"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."
As far as Hilda Doolittle's work goes, Oread was a personal favourite of mine when I read it. Being that much of H.D.'s work is based off of Greek mythology, felt that in reading it (before doing any research whatsoever) I felt that it had a great connection to the nymphs and their tales. After doing said research, I found that I was correct in my thinking. I discovered that an Oread (being the title of the piece) is a mountain nymph, a nymph itself being a minor goddess that inhabits either woodlands or seas.
H.D.'s work is an outcry of feminine strength from women whose names are written in history, but whose words were few. H.D. felt that her job was to be the voice of these women and say the things that they weren't able to. Of course, whether or not the women she wrote of were fictional had no bearing on the power behind her writing. She was a voice of even the product of mythos, who in turn were the voice of women as a whole for the past, present, and future.
The nymphs, being considered a minor goddess, seem at first glance to not get much of a word from H.D., but after further reading, one takes note that there is more force in what the nymphs are able to say in these six lines than many people can say in an entire novel. They are given the power of the forest they reign over, washing the masses over with evergreen and woodland fern. In these few words, they are given the power to knock down even the seemingly more powerful hunter and huntress who would be within the confines of their trees. With this power seems to read the chaos of the seas being utilized by the serene woods.
