ANALYSIS O

F TO HELEN

BY

: YE

RE

MI A

ABSTRACT

The writer would like to analyze a poem, titled To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the intrinsic elements contained in this piece of poem. This paper would like to analyze how the intrinsic elements contained in this poem correlates with the life of the author.

Keywords : Allusion, Simile, Beauty.

INTRODUCTION

Poetry is a masterpiece of art produced by people which is not only about a simple writing but also a composition of many depictions that generates a lot of meaning through sight, feel, smell, and other components of human senses.

As people know, poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient. It has been the concern of the folks not only the lowborn citizens but also the royal families and the educated men. Poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than ordinary language does. Being in the group of the intelligent, it is a must to study more intensively about the poetry. To enjoy and love every time reading the poem is very important for the writers in composing this essay.

THEORY

Allusion

As a literary device, an allusion entails the activation of independent elements from the evoked text. Ben-Porat describes four stages in the interpretation of an allusion. The first stage is the identification by the reader of a marking element in the alluding text “as belonging to or closely related to an independent referent text.” Direct quotation from a source text is the most obvious kind of marker.

An example of a famous allusion came from Milton’s Paradise Lost :

“All night the dread less Angel unpursu’d

Through Heav’ns wide Champain held his way, till Morn,

Wak’t by the circling Hours, with rosie hand

Unbarr’d the gates of Light. There is a Cave

Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne”

When talking about allusion, any conversation would not be complete without

discussing the King of Allusion, Milton. In these lines alone, we count no fewer

than three allusion: one to Abdiel, one to the Greek Myth The Horae and one to

Homer’s The Odyssey.

Similes

The function of similes may, in its most basic meaning, be to fully, illustrate an idea or the quality of an object by means of a case that is either similar to the matter being described or different in an illustrative manner. The discussion by ancient rhetoricians of figures of speech strongly analogous to what we would understand by modern definition as similes focuses strongly on their persuasive function and is therefore not without relevance when considering a work ostensibly aimed at instructing the reader. The figures of comparison considered critical to persuasive argument include similes that become elaborated beyond their fundamental points of comparison.

BIOGRAPHY

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic,

considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest

American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with

contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing

alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Born in Boston, Poe was the second child of two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year.

Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia. Although they never formally adopted him, Poe

was with them well into young adulthood. Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar repeatedly clashed over debts, including those

incurred by gambling, and the cost of secondary education for the young man. Poe attended the University of Virginia for one semester but

left due to lack of money. Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed

name. It was at this time his publishing career began, albeit humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems

(1827), credited only to "a Bostonian". With the death of Frances Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement. Later

failing as an officer's cadet at West Point and declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer, Poe parted ways with John Allan.

Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845 Poe published his poem, "The Raven", to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. For years, he had been planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.

Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

DISCUSSION

Poe, in writing this piece, includes a lot of creature and beings from the Greek Mythology. Those who are familiar with it should feel home when he/she read the piece.

In this section, the writer would like to analyze the poem in two ways. The first is by looking at the intrinsic element that’s contained in this poem, and how the extrinsic elements have an effect in the creation of this piece. Be mindful that the allusions will be writen using bold and the similes would be underlined

THE FIRST STANZA

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.

In the first stanza, we could clearly see the allusion in here. As those who have read or at least have a bit understanding of Greek literature, Helen would be a name that’s not a stranger to our ears. It refers to the Trojan War, a war which inspired many form of literature. The two opposing sides, Troy and the Greek States, warred because of an insult by a Trojan Prince. Paris (The Trojan prince mentioned before) took the wife of Menelaus (King of Sparta) back into his home country of Troy. That wife of Menelaus was Helen, the most beautiful woman of that time. So it is somewhat relatable that the author used Helen, the fairest of them all, as his idea of a beautiful woman.

Next, let’s take a look at the simile. In this stanza, the author decided that Helen’s beauty was comparable with Nicean barks of yore. Barks in here was not a skin of a tree. In the times of old, the word barks have the meaning of ships and yore was the word for ancient So, the author compares Helen’s immeassurable beauty with old ships that bore the weary wanderer into his own native shore (A little bit of metaphore was used in here, as Helen’s beauty could not literarily take a man back into his homeland.)

THE SECOND STANZA

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.

The second stanza tell us another tale from the Greek Mythology. Hyacinth here of

course not only refers to the flower by the name of it, but also to a Greek hero with

the same name. Hyacinth was so beautiful that even Apollo took him as a lover.

The Naiads strays not too far from the mythology too. The Naiads were a creature

based out of the mythology. They are a creature of the waters and are known to

exhibit an extremely beautiful faces.

THE THIRD STANZA

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!

On to the third one, the author alludes to Psyche. Again, for those unfamiliar with

Greek Mythology, it would sound somehow strange. Psyche was the lover of Cupid.

In the mythology, Psyche was one beautiful mortal and it made Aphrodite, the

goddess of love, jealous with Psyche’s beauty. Aphrodite told his son, Cupid, to go

make Psyche fall in love with something so hideous. Turns out Cupid himself struck

his own bottom with his own arrow, which makes him in love with Psyche.

The agate lamp was also an allusion to Pysche’s story. When Psyche and Cupid met,

they always done it in a dark place. One day Pysche got curious and she brought an

agate lamp with her.

CONCLUSION

In the end, this poem tells us how the feeling of love could be relevant in the way we

see something as beautiful. The allusions were straight on and the similes were

powerful. Poe clearly loves this ‘Helen’ of his so bad that he compares her to nothing

but wonders of the ancient Greece. We knew that Poe lead a life filled with hardship.

His mother died when he was an infant, which make woman’s company seems

important to him. This piece that he wrote was written to commemorate one woman

that managed to be the first one to show him love. Poe loved everything about this

woman and it shows from the way he describe her beauty.

REFERENCES

Allen, Hervey (1927). "Introduction". The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: P. F. Collier &

Son.

Perrine’s (2004) Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (11th edition).

Robert Scott (2010) An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded Upon the Seventh Edition of

Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon.

Scheler, Max (1954). The Nature of Sympathy. Peter Heath (trans.). New Haven: Yale University

Press.

LaFallotte, Hugh (1991). "Personal Relations." Peter Singer (ed.) A Companion to Ethics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love