Analysis Of Imagism Leda By Hilda Doolittle

Allison Reinhardt

Mr. Maxwell

AP English

2 May 2017 Love, Language, and Myth

Aiming to replace muddy abstractions of the earlier century, imagism was created to replace the excessive use of flowery language of earlier poetry. Imagism offered a breath of modernism in a rapidly changing world (“A Brief”). It is this new way of thinking that poet Hilda Doolittle presents in her poems. According to the Poetry Foundation, the publishers of Poetry magazine, Hilda Doolittle was one of the first poets to push the ideals of feminism in the new age and consistently used her life and work as the basis of her poetry. Utilizing the elements of literary modernism she challenged Victorian norms and certainties. Hilda Doolittle, most well known by her

challenges readers by reversing stereotypical gender roles through imagery and irony. Traditional qualities associated with a gender are highly characterized within a society, but H.D. acknowledges these gender traits sometimes don’t hold true. Through imagery Doolittle paints a picture with beautiful reds, golds, and purples. This color imagery of “the deep purple...flecked with richer gold” (5;14) highlights the absurdity of a “red swan” and the irony of the poem. Swans are traditionally white, but this is a “red swan” with “red wings” (3). Furthering the ironic nature of “Leda” is that white symbolizes purity, yet this swan who is Zeus, has raped numerous women. The line “Ah kingly kiss” gives even more prominence to the rape Zeus committed. Because the swan is a feminine entity, the idea it commits rape furthers the irony. There is also liminality in the poem starting with an estuary, “where the slow river/meets the tide” (1-2). The river and ocean waters blending signify this liminality and the rape of Leda is a mingling of the divine and the earthly resulting in the creation of Helen, an object of many of H.D.’s poems. The liminality asserts that gender roles are not always as characterized as society makes them out to be. There is a mixing between gender traits and categorizing a sex to a specific set of traits is not

“Helen” asserts that society has a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of an individual and ignore that individual’s positive attributes. In “Helen” Greece focuses on how Helen was the cause of the Trojan War thus ignoring all of Helen’s beautiful attributes. Helen, an object of interest to H.D., is given a unique perspective in this poem where identity plays a crucial role. The title of the poem acknowledges that this will be about or concerning Helen of Troy. On a deeper level H.D. is also making a connection between herself and Helen by shortening the name of Helen. Hilda Doolittle shortened her name to simply H.D. and instead of the title being “Helen of Troy” H.D. shortens it to “Helen.” It gives the allusion of a more personal and intimate connection between them. It may also be symbolic of the way the Greeks were not open minded towards Helen of Troy and how individuals in the late 19th and 20th century were biased towards bisexuals and individuals who struggled with sexuality as H.D.