To Helen

“To Helen” has three stanzas with five lines each. The first-person speaker is generally considered to be Poe himself, writing to a woman named Jane Stanard. He describes this woman’s beauty with references to the Greek myths, especially those about the beautiful Helen of Troy.

The first two stanzas are located at sea. The specific locations listed in the second stanza, Greece and Rome, as well as the mythology he references point to Poe writing about the Aegean Sea. The sea is also a symbolic place away from Helen, who is the addressee of the poem, or the “thee” (Line 12)—an outdated word for you—of the poem. The sea is a place where the speaker roams: “On desperate seas long wont to roam” (Line 6). This characterizes the speaker as a traveler.

In this nautical location, Helen’s beauty is compared to boats that carry the traveler home. Poe’s simile includes the “Nicéan barks of yore” (Line 2), where “barks” means boats and “of yore” means from a long time ago. However, scholars interpret “Nicéan” in several different ways. To connect with Homer’s Odyssey, Nicéan has been read as a version of Phoenician. Other interpretations include the boats being from the ancient town Nicaea (modern Nice, France) or the island of Nysa (a reference to the Greek god Dionysus).