Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Curran.

Today's poem is one that was inspired by yesterday's poem. Reading the listeners by De LaMarre

made me want to read Edgar Allan Poe. And so I went back to some of his lesser-known poems,

at least compared to The Raven and Annabelle

Lee, for example. And I wanted to share a poem called To Helen. And this is a poem that I'm reading,

I'm choosing because it is in the classic 100 poems anthology that William Harmon edited. So if you

have that anthology, you can turn to it and learn more about it. So it's a three-stanzap poem with 15 total lines.

It's not terribly long.

So I'm going to read it, and then I'll share some of what William Harmon has to say about it, and then read it again.

I think Harmon is really interesting on this particular poem, so I wanted to primarily focus on his words and not mine.

So this is Edgar Allan Pose to Helen.

Helen, thy beauty is to me like those Nisayan barks of yore, that gently or a perfumed sea,

the weary, wayworn wanderer bore to his own native shore. On desperate seas,

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

naiad airs have brought me home to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo in yon brilliant window-nitch, how statue-like I see thee stand! The agate lamp within thy hand, ah, psyche from the regions,

which are holy land. This poem was written, was begun in as early as 1823, it was first published

in 1831 in post early 20s. And then he revised it again

all the way, he revised it multiple times all the way through 1845. And he died in 1849. He lived

from 1809 to 1849. So this is a poem that he spent most of his life on. It certainly clearly

meant something to him then.

And this is what William Harmon writes about it. I like this. I'm going to read this whole

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