Helen and Helen

One of my favorite poems that I read in high school was Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen." I loved the way in which Poe describes everything about the often mentioned "most beautiful woman in the world":

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.

Poe represents  Helen's beauty not through a description of her physical appearance in this stanza, but rather how her presence would make him feel were he to behold her. The simile describes Helen's beauty as being like rescue ships bringing a man lost at sea to "his own native shore." It is this complex comparison that allows the reader to gain a sense not only of Helen's mesmerizing form, but of the speaker's complete fascination with the her.

As I was talking to a friend about this poem, she told me to check out H.D's "Helen," which I found serves as a sharp contrast to Poe's poem:

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

A very straight forward statement of the speaker's feelings towards Helen if you ask me. It is interesting, however, that though this poem is quite different from Poe's (his being from the Victorian era and hers being from the modern era) this one employs similar elements to create an image of Helen rooted from a base of emotion. H.D uses a metaphor to describe Helen's empty eyes, and as she continues to describe her appearance, she mentions that Greece reviles at her, "remembering past ills."

To me, this is a beautiful demonstration of the poet's power to control literary elements to persuade you to feel how the speaker feels. In Poe's poem, I imagined and felt how enchanting a demigoddess would be, yet in H.D's poem I could feel myself  "revile" at a stony-cold face who brings nothing but trouble.