Helen of Troy in Poetry and Song

The face that launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy (Sparta). 
Artist unknown (link here)

I have italicize several words or phrases across the poems cited below to

assist in later editorial remark. These are *asteriked where done. - re slater

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!

*Poe treats Helen not as a historical or moral figure but as a symbol of idealized beauty that guides the wayward soul home. Drawing on classical imagery, Poe presents Helen as a civilizing, almost spiritual force whose beauty offers refuge from chaos and exhaustion, leading the speaker back to a realm of culture, memory, and aesthetic order. Unlike later poets who interrogate Helen’s suffering or objectification, Poe romanticizes and de-historicizes her, transforming Helen into a beacon of transcendence - less a woman than an emblem of beauty’s power to console, orient, and elevate the mind. - re slater

No Second Troy
by William Butler Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

*Yeats uses Helen as a metaphor for destructive beauty and historical inevitability, filtering the Trojan myth through his conflicted love for, obsession with, and continued muse for decades, Maud Gonne. Helen is not blamed outright; instead, her beauty is portrayed as so uncompromising and absolute that it must provoke upheaval in a violent world unworthy of it. Yeats reframes mythic catastrophe as tragic mismatch rather than moral failure, suggesting that certain forms of beauty are fated to collide with history itself - that there can be “no second Troy” because the conditions which make such destruction meaningful no longer exist. - re slater

Helen

by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

where she stands,

and the white hands.

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,

hating it deeper still

when it grows wan and white,

remembering past enchantments

and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,

God’s daughter, born of love,

the beauty of cool feet

and slenderest knees,

could love indeed the maid,

only if she were laid,

white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Copyright Credit: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), “Helen” from Collected Poems 1912-1944. Copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing

*H.D.’s “Helen” radically reverses the traditional gaze, portraying Helen as an object of collective hatred rather than admiration. Beauty here inspires not awe but resentment, and Helen becomes a figure rejected by the very culture that once exalted her. Through stark, imagist language, H.D. strips Helen of romantic aura and exposes how societies scapegoat women whose beauty unsettles them. The poem is less about Helen herself than about cultural projection - how desire curdles into blame once beauty is associated with loss, failure, or decline. - re slater

helen
by e.e. cummings

Only thou livest.    Centuries wheel and pass,
And generations wither into dust;
Royalty is the vulgar food of rust,
Valor and fame, their days be as the grass;

What of today?    vanitas, vanitas...
These treasures of rare love and costing lust
Shat the tomorrow reckon mold and must,
Ere, stricken of time, itself shall cry alas.

Sole sits majestic Death, high lord of change;
And Life, a little pinch of frankincense,
Sweetens the certain passing...from some sty

Leers even now the immanent face strange,
That leaned upon immortal battlements
To watch the beautiful young heroes die.

*Cummings’ “helen” argues that beauty revered at a distance becomes lifeless - and that myths which glorify it are but hollow artifacts themselves. The poem turns the poem upside down, rejecting Helen's common portray as a "grand, idealized, beauty 'worth a war.'" Rather, she is seen as a distant, cold, and emotionally empty legend incapable of inspiring real love or vitality except from those women, mothers, sisters, and daughters, who have lost their "beautiful" sons, husbands, fathers, and lovers as warriors to Troy's war.

More tragic is Helen's own story of being abducted as a child and sexually violated when 10-12 years old by a very young (prince) Theseus of Attica. She is later rescued by her brothers and returned to Sparta as an episode in Helen's life foreshadowing the Trojan War. To blame Helen for all future calamity, to call her dangerous or seductive, is to blame a woman whose own life began in violent coercion and sexualized context.

No less was Helen again abducted by Paris of Troy, to later be spirited away by the god Hermes to Egypt's safety under the protection of Proteus where she remained chaste and virtuous. There, she successfully resists Proteus' son attempting to forcibly marry her. Back in Troy, after the war's conclusion, her husband, Menelaus, recovers her intending to kill her but cannot in a moment of withering will. She then resumes her life as Queen of Sparta, sees Odysseus on his famed odyssey, uses drugs to dull her grief, and when dying, is made immortal by the gods to dwell in Elysium later to be reunited with her grieved husband, Menelaus. - re slater

love letters from helen of troy
by Elisabeth Hewer

you always feared god-born achilles
the most of all your fellows.
his divinity wove him taller,
better, quicker, stronger.

well here’s a secret for you:
*my father was a swan,
and the monthly blood on my thighs
is two-parts ichor.

you think achilles was of impressive descent?
touch me one more time.
maybe it’s time we found out
what the daughter of the mightiest god
can do.

look to your kingdoms.
i am coming for them all.

*Aphrodite gifts Helen to Paris for her beauty which triggers the Trojan War. Then enters Zeus' ever-jealous wife Hera and his "daugther," Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, in fraught rivalry behind the late Bronze Age war between (Anatolian) Troy (Western Asia Minor) and (Mycenaean) Greece around c. 1200 BCE. Next comes Zeus, mighty god of all, shape-shifter of "swan lore" and Leda's trickster, who permits the war to reduce human overpopulation and reset the heroic ages (in jealous indifference). Thus making of Helen a pawn in story of cosmic indifference by the gods. Beauty is fated. Power and war is inevitable. And life holds no meaning, just glory and death. - re slater

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

by Margaret Atwood

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
*My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in *my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

From Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Co., published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Inc.

*Atwood rips mythic Helen from her epic ancient setting and sets here into a modern strip-club. No longer a queen, a cause of war, nor divine beauty, she is a dancer for male spectators fantasizing over her body. Though the setting has changed Helen's "profession" as it were, has not. Beauty has ever been alluring and with allurement comes the exhausting, dangerous work of survival. Rather than being a possession of women beauty is extracted from them as something to be controlled, manipulated, extorted. What is stripped before the mirror is not nakedness but illusion displaying vulnerability, not glory. In that nakedness Helen speaks bitterly of men's naked desire and chaining sentence of entrapment by beauty. The same force that had destroyed cities continues to destroy lives. - re slater

Helen Of Troy

by Sara Teasdale

*WILD flight on flight against the fading dawn
The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.
This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead
That sparkled so the day I saw it first,
And darkened slowly after. I am she
Who loves all beauty — yet I wither it.
Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath —
Forever since my maidenhood to sow
Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep
Their bitter care above me even now.
It was the gods who led me to this lair,
That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,
They should not snatch the life from out my lips.
Olympus let the other women die;
They shall be quiet when the day is done
And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me
There is no rest. The gods are not so kind
To her made half immortal like themselves.
It is to you I owe the cruel gift,
*Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,
To you the beauty and to you the bale;
For never woman born of man and maid
Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,
Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame
That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars
And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.
Have I not made the world to weep enough?
Give death to me. Yet life is more than death;
How could I leave the sound of singing winds,
The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,
Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?
I will not give the grave my hands to hold,
My shining hair to light oblivion.
Have those who wander through the ways of death,
The still wan fields Elysian, any love
To lift their breasts with longing, any lips
To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,
To make the people love, who hate me now.
My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry
Against the fate that made men love my mouth
And left their spirits all too deaf to hear
The little songs that echoed through my soul.
I have no anger now. The dreams are done;
Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see
Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,
In all the islands set in all the seas,
And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me. Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew; —
With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars
Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow
Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.
Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time
The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.

I wait for one who comes with sword to slay —
The king I wronged who searches for me now;
And yet he shall not slay me. I shall stand
With lifted head and look within his eyes,
Baring my breast to him and to the sun.
He shall not have the power to stain with blood
That whiteness — for the thirsty sword shall fall
And he shall cry and catch me in his arms,
Bearing me back to Sparta on his breast.
Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again!

*Helen’s burden did not start with Troy - it began with a god’s desire and a woman’s violation. Helen was not just trapped by myth - she is born from it. Without thunderbolts, without Olympian grandeur, just a swan's graceful body without weapon or claws, comes Zeus to betray Leda's virtue (Helen's mother) reframing Zeus as the opportunistic paramore and the mythic origin not as destiny but as trauma. Accordingly, Zeus appears as a swan in Hewer’s Helen to remind the reader that Helen’s story began with disguised violence. Of beauty used to mask violent power, displaying the epic myth’s cruelty which preceded the war it later justified. - re slater

ANALYSIS

by R.E. Slater

Often, beauty is exposed not as a blessing but as a volatile social force -

projected, exploited, blamed, and endured - revealing more about

 the cultures that worship it than about the women who bear it.

Across the poems, beauty is no longer seen as a stable good. What emerges instead is a shared, unsettling insight: that though beauty is powerful, it is never innocent - and very often, not owned by the one who bears it.

Here’s the pattern that cuts across the poets and the centuries.

1. Beauty as force, not virtue

From Edgar Allan Poe to Margaret Atwood, beauty is treated less as a moral quality and more as an active force - something that moves people, destabilizes societies, and provokes projection. It inspires longing (Poe), upheaval (Yeats), resentment (H.D.), irony and exploitation (Atwood), and sterility or hollowness (Cummings). Beauty creates many emotions - often without voluntary consent of the deified.

2. Beauty as projection

In nearly every case, Helen's interiority is not described personally, but externalised when viewed, spoken about, blamed, or idealized. This admits to the reader that beauty too easily becomes a screen for culturalized desire and fear.

• Poe turns Helen into an aesthetic compass.
• Yeats turns her into historical inevitability.
• H.D. shows how admiration flips into hatred.
• Atwood exposes beauty as commodified spectacle.
• Hewer and Teasdale return us to the interior cost.

Perhaps it could be said that, "Beauty is revealed as something societies need, not something women choose."

3. Beauty as burden

What modern poetry adds - and especially in poets Sara Teasdale, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Margaret Atwood, and Elizabeth Hewer - is the recognition that beauty functions as a liability. It isolates, exhausts, endangers, and silences. Helen’s immortalized beauty does not protect her; it exposes her. The more potent the beauty, the less room there is for her human agency.

4. The collapse of the heroic ideal

Earlier traditions justified suffering by appealing to beauty (“a face that launched a thousand ships”). The poets reflected her, systematically dismantle that logic. Even Yeats, who romanticizes, ultimately admits there is “no second Troy” - that there are no worlds left where such destruction could be redeemed as meaningful. Beauty no longer justifies catastrophe; it reveals its obscenity.

5. What beauty becomes, taken together

Across these poems, beauty shifts:

• from ideal → instrument
• from gift → extraction
• from meaning → myth
• from glory → cost

Beauty survives, but is forevermore stripped of its benign innocence.

 It is no longer redemptive by default. It must answer for what is done

in its name. In hindsight, how might we answer this charge?

6. Beauty, Identity, and Value in a Process Frame

In process thought, beauty, identity, and value are not static properties but relational achievements. They arise in encounter, not essence. Beauty is not something possessed; it is something felt, responded to, and co-created. Identity is not a fixed substance but a pattern of becoming. Value is not imposed from above but emerges through relations that succeed, or fail, in integrating valuative (or becoming) difference.

When seen in this way, human history does not indict beauty itself but reveals  humanity's uneven capacity to receive it well in the light that it is given.

7. The Double Valence of Beauty in History

Across myth, poetry, and culture, beauty functions with a double valence.

Negatively, when communities lack ethical maturity, beauty becomes:

• appropriated rather than honored
• instrumentalized rather than encountered
• mythologized rather than listened to

In these moments, beauty is conscripted into power, blame, or spectacle - not because it demands this, but because relational failure distorts it.

Positively, when relational integrity is present, beauty becomes:

• a lure towards harmony
• a catalyst for caring rather than conquest
• a site where difference can be held without domination

In process terms, beauty is the lure of becoming value - but lures can be resisted, misread, or corrupted.

8. Re-reading Helen Through Process Thought and Philosophy

The poets scripted here in this post are not condemning beauty, nor evacuating human agency, but testing the ethical adequacy of human response to beauty.

Helen becomes a diagnostic figure - but not “the sole cause of disaster” - but the place where immature social relations collapse under aesthetic power.

The failure lies not in neither Helen's nor beauty's identity, but in how value is negotiated within historical, political, and gendered systems.

9. A Process-Theological Synthesis

Here is a conceptual keystone we might end on:

From a process perspective, beauty, identity, and value are not fixed attributes but relational achievements that emerge within history. Beauty functions as a lure toward harmony and depth, yet human communities have repeatedly shown themselves capable of receiving this lure either creatively or destructively.

The poetic tradition surrounding Helen of Troy does not indict the value of beauty itself, nor does it erase ethical, human agency; rather, it exposes how aesthetic power tests the ethical maturity of its recipients. Where relational integrity fails, beauty is appropriated, instrumentalized, or blamed. Where it succeeds, beauty becomes a site of mutual recognition and shared value. Human history records both possibilities.

In a phrase:

In process thought, beauty is neither innocent nor culpable -

it is relationally potent, revealing the moral quality

of the world that encounters it.

Helen

by R.E. Slater

Look to your kingdoms -

I am coming for them all.

- Elisabeth Hewer

Helen -
but not the beauteous face

men broke themselves upon -

but that ancient tremor of the world,
where humanity learned

it felt intensely more than it had.

You were never the cause,
only the imagined lure -
whose beauty was invitation,
asking what kind of people
the world would become

before beauty's presence.

We immortalize your seduction
amid white marbled war-cries,
mistaking personal responsibility

for all-consuming, violent ownership;
calling our failure fate
by giving it your name.

But beauty is not so simple -
it is a temptation, a query asking

to be met with care and mindfulness;

presenting moments of response

that either deepens or shatters

those who behold

such terrifying beauty.

In mythic Helen, we are moved,

and the world moved with you -

badly.

You endured unwanted attention;

you survived forces and designs;

not as ruin - but as memory,

of austere possibilities,

of quiet insistence,

birthing harm or wonder,

honored or challenged.

Your ethereal image

was mis-received;

become too real,

too alluring,

for the world to look on

and not be tempted.

Yet your eternal beauty remains,

athwart a high fortress wall,

looking seaward,

watching white-masted ships,

sailing to your surrender,

and promises of completeness.

R.E. Slater

January 23, 2026

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Helen of Troy

The Queen of Greek Myths

The story of Helen of Troy, her remarkable birth and her infamous love affair with Paris, the Trojan prince, resounds across the centuries. A figure of condemnation, pity and tragedy, her beauty set in motion the most legendary literary conflict of all time: the Trojan Wars. Yet, Helen’s story reaches far beyond Homer and the Iliad. From her godly parentage and the egg from which she hatched, to her marriage to the king of Sparta and her abduction to Troy, Helen crossed paths with the greatest figures of Greek mythology. But in a story told almost entirely by men, what then is the truth of Helen? Was her fabled life one of abuse and oppression, or was she the mistress of her own fate? And could it be that she did in fact really exist?

Join Tom and Dominic as they journey through the life of Helen of Troy, into worlds of myth and legend, and explore the significance of this most iconic of women - both for the world of the Ancient Greeks, and our world today.

Popular Modern Songs

• "Helen of Troy" by Lorde (2021): Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.

• "The History of Man" by Maisie Peters (2023): Listen on Spotify or YouTube.

• "Helen of Troy" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (2013): Listen on Spotify or YouTube.

• "Helen of Troy" by Robert Plant (1988): Listen on Spotify or SoundCloud.

Classical and Experimental Works

• "Helen of Troy" by John Cale (1975): Listen on Spotify or view the Wikipedia entry for the album.

• "Helen of Troy and Other Poems" by Sara Teasdale (performed by Michael York/Hoppé): Available for streaming at Internet Archive.

• "La Belle Hélène" by Jacques Offenbach: A variety of professional performances are available on YouTube Music.

• Film Soundtracks"Helen of Troy: Love Theme" by Elmer Bernstein (1956 Film): Listen on Spotify.

• "Helen of Troy" by Joel Goldsmith (2003 Miniseries): Portions of the score can be found on YouTube.