Today’s Poem: To Helen
Today’s Poem: To Helen
Poe feels right, even when he’s wrong
You know how it starts. Anyone with even the vaguest sense of the old canon of English poetry in American high-school literature textbooks knows how it starts: “Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicean barks of yore,” in “To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849).
We ought to sense trouble building when that adjective “Nicean” arrives in the second line. Poe is, well, Poe, and even in those first words we are tempted to slip into the dream of a poem by that dreamy poet. “Helen” is presumably Helen of Troy, and a bark is a barque, a boat (a three-masted sailing ship, in Poe’s times, but generally a poetic word for any kind of boat, derived from the ancient Greek word βᾶρις).
And “Nicean” means . . . something vaguely ancienty. There are theories, of course. Perhaps “Nicean” refers to Nicaea, an ancient Greek colony in Asia Minor, near the Bosporus, although the colony was founded long after Helen and is most famous not for its boats but for hosting the council that produced the Nicene Creed in A.D. 325 (1,500 years after the fall of Troy). Or perhaps the word refers to the Greek colony that would become the modern French city of Nice, a perfume and shipping center (founded in 350 B.C., 900 years after the Trojan War). Maybe it’s an allusion to the god of victory, Niké, or to Nysa, a mythical birthplace of nymphs (although that land is said to be a mountain district, not a place with boats).
No matter how plausible or implausible, these readings all involve slipping from one ancient thing to another — which is, in fact, the key characteristic of Poe’s sweetest poem, “To Helen.”
We start with Helen, and we end with the Holy Land, and along the way we glide through references to Odysseus, the Greek myth of Hyacinth, naiads, the Roman Empire, and Psyche (the lover of Cupid whose name is also the Greek word for the soul). The poem only makes sense if we take everything historical and mythological in the entire ancient world as forming a vague cloud of elements that are imagined to belong together simply because they are all ancient.
We shouldn’t allow anyone that kind of haziness. Then again, we always make an exception for Edgar Allan Poe. We saw this effect when we talked about “Annabel Lee” here in Poems Ancient and Modern two months ago: Poe pulls off work that no one else gets away with. Think of “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado.” On top of all the other characteristics for which, somehow, only Poe is forgiven, he has a symbolic looseness that ought to ruin his work. And yet we grant Poe that looseness: the cloudy metonymy that lets him gesture at, say, the Renaissance in his horror stories, as though the era were all one giant thing, one nebulosity.
And so with the ancient world in “To Helen.” Written in memory of Jane Stanard, the mother of his childhood friend, the poem was first published in 1831 and revised (and improved) through to its final form in the 1845 collection, The Raven and Other Poems. In three five-line stanzas — four four-foot lines ending with a three-foot line, with slightly varying rhyme schemes — “To Helen” has that ear-worm quality that Poe could find so often. It is beautiful, and it feels unified. Whole. Complete. “Thy Naiad airs have brought me home / To the glory that was Greece, / And the grandeur that was Rome” is perfectly right, no matter how vaguely wrong.
To Helen
by Edgar Allan Poe
Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn 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!
Perhaps the Holy Land is where Helen lives and not a place outside her realm.