Poem of the Day: ‘After Troy’

The Modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) — who took her initials, “H.D.,” as a pen name — is remembered today chiefly for the spare, classically themed poems of her early career. Briefly engaged to Ezra Pound (whose “Portrait d’une Femme” appeared as the Sun’s Poem of the Day on June 9), H.D. rose to prominence as a co-founder of the avant-garde Imagist movement of the early 1910s.Fermented in the same cultural moment that produced Cubism in visual art, Imagism proposed to strip away what its proponents considered the discursive excesses of Romantic and Victorian poetry: the rhetorical overflow, the talkiness. Instead, said the Imagists, let us simply present vivid, direct scenes and trust that the images we present are invested with, and convey, all the meaning they need to. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams (whose “Summer Song” appeared in the Sun on July 7) would write, more than a decade after that initial literary fermentation, in his long poem, “Paterson.”The Imagists proposed, as well, if not an outright revolt against traditional poetic forms, then at least a looser relation with those forms. Some movement members, notably Williams, focused their concerns on creating a distinctly American poetry, inscribing American scenes and experiences as mythic subject matter in a uniquely American language. Meanwhile, others — including both Pound and H.D. — found their subjects and influences in the narratives of the classical world, in Dante, and in the poetry of ancient China and Japan. For them, a break with the immediate past did not mean a break with all the past, but merely a shift in the terms of the conversation.Today’s Poem of the Day, commemorating H.D.’s September 10 birthday, has mostly trimeter lines. Its movement in and out of rhyme suggests a kind of feinting with the poetic tradition, acknowledging meter and rhyme but resisting its absolute control. In her later career, H.D. would write experimental drama, and her poem here gives us a dramatic monologue, after the manner of Robert Browning, yet emphatically not in the voluble manner of Robert Browning. In H.D.’s austere poem, an anonymous defeated Trojan speaks of the fatedness of Troy’s defeat, its rightness in the great schemes of the gods. As the last line implies, the fields outside Troy have “bled / with roses” more red. The carnage, the sacrifice of lives, willed by “nobler” gods, is the nobler carnage. That sacrifice is the higher sacrifice. The poem never explains as much or belabors its point. Yet we know that this is how its universe is ordered. In the unsparing world its bare-bones lines evoke, the unspoken fact is both a truth and a grim consolation. After Troyby H.D.We flung against their gods,invincible, clear hate;we fought;frantic, we flung the lastimperious, desperate shaftand lost:we knew the lossbefore they ever guessedfortune had tossed to themher favor and her whim;but how were we depressed?we lost yet as we pressedour spearsmen on their best,we knew their line invinciblebecause there fellon them no shiveringsof the white enchantress,radiant Aphrodite’s spell:we hurled our shafts of passion,noblest hate,and knew their cause was blest,and knew their gods were nobler,better taught in skill,subtler with wit of thought,yet had it been God’s willthat they not we should fall,we know those fields had bledwith roses lesser red.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘After Troy’

More from the New York Sun

Exclusive: FBI Staffers Fired for Role in Mar-a-Lago Probe Were Assigned to Espionage Unit That Investigated Iranian Threats in America, Sources Say

Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

More from the New York Sun

Exclusive: FBI Staffers Fired for Role in Mar-a-Lago Probe Were Assigned to Espionage Unit That Investigated Iranian Threats in America, Sources Say

Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

Transatlantic Divide: Epstein Files Take Heads of Europe’s Elite While America’s Hold Firm

Trump Says Iran Attacks Running Ahead of Schedule

Reported Ban of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie From Royal Box at Prestigious Ascot Race Points to Deepening Epstein Crisis for Windsors

‘As Far as We Need To Go’: Hegseth Says More American Forces Being Deployed as Attacks on Iran Escalate

Welcome to Washington: Upcoming Midterm Cycle Will Be the Ugliest, for Both Parties, Since the Tea Party Wave

1973 Sci-Fi Film ‘Westworld’ Pioneered Digital Effects — and Warned Us About AI