Explore the poem

Think of a rose. Think of how roses are conventionally described in poetry. You might imagine perfume, sensuality, thorns, love, perhaps as in Burns’s ‘O my love is like a red, red rose’.  Characteristically, Doolittle replaces the conventional poetic symbol of the red rose with a less favoured, less praised variety, the sea rose. Thus she implies a critique of conventional poetic taste and practice and indicates her own, different aesthetic.

What qualities does the ‘sea rose’ possess to distinguish it from its more celebrated kin? Notice the adjectives: ‘harsh’, ‘meagre’, ‘sparse’, ‘stunted’, ‘small’. It may be ‘marred’, it may be vulnerable and exposed to the violence of the elements (‘caught’ and ‘flung’), it may be alone (‘single’), but the sea rose is tenacious and tough; ‘hardened’, it endures. Instead of gorgeous perfume, its fragrance is ‘acrid’, a smell not always thought attractive, but one that is certainly potent.

Clearly the ‘sea rose’ is an analogue, a metaphor. For the poet herself, perhaps, or for the poetry she writes? For both? The poem is delicate, fragile looking, spare, stoical, as if sculpted in air.

About Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Feminist icon, friend and patient of Sigmund Freud, famous bohemian, Hilda Doolittle was an innovative, celebrated American poet and the first woman to win an American Academy of Arts and Letters medal.

Doolittle married once and had a number of heterosexual and lesbian relationships in her life. She was closely associated with Ezra Pound and with imagism, which was characterised by its stringent rules of directness and compression and its rejection of conventional poetic language and metres. Pared down, often focused on a specific object, Doolittle’s verse displays a spare, almost gaunt quality, an economy of language wholly in line with the imagist manifesto.

Doolittle had a deep interest in Ancient Greek literature and her work often made reference to Greek mythology. The Imagist vogue for sparseness and compression is exemplified by the fact that Pound advised Hilda Doolittle to change her poetic name to just the letters HD.