Hymen — A Reader’s Guide

Ritual and Dramatic Structure

The excerpts reveal a work that is neither straightforward lyric nor conventional drama. The opening 'Hymen' presents a full choral scene with stage directions, including the entrance of four little girls who sing of crocus buds and river-beds. This theatricality is not sustained uniformly: later poems like 'Evadne' and 'Song' are intimate, first-person addresses. The catalog of sea-heroes in 'The Islands' shifts to a breathless, incantatory list of names—'Oknolos, Elatreus, helm-of-boat, loosener-of-helm'—that builds to a cry of 'heart-sick weariness.' The variety suggests a deliberate juxtaposition of public ritual and private emotion, though without the full text it is unclear how these modes interact across the collection.

Imagist Precision and Sensory Detail

H.D.'s imagist training is evident in the sharp, sensory images that anchor abstract emotion. In 'Not Honey,' the speaker rejects honey and flowers—'not the plunder of the bee'—in favor of 'heat, more passionate of bone and the white shell and fiery tempered steel.' The poem builds through negation, listing what is not desired before arriving at a tactile, almost violent physicality. Similarly, 'Evadne' describes the god's hair as 'crisp to my mouth as the flower of the crocus' and his touch as 'cool as the silver cress on Erotos bank.' These comparisons ground mythological encounter in natural, often botanical, detail. The recurring motifs of flowers—gladiolus, violets, crocus, iris—serve both as decorative elements and as precise carriers of meaning, linking human and divine realms.

Mythological Voice and Gender

The excerpts feature several female speakers from Greek myth: Evadne, Circe, Phaedra, and Hippolyta. Their voices are not uniformly passive or victimized. In 'Evadne,' the speaker claims agency: 'I first tasted under Apollo's lips / love and love sweetness, I Evadne.' The repetition of 'I' asserts identity and experience. Conversely, 'Circe' and 'Phaedra' (titles only, no text provided) may offer different perspectives. The catalogue of male sea-heroes in 'The Islands' is spoken by a voice that feels 'weak with pain and old loss,' suggesting a female or marginalized perspective overwhelmed by masculine heroism. Without the full poems, it is impossible to assess the range of these voices, but the excerpts indicate a nuanced engagement with gendered power dynamics within mythological frameworks.

Readers approaching Hymen should attend to its formal variety: the poems shift between choral spectacle, dramatic monologue, and imagist lyric. The catalog subjects—Poetry, fantasy-folklore—only partially capture the work's experimental structure and its grounding in classical source material. The excerpts suggest a collection that rewards close attention to sensory detail and mythological allusion, but the absence of complete poems limits any definitive reading.

I found myself thinking of Hymen’s sea-heroes, the way H.D. lets myth drift into private ache. Later, I remembered an old oddity called Nothing to Say A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' — Story, Setting & Ideas—not for any grand style, but because both felt like quiet rebellions against what words are supposed to do. Strange, how different books hold the same hush.