"Oread" is a poem by

Hilda Doolittle Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the ...

, originally published under the name H. D. Imagiste. It is one of her earliest and best-known poems, and was first published in the founding issue of ''

BLAST Blast or The Blast may refer to: * Explosion, a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner *Detonation, an exothermic front accelerating through a medium that eventually drives a shock front Film * ''Blast'' (1997 film) ...

'' on 20 June 1914. The title ''Oread'' (''cf.''

Oread In Greek mythology, an Oread (; grc, Ὀρειάς, Oreiás, stem grc, Ὀρειάδ-, Oreiád-, label=none, la, Oreas/Oread-, from grc, ὄρος, , mountain, label=none; french: Oréade) or Orestiad (; grc, Ὀρεστιάδες, Orest ...

) was added after the poem was first written, to suggest that a

nymph A nymph ( grc, νύμφη, nýmphē, el, script=Latn, nímfi, label=Modern Greek; , ) in ancient Greek folklore is a minor female nature deity. Different from Greek goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as personifications of nature, are ty ...

was ordering up the sea.

Text

:Whirl up, sea— :whirl your pointed pines, :splash your great pines :on our rocks, :hurl your green over us, :cover us with your pools of fir.

"Oread" as Imagist poem

"Oread" may serve to illustrate some prominent features of

Imagist Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized literary modernism, modernist literary movement in the English language. ...

poetry. Rejecting the rhetorics of Late Romanticism and Victorianism, the Imagists aimed at a renewal of language through extreme reduction. This reduction is what

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

had in mind, when he wrote, counseling future poets: "use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something".Pound, Ezra.
A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste

Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism in the wider culture. It was formed from ''Poetry'' magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Rut ...

. Retrieved 4 June 2022 In this poem, the reduction is brought to such an extreme that two images are superimposed on each other, depriving the reader of the possibility to determine, which is the "primary" one. The two image domains relevant here are the sea and the forest. The

, apparently the speaker of the poem, expresses her wish that the sea unite with the land. But while from the first line it seems clear that the sea is addressed, the second line counters this impression with the "pointed pines" of a forest. The anaphoric link between the first two lines and the use of

epistrophe Epistrophe ( el, ἐπιστροφή, "return") is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences. It is also known as epiphora and occasionally as antistrophe. It is a figure of speech and the coun ...

in the second and third lines enhance the connection between the two domains and much the same might be said about the expression "pools of fir" in the last line.

References

1915 poems Imagism