The poem itself becomes a symbol which, like many others, will be misconstrued within existing frameworks of analysis. The culturally pervasive and burgeoning institution of psychoanalytic science, in many ways, endangered the multiplicity of interpretations made possible by such artistic endeavors, namely by valuing the definitive explication produced by modern innovation over the process of exploration and revision. Read within the context of many of her observations on the Trojan War and World War I, such definitive interpretations of culture and the individual psyche often endanger the ability to value difference. hese ideas remain particularly apparent in her presentation of the hieroglyph motif in “Eidolon,” which frequently highlights Helen’s interpretations of such artistic symbols as being culturally constructed.

H.D. uses the hieroglyphs as a metaphor for the creative process, in which one uses one’s life experience to generate such symbols as artwork or poetry. Like the act of artistic creation, interpretation remains inextricable from one’s own experiences and cultural background.

In the fifth poem of the fourth book of “Eidolon,” Doolittle presents the reader with an explanatory prose passage, which states that, for Helen, the hieroglyphs she attempts to decipher remain inextricable from the classical Greek aesthetic to which she has been exposed over the course of her life. As she describes the strange Egyptian friezes, she proposes that they operate in a similar manner as do imagist poems, namely by presenting layers of meaning superimposed upon one another. The poem itself mirrors this description of the way hieroglyphs function, particularly in its incorporation of both autobiographical material from the author’s life and Greek myths. H.D. uses the hieroglyphs as a metaphor for the creative process, in which one uses one’s life experience to generate such symbols as artwork or poetry. Like the act of artistic creation, interpretation remains inextricable from one’s own experiences and cultural background.

In conveying these ideas, H.D. presents the reader with a discussion of Helen’s continual reading of her own autobiographical experiences into the symbols she interprets. She writes, “…superimposed on the hieroglyphs is the ‘marble and silver’ of her Greek thought and fantasy.” The poem that follows embodies this conflation of Greek mythologies with Egyptian symbols, particularly as she compares the Egyptian frieze to “the intimate labyrinth // that I kept in my brain, / going over and over again…” In this passage, she implies that, like the winding halls of the labyrinth in the myth of Ariadne, Helen’s interpretations of the hieroglyphs continually raises new and unfamiliar questions about her life and psyche, which keeps generating new ideas and emotions to be dealt with. By introducing such a metaphor to the poem, Doolittle hints that for Helen, the symbols of Egypt continue to evoke a series of subjective ideas rooted in her life in Greece, which remains inextricable from her interpretation of the emblems and hieroglyphs of the foreign landscape that surrounds her.

Although her statement that Helen’s life in Greece remains inextricable from the symbols of Egypt illuminates one’s reading of the poem that follows, Doolittle complicates the idea she has introduced, namely by conflating the emblems of her own experience with those of the heroine. Conveyed through a series of concrete images that appear in Doolittle’s autobiographical writings, such as “the spiral-stair” of colleague and love interest D.H. Lawrence’s home, which becomes part of the “intimate labyrinth” that Helen “learned by rote,” she suggests that her own life remains inextricable from her interpretation of the symbols of Helen’s existence. Read with these ideas in mind, the poem uses such images to convey subjective ideas about the role of autobiographical material in artistic pursuits. The poem suggests that, just as Helen fails to extricate “the maze” of the labyrinth from “the painted ibis in Egypt, / the hawk and the hare” that she encounters there, Doolittle’s own life remains embedded in the symbols of Helen’s existence. Ultimately problematizing the explanation that prefaces the poem, which suggests merely a conflict within Helen’s psyche, the ideas that such images as the “the spiral-stair” convey suggests a greater issue of portraying one’s own life through the symbols of Helen’s, as well as interpreting the recurring symbols of another individual’s narrative. Approached within the context of her psychoanalytic approach, H.D.’s hieroglyph motif suggests the inevitability of false interpretation, both of her own message and those of other poets and analysands.