Wash of Cold River

By H. D. 1886–1961 H. D.

Wash of cold river

in a glacial land,

Ionian water,

chill, snow-ribbed sand,

drift of rare flowers,

clear, with delicate shell-

like leaf enclosing

frozen lily-leaf,

camellia texture,

colder than a rose;

wind-flower

that keeps the breath

of the north-wind—

these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind

reach out to share

the treasure of my mind,

intimate hands and dear

drawn garden-ward and sea-ward

all the sheer rapture

that I would take

to mould a clear

and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,

beautiful space and line,

marble to grace

your inaccessible shrine.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), “Wash of Cold River” from Collected Poems 1912-1944. Copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1982)

Biography

H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. H.D.’s oeuvre spans five decades of the twentieth . . .

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