neglected goddess, a goddess of the sea whom “landsmen” call “useless” and blame for shipwrecks. “The Shrine,” whose narrator could be female or male, reads at points like a protest against men’s denigration and trivialization of female strength.

The motif of resuscitation informs virtually all the poems, which repeatedly address themselves to some neglected, nearly extinct iconic figure. The first such figure is the sea rose, “marred and with stint of petals,” but far more “precious” than the ordinary garden rose or spice rose. “Can the spice-rose,” asks the ending, “drip such acrid fragrance/ hardened in a leaf?” Questions like these hint that the speaker—and, by extension, the writer—is a revolutionary, a woman who rejects traditional roles, refusing to write “pretty” verses. The speaker will prefer, even revere, the bitter and attenuated over the lush and sweet and the blasted cliff over the fragrant forest. If she must be “wind-tortured” in the process of choosing such a preference, she will welcome that torment. In the end, the beaten thing (such as the goddess of “The Shrine”) triumphs: “Yet though the whole wind/ slash at your bark,/ you are lifted up” (“Sea Lily”).

The sea garden is a mythological realm, beyond this world yet filled with this world’s passions. It is like the realm of the Greek gods. Its inhabitants are often androgynous or of undesignated gender. In one of the late poems, “Prisoner,” one prisoner addresses another with whom he or she has fallen in love. Both seem to be prisoners of war. In the world of the sea garden, a world of water rather than land, radical combinations are possible, and the bounds of gender itself are in question. In an early poem, “The Contest,” the speaker addresses a warrior or wrestler with a “male torso” in the first two sections. In part 3, the wrestler seems to answer back, describing the speaker’s posture and “slight breast.” Neither speaker is named, and gender remains uncertain despite the not entirely conclusive markers. The poem is on a high level of abstraction; the contest, apparently between two people, reads as a counterpoint of images.

It is such a purification, a stripping away, toward which these poems constantly strive. The sea flowers themselves, subjected to the battering of the waves, barely survive. What remains of them is curiously splendid. Austerity, in H. D.’s Imagism, often shades into luxuriance. Many of these spare poems are thick with flower names, descriptions of jewels, and descriptions of the face and body of the beloved. H. D. uses a lush and often esoteric vocabulary reminiscent of such late-nineteenth century aesthetes as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. She also shares their love of things Hellenic, their aura of sexuality, and their fascination with religious arcana. Her Poundian influence and her own literary inclination, however, always lead her back to simplicity, to the thing itself. The figure of the erotic martyr, which appears in H. D.’s poems and in the work of many authors of the late nineteenth century, represents the desire for purification, divestment, or stripping away rather than histrionic display.

“Spare us from loveliness,” the speaker keeps crying in the poem “Orchard.” Ambivalence about beauty drives the early work of H. D. to a continual refinement of imagery. That refinement is represented by nature at its barest, and the action of the wind on land. In a poem such as “The Cliff-Temple,” the action of the wind is like the action of the poet on her own language, continually breaking things down, working to reveal essences. High places and unattainable gods are contrasted with forest underbrush and fallen fruit as the poet reminds herself to flee from luxury toward the difficult. The higher she climbs, the more removed is her goal. “O poplar,” she cries in “Mid-day,” an early poem,

you are greatamong the hill-stones,while I perish on the pathamong the crevices of the rocks.

This despairing ending is revised in later poems. “The Cliff-Temple” ends with the speaker’s almost matter-of-fact recognition that the journey will never end, nor the object be attained:

Over me the wind swirls.I have stood on your portaland I know—you are further than this,still further on another cliff.

In Sea Garden, H. D. seems to be writing about her own career; the poems are all, in one way or another, about their own composing. Any extraneous matter has been eliminated, and even those poems that, according to biographer-critics, arose from the events of H. D.’s life seem to bear no relationship to anything in the external world. Her experience has been impersonalized, made into metaphors of poetic inspiration and poetic quest.

In the final poem of the volume, “Cities,” the poet broadens her scope. The book’s messianism, which is, in all but this poem, purely individual—the dream of a muse who comes to stay—culminates in the vision of a New Jerusalem for an entire community. An unnamed “we” (the reader presumes a society of artists) conspire to eradicate banality and resurrect the beauty of a forgotten era. The poem describes an ugly urban maze erected by the “maker of cities” above the old, gorgeous city of “arch upon perfect arch,/ of pillars and corridors that led out/ to strange court-yards and porches.” The speaker wonders about the maker’s motives, concluding that both he and the old city’s inhabitants were put off by its splendor:

For alas,he had crowded the city so fullthat men could not grasp beauty,beauty was over them,through them, about them,no crevice unpacked with the honey.

The new city, posits the speaker, was intended to foster human striving after beauty by removing it from reach but keeping it in sight. This same intention informs many of the poems in the volume. The poet repeatedly seeks to escape beauty and strive for the transcendent. In the context of “Cities,” however, the idea has elitist and misanthropic implications: The speaker describes the new inhabitants as larvae, “disfigured, defaced,” sleeping in their cells, crawling out “to attack our frail strength.” “We,” on the other hand, the few remaining former citizens, are bees who still hoard traces of honey, whose task it is to “recall the old splendour,/ await the new beauty of cities.” Twice the speaker addresses the ugly new citizens with the very phrase the “landsmen” used against the goddess in “The Shrine”: “You are useless.”

Although a feminist interpretation is possible (the old city, with its feminine architectural shapes, is a matriarchal civilization, while the new one is a repressive patriarchal one), the inhabitants of the two cities are distinguished not by gender but by beauty and its appreciation. “We protect our strong race,” says the speaker. The reader, who may detect in the poem the same elitist nostalgia that often informs the work of other famous modern poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, may interpret the poem in terms of elitism rather than feminism. A certain tone running through the volume, one of self-dramatization and self-aggrandizement, culminates in this vision of a heavenly home for lovers of beauty.

The exacting reader may find the sea garden an airless and insular place, but there is no question of the beauty of these poems’ highly concentrated imagery, of their rhythms and assonances, of their short, incantatory lines, or of H. D.’s singular achievement in defining the poetic movement known as Imagism. Sea Garden is a strong first volume by a poet who would move on to greater accomplishments; the work defines at the outset a career that would be marked by restlessness and a perpetual, mystical questing.