The End is the Beginning: Iphigeneian Contexts

H.D.’s interest in tragic choruses “is tied to her deliberate lyric experimentation, an effort to find polyphony in lyric voice and complexity in lyric temporality and spatiality.”Footnote ¹ Yet the appeal of choral songs extends beyond the possibility of polyphonic lyric that they offer. In her unpublished essay “Helen in Egypt” she describes the chorus as “the beautiful hieratic semi-circle that custom (a survival of some old religious ceremony) still prescribed to the sophisticated fifth-century Athens” (10). As poetic expression, the chorus, maintained in tragedy “because of some old implanted law or superstition,” still served to “symboliz[e] the goddess” and the chorus’s “identity with the goddess” (10, 11). That is, in H.D.’s mind, no matter what was said in them, choral songs pointed to, were constituted by this relationship to the divinity. Yet, despite her real and continuing attraction to aspects of Greek ritual, H.D. is more ambivalent towards ceremony than Pound or Eliot. Always alert to polyvalence, mirrorings, and layerings, she is often wary of what the words may point to, of what the rhythms might conjure: not transcendence, not the gods, but deception.

This ambivalence is revealed in H.D.’s choice of texts and choral lyrics to translate; many are concerned precisely with the possibility of song, its nature and danger. Unlike Eliot and Pound’s obsession with the Agamemnon, as well as Pound’s broader interest in the Odyssey, H.D. turns to a tragedy about the beginning of war rather than its end, as perhaps would be most fitting in 1915. IA illustrates the intermingling of public and private: What is worth sacrificing personally for the common good, it asks. But, as Euripides suggests, the “common” pressures – in this case, the desire to avenge Menelaus – are not only social or “national” and so potentially ennobling, but often familial, personal, petty. If Euripides – writing this play in self-imposed exile in Macedonia at a time when Athens had shown itself too bold and had been ravaged by war on multiple fronts – uses his mythical theme as a screen for a contemporary debate, so H.D. reanimates Euripides’ gesture. At the same time, history itself seems to be repeating. The movement east, from Greece to Asia, that the play portrays or whose fulfillment it enables, was to be re-enacted by Alexander the Great less than a hundred years after Euripides’ death, and was now, more than two thousand years later, coming to pass again, as the British warship Agamemnon sailed towards Gallipoli in 1915.

Not only is IA a late play, it is Euripides’ last and, therefore, the last “canonical” tragedy. Unlike Pound, who would eventually place himself at the very origin of the classical tradition with his translation of (what he thought was the oldest part of) the Odyssey, H.D., in her first major translation effort, places herself at its purported historical end. Thematically, however, she stakes a claim for an even earlier beginning. If she highlights, and even augments, Iphigeneia’s sense of self-sacrifice and glory,Footnote ² she does so precisely in order to place a young woman at the center of the Homeric world (and its tragic retellings), a young woman who would not be its guilty, motivating cause (Helen), but its heroic enabler. Without Iphigeneia and her sacrifice, there would not have been an Iliad, or an Odyssey, let alone an Agamemnon. IA would thus be the last play that nonetheless paradoxically restarts the tradition.

IA’s lateness has formal consequences. Sylvia Brown calls it “clearly the most eccentric of the late plays metrically.”Footnote ³ In these late plays, Euripides uses “syllable-counting, word-break and accent” to compensate for the decreased importance of quantity in organizing his lines.Footnote ⁴ He structures his lyrics using theme and variation, not allowing his meter to settle, for example, into a firm iambic or trochaic swing, and uses parallelism in the organization of his strophes.Footnote ⁵ Though Gregory is right to suggest that Greek choruses in general might have seemed appealing to H.D. because their lines were shorter and their meters traditionally lyrical, it seems likely that the specific reason she turned to this play in 1915 was its metrical freedom, and its “readability” according to measures that she herself was already using in her writing (after all, Euripides had been proclaimed a vers-librist by Pound already in 1913): that “gentle, subtle lap-lap of the almost tideless ocean that beat a measure so fine, so subtle, so etherealized that one could scarcely count it,” as she puts in “Hipparchia” when describing the “metres in the air” (Palimpsest 39).

H.D. uses IA in order to address both a poetic and a political-ethical issue. On the one hand, it offers her a way to write a longer poem that still coheres around an image: that of Iphigeneia, like Pound’s Herakles in the Women of Trachis, asserting or even exceeding paternal law and “seeing it clearly.” On the other, it allows her to explore the relationship of art, and especially poetry, to war and to begin to think about ways of including “history” in her writing.Footnote ⁶ “History” would include textual history as well, of the kind that both Pound and Aldington were examining around the same time, and she may indeed have beaten them to it. For Aldington, writing to Pound from the front in France in 1918 with potential research avenues into Homeric editions, suggests looking at “translations into the vernacular” from “about More’s time” because “Dryad [= H.D.] found a latin version of the Iphigeneia by some Lesbian, – pardon – bluestocking of the Lady Jane Grey epoch. It was quaint and not without vigour.”Footnote ⁷ Aldington is misremembering the details, but the translation in question must be that by Lady Jane Lumley (1537–78), who had translated the IA into English rather than Latin around 1553–54, on the occasion of her marriage (she and her husband Baron Lumley had “the largest library in England at the time” and often translated together).Footnote ⁸ Lumley’s IA version had just been published for the first time in 1909, which is probably what brought it to H.D.’s attention in the early teens; Lumley’s MS notebook was also in the British Library, where H.D. may have consulted it. The printed volume’s editor explicitly identifies Lumley’s translation as “the earliest extant attempt to render into English a work of one of the Greek dramatists” (v), and there is no doubt that in choosing this play to translate, H.D. was also constructing an alternative tradition of female “hellenists,” weaving an imaginary garland that tied her to Lumley, and indeed specifically supplemented her work, for Lumley had omitted the play’s choruses from her prose-only version.

Yet, from their first partial publication in the Egoist in November 1915, H.D.’s “Choruses” were misrepresented. They were preceded by an unsigned note that has customarily been attributed to her, as if it were her translator’s manifesto. Τhe voice, however, that articulates the supposed aims of H.D.’s translation is almost certainly Aldington’s, who had written the also unsigned manifesto-like announcement for the Poets’ Translation Series (in which the full-length translation of the “Choruses” would soon appear) a few months before:

From the French reference, to the unequivocal use of “barbarism” and the pretentious “supererogatory,” to the strict categorization of adjectives and the glib reference to the “Homeric epithet,” this paragraph is much closer to Aldington’s authoritative faux-scholarly style than to H.D.’s usual meandering tentativeness. The note is also inaccurate. First, the adjectives singled out are actually not in the sections published in the Egoist; when they appear in the full “Choruses,” they are indeed translated.Footnote ¹⁰ Second, in the first section published in the Egoist, which is Homeric in spirit (see below), there aren’t all that many epithets even though one might expect them, and the epithets that are present are again translated: either adjectivally as in “golden Menelaus / And Agamemnon of proud birth,” or periphrastically as with H.D.’s rendering of ἰσάνεμον ‘like the wind’ as “has strapped the wind / About his ankles.”Footnote ¹¹ That is, much as Pound and Eliot will only grudgingly acknowledge the virtues of H.D.’s translation in their later reviews because they are using the reviews to promote their own Greek agenda (as we have seen in Chapter 2), so does Aldington here, albeit from a more sympathetic point of view. The common thread, though, is that H.D. is taking her freedoms with Euripides’ words, caring more about their general “sense” than their specific contours. Much like the rest of the note, this implication is inaccurate as well, but has contributed to the prevailing understanding of H.D.’s “hellenism,” whether we view it positively or negatively.

H.D. treats her “choros sequences” as stand-alone poetic sequences.Footnote ¹² She does not name the sections she is translating with their conventional Greek names (parodos [= first choral song marking the chorus’s arrival on the stage], stasimon [= choral song], etc.), but numbers them instead. She also does not follow the responsive Greek strophic structure; in fact she actively erases it by also numbering serially the subsections within each section of her sequence. She usually does not pattern her subsections so that they appear responsive, and even cuts up single Greek strophes into much shorter segments. She, moreover, sometimes alters the Greek “sense” in the way that would work best for her poem; most frequently, this means cutting misogynistic passages that are tied to what Pound would call “moralizing.” For example, in the first IA stasimon she omits the first strophic pair, in which the chorus claims that only a passionless marriage can bring happiness and flatly condemns Helen, praising the Greek leaders for going to war. At the same time, cutting this passage allows her to structure the whole sequence more coherently. As they stand in H.D.’s version, the play’s choral songs, far from being “irrelevant” to the play’s action,Footnote ¹³ offer a timeline of war. Beginning with the present vision of the ships at Aulis in section i (parodos), we move back to Paris’s abduction of Helen in ii (a shorter first stasimon consisting only of its epode), then forward to the prophesied retrieval of Helen from Troy and the city’s destruction in iii (second stasimon). Section iv (the third stasimon) takes us even further back than ii, before Paris’s choice and reward, to the event that occasioned it: Peleus and Thetis’s wedding and the beginning of discord. The section ends with a reference to Iphigeneia’s current supposed “wedding” to Achilles (the excuse for summoning her to Aulis) and the contrast between the two. Finally, in v Iphigeneia summarizes the whole story of Paris’s judgment and the discord between the gods, which leads to her death. The “theme” that runs through these choruses and that H.D. calls attention to more than Euripides, partly by virtue of her condensation of the play, is the possibility of song or even speech in a time of war. What her chorus debates is the role of the observer of the war, while the “dramatic” action is the transformation of such an observer, Iphigeneia, into actor. Though in some measure her method here resembles that which Pound would use in Lustra insofar as she fragments the Euripidean play, the goal is to make its structure and coherence more clearly emerge, and H.D. achieves that, unlike Pound in his “Homage,” by probing its every word.

Straits: Imagism at Aulis

H.D.’s opening section demonstrates what she means by translating what the Greek words hide.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, as Pound would do in his Women of Trachis choruses much later, her version of the parodos coheres around a single word/image: stenoporthmōn ‘of or on a strait,’ which the chorus use to encapsulate their difficult journey to Aulis. H.D. uses “strait” three times to designate three different locations situated between land and water: once where it is actually used in the Greek to describe the narrow sea-passage of Euripos (“I crossed Euripos’ strait – / Foam hissed after my boat”), once to designate the Eurotas river in Sparta, where Helen was taken (“There are clumps of marsh-reed / And spear-grass about the strait”), and once to describe the site of Paris’s judgment on Mount Ida (“As the three stood / Among the fresh-shallows of the strait”) (CP 71–72). It is possible that H.D. confused the name of the earlier strait “Euripos,” which the chorus had to cross to get to Aulis, with the Spartan river Eurotas, which remains unnamed in her translation, and that she then also unintentionally conflated Eurotas with Ida since the latter remains unnamed in the Greek.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet H.D. refuses to geographically orient us throughout. For example, when she writes in her second stanza “I left Chalkis, / My city and the rock-ledges. / Arethusa twists among the boulders, / Increases – cuts into the surf,” she leads us to infer that Arethusa, its movement expressed in the present like that of the chorus in the section’s preceding stanza (“I stand among the sea-drift before Aulis”), is part of the chorus’s immediate landscape when in fact it belongs to the Chalkis they have left behind (71). A simple “where” or “there” before “Arethusa twists…” would have clarified this. The fact that H.D. withholds it suggests that she wants to convey a precise feeling for the kind of space we are in (with its rocks, sand, and sea-drift), but at the same time maintain a sense of geographical confusion or disorientation even as she provides us with (some) place-names. Similarly, while she omits any overt reference to Sparta (as does Euripides, relying on Eurotas as a location marker), she nonetheless encodes its sounds, as well as those of stenoporthmōn itself, in her interpolated description of it: “And spear-grass about the strait.” Moreover, by introducing “spears,” she makes her landscape cohere even more tightly. Paris passed through “spear-grass” when he took Helen, and he will soon have to pass through spears again if the Achaians arrive at Ida/Troy instead of “the three [goddesses].” The goal of the passage is to strike some familiar notes, but not too explicitly, as the readers themselves try to make sense of this old play in new guise.

The choice of stenoporthmōn as the passage’s key word does more than suggest the simultaneous and almost physical presence of these events (arrival of army at Aulis, Helen’s abduction, Paris’s judgment) in the mind of the chorus and audience. By insisting on “strait,” H.D. turns the literal description of a geographical space into a figurative description of past events, evoking the metaphorical straits in which Helen and Paris had found themselves, the former when leaving Sparta, the latter when choosing Aphrodite. By the same token, however, she externalizes, makes physical an interior, psychological landscape, assigning the image of the Euboean topography to the two crucial mythical moments. In her later essay on Euripides’ Helen, H.D. would define Greece itself, the Greece we enter “through the words,” as “the thousand intimate little bays, the foaming straits,” suggesting that her entire conception of Greece rests on this double reflection of external and internal, physical and emotional, metaphorical and literal, that she draws out of Euripides’ opening (9). Like this strait, Greece is impossible to untangle and difficult, but not impossible to cross.

The strain denoted in stenoporthmōn further guides her lexical choices in the passage. The landscape described by the Greek chorus is a paradigmatic H.D. landscape, between land and water, and that may have well been its initial appeal.Footnote ¹⁶ In the first six lines Euripides uses three different compound words to mean “by-the-sea” (παρακτίαν, ἐναλίας, ἀγχιάλων), refers once to a beach (ψάμαθον) and a marine passageway (στενοπόρθμων) and twice to water (χευμάτων, ὑδάτων). Though H.D.’s use of compounds like “sand-hills,” “sea-drift,” and “rock-ledges” to designate the compound Greek adjectives pushes English towards Greek in a way that would have pleased Pound, her words do not match up with their Greek counterparts in specific meaning. The Greek words designate the border, or even simply the proximity, between beach and water without commenting on it. H.D., in contrast, through the entry point afforded by her key term, reads that border as belonging to the landscape of her Sea Garden: that is, as a hard-edged, dry space, unwelcoming to chorus and Greek warriors alike – we may recall again the introduction of “spear-grass.” That that book was being compiled at exactly the time she was translating IA suggests the degree of synergy between translation and “original” work.

H.D.’s syntax also reflects her key word. Overall, for Euripides’ long hypotactic clauses she substitutes short phrases (one per short line), for his fluidity, a sense of hardness, reflected in the jagged edges of her lines. The most striking difference between the texts lies in H.D.’s heavy use of active indicative verbs: “I crossed,” “I crossed,” “I left,” “I come,” and so on. The long Greek strophe (lines 164–85), to which H.D.’s first subsection corresponds, is structured around only five indicative verbs. H.D. creates one stanza per Greek verb (plus one, the second, where in Greek there are two active participles) though she does not try to follow the Greek syntax within her stanzas and, in fact, multiplies its verbs. Her eschewing of the Greek hypotactic structure results in multiple word repetitions that do not necessarily produce a rhythmic effect,Footnote ¹⁷ as, for example, in her fourth stanza:

The repetition of “they have” or of “ships” seems stiff, inflexible. Reading through the Greek stenoporthmōn, then, she allows it to color her entire presentation of the landscape – her thematic, lexical, and syntactical choices – and discovers in Euripides’ suggestion of difficult but ultimately successful passage her own Sea Garden.

Yet, having begun by placing her speaker in the space of her own imagist poems, H.D. then gestures beyond them. What this chorus encounters next is war, in the guise of an almost Homeric catalog of ships and warriors, no doubt an intentional echo on the part of Euripides. The parodos ends with the description of Ajax’s ships, but H.D. detaches part of that account into its own subsection and generalizes it in order to create a concluding pair of stanzas for this first section of her translation (in Greek only the last two lines provide a concluding note):

Euripides’ chorus comments on the superiority of Ajax’s fleet; H.D.’s focuses on the awesomeness of this vision, inserting a variation of a line spoken earlier: “If a god should stand here / He could not speak / At the sight of ships / Circled with ships” (CP 73).Footnote ¹⁸ They thus insist on the incommensurability between the first-hand experience or witnessing of (the preparation for) war and its recounting. At the same time, though H.D. extends the chorus’s admiration of Ajax’s ships to the whole Greek fleet, she undermines the implications of that greatness. While Euripides says “If anyone sets / barbarian barks against these, / no homecoming [noston] will he win” (lines 296–98), H.D. undoes the opposition: Both the Greek ships and those of their enemies are beyond measure. A statement of certain victory – in Greek limited to Ajax and his “most nimble” (line 293) ships – is transformed into a battle of equals, the only certainty being that of radical change for both sides. Loosely translating Euripides’ line νόστον οὐκ ἀποίσεται (298) by “nothing will ever be the same,” H.D. generalizes the impossibility of nostos; there can be no return from war for anyone, Greek or barbarian, victor or loser – something the Greek chorus does not seem to know. To make this point even more forcefully H.D. then turns the neutral statement with which the Euripidean parodos ends into a premonition of doom. Rather than translate “such is the armada / I saw here and what I remember, / from what I heard at home, / of the assembled army” (lines 299–302), she teases out the lines’ implication: “the shouts,” “the harrowing voices,” “graven with ships.” What is seen and remembered but barely spoken becomes for H.D. evidence of trauma, as she instills in her chorus a prophetic – as far as the play is concerned – knowledge of the future. They speak of the shouts and harrowing voices with a sense of certainty that can only be retrospective and marks the translator’s own presence in the text. Hearing the emphatic Greek consonance together with the ου assonance in τὰ δὲ κᾱτ᾽οἴκους κλύουσᾱ σῡῩκλήτου (line 301) as evidence for the kind of sounds the chorus has heard, H.D. translates accordingly and renders explicit the tension between memorializing the ships and being left behind. The chorus stand “with an army,” but also “apart,” and yet they too may share the army’s “grave” fate – a pun H.D. probably intended.

“The harrowing voices within the house”: Prophecies of War

In the second stasimon, H.D.’s section iii, we hear precisely from “The harrowing voices within the house” as Euripides’ chorus imagines the future exploits of the Greek army and the eventual downfall of Troy. Yet such a distinction between sides is blurred when the Greek women ventriloquize the Trojan women’s sorrow, “quoting” their laments to come after the predicted sacking of Troy. Precisely in hoping not to ever be put in the place of the Trojan women, they become them in sung prophetic imitation – prophetic not only of the Trojan women’s plight, as they think, but also of Greek women in Euripides’ own time. H.D. has her chorus occupy the position of the Trojan women from the beginning even if they only speak as them at the end. She writes, for example, that the Greek force will “come to Simois – / The strait,” not “arrive” there (as in Greek), implying that the speaker is already by that Trojan river (CP 77). This fourth use of “strait” – translating no Greek word – serves again to establish the imagistic coherence of the translation; in the first section, we had heard of Paris “coming” to two fated watery places, the Eurotas river and Mount Ida, and now correspondingly the Greeks are coming for him. Moreover, in H.D.’s text the chorus is already (with) Kassandra, seeing the destruction of Troy. While the account of the Greek invasion of Troy is set in the future, Kassandra intrudes in the present: “They will enter Troy. /… / Kassandra shakes out her hair –” (CP 77). This temporal distinction is present in Euripides as well, but there it is at least introduced by akouo ‘I hear’ (lines 757–58).

H.D. presents a more violent picture of the battles, extending Euripides’ description of weaponry and compounding his images of force. The gathered Greek army (line 753) becomes “The crowd of the Greek force,” their arms and ships (754) “stacked arms and with troop-ships” (CP 77, my emphasis). Her heightening of violence is directional; as in the rest of her translation, here too H.D. exhibits no sympathy or alliance with the Greeks, displacing even the pretense of a “national” cause for war (which Euripides himself puts into question of course) and implicitly arguing, here and elsewhere, against the notion of a just war, highlighting instead the losses sustained. For example, rather than have the Greeks simply arrive at Troy, she adds a line to declare “They will enter Troy” (CP 77). Moreover, though the Greek identifies the ground of Troy as Phoebean, H.D. transfers that adjective to Troy’s “porticoes” (“The sun-god built the porticoes”), thus implying that by “entering” the city they are breaking into a god’s territory (CP 77). Rather than introduce the Trojans waiting for the Greeks at the city walls, ready to defend their land (762–64), she places the Greeks already “stand[ing] on Pergamos” and “crowd[ing] about the walls,” as if there is barely any resistance from the other side (CP 77). In the one instance where she suppresses a violent image present in the Greek – Ares, used as a synecdoche for the war brought on by Greeks, will “take away severed heads” of Trojans (776) – she does so precisely to erase the purportedly just act of revenge. She turns this specific act of violence into a generalized and therefore all the more powerful “bright stain,” presumably of blood, on the “stone-battlements” of “ancient Troy” (“ancient” too is an addition, heightening the sense of sacrilege) (CP 78). When she finally writes that Troy is “given up to its fate” she eschews the more specific description in the Greek: “sacking the city utterly” (CP 78).Footnote ¹⁹ She thus further removes traces of glory from the Greeks who are sacking Troy; it is not, she implies, that they are such great warriors, but rather that that was the city’s fate. By slanting her translation in this way, H.D. downplays the tension that Euripides develops between the chorus’s excitement for battle and admiration of the Greek army and their suppressed fear for their own future.

Euripides’ chorus identifies the lamenting words to be spoken by the Trojan women (and wished away from themselves) as mythoi: παρ᾽ ἱστοῖς / μυθεῦσαι τάδ᾽ ἐς ἀλλήλας (lines 789–90; “as by their looms / they say to one another”). This lexical choice would hardly be noteworthy if the word did not poignantly return in its meaning of “fable” at the end of their ventriloquized song. After blaming Helen for their fate, the imagined Trojan chorus doubts her parentage and wonders whether the report of her half-divinity is “true” (line 795) or an untimely rumor, the Muses’ invention, a mythos qua myth (798). They ask, that is, whether their city’s destruction had a divinely ordained cause. But the Euboean women who are at this moment speaking these mythoi (qua words) are themselves idly spinning a poetic fable insofar as they are imagining the future voices of others (which, metatextually, they/we have heard in Euripides’ earlier Trojan plays).

H.D.’s translation teases out the implications of this act of ventriloquism. While Euripides’ chorus hopes they will not have to experience a plight like the one they imagine the Trojan women will speak of (“May no foreboding / ever come to me or to my children’s children”; lines 785–86), H.D.’s chorus makes experience and telling inseparable: “May no child of mine, / Nor any child of any child / Ever fashion such a tale / As the Phrygians shall murmur” (CP 77).Footnote ²⁰ By using the vocabulary of conscious artistic creation here, H.D. dispenses with the imagined Trojan women’s purported distinction between fact and fiction, and simply answer the question. Every telling is a fashioned tale, in which there is little room for the determination of “truth”:

H.D. rearranges the imagined lament so that the imagery of destruction and violence is intercut with the epistemological question about Helen. What in Greek, then, may be taken as a gesture towards a factual statement about Helen (is she the offspring of Zeus or not?) becomes here almost irrelevant in the face of human lament and desertion: if … truth, but still we lament, even if … no truth. Whatever the cause or justification of war may be, wherever or however it may be expressed, the result will be the same, the only tales to be fashioned variations of this one. By devoting a separate line to each of the poetry-associated words in Euripides (the Pierian-inspired deltoi ‘tablets,’ anthrōpoi ‘humans’ [H.D.’s “poets”], mythoi) only to reject each of them, H.D. claims a very particular role for the “poet,” here in the guise of these Greek women pretending to be their Trojan counterparts: not the accurate and permanent (“cut on ivory”) recording of the past, or even of the present, but the prescient fashioning of the future that can nonetheless only be expressed allegorically – that is, when speaking through another. As indeed H.D. is doing here, writing through Euripides in 1915.

“Scattered light”: Muses and Heroines

While the voices imagined in the second stasimon are those “voices in the house” that echo at the end of the parodos in H.D.’s version, the first and third stasima, on the other hand, address divine speaking/singing, precisely the other kind of “myth.” H.D. emphasizes this alternation in her translation as her sections ii and iv attempt to address the question of the “reality” or “truthfulness” of myth that the Euripidean chorus has posed in the passage we just looked at. In these two sections H.D. highlights, if not exaggerates, the complicity of song in war. Going against the Greek in the first stasimon, she places Paris’s musical abilities at the start of war, presenting him as a pied piper: Paris “caught all Olympus / In his bent reeds” (CP 76). This is an important (and probably unintentional) misreading. In the course of describing Paris’s bucolic life, Euripides likens him to Olympus, a famed singer and purported inventor of the aulos: “playing Asian [barbara] melodies upon the syrinx, / imitating upon your reed pipe / the Phrygian aulos of Olympus” (lines 576–78). H.D.’s ambiguous line, however, either suggests that Paris metaphorically captured, that is, successfully imitated, the essence of Olympus (as synecdoche for the gods) in his music, or that he literally captured the Olympian gods by means of it (after all, we soon hear about the three sparring goddesses finding him on Ida). In either case, what was an incidental detail is here used to heighten the stakes and prepare us for the possibility explored in H.D.’s next section, the second stasimon discussed above.

The third stasimon (H.D.’s section iv) develops the Greek chorus’s imagined fear about song’s potentially deceptive and destructive powers. The strophe goes further back in time, before Paris’s choice, to Thetis and Peleus’s wedding. The Greek begins with an inquiry about a wedding hymn (“What wedding-hymn was that which…” [line 1036]); it then specifies the day on which the wedding occurred by describing the various aspects of the feast, one of which involves the Muses. H.D., however, has the Muses govern the action completely. Skipping to the fifth line of the Greek strophe, H.D. introduces the Muses immediately by redundantly translating the Greek epithet καλλιπλόκαμοι (kalliplokamoi) with “Burnished-head / By burnished-head” (CP 79). Of course the Muses’ heads are “burnished” in the figurative sense of being perfected, perfectly coiffed, as the Greek states. At the same time, the literal meaning of the word points us in a different direction, that of polishing metals, and by extension not to hair, but to helmets. H.D. encourages such confusion by then calling them “Pierides”; this toponym would be immediately recognizable to the Greek audience, but perhaps less so to an English-speaking one that might instead take the “Pierides” to be an Achaian tribe, like those listed in the catalog of ships of the parodos, on the hunt for Helen (“Pierides sought the bride,” H.D. ambiguously writes [79]). Rather than translate the place-name into the more familiar name, she paratactically identifies their many activities: playing music on flute, lyre, and syrinx, chanting, dancing, calling and bringing together bride, groom, and guests. She thus reorganizes and tightens the Greek strophe into a single performance by the Muses – a performance, moreover, that not only accompanies the wedding, but seems to make it possible. She also ends with an image absent in its specificity from the Greek when she adds that the Nereids – the name this time translated into “sea-spirits” – “Moved and paused / To mark the beat / Of chanted words” (79, my emphasis). H.D. does not want us to miss that it is the tragic chorus that is conjured here.

When in the antistrophe the centaur Chiron predicts Achilles’ birth, he is said to be inspired by Apollo, or, more precisely, to be a seer knowledgeable in Phoebus’s “muse,” namely prophecy (lines 1064–65). H.D. reads this “muse” in accordance with the Muses she has just presented, writing that Chiron speaks his prophecy “Inspired by the rites of song”:

H.D. reads the connective conjunction tote that follows Chiron’s prediction (line 1076) as expressing consequence (“Therefore”) rather than subsequence; the latter is the more probable reading, though as with the English “then” the line between the two can be blurry. But H.D. wants to imply that the chanting spirits (that is, in H.D.’s version, the Muses, when in Greek it is daimones, mostly likely the gods in general) bless Thetis for this reason: so that she, “fair-fathered,” may mother a worthy son. She thus presents this blessing in song as sanctioning the war to come, justifying it for the sake of a splendid image: so that this light, Achilles, can shine, the fire of Troy will have to come about. In Bid Me to Live H.D. would suggest the complicity between certain kinds of new poetry – avant-garde, vorticism, even her own “Imagiste” aesthetic of harshness and hardness – with “the times” and, thus, the war; she first does so here.

It is in this light that we should see H.D.’s subsequent “glorification” of Iphigeneia. Achilles will “scatter fire” in Troy in H.D.’s version, but the first victim of his “light” will appear already in the next stanza, in the stasimon’s epode: Iphigeneia herself, whose own hair “is scattered light,” and whose presence onstage leads the chorus to ask once again “where truth is” (CP 80). Yet, when at the end of the play (H.D.’s section v) Iphigeneia “accepts” her sacrifice, she presents herself not as victim, but as aggressor, ordering the women to sing, the Greeks to stand silent, Agamemnon to assist her – and especially so in H.D.’s rendering. H.D. adds more imperatives than are there in Greek precisely to suggest that Iphigeneia is in command of the ceremony and indeed of the entire Greek army. Rejecting the image (presented by the chorus earlier) of a heifer headed to the slaughter, Iphigeneia becomes the one demanding the slaughter and dictating its terms and proceedings. Though in Greek she asks to be led to the altar (line 1475), H.D.’s Iphigeneia proclaims her own free will (“I come – I free Hellas”), and wants to be acclaimed not simply for ensuring the continuation of the Greeks’ journey, but for “destroy[ing] Phrygia and Troy” (CP 83, rendering the Greek heleptolin [line 1476] and thus usurping the Aeschylean Helen’s role). She also asks for a song that sings “Without change of note, / My death-paeon and Artemis’ chant” (CP 82). While in Greek the paean is clearly for Artemis (lines 1467–69), H.D. implies that it is, paradoxically, for Iphigeneia herself, who demands to be glorified as both hero and goddess. H.D. thus fashions her as a counter-Helen and as a counter-Achilles – the one who makes the prophesied heroic Achilles possible. Though Gregory is right to say that H.D. highlights Iphigeneia’s embrace of war, this scene does not represent as H.D.’s final word. The “heroic axis”Footnote ²² is consistently undercut throughout the chorus sequence; that is, H.D. shows herself to be aware of the dangers of her own mythologizing, of her own historic or mythical revisionism that would turn Iphigeneia into a hero-goddess. The play may end with this glorified image and its attendant song, but we have already heard the future, what such song may make possible and what voices it may then cover over, as H.D. has made the case for the importance of being not a bold actor but an astute and empathetic witness.

Susan Stanford Friedman has argued that “the impersonal discourse of H.D. Imagiste was not suited” to writing about traumatic events of war; instead it was prose that became “the discourse that freed H.D. to narrate her experience of modernity” because it was “personal, narrative, directly gendered, and historical” – as indeed we have already seen with “Hipparchia.”Footnote ²³ In large part Friedman is correct in her assessment: The bulk of H.D.’s production, published and unpublished, in the interwar period is in the form of novels and novellas, some set in the Hellenistic world, and all semi-autobiographical. Yet, as I have argued, H.D.’s first “imagiste” poems are not quite as disembodied and timeless as they might initially appear, while her Iphigeneia choruses are already doing the work that Friedman locates in H.D.’s later mythical dramatic monologues and in her novels; they already allow her to explore her ambivalence as a poet in a time of war. Before the constant retellings of the London war years in her 1920s (and later) prose, then, H.D. first begins to explore the question of war and its consequences, and the relation of art to war, through this encounter with Euripides. Aldington would write to her a few years later that though “there are moments when I doubt even the Greeks,” still “the ‘Greeks’ are our norm” because they “solved” the problem of life and art; H.D., in contrast, uses “the Greeks” to unsettle the very idea of such a solution (HD/RA 78). In the quintessential “straited” landscape of imagism, she stages a confrontation between what we might call the ideal and the real: the crystalline, musical world of the spirit and of song, as portrayed in the Muses stasimon, to which H.D. herself was heavily drawn, and a “real” world and real war impinging upon it that, moreover, it seems to have brought about. In this sense, then, maintaining the distinctions between “real” and “ideal” becomes pointless as they show themselves to be completely intertwined. She already responds in her text to the possible reaction of a critic – namely that, in turning to Euripides, she is looking away from her own time – by using the Iphigeneia choruses to encode both the promise and the danger of song, of poetry in a time of war. At the same time, by so doing, she pushes to the surface critical moments in the Euripidean choruses that may have seemed unimportant under the swing of the play’s plot and the Panhellenic mythos it was unfolding, a mythos to which other early twentieth-century hellenists may have been all too eager to subscribe.

Erotic Rhythms

Hippolytus had been the play that gave Richard Aldington his first glimpse into the possibilities of vers libre and led Pound to pronounce Euripides a vers-librist. Aldington’s own early unpublished partial translation of the playFootnote ²⁵ is indeed in free verse (unlike, for example, his later prose translation of Alcestis or his prose translations from the Greek Anthology). When Aldington frantically tried to restart the Poets’ Translation Series before even returning from France in late 1918, H.D. delivered with “Choruses from the Hippolytus,” which was published in 1919, bound with the Iphigeneia choruses.Footnote ²⁶ Their common interest in this play may be explained by several factors: Walter Pater had written a long essay inspired by it, there had been an influential production of the play in London in 1904 (in Gilbert Murray’s translation), and, as H.D. may well have known, there was, as with IA, a female precursor. Mary F. Robinson had published a metrical translation of Hippolytus in 1881.Footnote ²⁷

Hippolytus begins where Iphigeneia ends. In the opening section H.D. creates an exactly parallel situation with the final scene of her Iphigeneia: A group of (male) attendants, the equivalent to Iphigeneia’s maidens, pray to Artemis, after which Hippolytus himself does so. All of the play’s choral songs have to do with Eros, which is essentially what Iphigeneia does not address, since its marriage plot is a ploy and quickly turns into a war plot. As Gregory writes, H.D. moves from the “heroic axis” of hellenism to the erotic one, and from a paternal to a maternal plot.Footnote ²⁸ The two translations are, moreover, complementary qua commentaries on imagism and its commitments, including its presumed relations to Greek. As with IA, H.D. takes some pains to make her Hippolytus sequence imagistically cohesive. The most consistent feature is the use of “dart” as a synecdoche for Eros, echoing of course Pound’s very definition of the image (“when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective”; GB 89). But unlike in the IA, H.D. is focused less on phanopoeia and more on melopoeia in her approach, exploring this particular Greek cliché: namely, the obsession with the incomparable “music.” To some extent this fits the plays themselves. Hippolytus is an earlier play and more conventional formally (again, as Pound and Eliot are thinking about tighter forms). Additionally, it is obsessed with “meter”; it depicts the actions and effects of Eros through references to rhythm and song and through a “symbolic” or performative use of meter specifically and sound generally.Footnote ²⁹ H.D.’s preoccupation with this play can be seen as parallel to Pound’s with the Agamemnon in this sense. But while Pound is struggling with Greek sounds and meters – all his writing about tragedy is characterized by the ambivalence produced by such a struggle – H.D.’s actual versions dramatize sound’s “excess.” They display and thematize what cannot be cleared away by rhetoric like that of Pound, imagiste.

H.D. intensifies and expands Euripides’ strategies of registering Eros as metrical disruptionFootnote ³⁰ while also extending Eros’s reach. With the Hippolytus choruses H.D. addresses directly the tension she develops between the two paired stasima/sections of Iphigeneia regarding the nature of song: song as aligned with gods or with mortals (especially women), song as deceit or as measure of truth. In this partial version of Euripides, and especially in her later adaptation of the play, it is the measuring of the distance between life and death, between mortals and immortals – which, in Hölderlinian fashion, also stands in for the distance between “modernity” and “Greece” – through “song,” which is brought, performatively and thematically, to the forefront, and which is revealed as a risky erotic space.Footnote ³¹

H.D.’s treatment of the drama negotiates the terms of two triangulated oppositions, onto which further oppositions are mapped. The first is between what Freud would call the life or sexual drive and the death drive: Eros, the force that seeks to “combine organic substances into ever larger unities” and to thus complicate and preserve life, and the death drive, “the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.”Footnote ³² The triangulation here is a split within Eros that H.D. is interested in exploring: Is the (self-)destructiveness of desire, its link to madness, something other than the expression of the death drive? I will return to this below; though the seeds for this question are present in the Hippolytus choruses, it is raised more explicitly in HT, owing presumably to the publication and circulation of Freud’s own work.

The second opposition is one between two understandings of rhythm. The linguist Émile Benveniste reminds us that in most of its ancient occurrences the Greek word ῥυθμός (rhythmos) does not mean what we currently understand by rhythm and, despite its provenance from the verb ῥέω (rheō) ‘to flow,’ neither does it designate the flow of water. Noting that, in any case, those two senses are contradictory, Benveniste argues that the Greeks did not perceive a similarity between what they wanted to call rhythm and the movement of water, but instead used a word associated with liquidity to designate “la forme dans l’instant qu’elle est assumée par ce qui n’a pas consistance organique.”Footnote ³³ Up until the Attic period, the constant and sole meaning of rhythmos was “forme distinctive, l’arrangement caractéristique des parties dans un tout” (330). More specifically, rhythmos was not a fixed or realized form, but a form always subject to change (333). By applying the word rhythmos to the movements of the human body in dance, Plato was the first to associate it with something regular; as Benveniste puts it, “cette ‘forme’ est désormais déterminée par une ‘mesure’ et assujettie à un ordre,” and rhythmos begins to designate a “séquence ordonnée de mouvements lents et rapides” (334). The word, that is, underwent a double displacement: from the domain of the inorganic to that of the human, and from that of space to that of time. No longer only referring to the contingent arrangement of constituent parts, it could now designate the intentionally organized repetitive alternation of distinct, and perhaps opposed, elements.

While I am sure that H.D. had not reached Benveniste’s particular philological conclusion, her understanding of rhythm recalls the word’s other, first sense. Certainly her characters’ repeated evocation of “metres in the air” is consonant with the idea that a rhythm might be a temporary form that one can only grasp at before it vanishes into a new shape. While one sense of rhythm would point to an intricate plan deliberately put in place by humans, whose goal would be to control a set of natural givens or constraints, the other might be – and that is how Maurice Blanchot conceives it, building on Benveniste’s insights – precisely the first one’s disruption: the accidental emergence of unplanned form that reverses or puts into question the edifice being built. The one rhythm would name the (imposed) order or disorder of things – the alternation of order and disorder – while the other would obviate such measuring, already gone by the time it is perceived. The triangulation I referred to above would be in this case between an understanding of rhythm that involves the opposition and alternation of, for example, the presence and absence of a regular meter, and one that is not defined with respect to such an alternation, to rhythm as conventionally conceived (or to its breaking), that cannot link up into any pattern that we might call metrical or unmetrical. “Feet, feet, feet, but not that kind,” as H.D. writes in “Murex,” and indeed her exploration of other kinds of “feet” during this period is focused on a particular use of rhyme (Palimpsest, 146).

By approaching the Hippolytus through these triangulated oppositions, H.D. tries to articulate a relation to Greece and to Greek drama that exceeds the available models in whose parameters Pound finds himself caught in the “Hellenist Series” and beyond. She articulates a textual and conceptual relationship to tragedy that is at once more interdependent and less fixed than that envisioned by either Pound or Eliot. Though it will take until the Ion translation for H.D. to be able to reimagine the erotic yet not wholly destructive possibility of poetic inspiration in general, and Greek inspiration in particular, the Hippolytus works pave the way through their rethinking of “rhythm” and “metres” in both the deep sense and the technical one. Neither rhythm nor its absence, neither constraint nor freedom, is adequate for expressing a living relationship to Greece but something barely definable in between those opposed terms may yet be able to.

“Wild words, mad speech”: The Metrical Representation of Phaedra

Anne Carson beautifully summarizes the consistent negative depiction of Eros and his effects in ancient Greek poetry: “His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder.”Footnote ³⁴ Euripides’ Hippolytus forms no exception to this “standard attitude and conviction.”Footnote ³⁵ The play’s first stasimon, H.D.’s fourth section, describes the complete power of Eros over humans even compared to other gods, as exemplified by Herakles’ rape of Iole and Zeus’s of Semele. H.D. intensifies Euripides’ description, preparing her treatment of the Hippolytus myth in HT. She presents the unnamed Iole as an Artemis figure (“that girl, / chaste – / a wild colt, / mateless, uncaught”) who is forcefully corrupted, transformed into a “bacchante” by Herakles with Aphrodite’s permission (CP 89). H.D., moreover, makes Aphrodite, rather than Zeus’s appearance as god, directly responsible for Semele’s death:

Eros thus sets both gods’ and humans’ affairs out of joint, and in fact this out-of-jointedness is what binds them, according to H.D.’s version of the stasimon. H.D. will further explore this theme in HT, excluding only one god, Artemis, from Eros’s thralldom.

But before we hear of Eros directly in Euripides’ play, we witness his effects, first learning of Phaedra’s affliction through the chorus and then seeing her ourselves. H.D.’s second section, her translation of the play’s parodos, opens with the chorus referring to Oceanus, the river encircling the world. H.D. naturalizes the myth, turning Oceanus into the sea, while his waters dripping off a cliff become a pool left by the sea at high tide. A description of women washing clothes by the river follows:

While these are free verse lines, they do set up a pattern: They mostly end with two stresses (hígh-tíde, róck-shélf, etc.), all of which describe nature. This is interrupted by four consecutive lines with cretic endings (e.g., wómen díp, wáter járs), in which the activities of the women at the pool are described. Then we go back to the spondaic ending until we get to the stanza’s last line, which ends with “mistress.” Because of the preceding pattern we are almost forced to stress the word’s second syllable, as if “mistress” too were a compound word. In this way, Phaedra is placed between the human – more precisely, the feminine – world and the more “permanent” or forceful powers shaping the landscape, the very powers that in the first section of the translation Hippolytus has aligned himself with in his prayer to Artemis. This movement mirrors what is going on in the Greek metrically; there too there is a shift to a different set of meters for the lines pertaining to the women. To the extent that Euripides is using his meter performatively, H.D. follows him by resorting to strategies that work for English.Footnote ³⁶

In the rest of the parodos the chorus describe Phaedra’s suffering and attempt to determine its cause, first in the divine realm – as either the result of possession (“you are possessed / by Pan, by Hecate”) or sin (the Murrayesque “have you sinned / … / against Artemis?”) – and then in the human: her husband’s possible infidelities, “sad news from Crete” (CP 86–87). Throughout, we have fairly regular stress alternation in H.D., approximating an iambic pattern and almost no clustering of stresses. Only when Artemis, in contrast to the other gods, is described in her natural surroundings at the end of H.D.’s third stanza do we return to the spondaic endings, with “huntress,” like “mistress” earlier, acting as an intermediate word:

There is, thus, a clear aural opposition set up in H.D., not between human and divine, but between human and natural, and by extension, between Phaedra’s female world and specifically the realm of Artemis (qua Frazerian nature goddess) for which Phaedra will soon yearn.

H.D.’s third section translates an exchange between Phaedra and her nurse, which contrasts the nurse’s sympathetic pragmatism and Phaedra’s “mad” wish for nature. This segment of the Greek play – including the nurse’s long opening speech which H.D. skips, her dialogue with Phaedra, and some short speeches by Phaedra – is in anapestic dimeters, rather than in the iambic trimeter which is customary for tragic dialogue. However, beginning with Phaedra’s second speech, her anapests exhibit “the Doric alpha associated with lyric delivery, though metrically they are no different from the Nurse’s non-lyric anapests.”Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, “lyric delivery is often associated with delirium … and although Phaedra’s lines are spoken, the Doric vocalism may help to suggest an abnormal state of mind.”Footnote ³⁸ When then H.D. translates this half-lyric exchange, she too shifts her translation’s rhythm. The Greek anapests have at least four long syllables and usually more. H.D.’s lines for Phaedra, though not for the nurse, are also longer: in her first and third speeches, almost exclusively with four stresses, a pattern otherwise absent in H.D.’s translation.Footnote ³⁹ What the nurse and Phaedra share in the opening of the dialogue is alliteration, even of the same letter, h:

Such alliteration is also present in H.D.’s version of the parodos above, and throughout the rest of her translation; thus we may assume that here it is a mark of “sanity,” of regularity or normalcy, a sense of attunement. For it is at this point that Phaedra’s lyric anapests begin in the Greek, and after an initial alliterative line, H.D.’s Phaedra disperses, and then drops, the alliterations completely, while the nurse picks up on Phaedra’s dropped w alliteration and continues the earlier h alliteration:

H.D. also moves away from both her initial four-stress lines and their stress alternation as Phaedra’s speech becomes increasingly fragmented: In this second speech, her every (monosyllabic) word also turns into a stressed word. Even her cry, only present in the beginning of the speech in Euripides, is repeated. (We have an intimation of this crowding of stressed syllables already in the first speech, where there tend to be two consecutive ones in the middle of Phaedra’s lines, in contrast with the nurse’s more spaced-out stresses.) When the nurse then refers to Phaedra’s speaking, she does so precisely by having four consecutive monosyllabic (and, in theory, stressed) words: “wild words, mad speech.”

In her third speech, H.D.’s Phaedra returns to the longer lines used in the first; as in the second, though, the stresses range from two to four stresses per line.

While previously her desire broke societal norms, here Phaedra expresses a more dangerous wish: She wants to transform herself into Artemis – from mistress to huntress – in order to be more attractive to Hippolytus. H.D. expresses through many metrical shifts this crossing of the boundary between mortal and immortal, which she will explore at length in HT. From the loosely trochaic, mostly stress-based, and faintly alliterative first line, most similar to the lines H.D. uses throughout her translation; to the crowding of four stresses in five words in the second (and, similarly, in the sixth); to the iambic third line (which replicates almost exactly the th-r-f sounds of the Greek thērophonoi ‘killers of prey/wild beasts’ [line 216]); to the adonic fourth which may well have come from Pound (leáp on the bríght stágs); to the fifth line, which begins spondaically (thus creating another string of four stresses if read with the preceding line) and continues anapestically so that the initial spondee can be taken as an anapest with substitution (Gód, hów I would shoút to the beásts); to the two concluding almost perfect anapestic trimeter lines, H.D. would seem to deem madness this metrical undecidability, this mimicking of Greek meters. H.D. depicts Phaedra’s mental unraveling as a descent into Greek until finally her Phaedra and Euripides’ coincide in the anapest; in this way, she mirrors the fact that Phaedra’s madness is marked in Greek through the Doric alpha – that is, through a linguistic device. It is not that she makes no sense (indeed, she does) or that she breaks the meter (she does not) but rather that there is something “foreign” felt in her native speech – just as there is in H.D.’s English speech with the metrical shifts and spondees. Artemis, for whose realm and identity Phaedra yearns, is thus figured as Greece itself, both through meter and through the alignment with a conventional topography of hellenism,Footnote ⁴⁰ something that H.D. will more explicitly gesture towards in HT.

In her last speech, addressed to Artemis, Phaedra again speaks almost entirely in (stressed) monosyllables, this time ending most of her lines with the double stress we know from the parodos: the spondees associated with nature.

As in the parodos, here too we sense a shift as soon as Phaedra moves away from the description of the goddess to what she herself asks of her; from three stresses distributed to the beginning (one) and end (two) of each line, we move to two or three stresses alternating iambically. Already through the anapestic rhythm established at the end of the previous speech Phaedra has been moving away from fragmented, stress-crowded lines as H.D. suggests her slow return from “madness,” which follows in the untranslated remainder of the scene in Euripides (where Phaedra drops the Doric alpha and resumes regular anapests like the nurse’s). As Phaedra’s erotic desire for Hippolytus becomes a desire to transform herself into Artemis and thus encodes the desire for a translation into Greece (just as Euripides translates himself into Homer, according to H.D.), the “price” is madness, envisioned here as what Carson calls the ruin of “the formal beauty of our line of verse” in two apparently opposite ways: both as a pounding repetition that obliterates difference and as a constant shifting of metrical form that prevents any pattern from forming.

The triangulations of eros and rhythm coincide in this first and only presentation of Phaedra in the “Choruses from Hippolytus”: Phaedra seeks to meet Hippolytus in his dangerous love of immortal Artemis, while H.D. meets Euripides in a common, though differently realized, reliance on metrical figuration. In the first case, Phaedra finds herself between the human and the natural realm (or wants to), while in the second, H.D.’s lines stand between free and metered verse, and between English and Greek versification principles. In both cases, however, what is being negotiated is the relation to Greece (though the alignment of Artemis with Greek antiquity specifically becomes clearer in HT).

Eros: Darts and Wings of Discord

The remaining sections of H.D.’s Hippolytus choruses attack the question of Eros head-on, and with remarkable coherence. The latter is partly due to the play itself: Once the intervening scenes are removed, it becomes evident that Euripides consistently resorts to similar bird imagery for Eros throughout. Indeed, if the IA Choruses hatched the literal and figurative straits suggested by Euripides’ stenoporthmōn, the key word in Hippolytus for H.D. is not the famous arrythmos (a-rhythmic) used explicitly for Eros in the first stasimon, but rather the third stasimon’s dysornis: bad-bird-omen, that is, inauspicious, from the Latin auspex, which in turn is made up of avis ‘bird’ and specere ‘to look.’Footnote ⁴¹ In the translation there is a growing tension between the auditory and visual aspects of Eros as H.D. examines the contours of this Greek bird, parsing what it might spell out for her own poetic project. Sonically echoing dysornis, she chooses to translate arrythmos by “discord” – and thus, reframing rhythm through rhyme, moves closer to Benveniste’s understanding of rhythm, as I will argue below – and encapsulates Eros in the repeated word “dart,” that quintessential word of the image-in-motion, of the image-qua-translation mixing objective and subjective, outside and inside.

Phaedra’s scene with the Nurse prepares the ground for the proper appearance of Eros in the first stasimon (H.D.’s section iv). In the first strophe the Greek chorus ask Eros not to come arrythmos (line 529), translated by Kovacs positively (and redundantly) as “nor ever come but in due measure and harmony.” Of course, as Carson suggests, this is precisely how Eros comes. Here the chorus’s wish is already denied by their very language: Though this stasimon begins with four metrically identical lines, it has a greater assortment of meters than, for example, the next stasimon. Fittingly, the song in H.D.’s version does not have a consistent measure either as it sonically tracks Eros’s activities. The first stanza, which translates roughly half of the Greek strophe, has two stresses per line until Eros’s “discord” is mentioned, increasing the stresses to four and, as it were, “causing” a stanza break; the line preceding the four stresses, moreover, consists of two anapests, unlike any line before it. This double oscillation, mostly between two and three stresses though sometimes jumping up to four and down to one, and between a stress-based and a stress-syllable-based meter continues in H.D.’s next stanza as well as in the rest of her translation of the stasimon.

Taking her cue from arrythmos, which, regardless of specific meaning, echoes the word erōs, H.D. establishes Eros as a sound effect. She omits the Greek chorus’s initial double invocation of “Eros,” choosing to address him once as “Spirit” in her first line and name him only at the very end of her (split) strophe,Footnote ⁴² where he indeed reappears in Greek as well, though as the first rather than the last word:

H.D. builds up to the revelation of Eros’s name through sound. Registering the effect of the “Eros” repetition in the Greek, as well as that of the r/s sounds – which then echo in pyros ‘fire’ and astrōn ‘stars’ (line 530) – she varies “spirit” into “spark,” thus linking it up with “fire” in English as well. The sound of “spark” echoes throughout, first in “attack,” then in “shaft” and “dart,” before its r gets lodged in its rightful place: the name “Eros,” in which these two English stanzas culminate. Rather than start with Eros like Euripides, H.D. reveals him, remotivating his name; after inverting it in her first line (O Spirit), she describes Eros’s actions, then his function, and then particular examples of his effects before finally naming him.

H.D.’s chorus seems to keep Euripides’ apparently musical term arrythmos when it pleads with Eros to “not front me with grief, / yourself discord manifest!.” But this is an odd translation, not least because it is unclear whether Eros is addressed as “discord manifest” or whether he is instructed not to manifest discord. She also interprets the privative a in Greek as dis(cord). Arrhythmia as the absence of rhythm would be even more negative; discord retains some reference to concord, some sense of measure, suggesting that if one note were changed, harmony might ensue. At the same time, by choosing “cord” rather than “measure” or “rhythm” to render this instance of rhythmos, H.D. repeats the etymological history of the word, since, after all, “concord” initially had nothing to do with music, referring instead to the unity of hearts (corda in Latin, kardiai in Greek). In so doing, she reveals the absurdity of the chorus’s wish: almost by definition, Eros brings about the disunion of hearts, or of one heart with itself. As Carson writes, the erotic story must always be a triangulated one, “in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact.”Footnote ⁴³ The chorus seem to realize this, too, since in the next stanza – and I think H.D. splits the Greek strophe for this reason – they go on to claim that Eros always comes in excess of, or eluding what we could conceivably know or measure. He is a hyperteron belos (line 530), a shaft or arrow that exceeds the power of stars or fire. H.D.’s ambiguous “[Do not] yourself discord manifest” suggests, moreover, that Eros does not produce discord, but reveals that it is already there. Eros would then draw attention to the fact that one does not need to be struck by him, Eros capitalized, to live in such a triangulated world, but that eros, the distance that that name or force stands for and seeks to both overcome and maintain, is already there.Footnote ⁴⁴

By avoiding the terms rhythm and measure, H.D. also moves the concept of rhythmos away from the realm of meter, with which our rhythm is more closely tied, and towards that of rhyme, loosely conceived as the repetition of sound, where the notion of accord or discord seems more readily applicable. We have already heard Phaedra experience both discord and arrhythmia due to Eros: Her broken attunement to her everyday, human, world was registered through the breaking of alliteration, while her attraction to Artemis specifically was marked through metrical inconsistency and through the absence of the stress alternation thought to be so crucial for English verse. While an absence of rhythm would suggest that the repetition and alternation of discrete units is not proceeding in accordance with an identifiable or intended set pattern – either lacking in repetition or having it in excess, thus being “monotonous” – the absence of accord from rhymes is, to some extent, always a given. Rhyme manifests discord with its accord since it is only a part (of a syllable, a word, a line) that is repeated and matches up; even in the case of word-rhymes, the lines which these words conclude are not identical.Footnote ⁴⁵ Its “identification” thus necessitates a constant simultaneous progressive and regressive movement that allows one to discern a pattern that might or might not be strictly repetitive or “rhythmical”; a pattern that is, in theory, always subject to change with the addition of a new sound element that allows what has preceded to be arranged in a different constellation. H.D.’s discordant Eros would then involve the revelation, the manifestation of a pattern always disrupted, or about to be, and starting anew, a pattern we don’t know how to parse until it is no longer there. Through “discord,” then, H.D. offers an alternative reading of the Euripidean turn of phrase, pushing rhythm back towards its (per Benveniste) original sense by preferring the imprecise repetition of sound over the implied repetition of structure; this is something that she will explore and exploit more fully in HT. As a result, however, she also leaves the notion of arrhythmia out of the picture after displaying it in action in Phaedra’s scene; it too will return in the form of Artemis in HT, where it will suggest a formlessness that might be equivalent to death, and of which we have had a presentiment here in the monotonous double stresses of nature.

While the coherence of H.D.’s sequence depends in large part on Euripides’ own consistent use of bird imagery, which H.D. amplifies by using the word dart as a kind of synecdoche for Eros throughout (whether or not it is warranted by the Greek), the principle of Eros-as-sound also dominates H.D.’s translations of the other stasima. In the second stasimon, H.D.’s section v, the chorus elaborate on their earlier plea for escape from Eros’s discord before returning to Phaedra’s suffering. Wishing “for wings,” they want first to “dart” to a place where sorrow is transformed into beauty, where, in an evocation of the myth according to which Phaethon’s weeping sisters were transformed into amber-dripping trees, “tears of amber and gold … dart / their fire through the purple surface” of the sea (CP 90). “Dart” draws a straight line between the chorus’s expressed desire to take on the avian nature of Eros and its ideal fulfillment: the transformation of Eros’s discord, of his burning love-dart (Phaethon’s death by thunderbolt) and the suffering it causes, into a light-giving sculptural image. Then, more ambitiously, they “seek / the song-haunted Hesperides,” where the gods are “grant[ed] happiness” (90–91). The absence of Eros here is, as his presence was earlier, translated into poetic or musical terms: Where the darting of Eros has been left behind or transformed, regular song and rhythm may be possible, if not actual (since H.D. attenuates into “song-haunted” the straightforward aoidōn “singers” [line 743] of the Greek). Again, the sonic form of the stasimon in Greek reflects this. The first optative strophic pair – the pair of “harmony” about Phaethon’s sisters and the Hesperides – is relatively homogeneous metrically, while the second, which focuses on Phaedra, is in a medley of meters, marking discord. As with the previous stasimon and in line with her explicit reading of Eros as tied to rhyme rather than meter, H.D. conveys this through sound-, not stress-patterning. Her translation of the first strophic pair is dominated by s endings, emulating the whizzing and whirring of the conjured birds; these alliterations and assonances are amplified into an almost regular rhyme scheme in her Hesperides stanza.Footnote ⁴⁶

Yet the absence of discord, suggested by this sound patterning, is revealed to be an illusion, another one of Eros’s ruses in H.D.’s second strophic pair. There Euripides describes Phaedra’s flight from Crete to Greece and her descent into despair. Though the s is less strongly felt in H.D.’s rendering of the second strophe, it does echo in key words – “mistress,” “unhappiness,” “palace,” and “Athens,” all specifically contrasting that blissful natural world of the Hesperides – and culminates in the well-chosen “auspice,” a bird word that translates the equally sibilant Greek dysornis (CP 91). Their wish for avian transformation not granted, the chorus are again reduced to watching the birds and reading them as “evil” (91). In H.D.’s second antistrophe, the final s is almost abandoned, appearing only in “mistress” for a second time and, crucially, in “Kupris.” The goddess is once again revealed, sonically if not verbally, as the source of the auspice and of the “real” bird darting in the play. Dysornis seems to encapsulate this whole stasimon – with the chorus’s avian desires expressed, thwarted, and rerouted to the correct reading of the situation, namely the inescapability of Eros and his discord – and it is the very word that H.D. tries the hardest to sonically “hatch” throughout her translation: from her emphasis on “dart,” which borrows two of its consonants, to her choice of discord, which is almost its transcription into English, to her elaborate s sound patterning.

In H.D.’s last section (vii), the fourth stasimon, the chorus seem to have reconciled themselves with the power of Kupris despite the tragedy it has caused (Phaedra’s suicide and Hippolytus’s accidental death remain unmentioned, however),Footnote ⁴⁷ transferring the aesthetic attributes present in the first strophic pair of the second stasimon (Phaethon–Hesperides) onto Eros himself. This potentially violent force is now presented as an enticing being, chrysophaēs ‘gold-gleaming’ (1275) and poikilopteros ‘with wings of changeful hue’ (1270), that swiftly surrounds the humans and gods it attacks (ephormasē ‘arouse against or rush upon, attack’). H.D. translates ephormasē with the familiar “dart”: “he darts gold wings / maddening their spirits” (CP 93). Yet, by using “dart” this time to refer not to arrows (cf. “the love-dart / sped from your hands,” 89) but to Eros’s “gold wings,” she explicitly unites the images of the first and second stasima,Footnote ⁴⁸ turning Eros into a good omen rather than a bad one: “now he flies above earth, / now above sea-crash / and whirl of salt: / he enchants beasts / … / he charms all born of earth” (93). Finally, since Eros’s activity manifests as extending to all living things, H.D. feels justified in aligning him with Helios. In Greek, Eros affects all that the sun sees (line 1279), which H.D. heightens by using the word “light” for both forces, referring to Eros’s “wings’ swift / interplay of light” and to Helios as being “fiery with light” (93). She then closes her translation by calling Kupris “alone” the “creator of all life” – a characterization added on to Euripides’ statement that she “reign[s] absolute” – thus making explicit the identification of Eros with the Freudian life force (93). This transfiguration, however, hasn’t been quite earned in H.D.’s sequence. It suppresses Eros’s aural component, which her translation had been so assiduously developing, and elevates instead his visual or even imagistic impact, as if one has to be sacrificed for the other.

The “Choruses from Hippolytus” offer two sonic models for a relation to Euripides’ Greek measures (and, by extension, to Greece itself, as HT will make clear): one on the basis of the desire-induced arrhythmia experienced by Phaedra, which is, however, not explicitly thematized in the translation, and one on the basis of “discord.” The former can be seen as an all-or-nothing approach: Either the rhythm can be imitated, as Phaedra wishes to imitate Artemis, or it can’t and the polymetry of madness or the monotony of death ensues. The latter, aligned with the Benvenistean model for rhythm and associated with rhyme, is more flexible, allowing for temporary and inexact patterning that admits multiple significations. In the end, though, H.D. moves away from both, going back to the image instead. There is no reason H.D. should have ended her “Choruses” with the fourth stasimon. She could have included Hippolytus’s dying song, as she did with Iphigeneia, or the chorus’s final anapests. That she does not gives us a clue as to where she will take this next: In HT the god opposite Artemis is not Aphrodite, but Apollo in his guise of Helios. There H.D. will pick up the thread she dropped here and trace precisely how Eros’s creative potential might be reconciled with the discord he manifests.

Keeping the Print: From Poem to Play

HT has been treated as an adaptation, not a translation or palimpsest: H.D. takes the myth of Hippolytus from Euripides and changes it to some extent to allegorize her own life, or “extends” it in a way that befits twentieth-century feminist concerns, as she does in her dramatic monologues of this period.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, as with the Greek work that we examined in Chapter 1, at every turn, H.D. specifically refers to and overwrites or reverses Euripides’ text – as her markings on the Loeb edition (ed. Way) she was probably using at the time confirm.Footnote ⁵⁰ H.D. consistently borrows images, phrases, and sounds from the Greek play. This is especially true in her depiction of Phaedra and Eros, which is perhaps not surprising given that these were the thematic focus of her earlier translation. Here she externalizes and presses, as it were, all that was there left unsaid, exposing the underside, the unconscious of Euripides’ play; at the same time she debates the larger significance of the questions the latter was already posing. HT knows well but goes beyond Euripides’ words and plot and is guided by the thought of arrhythmia that H.D. herself had not quite addressed in her earlier version. It is a translation in the vein of H.D.’s conception of tragedies themselves as translations – a translation that allows for the emergence of Euripides’ “metres”: the way in which his play measures or conceptualizes sound pattern and rhythm, eros and death, mortality and immortality, Greekness and foreignness, as well as the conjunction of all these elements. In the end HT also offers a self-conscious meditation on its own process of production, and on possible relationships to Greece from the vantage point of the twentieth century.

HT begins not with Artemis’s prologue, nor with the play’s “Argument,” but with a poem of the same title; in 1950 H.D. wrote that it was this poem, first published in 1921, that inspired the play (“H.D. by Delia Alton,” 221). “Hippolytus Temporizes” is dated and located: “Isles of Greece, Spring 1920.”Footnote ⁵¹ This is the present out of which the “tradition” and “legend” mentioned in the “Argument” that follows are interpreted, according to which they are temporized. The poem, however, has no direct reference to Hippolytus or to particular goddesses, so only its title directs us to its relation to the myth. This kind of indexical yet veiled relation seems to be precisely the poem’s point and, to the extent that it functions as a guide to reading the play itself, the point of HT as well. The poem, that is, is programmatic: It uses palimpsestic imagery to express both the play’s thematic concerns and its status as a translation, telling readers how this ostensibly new play will relate to the old one. At the same time, “Hippolytus Temporizes” links up to H.D.’s own published work by recalling her “Choruses” and by engaging once again with the Keatsian Greece against which H.D. had defined herself in her earliest poems. The volume’s arrangement, then, also performs the genesis of H.D.’s status as a playwright: from the “lyric fragments” of imagism inspired by and enacting relationships to Greek texts, through tragedy, to this more ambitious, larger-scale, mixed-genre book.

Each of the poem’s four stanzas consists of a first line that is followed by between eight and eleven lines enclosed in parentheses. All first lines begin the same way, with “I worship”; those of the first and last stanza are identical (“I worship the greatest first”), while that of the second differs in word order (“I worship first the great”) and that of the third introduces new elements (“I worship the feet, flawless”). A contrast is set up between the chaste declaration of worship in each stanza’s beginning, suggesting that the poem is addressed to a god(dess), and the very sensual descriptions of the female body that follow in the parentheses. The first stanza focuses on the woman’s flesh and her body as a whole, the second on the eyes, the third on feet, and the fourth on the effects the previous three have on the speaker. Primed by Euripides’ play, where Artemis and Aphrodite are sharply distinguished rhetorically, but blurred imagistically, and by her own translation, which shows Eros lurking even in the purest places, H.D. here uncovers the eroticism hidden, sublimated we might say, in every supposedly innocent declaration of devotion.Footnote ⁵² This is what her play repeatedly shows and why it culminates in a night of passion between Phaedra and a deceived Hippolytus who mistakes her for Artemis. This event is H.D.’s major departure from the customary tale, which she nonetheless does not even mention in her “Argument,” seeing it presumably as only the realization of a fantasy harbored already by Euripidean Hippolytus. The poem “Hippolytus Temporizes” may not name Hippolytus, but it is Hippolytus.

This relationship is negotiated in greater detail throughout the stanzas. The first contains three images of one material covering another but, as the central metaphor of the sandy beach shows, allowing the one covered to show through underneath, or even shape, its cover:

H.D. starts with the image of the couch as her speaker sees one texture, that of fleece, giving shape, form, to the cloth which covers it. What follows is not a simple description of a body presumably lying on the couch – that fact is never established. Instead the speaker uses the cloth–fleece relation as an analogy for the relation between the woman’s bones and flesh, which is then further compared to the way the underlying harder material of the beach shapes the sand that sits on top. Yet this second analogy is introduced in such a manner (“her bones … are white as sand”) that it seems it should be applied the other way around: that is, that the bones are the sand and the flesh the crescent shapes, which of course makes no sense. By presenting it in this complicated way and forcing us to read the supposedly illuminating analogy backwards (and to then try to disentangle it), H.D. also forces us to experience what she is talking about. In reading the covering, the sand, we literally see, read the bones; thus we first encounter the composite “structure” (or superstructure, since this is two analogies in one) rather than the parts. By stanza’s end the series of analogies turns out to have been an epiphany: Suddenly between the fleece–cloth composite, the bone–flesh composite (i.e., her body) appears – maybe. Whether it does depends on how we read “so.” Is it that her body, which is defined by the interplay of bone and flesh, “lies” as if in or similar to the space created between cloth and fleece in the speaker’s imagination or thought (an analogy again), or is the “so” redundant, the sentence simply saying that her body lies between cloth and fleece?Footnote ⁵³ Absence or presence? Since this analogy literally offers us a visual representation of how the whole poem works – beneath every declarative sentence, a parenthesis – the question can be extended: Beneath every devout proclamation is there a suppressed fantasy of a sexual encounter or a real memory of it? Beneath every new work, a contemporary equivalent or analogy for an old one, or the old one’s actual bones?

By making this poem the frontispiece of her adaptation, H.D. no doubt ties it to her particular perspective on the Euripidean play as she further explores the blurring of the distinction between desire and chastity, Aphrodite/Phaedra and Artemis. But she also puts the very question of textual relation at the center; the poem is not only the germ of the play thematically but a kind of translator’s manifesto. The surface–underlayer relation described, where an underlying structure remains visible and shapes a more fluid and perhaps transient cover, is expressed in terms of writing. The sand “keeps the print” in the beach analogy; in the couch analogy, the “shapes beneath” – in this case, the fleece – are printed on textile (cloth). The palimpsestic relation H.D. argues for here is, as this first convoluted stanza shows, not a simple one: not a matter of erasing the top layer and finding the one below, or even of being able to accurately trace the contours of the latter through the former, but rather a groping of one’s way through a maze of analogies, mirrorings, and echoes. If, then, her central (textual) metaphor in this first stanza works by reversal and complication, won’t her play too also in some sense reverse the terms of its Greek original, not to cover it up or to obscure it but precisely to make it more visible – “discord manifest”?

Though the analogies of the first stanza do not explicitly reappear in the rest of the poem, they leave their mark. The word “beneath” appears in all but one stanza, for a total of four times. Moreover, after its first appearance, “beneath” is used in constructions that disrupt the poem’s iambic flow. H.D. places words that begin with stressed syllables next to it, creating a spondee in the middle of her line, as though “beneath” awakens some other rhythm: “benéath fétter of gólden clásp,” “benéath stráps of góld that kéep,” “benéath quívering of mólten flésh” (3–4). As soon as it is uttered, something unexpected or previously hidden makes itself heard: the possibility of two stressed syllables placed next to each other that sounds so forced in English, the clustering of stresses that in H.D.’s Hippolytus choruses marked in Phaedra the arrhythmia induced by Eros. The word “rhythm” works in a similar way, when it is used in the poem’s most irregular stanza:

This third stanza not only has a completely different opening and a parenthesis that begins on the third rather than the second line, it also keeps intact the poem’s pattern of three stresses per line in only four of its ten lines (1, 5, 6, 8); there are three lines with two stresses (2, 9, 10) and, correspondingly, three with four (3, 4, 7). Its first line has the first feminine ending in the poem (“flawless”), while throughout there are more instances of consecutive stresses, albeit usually separated by a comma (“ah, sweet, dare,” “of yours, carven”). Foreshadowing the oppositional terms of the play, it is in a stanza specifically about constraint that the rhythmical–metrical constraint according to which the poem has operated so far is broken. As the speaker envisions caught, trapped Artemis’s footsteps at the origin of rhythm (an image that the drama will continually return to), connecting metrical with actual feet, a disturbance in rhythm makes itself felt. But insofar as it keeps erupting, causing a momentary change of form, rather than breaking the pattern altogether or starting a new one, this disturbance resembles Benveniste’s second rhythm; like “beneath” in the other stanzas it manifests different possibilities of shaping, a different print, lurking under the surface path chosen.

Finally, H.D. is here rewriting Keats yet again, which amplifies the programmatic nature of her poem, both with respect to modern poetics and to what “Greece” means. In an untitled sonnet Keats chafes against the “dull rhymes” by which English poetry is “fetter’d.” He proposes finding “Sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of poesy” and compares the poets’ newfound attention to “sound and syllable” to Midas’s obsession with “his coinage” – this is perhaps a source for H.D.’s gold imagery.Footnote ⁵⁴ HT explores the consequences of Keats’s last couplet: “So, if we may not let the Muse be free, / She will be bound with garlands of her own.” What are the Greek muse’s “own” garlands in the third decade of the twentieth century?

The “thread-bare plot”: Realizing Euripides

Hippolytus itself is palimpsestic as a play insofar as it is Euripides’ rewriting of his first Hippolytus, with its scandalously brazen depiction of Phaedra’s passion; as Zeitlin writes, the new Phaedra speaks “as if she were responding directly to (and identifying with) the audience’s reaction to the previous play.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It has also had a rich reception history. Beyond its famous overwriting by Racine, Hippolytus was rethought from a thoroughly sexualized and transgressive perspective in Swinburne’s “Phaedra,” and fancifully extended in prose in Pater’s “Hippolytus Veiled.” Though Pater shares some of Swinburne’s decadent aesthetic, his Hippolytus is squarely focused on the youth’s relationship with his self-sacrificing, saintly mother and his obsession with reviving the worship of Artemis, here presented as the daughter of Demeter; instead of Swinburne’s powerfully appealing Phaedra, Pater’s is a violator who preys on Hippolytus. We can detect in H.D.’s play both a Swinburnian Phaedra and a Paterian Hippolytus; no doubt she also relies on “Hippolytus Veiled” for the significance of the mother–son relationship and on Swinburne’s poetics more broadly for the cultivation of the erotics of sound.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, H.D. more subtly borrows from Pater his frame of approach. Included in his Greek Studies (1894), “Hippolytus Veiled” begins as an essay, as a meditation on place and on the knowability of the past. Pater laments both the paucity of evidence for the full reconstruction and understanding of the “many phases of the so varied Greek genius,” and the centralization of Greek culture in Athens (157, 159). Even though this “scholarly” frame is fully eclipsed by the story’s pathos, Pater actually uses the Hippolytus myth – and especially the story of Hippolytus’s Amazon mother, here additionally tied to the Eleusinian mysteries – in order to suggest how those circumstances (paucity and centralization) came to be. He depicts in rich detail a cultic, “local” world about to be fully subdued by Theseus (and Phaedra) despite Hippolytus’s commitment to reading a “book” of the “varied incidents of [Artemis’s] story” (174). Yet we ourselves are reading a similar text nonetheless: “the impress of life in those old Greek cities … not less vivid and entire” in Pater’s own essay (157). H.D.’s play similarly ties an oblique dissection of Greek culture and its transmission into a plot both erotic and familial, simultaneously retelling and overwriting the traditional story and its history. On the one hand, she specifically “realizes” aspects of the play – perhaps those same aspects Euripides suppressed for his new Hippolytus – and on the other, she includes a final act that goes beyond it.

The nature of H.D.’s intervention in the Euripidean story is, of course, much different. Unlike in Pater’s chapter, where the unrecorded is filled in and the Athenian Euripides is not even mentioned (indeed, “veiled”), H.D. enacts several aspects of the play that were only spoken of in Euripides. This is one element in her “temporization”: She “adopt[s] some course for the time or occasion” and “adapt[s] … or conform[s] to the time and circumstances,” the circumstances being those of the Freudian or surrealist world with its porous boundaries between reality and dream, but also the imagist world, where things objective and subjective merge (OED). The primary change of this kind is in the depiction of Phaedra, and it culminates in the sexual consummation of her relationship with Hippolytus. While in Euripides Phaedra is weighed down by her headdress and wants to be rid of it (lines 198–202) – “Lift my head,” “this weight about my forehead,” in H.D.’s rendering – in HT she has already removed it: “once I might have been / proud with gold head-dress,” she says (52, my emphasis). Similarly, while in Hippolytus Phaedra wishes she could sleep outside, have her hair loose, and so on, in her Doric alpha section of “madness,” here those wishes appear as orders already given and, crucially, followed through. H.D. has Phaedra’s nurse, Myrrhina, report all the preparations that have been undertaken for Phaedra to sleep outdoors as though she has already said it. And indeed, she has said it, not only in Euripides, but in H.D.’s Euripides. To reinforce this sense of dialogue with the earlier text(s), H.D. hews to Euripides very closely in her description. When Myrrhina says that Theseus allowed Phaedra to “sleep by the cold water here,” we hear beneath it πῶς ἂν δροσερᾶς ἀπὸ κρηνῖδος / καθαρῶν ὑδάτων (208–9);Footnote ⁵⁷ when she mentions that Phaedra will sleep “in a tent built up of cedar-wood, / hung over and around with canopies,” we hear Euripides’ Phaedra saying, ὑπό τ᾽ αἰγείροις ἔν τε κομήτῃ / λειμῶνι κλιθεῖσ᾽ ἀναπαυσαίμαν (210–11; and this short speech is indeed sectioned out in H.D.’s Loeb);Footnote ⁵⁸ when Myrrhina asks her, “What madness prompted / these strange fantasies?” she is speaking the lines of Euripides’ nurse: μανίας ἔποχον ῥίπτουσα λόγον (214; another heavily annotated line in H.D.’s Dindorf Euripides).Footnote ⁵⁹ But what in Euripides was madness has here become fact, and this helps us situate where H.D. stands with respect to her original: We do not see a sick and weak Phaedra as we do in Euripides’ play, but rather one as strong and as intent on pursuing what she wants as Hippolytus. As H.D.’s Phaedra realizes Euripidean Phaedra’s wishes, she utters what the other Phaedra did not dare say explicitly though she described it in her “mad speech,” where she yearned to hunt and ride horses like Artemis (lines 215–22, 228–31). Here she boldly impersonates the goddess, claiming that she has been “too long the mistress / of the stream and forest” (63), and urging the Cyprian boy/Eros to recognize “that I am Artemis” (64). Yet though she is able to fool both the boy and eventually Hippolytus, when Phaedra supplements her instructions for her tent at seaboard, H.D. gives us an ornate elaboration on Euripidean Phaedra’s wishes that is precisely “eastern” and non-Artemisian, thus highlighting the interchangeability or, rather, interpenetration between the two terms of the opposition (Athenian vs. Cretan, Western vs. Eastern, Artemis vs. Aphrodite, Hippolytus vs. Phaedra) that all of the plays’ characters, with the exception of the boy, more or less adhere to.

H.D. similarly “realizes” the Euripidean chorus’s “song-haunted Hesperides” in the form of Artemis’s chorus of virgin maidens who died before being struck by love. They speak of “love” exactly as the Greek chorus had of Eros in the first stasimon, though again expressing not a wish but a fact: “Never to us apart / did love thwart / body and soul and mind / with poisonous dart, / searing our happiness, / marring content, / tearing the heart” (121). The second stasimon had portrayed the garden of the Hesperides as a place of harmony, safe from the darts of Eros; so here Helios describes the “ecstasy” in this chorus’s preservation of a kind of pious rhythm: “in hope, / in these still forms, / in this stern dance, / in pious feet” (123). Indeed, the maidens stand out even in this play of richly patterned sound because of the consistency of their rhythm and rhyming. Their lines are generally of uniform length with only two primary stresses, usually placed at the beginning and end; as the play progresses, their stanzas rhyme more and more, sometimes using slant rhymes, or the same rhyme sound throughout.

But, as in the Euripidean second stasimon (and especially in H.D.’s version) the promise of the Hesperides was sonically undermined from within, here too the maidens’ song has a counterpart in yet another prominent figure of the Euripidean choruses, who is here ambiguously realized. H.D. introduces the character of a shipwrecked Cyprian boy that unwittingly plays the part of Eros, acting as an intermediary between Hippolytus and Phaedra, whom he takes for Artemis. His confusion partly stems from the fact that he does not see a difference between Artemis and his local goddess, the always unnamed Aphrodite.Footnote ⁶⁰ The boy’s speeches are all sung, frequently in three-line stanzas with very clear rhyme schemes (pp. 59–60, 66–67, 69–70) – again something absent from the rest of the play despite its heavy use of rhymes. Phaedra first identifies him as Eros through his singing (“The very song / the boy has sung to us – / is he not Eros?” [65]), and then encourages him to snare Hippolytus by it: “touch his soul with singing, / sing” (69). One of his songs, moreover, echoes that which Hippolytus sings to Artemis in the opening of Euripides’ play (lines 73–87; see my discussion below). Through this repurposing of the song H.D. starkly shows the all-pervasiveness of Eros, leaving no doubt that Hippolytus’s desire for Artemis is erotic and so, to some extent, exonerating Phaedra for her impersonation of the goddess.

H.D.’s introductory “Argument” – a feature of all her editions of Euripides, where the play’s summary is offered – presents the tragedy as one already known: “the familiar story of Theseus of Athens,” “the prototype of unrequited passion for many centuries” (7). Hippolytus’s death “in a frenzied drive” is “as tradition has always maintained” (7). She makes no mention of her changes to this story (though open-endendly hints at them when she writes that “how Hippolytus returns the affection so secretly and tragically bestowed has become a legend”), except at the very end: “The consequence of [Hippolytus’s] death to two of the Olympians is here set forth in the final act of this tragedy, HIPPOLYTUS TEMPORIZES” (7). That this is the feature she chooses to highlight suggests that the focus of HT is not the reimagined love affair or the directness with which Artemis and Aphrodite are identified rather than opposed. Indeed, as I argued above, H.D. treats these as already features of her original that she is allowing to peek through more clearly. When Hippolytus rebuffs Phaedra as he emerges from her tent after their passionate night together (since he no longer sees her as Artemis), he seems tired of the very gesture:

Of course what we know and Hippolytus does not, and what makes this play different from its older iterations (Euripides, Racine, H.D.’s own translation), is that Phaedra has actually succeeded in tempting Hippolytus, and changing the plot. But this is not what H.D. is interested in here. Gregory is right that HT is “erotically continuous” with Hippolytus;Footnote ⁶¹ all of H.D.’s modifications extrapolate erotic patterns in Euripides, and indeed rely on specific passages. As H.D. says of Euripides, though, the plot is a translation of “old symbols” and “old ideas” that occurs in order to make something else possible: in this case, the debate about the value of Hippolytus’s life and of his attempt to capture Artemis’s feet. Is there a way to get at what she represents without succumbing to Hippolytus’s violent fate?

“Feet, flawless”: Song’s Freedom and Constraint

In H.D.’s view, one function of the tragic chorus is to point towards the link between gods and humans; this link is what Greek tragedy depends on, but does not explicitly address. The nature of Hippolytus’s relationship to Artemis is indeed a question that Euripides’ version provocatively opens up, but does not really explore until Artemis appears at the end, when she gives a long speech and briefly interacts with the dying youth (lines 1389–1406). H.D. takes up this remainder, the parentheses beneath the Greek “argument,” while at the same time using it to think about both the nature of “metrical” writing and the possibility of a relation to antiquity.

After a prologue by Aphrodite, Euripides’ play opens on Hippolytus and his male chorus of attendants dedicating a wreath of flowers to Artemis. In H.D.’s translation of this segment (the first section of the “Choruses”) Artemis is greeted twice, once by the chorus and once by Hippolytus; the difference between those two addresses is small, but significant. The chorus name her in the midst of epithets; the passage reads more like an invocation of the goddess than a greeting, and H.D. emphasizes more than Euripides her distance from them by giving more prominence to the ouranos, the sky or “depth of space” where Artemis dwells (CP 85). In direct contrast, H.D. has Hippolytus greet Artemis directly; moreover, she replaces the qualification eusebous ‘worshipful,’ ‘pious’ (line 83) for Hippolytus’s hand with the word “spirit,” which she had used of Artemis (CP 85). The repetition of this word in the first and last lines of this section brings Artemis and Hippolytus together and performs the meaning of the last few lines of Hippolytus’s speech, which H.D. does not translate: “I alone of mortals have this privilege: I spend my days with you and speak with you” (lines 84–85). She instead replicates the familiarity that Hippolytus narrates in his mode of address.

In the spirit of “realization,” of letting show the contours of the Euripidean play’s “bones,” the first act of HT revolves around the conversation between Artemis and Hippolytus hinted at but not provided in Euripides. Artemis opens H.D.’s play with a speech that is in many respects the opposite of Aphrodite’s angry prologue in Hippolytus. She appears on the proverbial stage not to demand the respect due her, but to hide from it:

Artemis clearly sees no middle ground, no reconciliation possible between mortals and immortals. As in the “Hippolytus Temporizes” poem, the goddess is chased by honor and praise: “someone will come / after I shun this place / … / and pile an altar, / but I shall have gone further” (8). Even those who try the hardest to honor her are bound to fail precisely because, in their efforts to praise, they disturb divine time (“mar my ease”) and because their praise always implicitly (or even explicitly) demands something in return. Artemis here is not the goddess of the hunt but chased herself, made one with her animals. She is said to “hide,” while Hippolytus claims to have found “trace of [her] in the mountain”; a sprung trap “entraps” Artemis by indicating she “had been there” to free a caught bird (10).

To explain why she needs to keep her distance, Artemis sets up a second opposition between the divine and the immortal. The god is one who still maintains a relation to humans (and who, as the Hippolytus choruses told us, is not immune to Eros), while what Artemis wants is to lose it:

H.D. thus reverses the customary human–god relation: not humans, the playthings of the gods, but gods burdened, tricked, trapped by mortals, more bound by obligation than those praying to them: “you trick, / you trap, Hippolytus, / a goddess in your snare,” Artemis keeps repeating (18). (In contrast, Euripides’ Aphrodite begins her prologue by stating that gods “enjoy receiving honor from mortals” [lines 7–8].) Ironically, then, H.D. embodies a goddess and adopts her perspective in order to present her as one who wants to abandon not only such anthropomorphism, but all ties to the human. Like Aphrodite in Euripides’ prologue in this respect, Artemis too is ruthless in her demand for the destruction of the human element:

As H.D.’s earlier translation of the choruses has already told us, Artemis’s measure is that of nature.

The human element is repeatedly identified by Artemis through one feature: sound and, more specifically, the sound and rhythm of prayer. The man this goddess wants to efface, drown out, and overwhelm with “earth,” the man who populates the cities she wants destroyed, is not an unfaithful or an arrogant man, but precisely the faithful man, the priest – and also a musical man. Hippolytus’s search for Artemis consists, much like “Hippolytus Temporizes,” in an incantation. He repeats her name and begins his stanzas with a single word that echoes three or four additional times in separate lines: wild, Artemis, wild, there, there. We recall Iphigeneia’s first stasimon, where (in H.D.’s misreading) Paris “[catches] all Olympus / In his bent reeds” as H.D. contra Euripides places Paris’s music at the start of the Trojan War (CP 76). Yet the terms become clearer than they were in Paris’s “catching,” since capturing gods in music would be precisely that: imprisonment, entrapment, containment. “Alas, / alas, / alas, / I would escape, / myself escape from all men’s songs / and praying,” Artemis laments (17). When she defiantly tells Helios later that she does not love Hippolytus, it is to his song that she has recourse: “no song of his / lured me / with poignant note; / no shrill song-note / of mine responded to his piercing flute; / no, / I was mute” (119). It is the absence of responsion in song that is supposed to prove that “Love has not stayed my wild feet” (118) – we recall that, in the opening poem’s third stanza, love wanted to precisely bind the beloved’s feet.

Sound is continually made substantial and metaphorized as a cutting instrument. For example, Hippolytus figures Artemis’s name as a knife and arrow, tearing through both the air and his heart:

It is not Artemis herself, but the sound of her name in his speaking it that is the shaft and flame. In yet another quasi-reversal of Euripides, H.D. borrows here the language of her own translation of Hippolytus’s first stasimon discussed above, where it is Eros’s “love-dart” and not Artemis’s name that exceeds the stars (CP 89), as though this Hippolytus is consciously writing over the other play’s chorus and intertextually asserting his goddess as having priority over Eros (blind to his own erotic investment in her). As that description arose from the designation of Eros as arrythmos, so here the cutting associated with Artemis’s sounded name is transferred onto Hippolytus’s song itself: “I have inflamed and torn the dispassionate air / with sound of flute / and note of song / and metre” (12). From the outset of the play, then, human song is linked to excess and violence, yet at the same time other forms of “capturing” the gods are instantly dismissed. Hippolytus admits that the statues of Artemis he erects are “lesser” even though “wrought / by the most exquisite craftsmen” (14).Footnote ⁶²

Just as Artemis is split between her role as goddess and her immortality, however, so human song has an internal fissure, as our discussion of Artemis’s maiden chorus above intimated. Like statues, “conventional” songs are rejected as deadening by Hippolytus. When Artemis disappears, Hippolytus’s servant Hyperides asks for music to be played for him; H.D. notes, “The musicians form in usual, conventional dance form. They chant or sing as if before some imaginary altar” (39). Hippolytus vehemently objects:

H.D.’s “metrical palimpsest”Footnote ⁶³ is in full evidence: The iambic dimeter and trimeter lines that alternate here would form perfect iambic pentameter lines if put together. The underlying structure of the pentameter is thus felt even though it has been broken up, overwritten by H.D.’s new measures. But a second erasure also takes place as even the metrical palimpsest breaks down. Already the line “thrów the lýre down,” in which an inversion has to be admitted, strains against the two-stress reading imposed on it by the pairing with the clearly three-stress line above it, given the three long vowels and the visual rhyme between “throw” and “down.” In the stanza’s last three lines, right after the mention of the “sudden rhythm” of Artemis’s feet, any stress-syllable reading of the lines encounters the resistance of the final spondees (“whíte féet,” “bírd wíng,” followed by “fléd”); these recall the double stresses associated with nature in H.D.’s translation of Euripides’ parodos and first stasimon. We begin to hear, then, the kind of song that, as Hippolytus had told Artemis earlier, “may yet” capture her, suggesting, we now understand, that the usual kind of song could not (14).

The play has often been read as articulating H.D.’s argument for free verse; she opposes her broken-up lines to conventional meter. But the situation is more complex, given her Greek intertext and the abstract contemplation of “metres” and “rhythm,” and of freedom and constraint that it inspires. In Hyperides and Hippolytus’s exchange the question of poetic meter for writing in English is conjoined more or less obliquely to the question of writing in or through Greek, while “freedom” is shown as unattainable. First, Hyperides challenges Hippolytus, asking him in a broken-up iambic pentameter:

Subordinating language to dance, he offers one of the interpretations of the emergence of the tragic chorus, and points to the Platonic origin of our “rhythm” (per Benveniste). Hippolytus acknowledges, in iambics, that such a form may have been once useful:

But it is now inadequate, only good “to frame a slight song,” or a song that “beats out to modulate the dancing feet / of country choristers” (40). Again there is a double “metrical palimpsest” at work here. Hippolytus’s use of three-stress iambic lines points, on the hand, to H.D.’s breakup of the standard pentameter line, but on the other, it also gestures towards the standard tragic iambic trimeter in Greek.Footnote ⁶⁴ Capturing Artemis’s feet is a question both for the lover and for the translator, who has to balance between a native and a foreign convention. Indeed, in his earlier pursuit of Artemis, Hippolytus’s song was described precisely in the terms of “imitation.” He imitates bird sounds to try to get closer to Artemis and has “implored” many creatures “for some prayer, / some charm, / some peril to entrap your feet” (10). Even before he states his intention to lure her by “hiss[ing] / like a wood-creature,” Artemis has identified his speech as “wood-speech,” suggesting he has been quite successful in his replication of the linnet song (“bird-notes”); note that his success is metrically indicated by the spondaic pattern H.D. had associated with nature in her translation of the choruses (10).

Yet Hippolytus then suggests that the feet he has so focused on must be exceeded, that to capture feet, one needs more than feet, and certainly more than what Hyperides tells him is well-patterned iambic form.

Again we hear him progress from metrical palimpsest to stress clusters while maintaining a strong rhythm. Hyperides continues to try to restore him to measure, literally and rhythmically, giving a version of Artemis’s earlier response in broken-up iambic pentameter: “You cánnot cátch the seá / withín a sóng” (41). Instead, however, of advocating for freedom or passion in song, for “free” verse, Hippolytus does not exactly refute Hyperides/Artemis. He may make the ambition for song greater, but he still presents it, as he did to Artemis, as a violation, an imposition, a “setting” and constraint, whose ultimate goal, it is now revealed, is a kind of curing of arrhythmia, of human terror:

Maurice Blanchot speaks of rhythm as having become, in its current sense, a figure and image for the mastery, measurement, and “configuration” of the unknown; the sea or river is said to move “rhythmically” (and our “rhythmical” song would only be a rendition of that rhythm) as we impose on nature a regularity and measurability and immediately forget that we didn’t find it there.Footnote ⁶⁵ Motivated by the “human terror” that immortal Artemis’s total indifference to humans represents, even Hippolytus’s “freer” song seeks to bind it and cover it over with his love. As Hippolytus here rhythmically alternates iambic lines and lines with spondaic endings, this alternation traces and circumscribes his attempts to move from what has been metrically figured as the realm of the human to that of Artemis/nature, and betrays the still “set,” measurable, and measuring nature of his song.

The tension here is between patterned iambics, “meter” as it is conventionally understood, on the one hand, and what Hippolytus seeks, which is only a measure of another kind. The former is aligned with particular places of worship and a line of tradition – Hyperides dismisses Hippolytus’s words as a “peevish fit” and asks him to “come back … to the temple and the altar” where “song has been set / by your great ancestors / … / by the priest that sings” (41) – whereas the latter seeks the indeterminacy and fleetingness of nature but only to institute there new altars and new priests, to constrain it by consistently rendering its force with, for example, a final spondee (as H.D. has done). Hyperides brings in his “set song” to charm and trap Hippolytus, luring him away from the woods, just as Hippolytus had intended to do with his “excessive” song for Artemis. Desire for measure not set by the metronome but, for example, by Artemis’s feet, or by the “sequence of the musical phrase” per the tenets of imagism, still shares the dangers associated with song in IA, in some of H.D.’s 1920s novels, and of course here: deceit, illusion, justification for or forgetting of violence, of war, the dead, of what may not be susceptible to rhythm.

In Hippolytus’s terms, what conventional meter doesn’t allow and what he tries to get at by inhabiting the space between the terms of the opposition (human song/natural song) through his metrical alternations, is the capture of “sudden rhythm” or “sudden tide”: that is, the incorporation of that Benvenistean rhythm qua temporary manifestation of new form. Hippolytus’s initial exchange with Artemis, however, does suggest the possibility of a third measure, which is performed yet never explicitly articulated in the play. As in the “Choruses from Hippolytus,” it is rhyme, broadly conceived as sound repetition, that can more minutely measure sudden shifts and hidden currents. Despite what she tells Apollo, Artemis is not mute. Her proclamation to Hippolytus in Act One that “No craftsman may imprison / my swift feet –” initiates one of the play’s central aural motifs. While in the beginning of the play she had commented on him inaudibly and invisibly, speaking mostly in single lines as he called for her with longer speeches, she now enters into a stichomythia of matched couplets with him. Intertwining rhymes, and even identical rhymes, between the two speakers also become more pronounced as H.D. entraps metered tragic dialogue in her unmetered but sonically rich lines, mirroring Hippolytus’s snaring of Artemis. Rhyme is what measures their accord or discord:

It is Artemis who introduces the first rhyme, “life,” which Hippolytus repeats, and then Artemis rhymes “kingship” with his “worship”; in the next couplet his lines end with consonance (forest/priest), to which she responds with a consonance of her own (goddess/frowns). As soon as he begins the rhymes again with “towns,” she returns to her own initial rhyme sound with “rife,” a sonic choice which mirrors her resistance to his propositions and her insistence on placing only him in the human world of the city. He persists by double-rhyming, both giving back “life” and returning to her earlier “goddess” with his “mistress”; she, however, continues to rhyme with herself (“rabid” for “fervid”) though he interrupts her second line “with small talk and dire –” to rhyme it with “fire.” Angered, she returns to his earlier boastful consonance of “forest”/“priest” with the telling “disgust.” She once again comes closer to him in sound as well as in subject matter when she agrees to answer his question about the tales she has heard about his father: In one couplet she repeats his “queen” and rhymes “king” with his “thing,” to which he responds by again rhyming with her earlier “dire,” this time with “sire.” Instead of pulling away now, she rhymes doubly with his “father” (capturer/another), and they both continue the er/air/are rhymes for the next two pages in their longer speeches. Their relationship, her moving towards and away from him, is thus reflected in the rhymes used. As they come closer together, moreover, they both begin to interrupt one another’s lines, the dashes uniting rather than separating them. There is indeed a rapprochement by song, or at least by rhyme, despite Artemis’s protestations.Footnote ⁶⁶

Artemis’s resistance to song has to do with what H.D. learned from Euripides’ choruses: The realm of song, of (unconscious) sound patterning, whether concordant or discordant, is that of Eros. When Artemis finally asks Hippolytus to leave her, he tells her she is “everywhere”; she responds that she is not “where the Cyprian / weaves her perilous snare” (22). He then protests that Artemis’s woods are no place to speak of the Cyprian Aphrodite, and she retorts with a succinct summary of the Euripidean Nurse’s account of the goddess to Phaedra, marked by H.D. in her Loeb edition of the play: “Her name is everywhere, / her ways are dire” (22).Footnote ⁶⁷ And indeed, if we look – or rather listen – closely, her name is everywhere: The words “Aphrodite,” “Eros,” and even “Phaedra” are never spoken in this lengthy exchange, but their sounds, especially the er of Eros, are omnipresent in internal or final rhymes even where what they represent is being denied.

When Artemis tries to place Hippolytus in the domain of the city (and of the “old, worn-out play” with Phaedra) as he tries to recall her to realm of forest, it is through er/ər rhyme sounds that their battle is fought. Artemis introduces sounds that she rhymes herself (rumour–dishonour–favour) to ruin their forest-based rhyme communion. Hippolytus amends them, trying to return to their earlier sequence of er rhymes, through, for example, his “fever” for her “dishonour,” which she then turns into “favour”; he insists with “lover” (19). Artemis returns to the er sound only to call him “Boastful and hot as ever” in response to his proclamation that he is no mortal (20). When Hippolytus wants to “share [her] solitude,” she tells him he cannot:

Even as Artemis tries to distinguish herself from lovers and musicians her defiance is framed by a single sound: the are/er rhyme that moves from the beginning of the line at first, to the middle, and finally to the end, where it becomes a proper rhyme. Later in Act 1, when Hippolytus has softened her resistance with mentions of his Amazon mother Hippolyta, Artemis says she cannot “cherish” him because “the gods, / Zeus, Pallas and Another” will be “wroth with me” (30). Aphrodite, presumably the “Another” Artemis refers to, continues to remain unnamed, but this instance of not-naming confirms our suspicion that it is indeed her name – and that of Eros – that echoes in all the er/ər rhymes. Rhyme thus becomes tied to erotic desire: always articulated even if unconsciously, a mobile, ever variable pattern that is predicated on distance, on the repetition never being exact, on the sounds never fully coinciding; that thus captures without fixing, without capturing anything other than the attempt to capture; that transmits something without even knowing quite what that is.Footnote ⁶⁸

HT is not, then, H.D.’s manifesto for free verse. If it manifests anything, it is that verse is, as Eliot said, never free;Footnote ⁶⁹ that what verse is bound to and perhaps reveals is not what its speaker or writer may seek or want to show.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this case, in Hippolytus’s differently measured overtures to Artemis and in her responses, Eros is never explicitly said, but never not-said.Footnote ⁷¹ Through her sound patterns H.D. turns the Euripidean suggestion of Eros’s disorienting discord into the motor of her entire play; it is dangerously seductive, but also potentially better than the arrhythmia represented by Artemis herself.

Temporizing: Capturing Greece in 1927

In HT, H.D. inserts a gap in time between two of the main characters in Euripides’ Hippolytus, as she will later do through the commentary in her Ion. In this way, in a by all appearances classical or classicizing text, a drama belonging to a particular place (Troezen) but to no particular time, H.D. inserts the question of modernity (just as she did in her “Argument,” or in the few metapoetic comments about, for example, the datedness of the chorus and the tired state of the plots), and turns one of the ancient characters into us. The exchange between Artemis and Hippolytus is not only a narrative palimpsest, rewriting and reversing the Euripidean story without ever becoming truly unfaithful to it, and it is not only a poetological, metrical inquiry on a Euripidean basis that returns H.D. to a familiar contemporary debate regarding free verse. It is also historical. Primed as we are by the introductory poem, we cannot help but read Artemis here allegorically: Artemis as the ever escaping, or ever receding, ideal of Greece, either “natural” archaic Greece, in which an organic relation of humans to nature prevailed, or warrior, beautiful-youth Greece. Hippolytus’s address to her as “Wondrous, / O fair, / like some tall supple sapling / or some rare / young warrior / with his glittering arms and spear” (13) suggests as much, as does his Winckelmannian attempt at “imitation”; we recall, too, Phaedra’s descent into Greek meters in H.D.’s “Choruses” exactly when she wished to resemble Artemis. In Artemis H.D. embodies the ever sought-after and intruded-upon Greek antiquity.

In his search in the woods for evidence of Artemis’s now-past presence, Hippolytus turns into a budding archaeologist. He questions animals and plants in the hope that they might reveal her trajectory, and detects on the ground “the shape and pattern / of your feet” (12):

He looks for traces of Artemis just as H.D.’s near-contemporaries are digging up from the earth and reading into traces of antiquity in Crete, Mycenae, or Asia Minor, and contemplating its burning legacy on modernity. H.D.’s Hippolytus even uses a planetary metaphor that recalls Keats’s sonnet on Chapman’s Homer: “the arrows of your hair / that flame and burn / as if some travelling meteor / had dropped its mantle / where the laurels burn” (13).Footnote ⁷² When Hippolytus compares statues to songs, is he not also asking whether there can still be “classicizing” poetry if classicizing art has failed, as the artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century and then war itself had proven (recall Mauberley’s “botched civilization” and its “two gross of broken statues” [P&T 552])? Through Artemis, then, H.D. gives voice to persecuted Greece, talking back to all those – including H.D. – who invoke her and might wish to plunder her, turn her, supposedly dispassionately, into their object of desire. It’s as if Artemis is Moero revived, come to answer the question Hipparchia poses by translating her poem: Do you kill the wine when you press heavy on the grape-bunch?

It is this question that is obliquely addressed in the third act, H.D.’s major addition to the Euripidean play. In the exchange between Artemis and Helios (as H.D. refers to Apollo in almost all of her writings) she pits against each other what since Nietzsche was supposed to be one side of the coin, the Apollonian, thus inserting a fissure into the identical (the twin), while Dionysian elements are present in both.Footnote ⁷³ The fight is no longer between chastity or purity and passion, Artemis and the always unnamed Aphrodite – if it ever was in this play – but between desire for life (and light) and the drive towards death. These are the terms that the conflict is translated into in this act, these H.D.’s preferred nuances. Artemis, like Dionysus, is a destructive death force that seeks to return all to nature; we recall that in her initial speech – and it is the exact same speech that closes the play as well – she is plotting “with earth” the destruction of “Grecian cities” in favor of “the wild arbutus / and the luminous trees” (9). The realm of Artemis, though that of nature, is nonetheless presented as the realm of the dead insofar as it is that of the non-human, and non-humanist.Footnote ⁷⁴ Artemis is Hulme’s and Gaudier-Brzeska’s Greece ca. 1914, Helios the Greece of humanism. The Cyprian boy praises Helios as the all-seeing, ever present god, the closest of all gods to mortals:

Implicitly contrasted with Artemis and her professed disinterest in human affairs, Helios does not want to be solely an “immortal.” By choosing not to call him Apollo but “sun,” H.D. suggests he may be a more universal force, in contrast to Artemis’s specific Greekness, which insists on its own intangibility.

Act 3 opens with Helios lamenting Hippolytus’s imminent death, and calling on Artemis to intervene. Unlike Hippolytus, who in an abbreviated replica of their earlier stichomythia in Act 1 now acknowledges the power of Eros only implied then, Artemis continues to refuse it and does not condone his change of heart. She proclaims her powerlessness against death and calls on her ghostly maidens to lure Hippolytus’s soul away with their metered song. In contrast, Helios, echoing the ending of H.D.’s “Choruses” translation, acquiesces to Eros’s superiority and asks for his help to revive the youth (129–30). While the gods argue about Hippolytus’s physical survival, they also differ on the survival of his memory. The roles are thus reversed: Now it is no longer Hippolytus trying to determine how best to capture Artemis – through an altar, a statue, or a song – but the gods trying to decide exactly that question for Hippolytus. If Hippolytus is “us,” H.D.’s prewar generation fumbling towards a relation to antiquity, they are also debating what will best capture, or reflect, the “dying … dead” modern world (Bid 8). Does his (our) blind devotion to something other than our own time (even as he himself, in the end, is blind to exactly what that is, illusory arrhythmia or pervading Benvenistean rhythm) lead to life or death – and to what kind of afterlife?

The issue of Hippolytus’s afterlife is broached in Euripides as well, though in a section that H.D. does not translate: the chorus’s final anapests. They conclude the play with an almost metapoetic comment: “For tales of the great, when they spread abroad, surpass the common lot in evoking grief” (lines 1465–66). Evoking the emotive power of tales of grief, the chorus seems to guarantee Hippolytus’s future fame. Artemis in her preceding epilogue has also said the same (lines 1425–30). Yet here it is Helios who claims that Hippolytus will be remembered “forever” and live on “in white song” (115), while Artemis contests it, not wanting his passion, for her an evil act, to be memorialized or covered up by beauty, and forgiven:

Helios here echoes Hippolytus’s own claims about song (“drown[s] out / our human terror”) as having restorative potential despite its complicity with violence and deceit, its necessarily discordant and constraining nature. In contrast, Artemis, having first compared Hippolytus to a “parched hyacinth” (124), and then described, though without naming him, Hyacinth’s death and subsequent transformation and survival (127), asks Helios to make Hippolytus “stand by each harbor” as “a symbol of my love” (128). Artemis wants Hippolytus turned into a statue that she could finally accept as a “friend” now that he will have become completely inhuman (128). Yet Helios seems to have regretted the Hyacinth transformation for that very reasonFootnote ⁷⁵ and upon hearing him mentioned tries to revive Hippolytus with renewed fervor:

In the end, Artemis seems to win the argument: Hippolytus dies, Helios retreats in defeat, and she returns to her opening song, maintaining her separation from both mortals and all other gods, and plotting the destruction of the Greek cities – which, from H.D.’s twentieth-century viewpoint, she accomplished.Footnote ⁷⁶

The questions H.D. raises here recall those of the IA translation: Does song mean death? Is the quest for absolute beauty, for something untainted, for the god, and for a Greece that would stand for these things, death? Yes, the play answers. Disavowal of the everyday world means death for Hippolytus even if his actions betray that disavowal. The fervid pursuit of Artemis’s measure leads Hippolytus the poet to (become) a dead song, a “frozen altar” (as Rico tells Julia in Bid), a statue. What can poetry do? The play argues that, like Eros, as Eros, it deceives, lulls into forgetfulness, seeks to catch and charm, victimize the thing it praises; in pursuing a relation with Artemis, with Greece, the poet deadens herself and fails to capture the livelihood, the motion, the feet that first attracted her – or at least that is this particular poet’s fear at a time when her initially highly praised poetry becomes increasingly looked down upon.

But to the extent that Hippolytus is conveyed and remembered here, in this play, it is in the way Helios advocates. As the “Hippolytus Temporizes” poem praises constraint but momentarily breaks from it, so the play – having concluded that song cannot but betray what inspires it – ends with death and the banishment of sound but has shown us that transient moment of rhythm’s setup and dissolution, has shown us rhythm as a constant, mobile interruption that arises as if accidentally, without drawing attention to itself. Song may be thematized in all its failings, but it is left untouched when it works to bring together Artemis and Hippolytus or Hippolytus and Phaedra, even if, or precisely because, in both cases it is contrary to their stated desires. Revelatory and revealed discord, this rhythm names the moment of reversal and not of coherence (as Pound might have it), appearing (in the form of rhyme) at the precise moment when the speaker does not know what s/he is saying. Revelatory discord, similar to the one striking Euripides’ chorus in H.D.’s version when they wish to escape from Eros but are already caught in his ruse. Revelatory discord, similar to the one practiced by HT, which articulates itself as an overwriting of Euripides and nonetheless depends on it for its effects as it expands, probes, questions specific images, lines, or characters as possibly deceitful, constraining, or inadequate, as possibly not providing enough of an argument for life, or for their survival. It is this argument that H.D. uncovers in Euripides’ Ion eight years later. But in her temporization here, she draws both a connecting and a dividing line between Greece and us, antiquity and modernity; not identifying Greece fully with musicality or with loss, and using HT to ask questions about it instead, she delays making a decision.