Quotes from H.D.

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...

if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. — H.D., from "Eurydice," Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1982)

There is no faith and no hope without sleep.

I go where I love and where I am loved, into the snow; I go to the things I love with no thought of duty or pity; I go where I belong, inexorably, as the rain that has lain long from "The Flowering of the Rod [2]

Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself...for...I am a tree planted by the river of water...I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly.

There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed over in the twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway.

She knew herself the heart of a king buried in a sepulchre (in the land of his love) while the body of the king is elsewhere. My heart lies buried in there like Coeur de Lion (or whoever it was) who had his heart buried at Havre (or wherever it was) and the rest of him buried somewhere else.

Helen All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives where she stands, and the white hands. All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles, hating it deeper still when it grows wan and white, remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees, unmoved, God's daughter, born of love, the beauty of cool feet and slenderest knees, could love indeed the maid, only if she were laid, white ash amid funereal cypresses.

In a sense, it seems I am drowning; already half-drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking-glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown completely and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasures dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly.

the admitted first-cause 'of all-time, of all-history

Troy had never been till I came here

Was it Apollo's snare so that poets forever should be caught in the maze of the walls of a Troy that never fell?

I had met him, the New Mortal, baffled and lost, but I was a phantom Helen and he was Achilles' ghost.

if he cares, he will flay; if he loves, he will slay you

Helen, Helen, come home; there was a Helen before there was a War, but who remembers her?

it is better to taste of frost— the exquisite frost— than of wadding and of dead grass.

O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.

The sun shines alike, the rain falls alike, the wings of Samothracian Nike spread alike over the just and the unjust, the seeing and the not-seeing and the almost seeing and the just not seeing.

but if you do not even understand what words say how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

in the bowl distill a word most bitter, marah , a word bitterer still, mar , sea, brine, breaker, seducer . . . till marah-mar are melted, fuse and join and change and alter, mer, mere, mère, mater, Maia, Mary, Star of the Sea, Mother.

she carries a book but it is not the tome of the ancient wisdom, the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages of the unwritten volume of the new.

What is self? Self is a lotus bud slimed over in mud.

O but stay tender, enchanted