H.D.
“the sun and the seasons changed,
and as the flower-leaves that drift
from a tree were the numberless
tender kisses, the soft caresses,
given and received; none of these
came into the story”
In Helen in Egypt, one of the central dramatic moments is Helen’s rejection of the joyous romantic relationship she enjoyed with Paris before and during the Trojan War and the acceptance of a different kind of relationship with Achilles. The decision is captured in the passage above. The unwinding of a simile that compares the volume and delicacy of falling leaves to a lover’s caress contemplates the sensuality of a romantic partnership in terms Paris would have recognised. Such tenderness represents, for Helen, only the briefest of moments. The poem quickly jerks free from the reverie in the syntactic recapitulation of ‘none of these | came into the story’. All that one might dare to hope to gain from a romantic relationship is to be put out of mind. The conventions of romance (‘tender kisses, the soft caresses’) are briefly entertained before their dismissal in favour of an ascetic commitment to what Helen later calls the ‘epic, heroic’. Modernism and Religion uses the religious philosophy of personalism, practised by figures such as Emmanuel Mounier and Denis de Rougemont, to understand this decision. Personalism itself reflects another response to mysticism along the lines established by Evelyn Underhill’s 1930 preface and links Helen’s ascetic actions to a broader anti-war project pursued through the imagining of different forms of social organisation.
Image: Man Ray, H.D., 1917, photograph. Scan of a photographic plate from Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1917), p. 233. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
