The Sea
The sea is the dominating symbol of the poet’s first collection, Sea Garden. The garden, however, is essential to its symbolic meaning. The plants and flowers which the volume places in proximity to the sea are both threatened by and nurtured by this location. The waters of the ocean thus become symbolic of both destruction and creation, but not in as opposites. Instead, the poetry works to combine destruction as essential to the process of creation.
Women of Myth
Famous females from the world of mythology populate the poems of H.D. to an overwhelming degree. Figures that range from Circe to Leda and from Calypso to Phaedra all manage to synthesize into a recurring metaphor in which each retells or reframes or repositions the ancient myth from she is drawn into a story told from her perspective. In the process, each is united by a single common symbolic thread: being victimized and abandoned by the man they loved.
Helen of Troy
Helen of Troy pops up frequently in the poetry of H.D., including her longest and most intricate work in verse. That particular poem is not included in this collection, but Helen does show up in one of her most famous and frequently anthologized works titled simply “Helen.” What makes Helen of Troy in general and the subject of “Helen” in particular so central a symbol to the poet’s entire canon is that the poem is not actually about Helen herself, but a famous statue of her. This approach allows H.D. to explore Helen specifically as metaphor for the way that a woman’s identity is shaped by from the outside by others, primarily men. As a symbol, this is especially meaningful considering that Hilda Doolittle became known as the poet H.D. as a result of a close male friend—Ezra Pound—writing “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom of one of the pages of her very first submission of poems for publication.
The Sea Rose
In H.D.'s first volume Sea Garden, the poem “Sea Rose” stands out in particular because of the way it undermines all traditional associations with the rose. Generally, the rose has long been a symbol of delicate femininity, but in this poem the rose becomes specifically a symbol of strength, perseverance and survival. Taken together, then, the sea rose in the poem that shares its name is a symbolic of the rejection of conventional notions of femininity.
Freud
In the long poem “The Master” in which the titular figure is her own psychoanalysis—none other than Sigmund Freud himself—H.D. creates a metaphorical symbol from a literal being through the process that melds the symbolic and the literal. Psychoanalysis and the identification of symbols as the key to unlocking hidden truths becomes a metaphor for her entire life’s work in which she sought to apply the process in reverse. Even her poems that seem on the surface about flowers struggling against the water and wind on the beach are really symbols infused with a part of herself which has been disguised through coding in which the same way that analysis helps to decode symbols to discover a hidden aspect of herself. The poet credits Freud as the source from which she found "measureless truth."
