Tear, tear us an altar, tug at the cliff-boulders, pile them with the rough stones. We no longer sleep in the wind. Propitiate us. Chant in a wail that never halts; pace a circle and pay tribute with a song. When the roar of a dropped wave breaks into it, pour meted words of sea-hawks and gulls and sea-birds that cry discords. Recently H. D. has been giving us longer and more complex poems—condensed dramas of nature and life. Her style has become broader and deeper, and her thought more weighty. I wish I could quote all of a poem of this nature called _Sea-Gods_. I can only give a brief analysis of it. The entire poem is a sort of invocation and service of propitiation to the powers of the sea. In its opening lines the poet cries out: They say there is no hope— sand—drift—rocks—rubble of the sea, the broken hulk of a ship, hung with shreds of rope, pallid under the cracked pitch. They say there is no hope to conjure you. In short, the gods are merely broken wrecks of the past. The forces of nature cannot help us, it is useless to cry out to them, for they are —cut, torn, mangled, torn by the stress and beat, no stronger than the strips of sand along your ragged beach. But, says the poet, in a beautiful passage: But we bring violets, great masses, single, sweet: wood-violets, stream-violets, violets from a wet marsh, violets in clumps from the hills. Every kind of violet is brought and strewn on the sea. For what reason? Here is the answer: You will yet come, you will yet haunt men in ships— you will thunder along the cliff, break—retreat—get fresh strength— gather and pour weight upon the beach. You will bring myrrh-bark, and drift laurel wood from hot coasts; when you hurl, high—high— We will answer with a shout. For you will come, you will answer our taut hearts, you will break the lie of men’s thoughts, and shelter us for our trust. Has the sea, then, in this poem been used in some way as a symbol of the eternal drift, change and reflux of our life which we have tried to conceal under theories of ethics, of progress, of immortality, of civilization? Perhaps it has. And the violets—what, then, are they but simply the recollections of our earlier sea-state, of our endless, unconscious drift with the tides of life? I do not propose here to examine H. D.’s mystic philosophy. That philosophy cannot be disengaged from its context. But from a quite recent poem of hers—a poem very beautiful and baffling, I may perhaps be permitted to quote these few lines, wrenched from their context, without comment: