OREAD.

Hilda Doolittle (1914)

This short poem is called “Oread” written by Hilda Doolittle (HD) in 1914. It is an
avant-garde poem, more specifically an Imagist poem; with only a few words we can
perfectly imagine the scene in our heads. It is a highly visual poem.

Oread is a nymph who is calling the sea desperately in a cliff “whirl up, sea”.

If she is yelling at the see, we need to focus on syntax and the verbs’ use. We have at
the beginning of each line an imperative verb “whirl up… whirl you… splash your…
hurl your…cover us”. The use of imperative verbs is to call the sea, she wants the see to
do what she asked for. Also, the predominant pronouns and possessives are “your…
our… us”, so there are more people apart from the sea and Oread. If she says “our
rocks” and “cover us”, probably there are more nymphs desiring the same as Oread.

Another important aspect is the semantic fields. There are two based on nature: sea (sea,
pines, pool) and forest (green and fir). This parallelism matches perfectly together. The
personified sea goes to the forest to obey the nymphs’ desire. These semantic fields
have also a lot of images. First of all, the sea is personified to give it more protagonism
and make him come alive, the nymphs want the sea to “activate” his waves’ points and
splash them to the nymphs. To make sure she gets his attention, she uses a hyperbole in
line 3 “splash your great pines” the sea is huge and she is hypnotized because of it, she
and the other nymphs want them. In line 5 “hurl your green over us” she uses a
metaphor, the water is not green, but the forest is, the water reflects the greenness of the
leaves, that is why in the following line “cover us with your pools of fir” the water that
have already splashed in them is part of the pointed trees.

Seeing all these features, what I think is that this poem is a female desire, someone
urging. The nymphs belong to the forest, so they call the sea to penetrate his pines into
them and when she says “splash… on our rocks” she refers to the sea’s climax and soak
their breasts. In that time, women were passive with men in sexual aspect; the poem has
absolutely the opposite idea.