Greek mythology became a frequent fixture in H.D.'s work, especially as she began to transition away from the structures and tropes used by other Imagist poets, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and embrace more long-form work in the 1920s. Although the imagery in many of her poems harkens back to the landscapes of Greece and its mythical scenes, H.D. once told a friend that this imagery was actually inspired by her childhood on the coasts of Rhode Island and Maine—Greece being purely a poetic device. Critic Susan Friedman writes, "The oread may be Greek, but the setting for "Oread" comes from a past not more remote than her visits to the Cornwall seacoast and her childhood summers on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean."
Norm Holmes Pearson, scholar and friend to H.D., complicated this notion by indicating that while the Greek imagery may have been inspired by her personal memories, the metaphorical framework was also a way to process her own feelings from a distance. He said, "When you said that she used Greek myth to find her own identity, you hit upon an aspect of H.D.'s poetry which, rather surprisingly, has gone unrecognized. She has been so praised as a kind of Greek publicity girl that people have forgotten that she writes the most intensely personal poems using Greek myth as a metaphor."
In "Oread," the apparent simplicity of which can be misleading at first, H.D. engages in what Freud would call "displacement": the focus on a mundane scene or occurrence to process intense feelings or realities that cannot be directly addressed. Just as the oread, or speaker, displaces feelings of passion or sexuality onto metaphorical imagery, H.D. may have displaced her own feelings onto the poem by removing herself as speaker. Susan Friedman writes of "Oread":
To give form and expression to her own experience, H.D. displaced her voice into that of the oread and substituted the oread's emotion for her own. The ultimate subject of the poem is the consciousness of the poet herself, the intellectual and emotional complex of perception that finds its clearest expression in the picture-making mode of imagist epistemology. H.D.'s poetic apprenticeship with imagism laid the groundwork for her rapid absorption of Freud's related theories of the encoding and decoding of the unconscious.
An exquisite feature of H.D.'s work, therefore, is her ability to create safe and poignant spaces to explore the unsayable, while at the same time making an artistic demand that these longings be heard.
