TO HELEN
Edgar Allan Poe
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
致海伦
海伦，你的美在我的眼里，
有如往日尼西亚的三桅船
船行在飘香的海上，悠悠地
把已倦于漂泊的困乏船员
送回他故乡的海岸。
早已习惯于在怒海上飘荡，
你典雅的脸庞，你的鬈发，
你水神般的风姿带我返航，
返回那往时的希腊和罗马，
返回那往时的壮丽和辉煌。
看哪！壁龛似的明亮窗户里，
我看见你站着，多像尊雕像，
一盏玛瑙的灯你拿在手上！
塞姬女神哪，神圣的土地
才是你家乡！
First Stanza: Helen: An allusion to Helen of Troy in Greek mythology. Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Greece, was the most beautiful woman in the world. After a Trojan prince named Paris abducted her, the Greeks declared war on the Trojans, fighting a 10-year battle that ended in
victory and the restoration of Greek honor. Helen returned to Greece with Menelaus.
Nicean: Of or from Nicea (also spelled Nicaea), a city in ancient Bithynia (now part of present-day Turkey) near the site of the Trojan War.
barks: small sailing vessels.
End rhyme: A, B, A, B, B.
Second Stanza:
wont: accustomed to (usually followed by an infinitive, such as to roam in the first line of this stanza).
Naiad: Naiads were minor nature goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology. They inhabited and presided over rivers, lakes, streams, and fountains.
Naiad airs: Peaceful, gentle breezes or qualities
the glory that . . .Rome: These last two lines, beginning with the glory that was, are among the most frequently quoted lines in world literature. Writers and speakers quote these lines to evoke the splendor of classical antiquity. The alliteration of glory, Greece, and grandeur helps to make the lines memorable.
End rhyme: A, B, A, B, A.
Half rhyme: Face and Greece are similar only in that they have one syllable and the same ending–"ce." The vowels "a" and "ee" do not rhyme. Thus, face and Greece make up what is called half rhyme, also known as near rhyme, oblique rhyme, and slant rhyme.
agate: a variety of chalcedony (kal SED uh ne), a semiprecious translucent stone with colored stripes or bands. The marbles that children shoot with a flick of the thumb are usually made of agate (although some imitations are made of glass).
agate lamp: burning lamp made of agate.
Psyche: In Greek and Roman mythology, Psyche was a beautiful princess dear to the god of love, Eros (Cupid), who would visit her in a darkened room in a palace. One night she used an agate lamp to discover his identity. Later, at the urging of Eros, Zeus gave her the gift of immortality. Eros then married her.
End rhyme: A, B, B, A, B.
from the regions which are Holy Land: from ancient Greece and Rome; from the memory Poe had
of Mrs. Stanard
Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "To Helen", was inspired by Sarah Helen Whitman, the beautiful young mother of one of Poe's boyhood friends - "the first purely ideal love of my soul," according to the poet. Or was his poetic inspiration Jane Stith Stanard, as numerous Poe scholars argue? It makes little difference. Since the poem exists in two versions with minor changes, it was apparently first occasioned by his infatuation with Mrs. Stanard and then revised for Mrs. Whitman.
The woman of the title is compared to Helen of Troy, possessor of "the face that launched a thousand ships." That quotable quote appeared in Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus" and refers to the kidnapping by Paris of the world's most beautiful woman, who was the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. That abduction was the cause of the Trojan war.
No one is sure why Poe chose to refer to those ships as "Nicean barks." Nicea (or Nicaea) is an ancient city of Asia Minor. Probably the poet liked the quality of remoteness associated with the place name and the vowel music it produces in combination with "barks." Others feel he may have been echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a favorite poet of the young Poe, who in "Youth and Age" wrote the line, "Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore."
The alliterative "weary, wayworn wanderer" refers to Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), who was delayed ten years on his return voyage from the Trojan War by the adventures and misadventures recorded in Homer's Odyssey. Like the bark of Odysseus, Poe's Helen and her beauty have transported the poet on the sea of life.
Ever a romantic, Poe believed that classical images and allusions were the best ways to capture the "glory" and "grandeur" of the past. His subject's hair is "hyacinth," or the reddish-orange of zircon. The term has often been poetically descriptive of hair since the mid-17th century. Her face is "classic," and "Naiad airs" allude to the graceful nymphs of mythology, who inhabited streams and lakes.
In the concluding stanza, Helen becomes a statue, and we recall the serene facial expressions and flowing garments of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. The "agate lamp" in her hand connects to his mention of Psyche, the female personification of the human soul in Greek mythology. Psyche
was forbidden to look at her beloved Cupid. One night she did so by the light of this kind of lamp and earned his prolonged anger.
The Holy Land of the final stanza is the realm of ideal beauty removed both by time and space from the workaday world. In sum, his poem of adoration of a beautiful woman whom he met as an early teenager bespeaks a Platonic, transcendent form of sexuality. It seems consonant with his marriage to Virginia Clemm, a thirteen-year-old first cousin who died at 25 and who is immortalized in "Annabel Lee."
"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,/ Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge" quipped James Russell Lowell in the "Poe and Longfellow" section of his satirical poem, "A Fable for Critics". TS Eliot compared Poe's mind with that of "a highly gifted young person before puberty".
Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, whatever its limitations, was a catalyst. The current of his imagination flowed on into Europe and helped nurture the French symbolist movement. Stéphane Mallarmé in "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe" hailed him as the poet whose angel gave "a purer meaning to the dialect of the tribe". Poe may have seemed to Eliot an intellectual adolescent, but we could retort that he was in fact the grandfather of one of Eliot's most famous lines, "To purify the dialect of the tribe".
A child-like quality is certainly present in his verse. It's in the diction and the idealised childhood eroticism of "Annabel Lee". The Gothic imagination generally seems formed out of nursery shadows and nightmares, infused with adolescent sexual guilt. Poe's vision of love tainted and destroyed reaches an almost ecstatic pitch in "The Raven" and in "Ulalume: A Ballad" (a superbly made poem, better than "The Raven", I think). Poe enjoyed writing burlesque, and these narratives enjoyably teeter on, and draw back from, its brink.
In more lyrical, less Gothic mode, Poe might be a decadent reincarnation of William Blake. His simple rhythms and rhymes are asserted with an emotional directness that renders the simplicity trustworthy. Poe's idealism is purely aesthetic, however. His angels are jealous or demonic; he sings his liebestod in a fallen world.
In an essay, The Poetic Principle, Poe explains his aesthetic, and weaves into it an instructive anthology of poems he admires. Classics were an important influence, as the skill of his versification testifies. In this week's poem, "To Helen", classicism and aestheticism seamlessly fuse.
It's an atypical poem, perhaps, with its air of calm concentration, its almost imagistic focus. Poe, like Yeats later on in "Sailing to Byzantium" tries to transfix a notional Golden Age in verse that itself is timeless and hard. Whoever his personal "Helen" may have been, she is more than an
earthly beloved; partly the Helen of classical legend, she is also, the last stanza suggests, a Beatrice-like figure of moral – or, at least, untainted – illumination.
A little patience is required of today's readers, not only with those "Nicéan barks of yore". There is a "perfumed sea" to compound the decorative fantasy. But why not? This sea is "perfumed" because it's an ideal sea, sniffed on board the ideal boat of imagination. The adjective prefigures the flower which, in the next stanza, will give us both the sea's colour and a lovely image of scented, curling hair: the hyacinth.
In the second stanza, a slightly dislocated, Latinate grammar floats the poem towards symbolism. The speaker is the literal subject of "long wont to roam". But, metaphorically, the hair, face and "Naiad airs" have shared the voyage. The "roam/Rome" rhyme that "book-ends" this verse is a subtle touch – a miniature history in a pair of homophones.
The variation in each stanza's closing lines deserves comment. The trimeter line that follows the tetrameter in "The weary, way-worn traveller bore/ To his own native shore," has the cadence of homecoming. "To the glory that was Greece./ And the grandeur that was Rome" are regular trochaic four-beat lines, planted so firmly as to transform the banal thought –and the perhaps rather vague distinction between "glory" and "grandeur".
The last stanza is the amazing one. We don't expect to see Psyche at this point but there she is, in a silhouette as clear-cut as her "agate lamp". If she is the self, or soul, perhaps "the regions which/ Are Holy-Land" denote the Unconscious. The poem ends on its only dimeter line, a curtailment suggesting perfect sufficiency. This is the limit past which poets –and readers –travel only in silence. Unusually, for Poe, "To Helen" leaves a lot unsaid. But, personally, I'd rather have this one exquisite lyric than any number of his narratives.
Edgar Alan Poe：To Helen
?It is one of Poe’s most famous lyrics, inspire d by Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a schoolmate of Poe, in Richmond, Virginia. Poe described the poem as “lines written in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul.”
?The Helen of Greek myth was the beautiful daughter of Zeus. Her abduction by Paris was the cause of the Trojan War and the source of the Iliad of Homer.
?Psyche was the daughter of an unknown king. Her beauty was so extraordinary that men would worship her instead of courting her.
Aphrodite then, out of jealousy for her beauty, sent Eros to make Psyche fall in love with some unworthy man while an oracle said that Psyche
must wed a horrible monster on the top of a mountain. Psyche then was first exposed, and then carried by the wind to a castle. But Eros, instead of obeying Aphrodite, fell in love with Psyche and visited her every night, although never allowing Psyche to see him. However, following the
advices dictated by jealousy that her two sisters gave her, Psyche
managed to know who her lover was. Eros then deserted her, and when their love was discovered, Psyche suffered the wrath of Aphrodite, who mistreated her in many ways. However, after several complications the lovers could reunite, and Psyche was reconciled with Aphrodite and made immortal.
?Throughout the Poem, Poe uses allusions to classical names and places, as well as certain kinds of images to create the impression of a far-off
idealized, unreal woman, like a Greek statue.
?Helen stands, not like a real woman, but like a saint in a “window-niche”.
She becomes a symbol both of beauty and of frustration, a romantically idealized, yet inaccessible image of the heart’s desire.