To Helen

“To Helen” is a lyric poem with three quintains. A quintain, also called a quintet and a cinquain, is a stanza of five lines. In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe writes about the length of a poem: “[T]he brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect.” Unlike his longer poems, such as the famous “Raven,” “To Helen” is only 15 lines. This brevity is part of Poe’s project to convey the power of Helen’s beauty.

Poe turned to music as a way to consider meter in poetry. In his essay “The Poetic Principle,” he writes that “Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” In “To Helen,” Poe uses tetrameter, which is four metrical feet of two syllables each, for a total of eight syllables in the first three lines of each stanza. Sometimes the lines are iambic, which means the metrical feet follow an unstressed-stressed pattern of syllables. Here is an example of iambic tetrameter: “Thy hya | cinth hair, | thy class | ic face” (Line 7). Poe’s line resembles love lyrics with a blazon, or list of a woman’s features, from earlier eras that use this classic meter.

The opposite of iambic is trochaic. This means the pattern of syllables is stressed-unstressed. For instance, the first line of the poem is in trochaic tetrameter: “Helen, | thy beau | ty is | to me.” The effect of using a trochaic meter here is to emphasize Helen’s presence immediately, in the first syllable of the first line.

Poe sometimes varies the meter from tetrameter in the fourth line of each stanza, but the fifth line of each stanza is never in tetrameter. The fifth line has six syllables instead of eight, and the tenth line has seven syllables. The final line of the poem is only four syllables long: “Are | Ho | ly- | Land!” This shortening of lines increases the brevity discussed above, the emotion becoming most intense when the speaker, as a traveler, reaches Helen on land.