The poem opens “Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicean barks of yore,” and we should know that we are already in trouble. “Helen” is presumably Helen of Troy, and a bark is a kind of boat, the word chosen for its archaic sound, signaling that we are talking olden times. But what in the name of all that is holy is the adjective “Nicean” supposed to signify?

There are theories, of course, because there are always theories about the works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Perhaps “Nicean” refers to Nicaea, an ancient Greek colony in Asia Minor, near the Bosporus, although the colony was founded long after the Trojan War and is most famous not for its boats but for hosting the council that produced the Nicene Creed in A.D. 325. Or perhaps the word refers to the colony that would become the modern French city of Nice, a perfume and shipping center. Maybe it’s an allusion to the island of Nysa, or the god of victory, Niké, or, in a gesture to Homer, a play on “Phaeacian,” or . . . 

No matter how plausible or implausible, these readings all share the fact that they involve slippage from one ancient thing to another — which is, in fact, the key characteristic of Poe’s sweetest poem, “To Helen.” We start with Helen, and we end with the Holy Land, and along the way we slide along references to Odysseus, the Greek myth of Hyacinth, naiads, the Roman Empire, and Psyche, the lover of Cupid whose name is also the word for the soul. The poem only makes sense if we take everything in the entire ancient world as forming a vague cloud of elements that are imagined to belong together simply because they are all ancient.

We shouldn’t let anyone get away with that kind of haziness. Then again, we always let Edgar Allan Poe get away with it. We’ve run Poe as a Poem of the Day here in the Sun several times, noting that there’s often a kind of symbolic looseness in his work. If “To Helen” is even looser that “Annabel Lee” or “Eldorado,” that only serves to make his poetic technique clearer. We praised Hart Crane for the run of metonymy — the slide of a thing into something associated with it, and then the slide of that new thing into something associated with it — in his poem “At Melville’s Tomb.” So why not Poe in “To Helen”?

Written in memory of Jane Stanard, the mother of his childhood friend, the poem was first published in 1831 and revised (and improved) through to its final form in the 1845 collection of Poe’s work, “The Raven and Other Poems.” In three five-line stanzas — four four-foot lines ending with a three-foot line, with slightly varying rhyme schemes — “To Helen” has that ear-worm quality that Poe could somehow find so often.

To Helen
by Edgar Allan Poe

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. 

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. 

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!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.