Hilda Doolittle’s “Oread,” one of her early Imagist works and published in 1914, is terse and singular. The six short lines of the poem’s single sestet focus on just one image–a forest. But the poem’s smart use of diction compares the forest scene to a whirling sea, creating a paradoxically dualistic singular image within the minute space of six lines. The brevity of many Imagist poems increases the value each word holds within the poem, and this poem is a great example of just that. For my imitation of the Doolittle poem, I chose marshland as my single natural image, and tried to converge that image with one of red clay near the poem’s end.
Lines 2-3 and 5-6 are each imperative clauses beginning with a command, following the pattern of the original poem. I also tried to mimic the shape of the original, ending the short first line in an em dash and framing the poem’s center at line 4 with the remaining lines (2-3, 5-6).
The poem, though short, proved difficult to compose. I fell short in qualifying one natural image with the diction of another, but tried to atone for that by including images of clay in the poem’s last three lines. I apologize for it sounding distinctly lewd as that was far from my intention.
“Red Soil”
Gurgling marsh—
still your sweaty surface,
drag your wet edge
on our clay,
flood your heat beneath us,
fill our soil with your steaming tide.
One distinct quality of HD’s poem has to do with how different the two juxtaposed images seem: forest and sea. In your poem, clay and marsh seem more closely related, and so you lose some of that dynamism. That said, the effort here is outstanding–if it does contain something of the lewd! You certainly capture the incantatory quality of HD, as well as the lushness of the imagery. Great work!