Helen

H.D. 1924

Helen of Troy was considered the most beautiful woman on earth, who was so desirable to men that they fought the twelfth-century B.C. Trojan War over her. For several reasons, poet H.D. found similarities between herself and Helen. In the realm of art, H.D. identified her efforts with her mother’s, whose name was Helen. Helen was to become H.D.’s name for herself and for the Helen situation in all women throughout history. H.D. once remarked, “The mother is the Muse, the creator, and in my case especially, as my mother’s name was Helen.” Helen of Troy’s daughter was named Hermione; this was what H.D. called herself as a child in the autobiographical novel of the same name. More and more, H.D. came to associate herself with Helen because so many of the men in her life — including Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and Cecil Gray — found her desirable. Poet William Carlos Williams wrote of her: “She fascinated me, not for her beauty, which was unquestioned if bizarre to my sense, but for a provocative indifference to rule and order which I liked.” It is indifference that also characterizes the statue of Helen in H.D.’s “Helen”; her indifference to the convention of marriage angers the Greeks who look upon her. H.D.’s relationship to Helen went even further. She likened Pound, to whom she was once engaged, to Helen’s first husband, Menelaus. She compared Richard Aldington, whom she married after she split with Pound, to Paris, the most handsome man on earth who stole Helen from Menelaus. Lawrence, who “made war” on H.D.’s marriage with Aldington, became identified with the warrior Achilles, Helen’s lover after the Trojan War.

“Helen” is a picture poem, a verse in which the picture or image of a marble statue of Helen is conveyed in words. This statue of Helen, H.D. tells us, has been reviled by Greeks throughout history. The primary reason is that Helen is blamed for starting the ten-year Trojan War. The poem is a cautionary tale describing how a woman’s beauty can be doubly tragic: deadly not only for the men risking all to possess it, but for the woman victimized by the beauty so coveted.