H. D. Packing a Punch

I have found H.D. to be another poet that I am having a difficult time understanding. Nonetheless, I like how H.D. found a voice of her own through representations of imagery, and I enjoy her shorter works. She really packs a punch into a single stanza of writing; the Imagist movement was launched by her and I admire this. Her poem, "Tribute to the Angels" threw me for a loop, but here is what I have gathered from the poem thus far. . . First, there is a combination of holy women in the poem, H. D. seems to be synthesizing all women goddesses, Eve, and Mary into one combined "femaleness". Like D. H. Lawrence, H. D. seems to be taking characters familiar to us and giving us a different perspective. In the poem, Eve is carrying the Book of Life--this seems to be a redemptive transformation! Eve is "Psyche, the butterfly; Out of the cocoon", so there is a transformation that Eve undergoes, she is free and out of captivity, no longer defined by the sin of the fall. Perhaps H. D. was tyring to echo her own transformations through her poetry, perhaps reflecting what she gained from psychoanalysis, as it is clear she praised Freud.

I found a question H. D. proposed that reads "Do I wish myself, in the deepest conscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?" Well, perhaps she was attempting to do this through her poetry such as "Tribute to the Angels". She does not establish a new religion, but she certainly gives new perspectives through the combination of Greek and Biblical women. Through her artistic journey, H. D. appears to be quite philosophical and spiritual in her own right.