To Helen

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Illustration by Edmund Dulac, 1912
"To Helen" in the March 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, Volume 2, Number 4, bound volume, page 238.

"To Helen" is the first of two poems to carry that name written by Edgar Allan Poe. The 15-line poem was written in honor of Jane Stanard, the mother of a childhood friend.[1] It was first published in the 1831 collection Poems of Edgar A. Poe. It was subsequently reprinted in the March 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. The final, revised version appeared in the 1845 collection The Raven and Other Poems.

Analysis

In "To Helen", Poe is celebrating the nurturing power of woman.[2] Poe was inspired in part by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, particularly in the second line ("Like those Nicean barks of yore") which resembles a line in Coleridge's "Youth and Age" ("Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore").[3]

Poe revised the poem in 1845, making several improvements, most notably changing "the beauty of fair Greece, and the grandeur of old Rome" to "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers referred to these as "two of Poe's finest and most famous lines".[4]

Allusions

In referring to Helen, Poe is alluding to

Marc Antony's fleet was built there. We can defend perfumed sea, which has been called silly, by noting that classical ships never left sight of land, and could smell orchards on shore, that perfumed oil was an extensive industry in classical times and that ships laden with it would smell better than your shipload of sheep.[5]

Full poem

Original 1831 version

Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfum'd 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 beauty of fair Greece,
And the grandeur of old Rome.

Lo ! in that little window-niche
    How statue-like I see thee stand!
    The folded scroll within thy hand —
A Psyche from the regions which
    Are Holy land !

Revised 1845 version

In popular culture

References

  1. ^ Burns, Allan Douglas. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002, p. 2.
  2. ^ Campbell, Killis. "The Origins of Poe", The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962: 153–154.
  3. ^ Jeffrey Meyers, "Edgar Allan Poe", in The Columbia History of American Poetry. Columbia University Press, 1993: 181.
  4. .
  5. ^ Jeffrey Meyers, "Edgar Allan Poe", in The Columbia History of American Poetry. Columbia University Press, 1993: 331.

External links