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HD's Circe may not be strictly a women's issue in the way that essays on suffrage and women's rights are, but I found it intriguing and curiously haunting; I believe what really caught my attention was the way it echoes the tension between the traditional female role and women's newfound power.  

The speaker in the poem is Circe, a witch or minor goddess from Homer's Odyssey who is famous for her ability to bewitch men and change them into beasts.  In the Odyssey, she manages to enchant Odysseus' men when they stop at her island to rest.  Odysseus, however, is intercepted by Hermes and given a plant which will allow him to resist her power.  In addition, Hermes warns Odysseus not to sleep with Circe unless she swears not to take his manhood.  Circe proves unable to outwit him despite her best efforts, and for the next year serves as host to him and his men.  The struggle here between male and female dominance is undeniable, and feeds into the atmosphere into the poem.

The poem opens with a statement of power, saying "It was easy enough / to bend them to my wish / it was easy enough / to alter them with a touch," referring to Circe's exploits over Odysseus' men.  It quickly turns, however, to a very traditional vulnerability in the interjected words, "but you."   Circe laments that, though she has countless other men subject to her wiles, saying she lacks the power to call Odysseus back to her.  The imagery of him "adrift on the great sea" (179) is very easily related to the young men crossing the English channel to fight on the continent, far from home.  The parallels are almost too easy to make.  On one hand, the women left in Britain have made their way into the workplace and positions of some influence, yet against the loss of the men of their generation, this seems a paltry gain.  Their power will not bring the boys back.

Without the context of the war, this poem might seem blandly traditional, upholding women's traditional roles, emphasizing the inevitability of the female figure's helplessness with respect to the right man—in Circe's case, Odysseus.  Yet against the backdrop of the Lost Generation, the poem takes on a different tone.  Circe seems not so much helpless as lamenting the loss of the good men.  She is, no doubt, a figure of significant influence and independence, not personally weakened by Odysseus departure, but sexually barren.  Those men who are easily turned to beasts, who are enticed by feasting and easily swayed from their duty as soldiers, are not worthy of her.  The issue is not so much one of gendered submission and dependence, but one of thwarted potential, for the best soldier is gone, is snatched away by the waves.  The poem becomes a reflection of Eliot's wasteland, barren and robbed of potential.