Trilogy

Flowering of the Rod” (1946). The poet’s friend and literary executor, Norman Holmes Pearson, assembled this 1973 edition as a fulfillment of H.D.’s wish that the three poems be published together. Leaving behind what she felt to be the limitations of Imagist poetry for responding to the crisis of war, H.D. embraced the modernist long poem form in Trilogy, which links war’s destructiveness to a protracted history of women’s oppression within patriarchal mythology and religious traditions. The third and final section, in particular, revises the biblical story of Mary—a striking choice in light of Freud’s suggestion that H.D. might have associated herself with Mary. H.D. drew heavily on her knowledge of Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, and esoteric religious traditions—including Moravian heterodoxy—in order to craft a poem that reckons with the injuries of male violence and seeks to imagine how social, cultural, and spiritual renewal might be possible in the wake of such violence. In the sections from “The Flowering of the Rod” displayed here, H.D. presents this renewal as a kind of “resurrection” as the speaker invites the reader to refuse to participate in the scene of death belonging to a male “harvester” and, instead, to pursue ways of living that embrace an ethics of love.