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 Troy
by H.D.

We flung against their gods,
invincible, clear hate;
we fought;
frantic, we flung the last
imperious, desperate shaft

and lost:
we knew the loss
before they ever guessed
fortune had tossed to them
her favor and her whim;
but how were we depressed?
we lost yet as we pressed
our spearsmen on their best,
we knew their line invincible
because there fell
on them no shiverings
of 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 will
that they not we should fall,
we know those fields had bled
with roses lesser red.

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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.