Helen (Style)

Style

“Helen” is an early modernist poem in free verse. Ezra Pound, having deliberated with H.D. and Richard Aldington, wrote in 1912 that poetry, to be modern, must follow three principles: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” These two principles apply to modern verse and, more specifically, to Imagism, an image being defined by Pound as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound’s third and last principle, however, describes only free verse: “3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” A more recent definition of free verse is Laurence Perrine’s (1956): “Free verse, by our definition, is not verse at all; that is, it is not metrical. It may be rimed or unrimed. The word free means that it’s free of metrical restrictions. The only difference between free verse and rhythmical prose is that free verse introduces one additional rhythmical unit, the line. Beyond its line arrangement there are no necessary differences between it and rhythmical prose.” What neither Pound or Perrine say here, however, is that free verse, while free of a metrical pattern, is also free to construct a pattern beyond rhyme, conforming to the contents or message(s) of the poem being crafted.

“Helen” is partially rhymed free verse. For example, the rhyme scheme in the first stanza is, loosely, aabbb. However, the b lines only partially rhyme by way of the plural “s” sound. Full and partial rhyme is used throughout the poem, as is occasional assonance. There are three stanzas, each reading as a single sentence. The second stanza is one line longer than the first, and the third stanza is one line longer than the second. The lines are mostly short and concise, conforming to Pound’s first and second principles listed previously. The poem also adheres to Pound’s third principle in that the poem’s meter is not regular. Yet overall, “Helen” contains a ragged regularity. The first stanza wholly consists of lines of two accents in a variety of combinations of accented with unaccented syllables. The second stanza is irregular but does begin and end with lines of two accents. The last stanza consists of lines mostly of three accents, with the last line of the poem having as many as four or five accents, depending on how it is read. In this respect, as the stanzas accrete lines, the lines accrete accents. While the reader moves down the poem, an image of Helen is built up mostly downward — from the face and hands of the first two stanzas to the knees and feet of the third.