Analysis of Wash of Cold River

Hilda Doolittle 1886 (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) – 1961 (Zurich)



Wash of cold river
in a glacial land,
Ionian water,
chill, snow-ribbed sand,
drift of rare flowers,
clear, with delicate shell-
like leaf enclosing
frozen lily-leaf,
camellia texture,
colder than a rose;

wind-flower
that keeps the breath
of the north-wind --
these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind
reach out to share
the treasure of my mind,
intimate hands and dear
drawn garden-ward and sea-ward
all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.


Scheme ABABXXXXAX AXCA CXCDXAXDX AEXE
Poetic Form
Metre 11110 00101 110 1111 11110 111001 11010 10101 110 10101 110 1101 1011 10110 100101 1111 010111 100101 1101011 10110 1111 1101 0101 11110 100101 1011 101001
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 581
Words 97
Sentences 2
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 10, 4, 9, 4
Lines Amount 27
Letters per line (avg) 17
Words per line (avg) 4
Letters per stanza (avg) 114
Words per stanza (avg) 24
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 30, 2023

29 sec read
92

Hilda Doolittle

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist, associated with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, including Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. She published under the pen name H. D. Hilda was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886, and grew up just outside Philadelphia in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and attended Bryn Mawr College. She moved to London in 1911, where she played a central role within the then-emerging Imagist movement. Young and charismatic, she was championed by the modernist poet Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in building her career. From 1916–17, she acted as the literary editor of the Egoist journal, while her poetry appeared in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review.  more…

All Hilda Doolittle poems | Hilda Doolittle Books

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