Poe To Helen Study Guide PDF

"To Helen," Poems, 1831
To Helen
by Edgar Allan Poe
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 !
"Like Those Nicean Barks": Helen's Beauty

The accumulated, impressive criticism on "To Helen" has considered every conceivable literary
source for Poe's famous epithet "Nicean barks." Milton, Coleridge, Virgil, classical myths
(especially the stories of Helen, Bacchus, Psyche, and Ulysses), and classical history (Alexander
the Great and Catullus) have been identified as the source for the Nicean barks that carry the
wanderer home. [See Edward D. Snyder, "Poe's Nicean Barks," Classical Journal, 48 (1953),
159-169; Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas O. Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 1, 166-171; The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Killis Campbell
(New York: Gordian Press, 1962), pp. 200201.] This scholarship establishes the range and
subtlety of Poe's allusiveness and considerable learning. Edward Snyder asserts that in the
composition of this poem there "had drifted [page 27:] through [Poe's] mind many shadowy
recollections of his reading and that it is something better than idle speculation to attempt to
identify each of the several cruces" [p. 159]. I should like to add to the discussion of one of these
"cruces" by suggesting that the "Nicean barks" to which Helen's beauty is compared in a simile
may refer to a tradition, or figure, in Grecian art that is called a "Nike." That Poe meant "Nicean"
to mean "victorious" and that it is a word formed from 'Nike," that is, "victory," are convincingly
argued by Thomas O. Mabbott in his edition of Poe's poems [I, 167, n. 2]. In Greek sculpture and
numismatics, a Nike is a beautiful woman standing on a boat prow, or bark. We know that Poe
was steeped in classical lore in the years before the publication of "To Helen"; he doubtless saw
or knew of the genre of sculpture of Nike on a boat prow. The tradition dates from a coin minted
by Demetrius Poliocetes, of the graceful and beautiful Victory on a prow, holding a trumpet and
celebrating his naval battle at Salamis. [Grecian coins and statuary were common in the
nineteenth century; Poe could have seen any number of them, including the Nikes, and used
them in his poetry. In identifying the epithet "hyacinth hair," Mabbott p. 170, n. 3, refers to coins
and statues having figures with "hyacinth hair."] The ultimate fulfillment of this tradition in art
is, of course, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
In tracing down the meaning and source of the epithet "Nicean barks," commentators have
generally ignored the exact grammatical sense of the first stanza of "To Helen." Helen's beauty is
compared in a simile to "those Nicean barks of yore." In what sense are Nicean barks beautiful,
and how can they be compared to the supernal beauty of Troy's Helen? Only if the lines refer to
the totality of a Nike sculpture or coin relief do they make the figurative sense clear and
meaningful. It is a complex allusion. The barks stand for or imply the whole ensemble of some
Nike (on a coin or in sculpture) like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which clearly includes
the goddess and the boat prow. The boat prow is inseparable from the Nike; it supports her and
is essential to an understanding of the meaning and purpose of this genre of Greek sculpture.
Note also that Poe wrote "barks," a detail which might be taken to re-enforce the idea that the
numerous Nike sculptures and coin reliefs comprise a genre or tradition of Grecian art which is
beautiful in Poe's estimation and which contributes to his view that Greece is the victorious holy
realm of art.
Subsequent details in the poem seem to be tied to Poe's Nike and bark. The "Nicean barks" may
relate to the "desperate seas" referred to in stanza two and anticipate details of Helen's beauty
("hyacinth hair," "classic face") already implied in the Nike sculpture, a beauty which, like the
bark, will deliver the speaker from these desperate seas. Finally the "Nicean barks" may
anticipate the "statue-like" bearing of Psyche of stanza three. It seems that Poe's imagination is a
quicksand of shifting mythic, historic, artistic, and literary relationships, and that several
references to the classical past flow into this provocative, complex poem. As Nike, Helen
suggests a triumphancy, statuesqueness, and beauty that refer to the heights of artistic
achievement and to ideal form in the Hellenistic Period of Greece. In these ways is Poe's "Nicean
barks" an evocative, rich, complex, meaningful figure, or epithet, for Helen's beauty.
Mario L. D'Avanzo, The City University of New York, Queens College
(http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/PS1970/P1973109.HTM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_rhyme
To Helen (A Short Study Guide): http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/Helen.html

[Text: J. M. Pemberton, "Poe's 'To Helen': Functional Wordplay and A Possible Source," from Poe Newsletter, vol. III, no. 1, June 1970,
pp. 6-7.]
Poe's "To Helen":

Functional Wordplay and A Possible Source
J. M. Pemberton
.
University of Tennessee
.
Previous commentators on Poe's "To Helen" (1831) have made some rather superficial
observations on Poe's use of the name "Helen." Several readers have noticed Poe's obvious
fondness for the sound of the name and its derivatives (Ellen, Eleanora, Lenore). Too, the
majority of commentators (along with Poe himself) have made biographical generalizations
about Jane Stith Stanard and Sara Helen Whitman as Helen's prototype. And, at least one scholar
has made a rather broad statement concerning Poe's identification of this name with the
abstraction of "beauty in the Greek sense" (1). No one, as yet, however, has demonstrated the
specific relationship between the Greek origin of the name "Helen" and Poe's use of it as a
pluralistic device in "To Helen." Through an examination of part of Poe's reading background, it
is possible to establish a clear understanding of this one important textual aspect of the poem.
T. O. Mabbott has shown that "Poe had not only a little Greek, but a respectable command of
it"; and Arthur Hobson Quinn has discovered that Poe had read at least part of Homer's Iliad in
the original Greek (2). In attempting to read the Iliad with the aid of any comprehensive Greek-
English lexicon of the period, Poe would have had occasion to look up the meaning of [[Greek
text=]] [[=Greek text]]. This is not only the proper noun "Helen," but also a common
noun (with exactly the same spelling) meaning "a torch or firebrand" (3). If the connection
between these two orthographically identical words did not fully strike Poe as he checked his
lexicon, the connection must have become apparent as he read further into Homer's physical
descriptions of Helen (for example, "Helen with the bright robes and shining among women. . .
." [Italics mine] III, 1.228) or into those descriptions of her found in so well-known and popular
a commentary as Lemprière's Classical Dictionary (1788):
. . . [Helen] is represented by Homer as so incomparably beautiful during the seige

of Troy, that though seen at a distance, she influenced the counsellors of Priam by
the brightness of her charms; therefore we must suppose, with others, that her
beauty remained long undiminished, and was extinguished only at her death (4).
It may be supposed that Homer's visual images of Helen's literally giving off light and the
linguistic coincidence of the connection between the common and proper forms of were
not lost on so strict a devotee of recondite learning as Poe.
What Poe did with this learning as he consciously and unconsciously gathered ideas for his
first version of "To Helen" is apparent in the context of the poem itself. Here, Helen clearly
becomes for the persona a magnetic personification of "inspirational beauty" in one sense, and,
in another (yet simultaneously imparted) sense, an apostrophized [page 7:] object which the
speaker literally sees in a "brilliant window-niche" (1.11, italics mine) and is visually attracted to
from his position on the sea shore, at the bow of a ship, or wherever. For, unless Helen were
"shining" in some respect, how could the speaker notice her at any sort of distance, standing so
"statue-like" (1.12) in a "niche"? The answer, of course, is that, as far as the poem is concerned,
Helen does literally glow, or radiate, with light as well as with her more abstract, esthetic beauty
and thus beckons the speaker, using both these powers (5).
This double image must have seemed well-chosen to Poe at the time, and it certainly works
well within the poem once the double function of "Helen" is understood. The problem for Poe,
however, apparently lay in the question of whether it actually was understood by his
contemporaries. That Poe obviously had doubts about his readers' perception of this semantic
ambiguity can be shown by a brief history and explanation of a hitherto unexamined textual
revision in the poem.
In the poem's first three versions, Poe's Helen, while in a "brilliant window-niche," holds a
"folded scroll" (1.13); but, in its fourth and final version (printed in the Saturday Museum, 4
March 1843), Poe exchanges a (presumably) lighted "agate lamp" for the "scroll" (6). That Poe
made many other changes in the poem's text in its various printings, but waited until his final
version to make this change (from "scroll" to "lamp"), shows his apparent dissatisfaction with the
clarity or with the effect — or lack of it — of Helen's self-illumination produced through the
verbal device already described. In the earlier versions, it is clearly the person of Helen herself
that made the "window-niche" "brilliant"; no artificial "brilliance," such as that provided by an
"agate lamp," had been necessary as far as the poet was concerned.
In order to make Helen more visually evident in the minds of both persona and reader and to
dispose of a seemingly unsuccessful ambiguity, Poe felt compelled to make a change which adds
nothing to the poem in terms of meaning or poetic sound, but does clarify Helen, now with a
lamp, as being a source of, primarily, esthetic illumination and, secondarily, a source of visual
brightness in the evening dusk or darkness which surrounds the speaker. (If the time setting of
the poem is not evening, but the full light of day, how could the speaker see, at a distance, a
dimly glowing oil lamp?) Thus Poe gives the reader a Helen who is a brightly concrete image as
well as a symbolic source of poetic inspiration.
Like any other literary craftsman, Poe would not have been adverse to this kind of functional
combination of senses; and one of his own favorite poets, Edward Coote Pinkney, could easily
have provided him, only six years before the first publication of "To Helen," with a poetic
treatment of "light" from a feminine source as a visually and esthetically attractive device. I refer
to Pinkney's "Song" ("Those starry eyes"), which was included in the poet's collection of his
poems published in 1825:
Those starry eyes, those starry eyes,

Those eyes that used to be
Unto my heart as beacon-lights
To pilgrims on the sea! — [column 2:]
I see them yet, I see them yet,

Though long since quenched and gone —
I could not live illumined by
The common sun alone.
Could they seem thus, could they seem thus,

If but a memory? —
Ah, yes! Upon this wintry earth
They burn no more for me. (7)
Compare particularly the first stanza of Pinkney's "Song" to Poe's first stanza of "To Helen":
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.
Given the idea of Poe's Helen having both abstract and concrete powers of "attraction," and
given Poe's avowed fondness for Pinkney's "lyricism" (8), surely one can see in the deceased
lover, in the stars, beacon-lights, and sun, and as well in the "pilgrims" of the Pinkney poem, at
least a partial source for the beauty of Poe's "luminary" Helen and for Poe's "wanderer." But
whether Pinkney's "Song" was merely an influence or a direct source is not so important as is its
value as a contemporary example of the kind of Classical/Romantic material with which Poe was
familiar, and which, along with his penchant for complex devices, he brought to bear in the
composition of "To Helen."
NOTES
(1) Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York, 1941), p. 177.
(2) See Mabbott, "Evidence That Poe Knew Greek," Notes & Queries, CLXXV (1943), 40; and
Quinn, p. 83. Poe's schoolmaster in Richmond during 1821-22, Joseph H. Clarke, wrote that
Poe's class read Horace and Cicero in Latin and Homer in Greek. For evidence of Poe's
continued study of Greek while at the University of Virginia, see Quinn, pp. 98-99.
(3) Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon Based on the German
Work of Francis Passow [whose lexicon appeared in 1819] (New York 1846), p. 435. While we
may never know for certain which Greek lexicon Poe used, there were several like the Passow
wörtenbuch and the Liddell-Scott Lexicon available to him.
(4) Italics mine; from John Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in
Ancient Authors (London, 1788), s.v. "Helen." This volume was edited in America by Poe's
friend and benefactor Prof. Anthon of Columbia University, who may have recommended it to
him. At any rate, the work was available to Poe, in several American printings, after 1824.
(5) See James W. Gargano, "Poe's 'To Helen'," Modern Language Notes, LXXV (1960), 653, for
a discussion of the nature of Helen's beauty.
(6) For a more complete textual and publication history of the entire poem, see The Poems of
Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Killis Campbell (Boston, 1917), p. 56 and pp. 199-203.
(7) T. O. Mabbott and F. L. Pleadwell, The Life and Works of Edward Coote Pinkney (New
York, 1926), p. 128.
(8) For discussions of several other Pinkney poems that influenced Poe's own poetry, see
Mabbott and Pleadwell, pp. 86-89 et passim.
http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/PS1960/P1970104.HTM
“To Helen” (A lesson plan that can be used as a study guide upon first reading the poem and
starting to do research): http://www.schoollink.org/csd/pages/engl/poepoetr.html
Eros (or Cupid) and Psyche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Psyche; Short overview:

http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/greek-mythology.php?deity=PSYCHE

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"To Helen," Poems, 1831

Helen, thy beauty is to me

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Lo ! in that little window-niche

"Like Those Nicean Barks": Helen's Beauty

To Helen (A Short Study Guide): http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/Helen.html

Poe's "To Helen":

. . . [Helen] is represented by Homer as so incomparably beautiful during the seige

Those starry eyes, those starry eyes,

I see them yet, I see them yet,

Could they seem thus, could they seem thus,

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Eros (or Cupid) and Psyche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Psyche; Short overview:

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