Helen of Troy

[woofwoof]

I came across this poem by the modernist poet HD which expresses how the people of Greece might have felt after Helen was restored to them at such a terrible price - so many lives lost in that 10 year conflict:

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.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

A painting which goes very well with the poem is Helen of Troy by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/?p=133

I think Rossetti's depiction really captures the cold, hard beauty of Helen. In the background you can see Troy burning. So many thousands on both sides must have died in this war, yet it's as though it is nothing to Helen. All she can think about is her own appearance, her fine clothes, her obvious love of luxury. [Makes me think of our own celebrity obsessed culture - millions starve / die in conflicts while we carry on worshipping fashion and celebrity...]

[Heather]

It's an excellent poem, but it's only one view. The legend does not say that Helen was obsessed with fine clothes and luxury. It does say that she was made to love Paris by the goddess Aphrodite, because Paris had given her the golden apple. If the Greeks knew that (and how would we know if they didn't?) perhaps they would not blame her.

HD is also guilty of laziness - using the word 'maid' for Helen, presumably for the rhyme. Maid means virgin, and she certainly wasn't that.

Rosetti's Helen is a typical PreRaphaelite woman - blank, no character at all. Very rash to try to depict her at all - how can you portray the most beautiful woman the world has ever known? What model can you possibly use?

Here is 'No Second Troy', W.B. Yeats's take on the Helen story. He is talking about the woman he loved, Maude Gonne, who was active in Irish politics:

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?