"Helen" takes as its subject the woman who has been the literary and mythic symbol of sexual beauty and illicit love in western culture. Much has been written about her, but H.D.’s poem does something new: it implicitly attacks the traditional imagery of Helen and implies that such perspectives have silenced Helen’s own voice.

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In a 1928 poem entitled "Helen," written while she still had the reputation of the pure imagist poet, H.D. implies that the beautiful woman is always hated by the culture which pretends to adore her beauty and that the only good beauty, so far as patriarchal culture is concerned, is a dead one. H.D.’s Helen is passive, motionless, a bitter parody of her static appearance in poets from Homer through Poe and Yeats. . . . Three decades later, in H.D.’s postwar masterpiece Helen in Egypt, Helen "hated of all Greece" as the cause of the Trojan war, is again the subject.

Although mythology recounts Helen's heritage as the love child of the god Zeus, her abduction by Theseus when she was a child, Aphrodite's promise to give her to Paris as a bribe for the golden apple, and the heroic adventures of the men who fought then ten-year war, Helen’s own feelings and Greece’s reaction to her are not part of the myth. Hilda Doolittle has filled that gap in the brief but haunting poem, , "Helen." The tone of the poem seems bitter, concerned only with Helen's rejection by Greece, but a closer reading reveals an identification of Helen with Greece.

In an interesting departure, H. D. presents the title-character in the poem "Helen" as a suffering madonna victimized by the Greeks. The word "white" is used four times in the poem's eighteen lines, "wan" twice, and "cool" once. Helen's birth is purified: in the traditional myth, she was conceived when Zeus took the form of a swan and seduced Leda; the Helen in H. D.'s poem is "God's daughter, born of love." Furthermore, there is no reference to her infidelity and her part in causing the Trojan War. She appears as a kind of Joan of Arc (she is called the "maid") menaced by fierce warriors.

Perhaps her most characteristic imagist poem recreates Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in Greek mythology, whose abduction from her husband, Menelaus, by the Trojan prince Paris started the Trojan War. H. D.’s "Helen" seems a remote ideal like the Greek heroine, yet the view of her is as much from the inside as from the outside; she is seen as a woman who suffers for her beauty and is forced to endure the hostile glances of those who blame her for causing the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. "All Greece hates / the still eyes in the white face," H. D.

Stieglitz' experiments with combining the still life and the landscape are also reflected in Williams' work. The four flower studies he published in Sour Grapes (1921), "Daisy," "Primrose," "Queen Anne's Lace," and "Great Mullen," are especially interesting for their sense of scale. "Daisy," for example, moves from a rapid overview of "Spring . . . gone down in purple," "weeds . . .

"Queen-Anne's-Lace," from the 1921 Sour Grapes collection, is an early example of Williams' use of the Cubist model as a way to confuse two frames of reference—to subvert the hierarchy of tenor over vehicle in the structure of metaphor via the poem's enjambments: . . .

As in some of the poems of Whitman, a predominantly natural description enlists humanizing metaphorical elements. Is a woman's body actually "present" in the scene described?

"Queen-Anne's-Lace" also questions the subordination of floral imagery to female attributes. Poets have so often tended to link women with flowers that it has become a cultural commonplace, one so well established that the association has become automatic. But Williams forestalls that automatic cultural reflex. He begins with a negation rather than an affirmation: "Her body is not so white as. . ." He then begins removes the woman's body from the insubstantial and decorative floral confines and asks us to think in terms of a field.

This dramatic dialogue offers a tensely individualized conflict between father and son that is hardened by the vigor and scorn of the words and broadened by carefully placed, suggestive details from nature. The son's adamant voice opens the poem, but is transformed into a passive Negro feminine presence exuberantly recalled by the white father, who feels half-pleasurably nagged in his fancied return to the conception and infancy of his son.