Text: Alice Moser Claudel, “Poe as Voyager in To Helen,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 33-37

[page 33:]

Unless one looks into literary histories of the United States which include poetry, one finds few of Edgar Allan Poe's poems in recent publications. The editors either do not find his work complex enough, or else, fascinated by the new instant poetry, they do not find it attractive. It may be that, hoping to engage the young with “relevant works,” they exclude Poe's work as too “pure.” If Poe is found in a new anthology, “To Helen” is the poem usually chosen. In some instances, a peculiar snobbery may be at work. If an editor has read Huxley (whose ear may have been less keen than he fancied, for he declares that the meter of “Ulalume” is galloping and gives no thought to the weight of the carefully arranged vowels and consonants), he may have been influenced; since we all know Huxley thought Poe vulgar. Another editor may feel that one should read three French poets to learn of Poe's influence upon them, because he has been assured that one cannot read Poe's own poems analytically; and still another may believe that he should recognize Poe only as a relative to apologize for, despite some talent, because Poe is not Dante or Donne.

It is difficult to read Poe's poetry analytically, not because he was shallow, but because he was subtle, and he was not writing metaphysical poetry any more than Samuel Johnson was. Poe's poetry, as well, tends to put one into a hypnogogic state in which one's pores, even unwillingly at times, absorb the magic spell. Although I resist “The Raven” as though it were a plague, a good reader can make me its victim. Poe's use of symbols seems to touch some depths in the subconscious mind that make a sensitive reader aware of many meanings along with the one closest to the mind. Long associations cluster around symbols. It is such associations that make a poem like “To Helen” more complex than some critics are willing to grant. Poe, by his own statements, chose his symbols carefully, almost clinically. He was not a slipshod writer of poetry nor a “jingle man.” We ought to be willing to give a little of the same kind of attention to Helen as we give to Prufrock. Mallarmé and Valery saw more in Poe's poetry than literary mirages. [page 34:]

In journeying through “To Helen,” several scholars, two of whom are poets, James Russell Lowell and Richard Wilbur, have been helpful guides to me. As long ago as 1845, in Graham's Magazine, Lowell wrote of Poe: “He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united: a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed.” Although Lowell is writing about the tales, the observation is helpful in reading the poems. Again, he comments: “The Mystic dwells in the mystery, is enveloped with it; it colors all his thoughts; it affects his optic nerve especially and the commonest things get a rainbow edging from it. Mr. Poe, on the other hand, is a spectator ab extra. He analyzes, he dissects, he watches.”(1) Poe's own comments on the way he worked support Lowell's insights. We have, as well, Professor Stovall's firm declaration: “I am convinced that all of Poe's poems were composed with conscious art.”(2)

Richard Wilbur, poet and scholar, points out that Poe's characters, particularly the women, are often symbolizations of ideal states, hopes and dreams, rather than women of flesh and blood. Wilbur, commenting on Poe's work, says it is “deliberate and often brilliant allegory,” and tells of Poe's desire to create and to possess “supernal beauty which is symbolized, in Poe, by the shadowy and angelic figures of Ligeia, and Helen, and Lenore.”(3) When a poet tells us something about a poet, it is wise to listen. He is, or should be, especially endowed to understand those “undercurrents” which Poe endeavored to put into his poems. The Poem is not to be considered in its realistic meaning or seemingly realistic meaning alone, although on that level there is much of the appeal which even the unsophisticated reader finds in Poe's poetry. Poe wrote that every work of art should contain within itself all that one needs to know about that work.

Before attempting to find what “To Helen” contains within itself, besides the obvious meaning, and to discover the “undercurrent” that deepens and at the same time intensifies its effect, I accept Wilbur's observation that Poe's women are symbolic, even allegorical figures. Whether Helen was suggested by Mrs. Helen Stannard is not now important, except that she may be the means for Poe's writing the poem. We probably would have had the poem, in any case. As Susan Langner emphasizes in Problems of Art: “To read poetry as a psychological document, in a context of the author's life, putting in further meanings and personal allusions from circumstantial knowledge is to do violence to the poem.”(4) I believe that Professor Langner here means by “personal allusions” such things as Poe's love life, diet, sickness, and so on, something quite different from the archetypal symbolism which Maud Bodkin discusses in her book and which does relate to poets like Poe.(5) That “To Helen” was published first in 1831 and then again in 1843 in a superior final version shows that Poe polished this poem, perhaps his most beautiful, which gives the impression of passion controlled by an intellectual intensity sometimes wanting in other poems. Looking for the undercurrents of meaning, rather than the meaning which appears on the surface of the poem, is not a strange way of reading Poe. Hervey Allen makes this point: “Briefly, Poe vastly influenced all modern poetry by the way he used imagery to evoke and suggest rather than to picture and photograph with words what he had to say. ... ‘To Helen,’ for instance, is a thoroughly modern poem. The imagery is evocative, its ‘logic’ is subliminal.”(6)

“To Helen” on its obvious level seems to be a love poem directed to a beautiful woman who is a source of comfort to an anguished soul, leading him by means of her idealized loveliness to his intellectual and spiritual home which has many abstract qualities emcompassed in the lines: “To the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome.” Gilbert Highet, the distinguished Classical scholar, emphasizing Poe's felicitous lines quoted above, sees Poe's Helen not as a girl the poet loves but as “the girl whose name and face image the perfection of Greek beauty” and whose loveliness is a symbol of Poe's love of classical culture. That beauty brings him back to the repose of classical culture and art after romantic adventure and what Highet calls “the visionary magic ‘of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”(7) Another interesting reference would have been Keats's “Ode to Psyche” (lines 64-67). Maud Bodkin in the work cited above reminds us of the ancient concept “... of woman as supreme embodiment of the beauty felt in the visible world and as a power quickening man's sensibility to that beauty, and linking it in love to all nature.” She gives Milton's use of Eve as an example and uses T. S. Eliot's phrase “disciplined dreaming.”(8) In “To Helen” one cannot help but sense the figure of Helen of Troy in her role as history-creator, inspirer of love and creativity, and finally as one who, according to legend, leads men to Elysium to become immortal. [page 35:]

But what of the “pins and buttons?” Like Poe we ought not to leave them unnoticed. He gives the “poetic facts” in the first line. Helen's beauty is what transports him (and I have the double meaning in mind); it is a “carrier” as were those Nicean barks which bore home the “weary, wayworn wanderer.” The phrase connotes not warriors like Odysseus and his men so much as pilgrims and seekers, who after engagements and quests return to their own native shore, like exhausted Grail seekers, or to use a more sentimental example, like the children in Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird. The motif runs throughout English and other western literature. But why Nicean barks? We find a correspondence later in the poem, but perhaps the choice of the word may have been made because of its religious connotations (in Poe's mind) and because of its strong connection with the New Rome. In Nicea the Christian religion found its dogma and shape and clarification with the formulation of the Nicene Creed which gave the church the order and unity Poe admired. Mabbott, in his new Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume I, Poems, states rather firmly: “A friend of mine once questioned whether the poem [“To Helen”] linked Christian and Greek traditions. There is a wanderer who fits well: St. Athanasius (whose name means ‘Deathless’), for he returned victorious from Nicea in Bithynia, after the formulation of the Nicene Creed; the perfume might be the odor of sanctity. There is no connection with Helen” (Note I, p. 169). In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (D. M. Low's abridgement) are many pages concerning the wanderings of Bishop Athanasius, but one sentence in particular fits in neatly with Mabbott's observation. Writing of the iniquitous trial at Tyre which humiliated, even degraded, the Bishop of Egypt, Gibbon has a telling statement: “He resolved to make a bold and dangerous experiment, whether the throne was inaccessible to the voice of truth; and before the final sentence could be pronounced at Tyre, the intrepid primate threw himself into a bark which was ready to hoist sail for the Imperial City” (p. 326). We have here a number of symbols important to Poe's “To Helen:” the bark, the wayworn wanderer, and the Imperial and Holy City of Byzantium.

If Poe had wished to use an adjective which would more strongly evoke legendary Greece and Helen of Troy, he could well have used the word “Mycenean” instead of “those Nicean.” Most critics agree that Poe was a rather careful chooser of words, even when they do not care for the words he chose. A recent text on American literature comments in an editorial note that perhaps the word “Nicean” was used because Poe was reminded of Milton's line in Paradise Lost (Book IV, line 275) in which he tells of “that Nyseian Isle.” Though anything may be grist for a poet to work with, I am not able to link Poe's use of the word with Milton's description.(9) Anyone, even those who are not Classical scholars, can know from numerous works how, when the Roman Empire became unwieldy and sprawling, Constantine turned to the eastern part of the empire to establish a political and cultural center. It was in Byzantium, New Rome, that so many worlds and cultures met and fused. Almost a thousand years before, Megara had colonized Byzantium; and Pausanias, a Spartan, had ruled there with all the luxury of an oriental potentate, forgetting his rigorous upbringing. Byzantium was a place of unity and at least a degree of order, as well as of creative energy and zeal. One could find there, as well, strong evidence of “the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome.” Herbert Couch, in his Greece reminds us that when on May 11, 330 A.D., Byzantium was inaugurated as the seat of government and given the name of New Rome (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) there began a “mingling of Greek, Latin and Christian interests.”(10) That the region was inevitably led far from Classical culture later on does not alter the fact that Oriental, Classical and Christian cultures here achieved a fusion which would naturally fascinate Poe. This blending, unity, and balance in the Byzantine culture (as well as the strange mingling of two worlds, one terrestrial, the other spiritual) led Yeats, another creative pilgrim, metaphorically, for he writes, using the sea for his own questing and cleansing symbol: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.”

There are other Christian suggestions in “To Helen,” vague perhaps intentionally. Poe writes of Helen's “hyacinth hair.” The image clearly enchanted him. He describes Ligeia's tresses as “setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, ‘hyacinthine!’ ’ We know that the hyacinth flower has various colors, among them pink, lavender, orange, and white, and that the jacinth (stone) is reddish-orange or amethyst, all exotic shades for hair (which Poe may also have wished to suggest) but from the point of view of “poetic logic” one can think of the curling petals of the flower, tightly winding but in a particular form suggesting the coiffure of a woman. He used the coiffure image in “The Assignation,” in describing the classical head of the Marchesa Aphrodite, which was clustered “in curls like [page 36:] those of the young hyacinth.” Can we ignore, however, the rebirth symbol? This flower, according to Greek mythology (and set forth in some detail in Ovid's Metamorphoses) grew out of the blood of the dead Hyacinthus, the beloved of Apollo, whom the God accidentally killed with his discus; and rites for the dead and reborn Hyacinthus were annually observed in Sparta. The idea of the reborn man, no doubt reinforced by the teachings of Jesus, was a compelling one for Poe.

“Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche” Helen stands like a statue. “Brilliant is the adjective for “light” (which as “illumination” has a double sense), and it is also the adjective which means “wise.” “Brilliant” describes power of the mind, and so the power which draws Poe is mental and spiritual as well as physical. A niche, which is often shaped like an arched window, so that window-niche has a double meaning as well (a place for a beam to guide one: a place for a statue), is taken from the Latin word nidus meaning “nest,” as any good dictionary would have told Poe, in case he had forgotten his Latin. And “nest” is home, a place of warmth and safety (spiritual home here), where there will be unity of soul and mind and body.

Jack Lindsay's A Short History of Culture, which gathers together information from many scholarly sources, states that the ancient Egyptians believed that a statue was also another dwelling place of the soul.(11) That Poe felt the sense of souls related to statues and especially to statues made of marble, we know from his story, “The Assignation,” cited above. The strange hero of this tale is an admirer of statues and names Canova as his favorite sculptor. Canova, who was born in 1757 and died in 1822, is best-known for his group of Psyche and Cupid. Most critics say that he revealed in this piece formal beauty and total lack of content. One would suppose this was an attempt to evoke feeling rather than to direct a message, an aesthetic principle Poe might have admired. In the conversation between the host and the visitor in “The Assignation,” there is reference to what Michael Angelo and possibly Socrates said about finding one's statue in the block of marble, as though the medium itself already possessed the soul of its statue to be. Paradoxically, Poe further emphasizes the affinity between a man and his statue when he has the hero quote from Chapman's Bussy D’Ambois: “He is up / There like a Roman statue! He will stand / Till Death hath made him marble!” This concept of one giving soul to the other, the marble to the man and the statue, the man to the statue after his own death, exchanging life for life, is somewhat like the folk belief of the soul of man in the mirror. From any reliable art history, one can learn that for the Byzantines a sculptured form or a form worked in mosaics was one's spiritual self or projection. In A Vision, Yeats has much to say about the effect of the two-worlds quality of Byzantine sculpture and art on his own mind and gives reasons why (and I believe the same magnetic qualities would have appealed to the earlier Poe) he wanted Byzantium to be the place where his own soul would be purged and where his creative work might live.

One of the more interesting symbols Poe uses is that of the agate lamp. On the obvious level of correspondence mentioned above, such a lamp is shaped like a bark of ancient design, and therefore the lamp is linked back as a carrier in the hand of his soul's carrier. The lamp is an illuminator, the source of illumination in the spiritual sense. The Biblical use of the word is probably best known from the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, but there is wide use of “lamp” in the Old Testament in a symbolic sense. The classic figure of a woman carrying a lamp has long been a metaphor for watchful and spiritual waiting and guiding. For decades, the Christian Science Sentinel carried on its front cover (it is now on the inside of the front cover) a drawing of a woman robed in the draperies best known from Greek art, holding the traditional boat-shaped lamp. It is not impossible to believe that Poe, as did Mary Baker Eddy, thought of the lamp as a dual symbol, both Christian and Classical. Indeed, he now addresses (in the third stanza) Helen as Psyche, and few would doubt that she stands for his soul; certainly she is not the Roman goddess, lately arrived, whom Keats addresses in his ode. What reinforces the spiritual view here is that Poe uses the preposition from rather than of, and there are the fascinating lines: “Ah, Psyche, from the regions which / Are Holy Land.” And again we think of Yeats's lines: “And therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” For Poe as for Yeats, as for Tennyson, the quest, the pilgrimage, the gleam was the real reason for living.

The final line of “To Helen” supports my belief, or so I think, about a home in the Greek-Roman-Christian-Oriental Byzantium. Despite his love for classical [page 37:] culture, the phrase “Holy Land” could not exclude the Christian for Poe. As pointed out above, Greek and Roman culture found a fusion in Byzantium (and quite literally, as well, with much sculpture “lifted” from the ancient Greek shrines by Constantine's soldiers). Later, however, during the Christian dominance, art and handiwork were all for the glory of God; and everything, even men's bodies as spiritualized in their statues and mosaics patterned themselves upon spiritual concepts, an offering of the soul, so to speak, to God for purgation in God's holy fire. An observation one cannot avoid making here, and not in line with what has gone before, is that if Psyche is soul and from, not of, those regions which are Holy Land, then in a transcendental sense, there is a strong suggestion of Wordsworth's “... trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” It seems certain that in “To Helen” Poe saw the possibility of returning home, or achieving his longed-for union of the ideal and the real, the spiritual and the physical, the unspoiled vision and imagination of childhood, not through death but through art. Poe is seeking classical control and supernal beauty (still to be found on earth), both of which could surely be found in the ancient Greek-Roman-Christian culture, an idealized home, as was for Yeats in our own century.

I have worked on the structure of the poem, and I think it is not an accident that it is divided into three stanzas, as three is the magical number (the Three Graces, the Trinity, the three-times-woven ring around the holy man in “Kubla Khan,” the innumerable examples from fairy tales and the Grail legends). Each shows woman in different aspects of her power, grace, and pure beauty, reaching in the third stanza a kind of revelation of woman as soul or spirit. In the first, the woman is a “carrier” (her traditional role of child-bearer, teacher of traditions to the young, and so on) and is equated with those Nicean barks of yore. Her loveliness and steadiness make the vessel which bears the pilgrim home. In the second, the woman's pulchritude, charm, and grace are not only the means of reaching home, but they are the givers (another womanly role is that of giver) of abstract gifts which are, paradoxically, gifts of the highest human achievement: glory represented by Greece, grandeur represented by Rome. The second stanza is not separate from but linked with the first one in a more complex way than in poems which seem more complex. There is no radical difference here, simply an extension, as in most trinities. The final stanza with the use of the word “statuelike” (as symbol equated with soul and for the womanly qualities of calmness and unwavering devotion) and the word “Psyche” presents woman in her most idealized state, as illuminator, beacon, healer, and — on the highest level of meaning — spiritual being from Paradise, Elysium, or Heaven, however one chooses to name “Holy Land.”

Salisbury State College

[page 37, continued:]

[[Notes]]

1 “Edgar Allan Poe” is reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson, (Ann Arbor, 1966), p. 13.

2 Floyd Stovall, “The Conscious Art of Edgar Allan Poe,” College English, XXIV, (March, 1963), 419.

3 “The House of Poe,” Poe, ed. Robert Regan, (Englewood Cliffs, 1967), p. 102.

4 (New York, 1957), p. 153.

5 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, (Oxford Paperback, London, 1963).

6 Hervey Allen, “Introduction,” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, (New York, 1938), p. vii.

7 The Classical Tradition, (N.Y., 1957), pp. 440-441.

8 Op. cit., 174, 177.

9 Walter Sutton, ed., American Literature: Tradition and Innovation (Lexington, Massachusetts, 1969), p. 1305.

10 2nd ed. (New York, 1953), p. 524.

11 Fawcett World Library Premier Printing (New York, 1966), pp. 202-204.