – here it is Helen who weaves the threads between Paris and Achilles. She does so by looking back rather than by predicting a future of destruction like Artemis in HT: “Theseus would have the answer, // but no, I will not call / until I review all the past / in the new light of a new day” (226). Though, moreover, Helen then proceeds to offer Theseus’s answer – “this is Athens or was or will be” (227, echoing 151) – she immediately interrupts herself: “but O the ecstasy – familiar fragrance, / late roses, bruised apples” (227). Just as H.D. had pushed aside the tyranny of the “pure” Athenian, perfectly balanced, ideal loveliness in favor of the Priapic late offerings in “Orchard” early in the imagist years, so here she begins to suggest the insufficiency of the Thesean model. Just as there the acknowledgment of lateness freed up speech, so here it occasions memory: “now I remember, I remember,” Helen exclaims, and what H.D. recalls is her earlier conceptions of Helen’s stasima, now treated more skeptically (227).

As would befit a rewriting of the second part of Helen, in which, unusually, all of the play’s stasima are concentrated, H.D. revisits her assumptions about the role of the chorus as a ritual institution, trying to think herself into and out of Helen’s invented ritual. In the Euripidean play, Helen’s invention and performance of the ritual to “bury” her husband’s eidolon (represented by empty robes) contrasts with the stasima that bracket it. For the chorus treats the same theme differently. The first stasimon laments the fate of real women mourning their husbands in the way that Helen only pretends to, while the second turns to the divine mourning of Demeter and connects it to the Eleusinian mysteries. Helen is thus literally placed somewhere between “what is god and what is not god” (line 1137) as Euripides offers us two conflictingly shaded interpretations of her action. Is her ritual simply the human version of the divine chorus that gathers around Demeter – the latter represented and commemorated in some way in tragedy itself – a ritual that can help assuage sorrow but can never fully rectify the loss? That is, even though it is not genuine (as any festival is only a re-enactment of the initial impulse that prompted it), does it retain its validity because it borrows the ritual structure? Or is Helen’s ritual reprehensible because conducted under false premises, because while she has been theoretically in sympathy with the other female victims of the war in the first half of the play (the parodos, split between Helen and the chorus, offers a mourning song similar to Demeter’s), she now simply apes their sorrow to get her way while leaving them behind? At first H.D. seems to suggest, like Helen’s second stasimon, that ritual mitigates destruction when she adds yet another shading to the reason for which Troy was “lost”: “a round of Delphic priestesses, / beating on Holy Ground, // a rhythm before the altar” (232). Yet Helen then offers the opposite perspective, aligning herself with the first Euripidean stasimon. She wonders if the women doomed because of their association with Achilles (Briseis, Polyxena) “matter[ed],” a question that is symbolic, historiographical, and aesthetic all at once: “did they count at all, / or were they mere members of a chorus // in a drama that had but one other player?” (241). Now the chorus is not the “author” or underwriter of war, but its victim, reflecting that same ambiguity present in Euripides’ Helen, and implied in the IA stasima as H.D. had translated them almost forty years before. Is loss made meaningful through its recuperation in a ritual or artistic context, or is that a privileged position to take, available to Helens and Demeters but not to ordinary women, for whom loss is just loss? This is precisely the question that H.D. in her early essay did not want to probe and that Helen in “Pallinode” had tried to eschew by identifying with Iphigeneia.

The issue of ritual falls into “Eidolon”’s larger-scale questioning of the relationship between creative and destructive impulses; indeed, Helen’s ritual in Helen encompasses both. What had been in “Eidolon” Book 1 a debate between “l’amour” (signified in the passage below by the “fluttering veil” of Helen/Aphrodite) and “la mort” becomes now one between poetry and war, essentially asking Helen’s question but in the terms of IA’s first stasimon (discussed in Chapter 3 above):

Soon H.D. extends the appeal of the “rhythm as yet unheard” from Helen (lured by Paris) to “poets” (thus clarifying the “us” inspired to “infinite questioning” above), and turns the Trojan War into poetry’s Hel(l)enic eidolon:

H.D. implies that the story of “the maze of the Walls” was more seductive than that of Helen in Egypt, which is why the former prevailed. Just as Greeks nominally fight for Helen, but actually – as already the Iliad suggests (often through Achilles), as IA confirms, and as Helen allegorizes – for themselves (seeking kleos, obeying eros), turning Helen into an empty pretense, an eidolon which even when revealed, as in Helen, does little to prevent a new mini-Trojan War from breaking out, so poets are (willingly?) tricked into singing about a war that didn’t happen (“a Troy that never fell”), indulging in a poetic fantasy of documentation, memorialization, or praise instead of documenting or participating in wars that did, or forgoing the writing about war altogether. Are poets, then, like Menelaus or Helen herself in Helen? They pretend to lament war, violence, and the losses that result but are themselves permanently propagating, navigating if not creating the script, are themselves permanently attached to an eidolon. Such an alignment comes from considering IA in light of Helen, but also from thinking about that play as a whole in a way that H.D. had not done in 1915. This criticism complicates the position that we assume H.D. is staking for herself here, highlighting her continuing ambivalence about her poetic activity and her engagement with a poetic war and an old mythology.

Yet, having offered this critique – the most subversive view of the complicity of war and song that she has traced in all her versions of Greek tragedy – H.D. tentatively takes it back. Helen has a task, and so do the poets. We are now not “caught,” but “called” to the walls:

The passage offers us a different way of understanding the “Troy that never fell.” The still-standing Troy, in which poets wander and to which they can be called back, is one that is always there to be probed, where there is always something left over to sort. That is, H.D. may be sidestepping entirely the question of reality versus fiction or illusion, the question of “what really happened,” in favor of the result: the permanent reality of an imaginative space that is inarguably constructed on the one hand (Theseus’ Labyrinth made by Daedalus, “the scene” discussed above) but still unknown on the other. Hence Helen’s specific return to “my bracelets, sandals and scarves,” beautiful accessories, to be sure, but also instruments of constraint and circumscription, binding her wrists, feet, and neck. The process H.D.’s Helen prepares to engage in here is similar to that of her Kreousa, who tells and retells her own story of constraint until she herself can take possession of it. The tension is conveyed rhythmically as well; “bracelets,” “sandals,” “scarves” are all dactylo-trochaic words (deliberately echoing back precisely to the, in English stress-scansion, dactylic Greek names “Theseus” and “Labyrinth”) that push against the iambic pulse of their line, just as “over and over” switched the previous two lines’ rhythm from rising to falling. Much like the momentary “rhythm” that revealed Artemis and Hippolytus’s suppressed and elusive connection in HT, so here within the overarching, readable rhythm or known story pattern a different set of “metres” might be felt. It is such new paths that the next two books will focus on as we move from palinode (the telling of the same story in a way that seems subversive but conforms) to pallinode (intervention).

Of Ships and Dolls: Achilles Meets Herakles

Books 3 and 4 revisit the making and breaking of legends as such, starting with the traditional Achilles. They conceptualize the process in terms imagistically similar to those outlined above. So, in 4.4 Helen compares having “watched, / as a careful craftsman, // the pattern shape, / Achilles’ history,” both to various things breaking (“As a circlet may break / in the heat of the smelting-fire, / or a plate of armour crack”) and to images being created (“seen him like the very scenes // on his famous shield, / outlined with the graver’s gold”) (262–63). The shaping of the “history” is the cracking of containing or protective structures (circlet, armor), and “craft” seems to lie in knowing to wait for them to break, in watching them break, or hatch, and then be outlined again. And, unlike the purely spectatorial watching at the end of “Pallinode” where Helen awaits revelation to come from elsewhere (“I will watch and wonder, / lost in an ecstasy, / awaiting the Miracle” [92]), there is no deus ex machina here, but solely Helen’s, and H.D.’s, crafty, watchful re-view. These books thus continue to be multiply allusive: still to H.D.’s own work (especially the Hippolytus and IA) but now also to that of her contemporaries Eliot and Pound, and to the Iliad as H.D. deepens her examination of Euripides by translating herself into the world he was looking at in turn. She locates the intersection of all these texts/traditions in a literal, material eidolon, as she moves down the LSJ definition from ghost to artifact: “an image, a wooden image, / a mermaid, Thetis upon the prow” (240). She concretizes the idea of the old “scene” or ritual and its potential openness examined in Book 2, making it easier to consider its construction and impact and at the same time turning this sculpted image of Thetis into another token for art more broadly, just as song was in Book 2.

The “wooden image” brings together the parodos from IA with Walter Pater’s “Hippolytus Veiled,” and with H.D. favorite, Pausanias. In IA, after an epode on Achilles “whom Thetis bore / and Chiron trained, / running in his armor / by the sand of the shore,”Footnote ¹¹³ the chorus spend several strophes describing the Greek ships, homing in on the “ensign” (sēma) of each. Naturally, on Achilles’ fleet, “In gilded images high upon their sterns / stood Nereids”; H.D.’s translation singularizes the ships so that “On the prow of each / A goddess sheds gold: / Sea-spirits are cut in tiers of gold” (CP 74).Footnote ¹¹⁴ The tension in the presentation of the image between passive (“are cut”) and active (“sheds”), fixed and mobile, is one that “Eidolon” consistently explores. In going back to her IA parodos, H.D. retells it from an excluded perspective – one that is featured in the play itself, much as Theseus’s is in Hippolytus though absent from H.D.’s versions – namely that of Achilles. At the same time, the fascination the wooden image exerts on Achilles here recalls the Paterian version of the Hippolytus story, where the youth worships exactly such a wooden statue of Artemis, and does so at the expense of his relationship with his self-sacrificing Amazon mother. So in HiE the eidolon and Thetis substitute each other: Achilles “forgot her, / the charm, the eidolon, / when his own mother came, // and he forgot his mother” (292). It is Pater’s story that reveals the active (and potentially negative) power that such constructs can exert, and while in HT H.D. had aligned Artemis and Hippolyta and further linked both with Phaedra, she returns now to Pater’s more rigid version of the myth. Finally, Pausanias 3.14.4 provides an account of the historical significance of such a wooden statue of Thetis in Helen’s home turf of Laconia during the Second Messenian War, crucially (for H.D.) connecting literary works with both cultic practice and documented events. In Pausanias’s telling, moreover, the statue helped reconcile a Spartan and a Messenian woman, leading them to build a temple for Thetis together; the story thus provides a pacifist female counterpoint to Euripides’ and Pater’s masculine and militant fantasies.

In Book 3 H.D. presents Achilles’ construction of the image of Thetis and “our” construction of his Iliadic legend as parallel processes. She summarizes the middle part of the epic in 3.5 (“Achilles skulks in his tent, / they said,” “so they armed Patroclus / and Patroclus was slain”), and then offers a “palinode” to the “they said,” by placing “Achilles’ self” not in the tent but as “a far shadow upon the beach,” a reluctant warrior that prays to “his love” for a “swift return” (247–48). Focusing on Achilles on the beach, a kind of eidolon of the Iliadic warrior, she turns him into a version of Helen in Egypt; he has been translated to Troy but is not wholly there. In 3.6, we see Achilles’ not inaccurately characterized “tempest-self” as it materializes in Iliad 19–21 and especially in his fight with the river Xanthus, before moving on to “Achilles’ anger, // his unspeakable grief” for Patroclus which leads to the battle with Hector (249). Yet, for the eidolon of Patroclus that visits Achilles in Book 23, H.D., hatching Euripides who himself hatches Homer, offers the eidolon of Thetis: “so he went to the prow / of his love, his beloved, // feeling her flanks, / tearing loose weed from her stern, / brushing sand from her beams, // not speaking, but praying” (248). H.D. puts the eidolon not near the end of war, as a figure for the loss that would explain Achilles’ final rage, but, partly inspired by IA, at its beginning – just as it is in Helen.

H.D. hatches the image of Achilles by the sea, present both in the Iliad and in IA, using the eidolon detail from IA and “Hippolytus Veiled” as a spotlight through which to read Homeric epic on the one hand and the modernist mythologies of her contemporaries on the other. She first introduces the Thetis eidolon by placing her Achilles in a “scene” set by Eliot and Pound’s Heraklean imaginings. Herakles has already entered HiE in relation to Achilles in both “Pallinode” (e.g., 4.7) and “Leuké” (7.5). Mythologically, this makes sense. Herakles is what Achilles could not be – namely, a son of Zeus – insofar as Thetis was fated to bear a son greater than his father.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Herakles is, in contrast, more closely aligned with Helen, also a child of Zeus; one of the classic eidola, his split self after death mirrors Helen’s own double fate at the end of Helen. Like Pound and Eliot, H.D. stages a moment of illumination through memory for her solitary hero, combining the Poundian Herakles’ vision of paternal law “in a sudden flare,” “in an instantaneous flash,” with that of Eliot’s speaker in the Heraklean “Marina,” who sees himself as father and maker.

While the fire imagery points to Women of Trachis,Footnote ¹¹⁶ the marine landscape, ship references, and the “what” questions echo even more strongly Eliot’s “Marina.” There too we read about the “scent of pine,” “reduced by wind,” “the hope, the new ships” (P 107–08, my emphasis). There too the speaker proclaims, “I made this, I have forgotten / And remember”; asks, in imitation of Seneca’s Hercules quoted in the poem’s epigraph, “What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow”; and reflects on “what images return / O my daughter.” H.D.’s Achilles has both the Eliotic self-consciousness – he recovers his mother qua constructed image, though he cannot yet remember, as Eliot’s speaker can, that “I made this” – and the Poundian blindness, the exclusion of what does not cohere (“but he only saw …”). Yet, while “Marina” opens and closes with specific and vivid imagery, its speaker’s emotional climax is in the penultimate stanza: in an intentionally more pointed yet vaguer “this” (“This form, this face, this life”) and “that” (“let me / Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken”) that, as often in Eliot, allow for a subjective sense of the ineffable, a hint of divine presence. In contrast, H.D.’s and Pound’s heroic illuminations conclude with the concrete and constructed image, which is more (H.D.) or less (Pound) explicitly partial. Where Pound suppresses the other tongues that could angle his image differently, H.D. spends the rest of “Eidolon” pursuing them.

In IA H.D. had emphasized the living, active power of the sculptural works on the ships’ prows, and here she develops that idea: first using the Thetis image to motivate or naturalize Achilles’ many conversations with Thetis on the Trojan beach in the Iliad (e.g., in 3.5, as cited above) and then, more importantly, to show the powerful guiding force of such a constructed image.

The poem’s anaphoric structure helps highlight the multiple trajectories traced for “eidolon,” both as concept and as term. The “image” becomes a “picture” – a word with more specifically artistic connotations – that is valued and hoarded (“treasure”), arousing “desire.” The chain is then pulled backwards: We return from picture to image, and can go even further back linguistically, reaching idol, then eidolon itself. An “idol” is a worshipped image; its power is not separate from its substance. In connecting it to its etymological source, H.D. tries to make the same case for the ancient “eidolon” itself. The abrupt shift to the ship imagery underlines this point as the Thetis eidolon and the ship it is carved into become one. Indeed, when HiE later returns to Thetis on the ship, the line between them becomes completely blurred: “O idol, O eidolon, /… / is she carved of red cedar? / … / he set her upon a plinth / like the curved prow of a ship, / and perhaps the tree is a ship” (291–92). What was initially presented as an analogy (between the original “image” or object of desire and the ship’s hull, each respectively worth more than princesses and new masts) is actually an identity. The image is the ship; they are made of the same materials and are both the means (or perspective) through which Achilles navigates the world.

But even here, and in contrast to WT, the imagistic is subordinate to the linguistic, sculpture to poetry. The repetition of the declarative “I say” suggests that what is presented is not “truth” but another story or speech act, another moment of legend-creation, or self-justification, that blinds the speaker to the harrowing description of Troy’s “desolation, destruction” (243). It thus compounds our sense of the power of language over the physical world, its role in shaping reality. H.D. enacts this process of effective “saying” in her verse. Like Eliot’s speaker in “Marina,” Achilles reviews the possibilities and limits of renewing a ship both metaphorically and literally – H.D. does the same with her words. She builds up to “eidolon,” deconstructs it again down to “doll,” then offers a doubled anagram (“old, old”), while at the same time renewing her own previous translations of it as “image” or “picture.” As with Achilles’ claim about the hull, not everything changes; on the small scale, the skeleton of sound remains though it is constantly rearranged, and on the larger scale, the emphasis on the interrogation of images persists. H.D.’s technique of lexical repetition and sonic echo that forms one of the basic structural features of HiE (and represents, of course, a use of the eidolon qua [sonic] mirroring) encodes, as in Euripides’ Helen, both the danger of mere “formalis[m]” and the potential for “transformative echo.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

In Book 6, H.D. picks up on this tension between formalism and transformation in order to more sharply distinguish Achilles and the host from Helen in terms of their understanding of the eidolon; here she comes closest to the gendered Pausanian presentation of the Thetis statue. War, she suggests, comes not from eidola but from their forgetting. After describing the contagion of war, she echoes the very first poem in “Eidolon,” where Achilles said that he is “commanded to display // a brand, a flame, torch” before admitting that his own “saying” is also commanded (209). So here, we read of the “torch of one brandished spear / that enflames a thousand others” (293). But the continuation of war seems premised on the absence of literal reflection:

The warriors cannot face the other side of their shield because they would be putting themselves in the position of their enemies – who, to the extent that the shield holds, are soon to be dead – and thus in a position of vulnerability. By further allegorizing the shield as the Gorgon head, they exaggerate the effect of the “pause”: permanent inaction, their moment of hesitation immortalized in stone. The shield or Medusa is what protects them, but only as long as they use and do not see it, only as long as they forget about it. Yet the figure who is truly active here is Helen; for it is she who is speaking, ventriloquizing the warriors, as we discover at the end of the poem. She completes the inversion of the Odyssean scene started in Book 1 by suggesting that the real pernicious temptation is not the voices of the soldiers’ wives but their own voices since, we learn, “the warriors lured [Achilles] out” of his hiding place on the island of Scyros (294). Moreover, though this poem deceptively begins and ends with the same question – “could a woman ever // know what the heroes felt” (293), “what can a woman know / of a man’s passion and birthright?” (294) – we realize that the question isn’t Helen’s but the warriors’ and that, in successfully articulating it, Helen answers it in the positive. This is a measure of how far she has come; these warriors, “the host,” had been her allies in “Pallinode,” but now she has understood how to distinguish their eidolon from hers. Unlike them who see the Flower that is Greece without understanding its fragility, unlike Achilles who repeatedly “say[s] there is only one image,” Helen can conjure and disperse many, including her own.

The Final Trade: From Eidolon to Token

The last three books of HiE attempt to reconcile the ideas we have explored thus far: the multivocity and malleability of Books 1 and 2 with the blindness seen in Achilles in Book 3. Book 4 functions as degree zero, an attempt to deny all that has come before by homing in on the most substantial critique of the eidolon: something made out of nothing, an illusion not worth paying attention to, or an unhealthy dependence that ought to be extinguished. We have already seen Achilles’ destructive “nothing / beside” above; for him, the eidolon erases everything else, and he barely knows it. Should the eidolon, and with it Helen, be erased instead? Book 4 begins with a repeated palinodic gesture – “It was nothing, nothing at all,” “it was all nothing,” we keep reading (255–56, 258) – and ends with Helen’s account of her attempted suicide at Troy, then merged with Achilles’ attack on her in “Pallinode.” But, like Helen in Helen’s second half, this Helen too is now fully in charge of the play. She combines earlier parts of HiE, and shifts in and out of roles and characters (as with the warriors above). So, though we have read of her death before, now in the latter half of Book 4 Helen joins Achilles’ story of his wandering through Troy in Book 3, Paris’s story of her death there in “Leuké,” and the landscape of “Hermes of the Ways” in order to describe her failed drowning: “I lay / on the salt grass and my hands / tore at the bitter stems // that cut me like adders’ tongues; / it was dark, I had not the power / to leap from the platform or wharf” (266). She also reconsiders the astral fate laid out by Theseus, wondering if she would “blaze out like a meteor” (274). Having thus erased herself, Helen plays the role of Thetis for Achilles (261), and additionally sees herself as the Thetis equivalent for Paris, proposing yet another eidolon albeit a less potent one than Achilles’ wooden doll: “Paris is beautiful enchantment / and enchantment lives / in the tree he called Dendritis” (291). Soon enough she has become both men too. Rather than being enchanted by Paris, she now calls herself “an old enchanter” (297), and then self-consciously reacts to Paris as Achilles had reacted towards her (299–300). Helen’s performance of her malleable and inconsistent identity suggests she has actively taken on the part of the Helen tradition itself, which similarly makes the signifier “Helen” into a reflective surface for individual or communal prejudices, fears, and desires. Unlike in Helen’s ritual in Euripides, though, the goal here is not a full repatriation, or even the establishment of a Teucerian imitation homeland. HiE is instead committed to remaining the reflection, in all senses, of all prior traditions, including the one it has just created.

Though Helen and Achilles are increasingly presented as creators – Achilles sculpts the eidolon as “child or a master-hand” (292), Helen “spin[s] the infinite thread” (298) and “plot[s]” a “formula” (297) – they follow the same pattern that H.D. does in the “eidolon–doll” passage above, and do not produce something entirely new, instead rearranging previous lines and scenes. “Nothing at all” isn’t opposed to something concrete, a static product, but to a pattern of action:

The thoughts break through the legend like fire – a destructive and an animating spirit, as we might expect – but the simile tells us that the pictures are already broken. The breaking-through itself, that is, has to first reconstitute the broken image in order to break it anew, just as H.D. herself has done in “Pallinode” and over the course of HiE. If we read into H.D.’s rhetorical choice here, it is only in imaginative reflection (through simile) that we may get a glimpse of the process before it is forgotten. This is H.D.’s/Helen’s major breakthrough: The veil of the dominant narrative, the dream of alluring eidola, the totemic power of a repressed image-attachment are not. Like the word eidolon scrambled and reconstituted in the passage discussed above, they consist of pieces to be put together, and they can be put together otherwise. They are, we might say, tokens, but that to which they point cannot be definitively determined.

Artistic productivity and procreation seem to be linked here, as they are in H.D.’s other work, but HiE also troubles the procreative patterns it sets up, as reflected in H.D.’s handling of the Euphorion legend. Though the captions mention this magical child, he does not actually appear in the poems. Instead, Achilles’ and Helen’s respective “children” are imagined as their past selves, which they/the poem has rediscovered. Earlier in “Eidolon,” H.D. had turned to the mythical moment at which Helen becomes interesting, at which her identity splits: her departure from Sparta. Helen recalled seeing “my child”

This remembered mother–daughter scene indicates that Helen is imaginatively leaving the Thesean maidenhood projected for her at the end of “Leuké.” Two details link the passage to Sappho’s Fr. 16, where this exact moment was first envisioned: There Helen, who “went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents,” reminds the speaker of the absent Anactoria, whose “lovely step” she wishes to see.Footnote ¹¹⁸ So here Helen’s departure is signaled by the placement of her foot; moreover, it is not her leaving but rather that she “never looked back” that serves as the culmination of this memory of her “first rebellion,” foreshadowed but not presented many pages earlier in “Leuké” 1.1. Though by the end of Fr. 16 Sappho’s sympathies seem to be with those left behind, the beginning of the poem suggests she is on Helen’s side; after all, Helen’s abandonment of her family is introduced as an exemplum of Sappho’s dictum that “the most beautiful thing on the black earth … is whatsoever a person loves.” H.D.’s Helen is similarly torn. Revisiting this scene in “Eidolon” Book 6, she more explicitly identifies the child with herself – a proper eidolon – which suggests that we think of the abandoned “work-basket” allegorically:

Helen complicates her alignments here, in this more benign version of the Kreousa–Apollo–Ion triangle. She both recalls the allure of the enchanter (probably Paris, but a few pages later she gives herself that title; what or who Helen loves is also left unnamed/unspecified in Fr. 16) at the moment of departure, and now looks back, stooping to gather the reels, no longer letting her old work product lie. As these musically elegant, sonically interwoven passages signal, it is the memory of that past “work-basket” and its “spools” that is being revisited, literally rewoven at last here – in H.D.’s case, that includes Sappho, Homer, IA, Hippolytus, and Ion, but also the Helen itself, all put together three decades later. In a passage that H.D. underscored in her copy of Leconte de Lisle’s Helen, the messenger describing to Theoclymenus the Greeks’ departure notes that Helen is the last to get on the boat and focuses on her elegant foot climbing the ladder (line 1570). Aligning the two moments of departure – from Sparta and from Egypt – through the detail of Helen’s foot, which earlier had been differently covered up by the poem’s male characters, H.D. points to the insufficiency of the Euripidean recantation (and of her own enchantment with it), which she here aims to amend by going back to the beginning.Footnote ¹¹⁹

So, in Book 6, H.D. ties this moment to the motif of legend-breaking:

The children of Achilles and of Helen are the characters themselves, but as this poem has seen them, the one in Chiron’s cave constructing his Thetis eidolon, the other on the verge of departure, abandoning threads that are now getting picked up.Footnote ¹²⁰ “Childhood,” that is, is coded as the recovery of an earlier creative moment. The programmatic reference to epic recalls yet again Sappho Fr. 16, which repeatedly compares “what one loves” to armies, ships, and chariots, rejecting them all. Yet, in the same way that Sappho doesn’t change any of the details of the myth she uses, but suspends its meaning between two alternative framings (Helen just followed what she loved; Helen caused her family pain much as Anactoria is hurting Sappho) while letting its primary associations (war) hover in the background, so H.D. here is not interested in the production of the new. There is no Euphorion, no mating between a “new” Helen and a “new” Achilles (who would be perhaps a “Neo-ptolemus” ‘new-warrior’), no forced merging of antiquity and modernity, whose impossibility Goethe already documented and whose tropes have become tired. Instead, H.D. returns to her original idea of Euripidean translation: She insists on translating her world back into that world, a world that is “old, old” but not exhausted, its tokens or words containing yet more paths to be trodden.

At the same time, the poem begins to admit its own legendary, and thus breakable, status. We have a palinode of “Pallinode” when Helen finally admits that “I was a phantom Helen / and he was Achilles’ ghost” (263). Subtly referring to Euphorion’s fate in Goethe, Helen wonders, “would we blaze out like a meteor? // would the blazing ember / sputter and fail and fall / or burn forever?” (274). Despite the continuing avowal that “it was nothing” (282), by Book 6 Helen takes control of the process and diverts this phantasmagoria into “some chance unexpected thing, / the simple magic coming // from something lost or left over” (280–81) – the magic of the old arising anew. Rather than the Thetis eidolon, the “lost” thing that Achilles retrieves is a “flint”: literally the material for fire-making, for starting the process of breaking through the broken pictures and watching them re-form. The penultimate section of “Eidolon” expands on this motif:

What does this single arrow symbolize? It is attached to neither male figure, nor eros, nor epic war, nor the mundane little things, but functions as the mark of their connection (“tension” as one caption calls it) – a connection conceived as vulnerability. In the very first book of “Pallinode” Helen imagines withdrawing an arrow “from the bruised and swollen flesh” of Achilles’ heel (8). Identified with “his mortality,” the arrow is proclaimed “the token” by which they “know each other” (9, 7). Here it materializes after “nothing,” pointing to an unknown way, to one of many possible directions of a future and equally precarious hatching, as the work’s final caption will suggest: “One greater than Helen must answer, though perhaps we do not wholly understand the significance of the Message” (303). Just as “Eidolon” began with voices from its past, so now it cedes its palimpsest to voices from the future.

Earlier on in “Eidolon” we were told that the dream and the veil “were one” (238). That was not HiE’s conclusion, but the beginning of its last movement as it attempted to find yet another series of alternatives for “eidolon.” The veil and the dream “are one” because both reveal by obscuring; that is, though they obscure, they create the illusion of the possibility of truth, of vanquishing the poetic sphinx, of deciding even between these two alternatives (“which was the dream, which was the veil”). In contrast, the “arrow” or “token” points out the obscure. “Token,” etymologically related to the German Zeichen ‘sign,’ is something that, like an arrow, points to or is destined for something else, reflecting “Another.” A token is “a thing serving as a visible representation of a fact, quality, feeling”: a “nothing” become something, an eidolon of an emotion.Footnote ¹²¹ It also intersects with eidolon qua “constellation” in its first obsolete sense of “a sign of the zodiac.”Footnote ¹²² Thus “token” is or can be, literally, a token for the word eidolon and, at the same time, the “inner wor[d]” it holds “if you look at” eidolon “long enough”; it is where “this peculiar twist, its magic angle … lead[s]” (Bid 162). The words’ concrete semiological connection, located in the small print of the dictionary, paradoxically refers to material of cosmic proportions, but only insofar as the latter has been already shaped: a constellation, the zodiac. Viewed this way, the eidolon is not a dream, something unreal, on the verge of death or barely escaping Hades, nor is it a veil obscuring the truth; rather, it is a way of making sense of the world through a process of destruction and construction, through the making and unmaking of constellations. It can be passed on, taught,Footnote ¹²³ but its necessarily incomplete nature does not foreclose what the receiver will make of it. Eidolon-token as word and concept, like H.D.’s Helen, is neither fully Greek, a complete return to the old paradigm (the Menelaus option), nor a recreation that transplants the old paradigm in a new place, keeping only the name, as Teucer was asked to do. It is neither purely hellenist, nor fully modernist, but precisely a token of both impulses.

“Left Over”

The word eidolon was earlier reduced to a skeleton of sound – the hull that remains, the rhythm that reverberates even if the steps are different. Similarly, HiE’s section “Eidolon” is reduced to a single poem by the same name that concludes it: “just call it EIDOLON, as the very last page of the whole of EIDOLON, that is Book iii, it gives the clue, the final – that the figure-head of the ship is this ‘dream’ or mother-symbol OR Helen or what you will,” H.D. instructs Pearson (HD/NHP 164). H.D.’s account – apparently conclusive but in fact multiple (“what you will”) – mirrors the last poem of “Eidolon” Book 6, which insists that “the secret is no secret” (303). Unlike in “Pallinode,” though, here “the Sphinx is seen” not vanquished and the “Phoenix” is confined to its “nest” which “reveals … the clue / to the rest of the mystery” (303). What is established is a system of reference – a constellation – rather than an answer, and to the extent that there is a clue, it is encapsulated in the word “token,” used finally in the penultimate line of “Eidolon.”

The poem “Eidolon” is indeed a small-scale reflection, a token of the larger “Eidolon” section since many of the main motifs reappear. But where “Eidolon” 6.8 focuses on celestial and mythical imagery, ending on a moment of peace, “Eidolon” hears what is left over: It foregrounds the sea and recalls a broken heart and a broken world. Each poem’s concluding image is hatched from H.D.’s early Euripides translations. Section 6.8 alludes to the conception of rhythm we’ve traced through Hippolytus (for which we’ve been prepared through the poem’s second stanza: “so the dart of Love / is the dart of Death”): “the seasons revolve around / a pause in the infinite rhythm / of the heart and heaven” (303, 304). Despite the initial distinction between the earthly and the celestial, the conventional (cyclical, alternating) rhythm of the former’s seasons encompassed in that of the latter, the “heart” seems to partake in both, as indeed it does sonically. These lines recall the ending of Dante’s Paradiso, but Dante focuses on continuing movement rather than interruption: “But like to a wheel whose circling nothing jars / Already on my desire and will prevailed / The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”Footnote ¹²⁴ H.D.’s “pause” – the pause to which the warriors in “Eidolon” 6.3 refuse to submit – can be thought of as the “intersection of the timeless / With time,” as Eliot puts it in “The Dry Salvages” (P 199), though shaded differently. It is not a moment of divine illumination, but signifies a momentary change in both patterns, a new rhythm in the Benvenistean sense of temporary form. This pause isn’t static, but constitutes a revolution in two senses: a return, a palinode; and an intervention, a pallinode.

Not content with ending on celestial abstraction – as Eliot might have been – and determined to restore the human “high imagination” that fails in Dante,Footnote ¹²⁵ the second and final ending of HiE offers an example of the “pause,” relying on the Thetis-eidolon motif first glimpsed in IA: “only Achilles could break his heart / and the world for a token, / a memory forgotten” (304). Most of “Eidolon” is actually focused on the sea as a producer of sound (“its beat and long reverberation, / its booming and delicate echo”) and as a writer (“its ripple … spells a charm / on the sand” [304]). This recalls H.D.’s early Helen essay, where she identified Helen’s prologue with the sea itself and suggested that “a sea that moves and changes and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in turn” is what we would see if we used “the lines of this Greek poet … as port-holes … that look out from our ship, our world” (9). Achilles’ desire for the sea is thus paralleled by H.D.’s for Helen’s story and for the connection between “our world” and “this world” of the past whose echoes we still hear and into which we try to translate ourselves. This “sea” is not yet known, but intimated. That is why the emphasis on the “memory forgotten” is balanced by the “token.” Yes, on the one hand, the unconscious guides human behavior but, on the other, the existence of the “token” suggests that the memory isn’t fully suppressed. Like the old story or the old word that is still open if we look, this is a sphinx-like memory that we don’t remember how to read. The token, representing that moment of pause, connection, and potential revolution, points to something that we need to construct; construction can take the form of breaking, and that breaking, as we have seen, can be “friendly and vicious in turn.” This particular poem’s tokens in the end point us not to Thetis, but to Helen herself. Her name and characteristic attributes unmentioned in “Eidolon,” she nonetheless triply reverberates here: through the recovered analogy with the sea; by partial synecdoche since the poem opens with her line “what could Paris know of the sea,” which had, however, earlier identified her with Achilles (299); and through sound. For what ties HiE’s two endings together is “the metres”: the extrametrical syllable “en” that concludes the anapestic last line of “Eidolon” 6.8 (“of the heart and of heaven”) as well as the final couplet of “Eidolon” (“and the world for a token, / a memory forgotten”), and which rhymes with the poem’s unspoken eidolon – Helen, erased and yet present, translated and not.

Just as H.D. acknowledged in End to Torment that “it all began” with her and Pound’s collaborative work on “the Greek fragments” (see epigraph), Pound recognized upon H.D.’s death that “H in Egt the real epic,” noting exactly that continuity and coherence he himself had aimed for and failed to achieve. Whereas he laments in Drafts and Fragments that “Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me. / … / I cannot make it cohere” (Cantos 116/816), he praises H.D.’s work’s “integrity from ‘pool of fir’ [from the imagist poem “Oread”] to splendid Helen in Egypt.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Yet, as HiE makes clear, the secret of H.D.’s success is that she interrogates her preferred images and texts – what else is HiE than H.D.’s long examination of Helen as an eidolon of Western culture and of her own fascination with her? – and is thus able to think critically about and consciously reincorporate “what is left over.” At the same time, she is willing, unlike Eliot, to grant texts and images independent power, which for Eliot is always taken over by the reflective mind. By finally choosing to translate eidolon by token, she “tokenizes” or condenses her relationship to Greece in a single word: “token” encapsulates the constant process of making and breaking, constraining and freeing – of translating or trading – that operates on multiple levels at once (literal, metaphorical, ideological, symbolic, personal) and that occasionally crystallizes into a momentary form or rhythm (a completed translation of a lyric, an intimated connection) but is nonetheless always subject to change. A token is something taught and something that signifies allegiance, or serves to authenticate, but it can also function as mark of what is not yet, or once again not known.