Memories light the corners of my mind...

A recent conversation has stirred my earliest memory of a poem that wasn't a nursery rhyme or one I had read in school or schoolbook. The poem is "To Helen" by Poe and, unfortunately, the complete image is broken up by haze:

The images I associate with the poem are of my bedroom in Hawaii (so I must have been about eight), a desk that had a fluorescent light built in, a plastic blue and white typewriter, and the poem. I don't know if the poem was in a book of poetry we owned or on a separate sheet of paper. It probably was in a slim volume, but I don't recall ever seeing it again.

Here's the poem:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont 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-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

I do remember being amazed that a poem could contain beautiful images, be more than something humorous or whimsical, and sound pretty nice to the ear as well.

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When I just now read the poem I noticed something interesting about the meter and rhythm. Each stanza sounds quite a bit different from the one preceding it, one reason being the variance in syllable number, and another being that each stanza also makes use of a different pattern of end rhymes. This is especially noticeable in the last stanza. I'm struck by the overall musicality of this poem, but have a hard time with the sound of the last two lines.

Perhaps Poe mentions something about it in The Rationale of Verse.