“The Bird-Choros of Ion” first appeared as a part of Euripides’s Ion, believed by scholars to have been originally composed in Ancient Greek sometime in the early fourth century BC. It later appeared in an English translation in H. D.’s Heliodora (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924), and again in 1934 when she went on to translate the play in its entirety. The scene depicts the orphan Ion, who, in his apostrophe to the birds that would otherwise roost there, warns that he will keep the steps of the Temple of Apollo clean with the threat of force from his arrows—though not without a certain remorse. About H. D.’s translation practice, Eileen Gregory writes, in “H. D. and Translation,” that “[a] significant formal invention comes from H. D.’s early translation—what she repeatedly called the ‘choros,’ ‘choros-sequence,’ or ‘choros-series’—and, along with it, experiments in lyric voice. Her early ‘choruses’—an amalgam of the choral odes with some monologues in lyric metres—represent a lyric sequence. This form allows H. D. an oblique lyric rendering of dramatic action, one which, especially in Euripides, is highly imagistic and affective. Spatial and temporal dimensions are likewise complex, since the chorus shifts between a mythical past, a present witnessing, and an emotionally charged projection of the future. Moreover, this form in H. D.’s practice allows her to explore lyric polyphony—the choral voice put beside monologues and dialogues, thus creating a persistent shift and reorientation of voice and consciousness. Another kind of polyphony is suggested in the choral voice itself, which is simultaneously ‘I’—with a distinct set of emotions, perceptions, and responses—and ‘we’.”