Helen in Egypt: Poetry (New Directions Paperbook) Read online

  Helen in Egypt

  by H.D.

  Introduction by Horace Gregory

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  Contents

  Introduction

  Pallinode

  Book 1

  Book 2

  Book 3

  Book 4

  Book 5

  Book 6

  Book 7

  Leuké

  Book 1

  Book 2

  Book 3

  Book 4

  Book 5

  Book 6

  Book 7

  Eidolon

  Book 1

  Book 2

  Book 3

  Book 4

  Book 5

  Book 6

  Introduction

  Who is Helen in Egypt? The argument at the very beginning of the poem indicates her origin:

  We all know the story of Helen of Troy but Jew of us have followed her to Egypt. How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode was the first to tell us…. According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen…. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.

  And who was Stesichorus of Sicily? He was a Greek lyric poet (ca. 640–555 B.C.) a contemporary of Sappho and Alcaeus, and whose pen name, “Stesichorus,” means Choir-setter. He was the inventor of the choral heroic hymn, and in that form raised lyric verse to the stature of the epic. He probably inspired Euripides to write his Helen in which, as the first scene shows us, Helen is in Egypt. All this is, of course, post-Homeric, yet post-Homeric versions of a myth often owe their inspiration to earlier, to half-forgotten, pre-Homeric sources. The only survival of Stesichorus’ twenty-six books of poems is a fragment of fifty lines. H.D.’s Helen in Egypt is no translation, but a re-creation in her own terms of the Helen-Achilles myth.

  Today it is believed that the fall of Troy took place about 1200 B.C. (As any historian knows, ancient dates shift according to theories in the measurement of time.) In a like scale of measurement, the Homeric epics came three hundred years later. By 900 B.C. the fall of Troy, as well as the complex of tragedy, both Greek and Trojan, surrounding it — due to Greek genius — had become timeless. In the fall of Troy was its beginning. It possessed the imagination of the poets. Troy’s end became the center of a galaxy of myths, a cycle in which the present tense is in a continual process of becoming (which is the language of poetry), in which the past becomes the future. It is appropriate that the overlying theme of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt is one of rebirth and resurrection.

  In her re-creation of the Helen-Achilles myth, it is no less appropriate that H.D. has chosen to wear the mask of Stesichorus. Her poem is written in a series of three-line choral stanzas; it is a semidramatic lyric narrative; each change of scene, each change of voice is introduced by a brief interlude in prose. Far from distracting the eye and ear of the reader, the design of the poem sustains the flow of its variations, and preserves its narrative unity. This innovation in the writing of Helen in Egypt is characteristic of H.D.’s art, for from the day that Ezra Pound presented her early poems as examples of “Imagiste verse” she has been known as one of the principle innovators in American poetry. Although she has frequently acknowledged that the years of her early training in the writing of poetry owe their debts to Pound’s remarks in his “A Few Don’ts for Imagistes,” her lyric gifts soon transcended the limitations of a school of writing. Since 1931, the publication date of her book of poems, Red Roses for Bronze, it has been a misnomer to define her poems as “Imagiste verse.” “However,” she said, “I don’t know that labels matter very much. One writes the kind of poetry one likes. Other people put labels on it. Imagism was something that was important for poets learning their craft early in this century. But after learning his craft, the poet will find his true direction.” Without denying the brilliance of Pound’s remarks in “A Few Don’ts for Imagistes,” it is true that the poets of that early group (all were young and high spirited) who later achieved distinction did so because of the individual merits of their poetry. Only those who pay more attention to labels than to poetry itself are likely to become confused by talk of “movements” and “poetic manifestoes.” It is clear that the memorable poets (including H.D. and Pound himself) among the “Imagistes” were not confused. These were the innovators of poetic form, and not those who wrote for the sake of merely seeming “new” or experimental.

  H.D.’s concern has been centered upon the nature of reality, or as she has said less abstractly, more modestly, “a wish to make real to myself what is most real.” Her innovations are allied to that concern, to evoke the timeless moment in a brief lyrical movement and imagery of verse. In the creation of her style no living poet has exerted a greater discipline in the economy of words. This is one of the reasons why H.D. is so often regarded as a “poets’ poet,” the creator of a classic style in modern verse. Her adaptation of Euripides’ Ion is less known than her shorter lyrics, nor are her longer poems in The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod, written in London during World War II, as well known as they should be. In retrospect these have become the forerunners of Helen in Egypt, the preparation for writing a new kind of lyric narrative, one in which the arguments in prose act as a release from the scenes of highly emotional temper in the lyrical passages.

  The scenes of Helen in Egypt may be accepted as visions perceived after the event of the Trojan War. The war years of the Greek and Trojan ancients were no less vivid, less total in their results than our half-century of wars today. Without mentioning parallels between them, the situations in Helen in Egypt contain timeless references to our own times. It is as though the poem were infused with the action and memory of an ancient past that exist within the mutations of the present tense. It is H.D.’s achievement to make us feel their presence. The dramatic scenes in the poem are written in defense of “hated Helen” — and the conflicts of Helen’s guilt are the springs of tension throughout the poem. The scenes are also a showing forth, an epiphany of the cycle of myths surrounding the active images of Achilles and Helen, visions in memory of her relationship to Thetis, strange scenes between Helen and Achilles, as well as those which show her meetings with Theseus and Paris — but I shall not attempt to paraphrase the poem. As every intelligent reader of poetry knows, to paraphrase a poem is an impossibility, nor is it possible to reiterate in prose the actual meanings contained within the poem. During the past thirty years there have been many attempts to give T.S.Eliot’s. The Waste Land various meanings. These succeeded only in bewildering the author — and he was left the choices of being amused, or flattered, or annoyed. It is best to say that Helen in Egypt increases its spell at each rereading. A line of the poem reads, “the old enchantment holds” — and that is true. Through the intonations of its choral music, the poem is an enchantment: there is magic in it.

  The twentieth century is not without its singular recreations of Greek myths. Of these Joyce’s Ulysses is best known. No less singular is André Gide’s essay in monologue, his Theseus. One can neither compare nor contrast H.D.’s Helen in Egypt with these. They are works in prose. Her poem is not an epic; it borrows nothing from the essay or the novel; yet like the other two books, it stands alone. It is a rarity.

  In twentieth-century poetry, book-length poems of the first order are also rare, and H.D.’s Helen in Egypt is among them. The classic spirit that inspires and sustains a poem of this length is almost lost: Helen in Egypt is a sign of its recovery.

  — HORACE GREGORY

  PALLINODE />
  Book One

  [1]

  We all know the story of Helen of Troy but Jew of us have followed her to Egypt. How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode, was the first to tell us. Some centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he reinstated her in his Pallinode. Euripides, notably in The Trojan Women, reviles her, but he also is “restored to sight.” The later, little understood Helen in Egypt, is again a Pallinode, a defence, explanation or apology.

  According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.

  Do not despair, the hosts

  surging beneath the Walls,

  (no more than I) are ghosts;

  do not bewail the Fall,

  the scene is empty and I am alone,

  yet in this Amen-temple,

  I hear their voices,

  there is no veil between us,

  only space and leisure

  and long corridors of lotus-bud

  furled on the pillars,

  and the lotus-flower unfurled,

  with reed of the papyrus;

  Amen (or Zeus we call him)

  brought me here;

  fear nothing of the future or the past,

  He, God, will guide you,

  bring you to this place,

  as he brought me, his daughter,

  twin-sister of twin-brothers

  and Clytaemnestra, shadow of us all;

  the old enchantment holds,

  here there is peace

  for Helena, Helen hated of all Greece.

  [2]

  Lethe, as we all know, is the river of forgetfulness for the shadows, passing from life to death. But Helen, mysteriously transposed to Egypt, does not want to forget. She is both phantom and reality.

  The potion is not poison,

  it is not Lethe and forgetfulness

  but everlasting memory,

  the glory and the beauty of the ships,

  the wave that bore them onward

  and the shock of hidden shoal,

  the peril of the rocks,

  the weary fall of sail,

  the rope drawn taut,

  the breathing and breath-taking

  climb and fall, mountain and valley

  challenging, the coast

  drawn near, drawn far,

  the helmsman’s bitter oath

  to see the goal receding

  in the night; everlasting, everlasting

  nothingness and lethargy of waiting;

  0 Helen, Helen, Daemon that thou art,

  we will be done forever

  with this charm, this evil philtre,

  this curse of Aphrodite;

  so they fought, forgetting women,

  hero to hero, sworn brother and lover,

  and cursing Helen through eternity.

  [3]

  Her concern is with the past, with the anathema or curse. But to the Greeks who perished on the long voyage out, or who died imprecating her, beneath the Walls, she says, “you are forgiven.” They did not understand what she herself can only dimly apprehend. She may perceive the truth, but how explain it? Is it possible that it all happened, the ruin — it would seem not only of Troy, but of the “holocaust of the Greeks,” of which she speaks later — in order that two souls or two soul-mates should meet? It almost seems so.

  Alas, my brothers,

  Helen did not walk

  upon the ramparts,

  she whom you cursed

  was but the phantom and the shadow thrown

  of a reflection;

  you are forgiven for I know my own,

  and God for his own purpose

  wills it so, that I

  stricken, forsaken draw to me,

  through magic greater than the trial of arms,

  your own invincible, unchallenged Sire,

  Lord of your legions, King of Myrmidons,

  unconquerable, a mountain and a grave,

  Achilles;

  few were the words we said,

  nor knew each other,

  nor asked, are you Spirit?

  are you sister? are you brother?

  are you alive?

  are you dead?

  the harpers will sing forever

  of how Achilles met Helen

  among the shades,

  but we were not, we are not shadows;

  as we walk, heel and sole

  leave our sandal-prints in the sand,

  though the wounded heel treads lightly

  and more lightly follow,

  the purple sandals.

  [4]

  Had they met before? Perhaps. Achilles was one of the princely suitors for her hand, at the court of her earthly father, Tyndareus of Sparta. But this Helen is not to be recognized by earthly splendour nor this Achilles by accoutrements of valour. It is the lost legions that have conditioned their encounter, and “the sea-enchantment in his eyes.”

  How did we know each other?

  was it the sea-enchantment in his eyes

  of Thetis, his sea-mother?

  what was the token given?

  I was alone, bereft,

  and wore no zone, no crown,

  and he was shipwrecked,

  drifting without chart,

  famished and tempest-driven

  the fury of the tempest in his eyes,

  the bane of battle

  and the legions lost;

  for that was victory

  and Troy-gates broken

  in memory of the Body,

  wounded, stricken,

  the insult of the charioteer,

  the chariot furiously driven,

  the Furies’ taunt?

  take heart Achilles, for you may not die,

  immortal and invincible;

  though the Achilles-heel treads lightly,

  still I feel the tightening muscles,

  the taut sinews quiver,

  as if I, Helen, had withdrawn

  from the bruised and swollen flesh,

  the arrow from its wound.

  [5]

  The Myrmidons are Achaeans in Thessaly, and by Achaei, Homer designates the Greeks in general. But these legendary or archaic Greeks of the north are reputedly fair-haired, a race destined later to migrate and give the warrior-cult to Sparta. Here, values are reversed, a mortal after death may have immortality conferred upon him. But Achilles in life, in legend, is already immortal — in life, he is invincible, the hero-god. What is left for him after death? The Achilles-heel.

  This was the token, his mortality;

  immortality and victory

  were dissolved;

  I am no more immortal,

  I am man among the millions,

  no hero-god among the Myrmidons;

  some said a bowman from the Walls

  let fly the dart, some said it was Apollo,

  but I, Helena, know it was Love’s arrow;

  the body honoured

  by the Grecian host

  was but an iron casement,

  it was God’s plan

  to melt the icy fortress of the soul,

  and free the man;

  God’s plan is other than the priests disclose;

  I did not know why

  (in dream or in trance)

  God had summoned me hither,

  until I saw the dim outline

  grown clearer,

  as the new Mortal,

  shedding his glory,

  limped slowly across the sand.

  [6]

  The great Amen, Ammon or Amŭn temple still stands, so we may wander there with Helen. She and we need peace and time to reconstruct the legend. Karnak? Luxor? Thebes, certainly. This is the oldest city in the world. Home
r knew it. But we look back, not so jar geographically and historically. They had met on the coast in the dark. Achilles has been here with her; no doubt, he will come again. But for the moment, she wants to assess her treasure, realize the transcendental in material terms. For their meeting in eternity was timeless, but in time it was short, and “few were the words we said.”

  How did we greet each other?

  here in this Amen-temple,

  I have all-time to remember;

  he comes, he goes;

  I do not know that memory calls him,

  or what Spirit-master

  summons him to release

  (as God released him)

  the imprisoned, the lost;

  few were the words we said,

  but the words are graven on stone,

  minted on gold, stamped upon lead;

  they are coins of a treasure

  or the graded weights

  of barter and measure;

  “I am a woman of pleasure,”

  I spoke ironically into the night,

  for he had built me a fire,

  he, Achilles, piling brushwood,

  finding an old flint in his pouch,

  “I thought I had lost that”;

  few were the words we said,

  “I am shipwrecked, I am lost,”

  turning to view the stars,