Oread by H.D.

Today I am presenting the imagist poet H.D. in class. She is a very interesting woman that influenced the imagism in poetry. Her poems are very different than the Victorian period poems. She feels that few words are needed to actually make poems; this is shown in her very early work such as Oread and The Pool.

In the poem Oread, I read it as the sea being a powerful force that is controlled by a nymph in the mountains. The shortness of the lines in the poem gives the reader the sense of that power. H.D. uses the word “whirl” at the beginning of the first two lines, which is an anaphora (the repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of two or more lines). The word “pines” is repeated at the end of the second and third lines; this repetition is an epizeuscis (the repetition of a word/phrase at the end of two or more lines). The words “whirl”, “splash”, and “hurl” also give the impression of great force coming from the sea.