The appreciation of To Helen
To Helen was written by Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, who is still famous in modern today. To Helen is one of his most famous lyrics, which expresses his love to a beautiful woman. This poem was written when Poe was only 14 years old when he saw Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard who was the mother of a schoolmate of him. When he saw her, he loved her deeply and suddenly. Then he wrote this poem.
In Poe’s poems, especially the lyric poem, he always uses mystery to express some supernal feelings. He is good at using some mystery, untouched images that is far away from readers in time and place. The image can be some objectives or person, such as goddess, heaven, Zeus, Trojan War and so on, to show his unique thoughts and feelings. Also he is the masters of the figure of speech, for he always uses simile, metaphor, analogy, paronomasia, alliteration and so on to make his feelings describe freely and totally. To Helen falls into this type of poem. In the poem, the poet uses some archaic words and Greek story, together with a series of rhetoric to show his first love .Helen is a goddess of Greek myths, who is the beau
tiful daughter of Zeus. Her beauty once caused the 10 years long war, called Trojan War. He used Helen’s name to show his love, for he thought the women was so beautiful just like Helen. And his love to Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard just was the same as the common people’s love to Helen.
The poem follows a basic iambic rhythm. The rhyme scheme flows as ABABB, ABABA, and ABBAB. It includes three stanzas, of these there are five lines separately. In every stanza, Poe describes the beauty of Helen, in fact is Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, in the outside and inside. And in the first verse, the love that the poet describes to Helen is beyond the love between men and women. The love includes some other love, such as the love to hometown, the love to relatives, and the love to freedom and peace. In the following verse, Helen’s beauty the poet describes is beyond our imagination and beyond his words by using comparison to the beauty of some goodness. In the last verse, he calls that Helen is holy in beauty. So we can see that the description is more and more deeper than the previous one.
In this poem, the poet uses a lot of the /i:/ /s/ sounds, then when we read, we feel the sound is very beautiful, and can feel poet’s deep love to Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard. It is like a lyric song, and we can enjoy it freely. Poet often shows his love by using many images, such as visual image, olfactory image and kinesthetic images and so on. In the first verse, “roam” and “bore” gives people a moving picture. In the second verse, the “hyacinth hair” and “brilliant window-niche” which is in the third verse, are visual image, and they give us an imagination of the beauty of Helen. From these images, we can have a general understanding of this poem. In the first verse, the beauty of Helen can be feel from distant, however the second verse it is a details description of her beauty. In the last verse it is a holy imagination of her beauty.archaic In all, we can see how the poet loves Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, who is not only beautiful in the outside, but also in her inner world.

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