Word: hilda
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...When you put your arm around Hilda, imagine she is Ginger Rogers...
Near the end of her life, Hilda Doolittle might be seen in Manhattan crossing Fifth Avenue from the Stanhope Hotel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tall, gray poet would head for the Pompeian frescoes and classical statues and then for the museum's restaurant to eat apple pie and ice cream for lunch. It was 1960 and H.D., as she signed herself, had come home briefly from Europe to receive the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died the following year, at age 75, in Zurich, within a circle of admirers...
...with "writes well, but there is not much in her." Her gift was for the short, precise line: "The hard sand breaks,/ and the grains of it/ are clear as wine." She was greatly influenced by ancient Greek and encouraged by Ezra Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged. Hilda first met him when she was 15 and he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania; her father was director of the school's Flower Astronomical Observatory. Doolittle and Pound were not the only future literary stars in the vicinity. William Carlos Williams was also enrolled at Penn...
...until the two of them make a full circle and return to where the little children are packed in a classroom, shouting out a rhyme that sounds like "Ring-Around-a-Rosy." Their desks levitate with the noise. At the side of the room opposite the door sits Hilda, bouncing with the others. She sees the grownups and waves. Then she makes her fingers into the sign...
...laugh in telling it. He was being evicted from his home. As he was pushed out the door, he suddenly beamed at the children who were standing watching the spectacle, and he made a V with his fingers as a victory sign. The children gave him a cheer. Hilda giggles at this story, and tries out the sign with her own hand...