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Analysis Of Sheltered Garden By Hilda Doolittle Essay

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One of the 20th century’s most important and influential modernist poets was Hilda Doolittle, more commonly known as H.D. While other artists struggled to find a new mode of expression, H.D. found imagism and created intense poems delving into very specific depictions. In “Sheltered Garden,” H.D. employs intense imagery using nature in order to put forth an opinion or viewpoint, which is also highlighted by another poem titled, “Sea Rose.” By analyzing these two poems, one can more fully comprehend the modernist movement/mentality and how H.D. shaped her own form of poetry. In “Sheltered Garden,” the poet uses the image of a garden to not only push against society’s constraint of women, but also its imposed ideas of beauty, creating tension between the natural and the unnatural. H.D. uses images of fruit to symbolize women in order to highlight the confining character of 20th century London society. To establish the connection between women and fruit the speaker poses the question, “Have you seen fruit under cover / that wanted light—?” (Doolittle, lines 18-19). Although it may appear that the speaker is, indeed, talking about fruit, the following lines use such diction as, “wadded,” “protected,” and “smothered,” which evoke images of confinement and a guarded life (lines 20-21, 23). Since “Sheltered Garden” was published in a collection of poems in 1916, it is reasonable to make the connection that the language used calls forth the rather restricted and constrained life of

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