Why must you recall
the white fire of unnumbered stars,
rather than that single taper
burning in an onyx jar?

This is a tale of veils and ramparts, the gaze of the author and perhaps a refracted mirror of personal/mental matters drifting awry. Helen in Egypt is a palimpsest, a blotted scribbling--a flight from Troy to the darkened cults of Osiris. I kept heeding Doolittle's advice and pleaded incessantly aloud to learn how not to remember. Time adds folds and our persistent treading leaves torn sandals and a dimming vigor. There is an ancient rhythm on display. There is a little and crest. Heroes fall and odes warble across the centuries. I finished this meditation on our porch on a September morning, one whose beauty was almost indecent. ( )

H.D. picks up on the alternate story that Helen spent the Trojan War in Egypt and took Achilles as her lover -- or did she?
The myth retold, in tercets with echoes of terza rima, is a feminist dialectic examining the conflict of patriarchal, militant Command and mystical, hieratic eroticism. It is H.D.'s response to the horrors of WWI and WWII.

Is there another stronger than Love’s mother?
is there one other, Discordia, Strife?
Eris is sister of Ares,

His unconquerable child is Eros;
did Ares bequeath his arrows
alike to Eros, to Eris?

O flame-tipped, O searing, O tearing
burning, destructible fury
of the challenge to the fairest;

O flame-tipped, O searing,
destroying arrow of Eros;
O bliss of the end,

Lethe, Death and forgetfulness,
O bliss of the final
unquestioned nuptial kiss. ( )