For a Helen
Here we come to the third of the mini-series of essays for National Poetry Month. This week’s entry is on George Seferis’ poem “Helen.”
There have been other poems written about Helen of Troy, of course. Probably a multitude, in praise or condemnation of “the face that launch’d a thousand ships/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”1 (We shall leave for another day the discussion of whether Helen would have wanted the ships launched and towers burned. For now, it is enough to say that she was the reason given.)
However, due to order of reading, it wasn’t until this poem, George Seferis’ “Helen,” with its opening epigraph from Euripides’ Helen, that I ran across the version of the story that said she, herself, was never actually in Troy. That it was only a phantom there.
It’s a hard shock of an idea, because of the reaction that it conjures – that entire war, all that destruction, fought only for a phantom? It’s impossible, unbearable.
Would it have been any better had it been actually fought for a woman?
Even if Helen had been there, would that have actually been any different for the rank-and-file soldiers? The vast majority of the men who bled and died at Troy would never have known her as anything other than a name, than a glimpse of a figure, if even that. Whether her actual physical self was at Troy or not, she was only ever a symbol for them.
Seferis’ poem makes this clear. He closes out a stanza with “and for ten whole years we slaughtered ourselves for Helen.” And then in the next:
all for a linen undulation, a filmy cloud,
a butterfly’s flicker, a wisp of swan’s down,
an empty tunic — all for a Helen
“A Helen.” Not Helen. All the suffering, all the death and loss, for a Helen, for something that is the equivalent of an empty tunic. A phantom. A symbol.
Ten years of death.
It is a heartbreak – no, a heart-rending – in beautiful language. We can hear, in the background, as an undercurrent to stanza and meter, the nightingales who are crying, who won’t let us sleep, who sing one last kindness on the bodies of the dead, whose voices spark that revelation from Helen. “’It isn’t true, it isn’t true,’” she cries, sounding like a nightingale herself.
It is no wonder we can’t sleep.
For those of us who come to the story of Troy and the Trojan War through the Iliad, it is a story of glory. Of the gods, and high conflict, and rage, justified. Great losses, great gestures. I don’t have the background to enter the discussion over how much – if anything – of the story of the conflict at Troy is based in fact, and honestly, that doesn’t matter here. The Iliad is fiction. But the power, the truth in Seferis’ poem doesn’t depend on that. The truth is the utter, sleepless tragedy of so much loss in a conflict that had no glory in its origins at all. That had as its origin an ego, a symbol. An excuse:
so much suffering, so much life, went into the abyss all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.
If you enjoy my writing, you may want to know that my new book, A Sleight of Shadows, is out on April 25th. That link will take you to the website of my local indie bookstore, Next Chapter Books, where you can order a signed copy, if you so desire. Just put the signing and personalization request in the comments when you order. They are also hosting a release event that night. But if you buy the book anywhere, or borrow it from your local library, thank you.
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus.