Welcome to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, July 1st, 2024.

Today's poem is by Edgar Allan Poe, and it's called To Helen.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

To Helen.

Helen, thy beauty is to me like those nice sea and barks of yore,

but gently or a perfumed sea, the weary, way-worn wanderer bore,

to his own native shore.

Undesperate seas long want to roam thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

thy naiad heirs have brought me home to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was

Rome. Low 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.

This poem begins simply enough and seems at face value, no pun intended, to be an ode to Helen of Troy, a great classic beauty, the face that launched a thousand ships, and sparked the Trojan War.

But there's definitely an idealizing of Helen here, not that history and tradition haven't idealized Helen themselves. She was reputedly

the most beautiful woman on the planet. And that fact features pretty heavily in how and why

she's caught up in the conflict at least of the Trojan War,

why Paris the Prince of Troy is given her by the goddess Aphrodite

and why he then thinks that he has a right to steal her away from her Spartan husband,

and the rest is history.

But Po here forgets all of that negative aspect of Helen's story,

even the later details of Homer's Odyssey, in which we meet Helen again,

...