The Appreciation of to Helen

This is a lyrics named to Helen, which was written by Edgar Allan Poe. Known as the American author and poet of the Romantic Movement, Poe rose to critically acclaim for his poetry and short stories by the early 1800's. He is good at using mysteries, images that are far away from readers in time and place. Those images can be some objective or personal, such as goddess, heaven, Zeus, Trojan War and so on, to show his creative thoughts and feelings. Also he is the master of the figure of speech, for his feelings are described freely and totally. To Helen falls into this type of poem. In the poem, the poet uses some archaic words and Greek story; together with a series of rhetoric to show his first love of Mrs. Jane Stith Standard, the mother of one of his classmates. Poe described the poem as “line written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul.”

The poem includes three stanzas, and each of them is five lines separately. In every stanza, Poe expresses the beauty of Helen by using comparison to the beauty of some goddess: “like those Nicean barks of yore”, “thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face” and son on. From my point of view, the love the author holds to Helen is beyond the love between men and women. It seems that the poem is also full of love for hometown, the love for freedom and for peace. We can feel that in these sentences: “to his own native shore” and “from the regions which are Holy Land”.

Above all are some aspects about the theme and content of this poem. As for the rhythm, it is a basic iambic rhythm. It follows like this: ababb, ababa and abbab.

Next, we’ll appreciate the poem from the angle of figures of speech.

The first stanza begins with an allusion and meanwhile Helen comes from the Greek story. Then, Poe takes advantage of comparisons: the beauty of Helen and the beauty of Mrs. Jane Stith Standard; the admiration from the common people, especially the Greek people, to Helen and Poe’s love for Mrs. Jane Stith Standard. Further more, much more rhetoric can be found in details. In the third line, we can see “the perfumed sea”. Actually the sea cannot smell itself, so it is a transferred epithet. In the fourth line, Poe uses the alliteration by put word which all begins in the same /w/sound together: “weary, way-worn wanderer”. In the last line, the “native shore” is a pun that refers to the shore in the hometown or the mother land, which also shows that the beauty of Helen, or say Mrs. Jane Stith Standard can remind people of the peaceful of the world.

The second stanza has another transferred epithet in the first line: “desperated seas”. In the second and third lines, “thy” has been repeated three times, which is called parallelism in order to emphasize the beauty of Helen. There is alliteration, a metaphor and an allusion as well. “Brought me home” maybe can be understood as another pun which refers to take me to my hometown or make me understood. Read through the second stanza, the beauty of Mrs. Jane Stith Standard is even clear and more impressive.

In the last stanza, the first line starts with “lo” and follows the “yon”, two archaic words to describe a very old and mystery image. Then in the second line “statue-like, stand” is obviously a simile. In the fourth line, “Psyche”, another allusion in this poem, refers to the soul in the Greek. In classic legend, Psyche, the lover of Cupit, was a woman so beautiful that the goddess Venus was jealous of hers. Just at this time, we can imagine how beautiful Mrs. Jane Stith Standard is.

All in all, the whole poem just intends to stress how deeply he, our Poe, loves Mrs. Jane Stith Standard after the first sight, and how beautiful Mrs. Jane Stith Standard is. I would say it is the poem that commemorates the poet’s first pure and holy love and the beauty of Mrs. Jane Stith Standard.