“To Helen” Introduction

• Edgar Allan Poe wrote "To Helen" in honor of a woman named Jane Stanard, who died many years before he published this poem in The Raven, and Other Poems (1845). The speaker of "To Helen" doesn't just see his beloved as beautiful. He sees her as stunningly beautiful, lovely as the legendary Helen of Troy herself—and the very sight of her face transports him to a world of classical myth and magic. Beauty, in this poem, is both overwhelming and strangely comforting: gazing at his goddess-like beloved, the speaker feels he's come home at last.

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“To Helen” Summary

• Helen, your beauty is, for me, like those ancient Greek ships that carried the exhausted, travel-worn Odysseus over sweetly-scented waters and back to his homeland.

  I've been used to traveling far and wide over dangerous seas, but your dark curling hair, your face like a Greek goddess's, and your nymph-like loveliness have brought me back home to the splendor and magnificence of ancient Greece and Rome.

  Look! Up in that shining window, I see you standing like an ancient statue, holding a marble lamp! Oh, lovely soul-goddess from the far-off sacred land!

“To Helen” Themes

• 

  The Power of Beauty

  Written in honor of the mother of one of Poe's childhood friends (upon whom Poe had a terrible crush), “To Helen” sings the praises of a beloved’s enchanting beauty. To the poem’s speaker, this woman isn’t just lovely: she's the spitting image of Helen of Troy herself, the legendary princess so stunningly beautiful that the men who squabbled over her started the Trojan war. Through passionate allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, the speaker suggests that beauty and love can make a living, breathing human being seem like an immortal deity—and transport a lover right out of his own place and time to the world of legend. Love, to this speaker, makes the ordinary world into an extraordinary otherworld—at the same time as it feels a lot like coming “home.”

  Completely besotted with his beloved, the speaker of this poem doesn’t just see her as any beauty, but as a mythic, legendary beauty. Lovelier than even a “Naiad” (that is, a water nymph) or an idealized statue, she appears to him as “Helen” of Troy: a classical ideal, a figure who embodies beauty itself. Her loveliness has such power over him that it seems he can only think of her in these dramatic terms!

  Not only does the speaker’s infatuation transform his beloved into a “Helen,” it transports him right out of the everyday world and into a powerful mythological past. Being in love feels to him like being flung into the classical splendor of ancient Greece and Rome—and then beyond it to a mysterious “Holy-Land” of gods and goddesses. All of these images suggest that being overwhelmed by beauty is all part of a profound, ancient tradition: a lover’s world is the land of myth, not the ordinary world.

  Strangely enough, all these magical transports make the speaker feel as if he’s actually coming “home”: while his beloved’s beauty has launched him into the world of the gods, that world is somehow where he really belongs. Feeling that he’s in the right place wherever his “Helen” is, he can stop his “wander[ings]” at last. To this speaker, gazing at his beloved’s gorgeous face doesn’t just mean feeling as if he were living in a heavenly, mythical dreamworld: it means feeling like that mythical dreamworld is his rightful home.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “To Helen”

• Lines 1-2

  Helen, thy beauty is to me
     Like those Nicean barks of yore,

  The very first word of "To Helen" launches the poem's lovestruck speaker into the landscape of myth. The name "Helen"—especially when it's followed up with talk of "beauty" and "Nicean barks" (or ancient Greek ships)—isn't just any old name: it's an allusion to Helen of Troy.

  In ancient Greek mythology and literature, Helen, daughter of Zeus and the mortal Leda, was the most beautiful woman in the world. In fact, she was so lovely that princes and kings fought over her, kicking off the bloody 10-year Trojan War.

  This speaker thus doesn't see his beloved as merely pretty. He sees her as transcendently, overpoweringly, immortally, legendarily beautiful. And her beauty is like a "Nicean bark of yore," a Greek ship of the ancient past.

  That simile might give readers pause at first: is "your beauty is just like a very old boat" really such a compliment? But by raising the image of these "Nicean barks," the speaker suggests that his Helen's loveliness belongs to a romantically mythic world. She's so classically beautiful that she might as well be a goddess in an old legend.

  And what's more, her beauty has the power to take him places: looking on her beauty, this simile suggests, he feels almost literally carried away.

• Lines 3-5

  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
     The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
     To his own native shore.

  

  

• Lines 6-8

  On desperate seas long wont to roam,
     Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

  

  

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• Lines 9-10

     To the glory that was Greece,      
     And the grandeur that was Rome.

  

  

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• Lines 11-15

  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!

  

  

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“To Helen” Symbols

• 

  The Lamp

  The "agate lamp" that the speaker imagines in his beloved's hand at the end of the poem symbolizes guidance, comfort, and wisdom.

  All through "To Helen," the speaker suggests that a big part of his intense love for his "Helen" is his sense that he's come "home" when he's around her. When she appears at the end of the poem holding a lamp, it's as if she's a lighthouse keeper, beckoning him to the place where he belongs by shining out a light in the darkness. (And remember, this poem was written in the 19th century and refers to the ancient world: this lamp should be imagined as a romantic-looking oil lamp with a burning flame, not an electric one!)

  Perhaps the speaker even feels as if his beloved offers him a kind of inner guidance: a lamp often suggests wisdom, the kind of metaphorical "illumination" that helps people to see the truth.

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“To Helen” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Allusion

  "To Helen" is riddled with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology. Those allusions suggest how utterly blown away the speaker feels by his beloved's beauty: he can only begin to describe her in terms of the goddesses and legends of the past.

  The poem's classical allusions start in the very first line, where the speaker addresses his beloved as "Helen." That name is a reference to none other than Helen of Troy, the gorgeous Greek princess who often gets blamed for kicking off the bloody 10-year Trojan War (in spite of the fact that the blame might more rightfully be laid on the various princes and kings who squabbled over her). If the speaker's beloved is "Helen," then she's the picture of beauty itself, a goddess among women.

  The speaker drives that idea home when he imagines his "Helen" as "Psyche" herself in the final stanza. Psyche was the goddess of the soul, but she began her life as a breathtaking mortal princess, so beautiful that Eros, the god of love himself, fell in love with her. (She eventually earned her goddesshood after undergoing a series of dreadful trials.) As "Psyche," the speaker's beloved seems like more than a mere beauty: she's a real soulmate, a figure who touches him in the deepest part of his heart.

  The poem's references to the beloved's "Naiad airs" (i.e., her nymph-like charms) and her "classic face" (like the perfectly proportioned face of a classical statue) underline the idea that her beauty is both powerful and timeless. The speaker is here imagining a figure of idealized loveliness, of the sort that many 19th-century artists and thinkers associated with the "glory" and "grandeur" of ancient Greece and Rome.

  And the speaker thinks of himself in classical terms, too. He imagines himself in the role of Odysseus, the famous Greek hero who was cursed to wander the seas for years after he angered the sea god Poseidon (those are his "barks," or ships, in line 2). This allusion gets at the speaker's deep alienation—and the way that the sight of his beloved Helen seems to cure that alienation. This speaker doesn't ever seem to have quite felt at home in the world, but when he sees the beautiful face of his beloved, he feels like Odysseus did when he finally crawled back onto the "native shore" of his homeland.

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• Apostrophe

  

  
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• Enjambment

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

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"To Helen" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Helen
• Thy
• Nicean barks
• Yore
• O'er
• Way-worn
• Bore
• Desperate
• Wont to
• Hyacinth
• Classic
• Naiad
• Airs
• Lo!
• Yon brilliant window-niche
• Thee
• Agate
• Psyche

• A reference to Helen of Troy, the mythic Greek beauty who was abducted by Paris, a Trojan prince. Helen's husband Menelaus, not liking this much, started the legendary Trojan War, in which Greece laid siege to Troy for 10 years.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “To Helen”

• Form

  "To Helen" has a deceptively simple form. At first glance, it appears to use three identical five-line stanzas (or cinquains). But on a closer look, those stanzas are all subtly different: their rhyme schemes and meters are never exactly the same twice. (Check out this guide's Meter and Rhyme Scheme sections for more detail on that.)

  This mixture of consistency and change—a repeating stanza structure that evolves and shifts a little every time it reappears—cleverly suggests what it feels like to be completely hypnotized by a beloved's beauty. The speaker could stare at his beloved forever: consistency! But every time he looks at her, he's struck afresh by some new aspect of her gorgeousness: change!

• Meter

  The basic meter in "To Helen" is in iambic tetrameter. That means that most of the lines here use four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. As an example, here's how that looks in line 13:

  The a- | gate lamp | within | thy hand!

  But the poem breaks from this meter often and with gusto. For instance, the very first line starts with a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm:

  Helen, | thy beau- | ty is | to me

  That strong stress right up top makes the speaker sound urgent and passionate—an effect that turns up again when he starts line 11 with a cry of "Lo!"

  The speaker also plays with meter in the last lines of the first and last stanzas. The first stanza's last line is in iambic trimeter, using three da-DUMs:

  To his | own na- | tive shore.

  And the last line of the whole poem is even shorter: it uses a lone dactyl (a foot that goes DUM-da-da), like this:

  Are Holy-Land!

  These short, short lines make it feel as if the speaker has been stunned into silence by the sight of his lovely "Helen": she seems to take his breath away, cutting him off short.

• Rhyme Scheme

  “To Helen” uses an unusual and unpredictable rhyme scheme: no two stanzas run the same. Here’s how the scheme breaks down across the whole poem:

  ABABB CDCDC EFFEF

  These patterns aren’t consistent, but they are all musical and harmonious, and often subtle: many of the rhymes here, like “face” and “Greece” in the second stanza, are slant rhymes rather than full rhymes, which gives the sounds a misty, diffuse quality.

  These wandering, dreamy rhymes all work together to evoke the speaker’s captivation and awe as he thinks of his beloved “Helen.” And by crossing some of the usual bounds of rhyming poetry, the rhymes here also suggest the speaker’s sense that his love is similarly boundary-crossing and unusual: it belongs, not to the everyday world, but to the world of myths and legends.

“To Helen” Speaker

• The speaker of "To Helen" is a dreamy, impassioned, and deeply romantic young lover. Clearly fed on a rich diet of classical mythology and history, he sees his beloved as the legendarily beautiful Helen of Troy—and himself as a "wanderer" like Odysseus, the Greek hero who was cursed to roam the world after he got on the sea-god Poseidon's bad side.

  Those references hint that this speaker feels like an outcast, a person who doesn't quite feel at home in the world. He doesn't just adore his "Helen" because she's stunningly beautiful, but because she makes him feel as if he's returned to his "own native shore" at last.

  With all this in mind, it's pretty reasonable to read the speaker as Poe himself. Poe wrote this poem in honor of a friend's mother, a woman named Jane Stanard, upon whom he had a massive, puppyish crush when he was a young man. Sadly, like many of the women in Poe's life, Jane Stanard died young.

“To Helen” Setting

• This poem is mostly set in the dreamworld inside the speaker's head—a dreamworld heavily influenced by the myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome. The speaker's body might be in a normal town, but his mind is on Mount Olympus, the home of the gods: even catching a glimpse of his beloved through a window puts this speaker in mind of classical statues, figures of idealized beauty.

  All the poem's allusions to the "glory" and "grandeur" of Greece and Rome suggest just how overpowering the speaker's infatuation feels. Totally smitten, he's living in a private world of epic loves, perilous journeys, and shining goddesses.

Literary and Historical Context of “To Helen”

• Literary Context

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an innovator. Most famous for his macabre short stories, he’s credited as a founder of literary genres from horror to science fiction. But he was also an accomplished poet, and some of his poems, like “The Raven,” are household names. While “To Helen” isn’t quite as famous as that raven and its ominous “Nevermore,” the lines “To the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome” developed a life of their own and are still widely quoted.

  Poe is often considered a major American Romantic, and “To Helen” shows some of the marks of the wider Romantic movement. In its fascination with love, its interest in intense and transcendent emotional experiences, its sensuous imagery, and its use of classical mythology, this poem has more than a little in common with the work of earlier English Romantic poets like Keats or Byron.

  Poe was also a huge influence on generations of writers who followed him. The writers and artists of the turn-of-the-20th-century Symbolist and Surrealist movements, for instance, were inspired by Poe's decadent language and strange, dreamlike imagery. And while Poe died poor and troubled, he's led a mighty literary afterlife: to this day, he's one of the best-known and most profoundly influential of all American writers.

  Historical Context

  Poe led a notoriously tragic and tormented life, and this poem quietly pays tribute to just one of his many painful losses.

  Poe's parents died while Poe and his siblings were very young, and the children were all sent to separate foster homes. The grieving, lonely young Poe got into the habit of developing intense attachments to substitute mother figures—who had an unfortunate way of also dying young. His beloved foster mother Frances Allan, for instance, passed away when he was only 20.

  This particular poem honors another of Poe's substitute parents: Jane Stanard, the mother of his school friend Richard. Poe met Jane when he was only 14 or 15, and seemed to absolutely worshiped her, often going to her for comfort when he was having trouble with his foster father John Allan (with whom he always had a turbulent relationship). The affection Poe felt for Jane blossomed into an intense crush: he later wrote that she was "the first, purely ideal love of my soul."

  But sadly, Poe only got to enjoy Jane Stanard's company for about a year before she died, possibly of tuberculosis, in 1824. Poe never forgot her. He first drafted "To Helen" in 1831 (eight whole years after Jane's death), and regularly visited her grave for years.

More “To Helen” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poe Museum — Visit the website of the Poe Museum to learn more about Poe's life and work.

  • A Brief Biography — Learn about Poe's life at the Poetry Foundation, and find links to more of his poems.

  • Poe and Jane Stanard — Learn more about Poe's sweet, sad relationship with Jane Stanard, the woman "To Helen" honors—and read an early draft of the poem.

  • The Poem in Pop Culture — See Tom Hanks reciting this poem (to sleazy effect) in the Coen brothers' version of The Ladykillers.

  • Poe's Legacy — Learn more about Poe's poetic reputation (and about the afterlife of "To Helen" in particular).

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

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  • Alone

  • Annabel Lee

  • Sonnet to Science

  • The Conqueror Worm