A Comparison Of Helen In Poetry And Hilda Doolittle

All poems have different meanings. Helen, a character from Greek mythology, was someone that was hated by Greeks for leaving them and heading to Troy for Paris, causing a war to break out. Edgar Allan Poe, an American author and poet, and Hilda Doolittle, an American poet, both wrote poems describing Helen from different perspectives. These two poems mostly contrast, by showing different perspectives and both describing Helen in different ways. Though they do both compare by both acknowledging Helen’s beauty.

First of all, the poems contrast with each other because they show different perspectives, Hilda Doolittle writes in her poem “All Greece hates/the still eyes in the white face,” this is from the perspective of the Greeks after Helen left them. They were too bitter to think clearly, and started only looking at Helen’s flaws, ignoring all of her flawless traits. Though in Poe’s poem, he’s focusing on only Helen’s flawless traits, he says in his poem, “Helen, thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore,” Poe in writing from the perspective of the someone in modern time, admiring Helen. This is shown when he writes, “To the glory that was Greece/And the

Showing this, Poe writes “Helen, thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore,” Poe compares Helen’s beauty to beautiful boats, sailing across the ocean, and he shows that the speaker thinks that Helen is flawless. While in Doolittle’s poem, she writes, “Greece sees, unmoved,/God's daughter, born of love,/the beauty of cool feet/and slenderest knees.” Doolittle acknowledges Helen’s beauty and knows that Helen is one of the most beautiful characters in Greek mythology. She also says, “the still eyes in the white face, the lustre as of olives.” Hilda Doolittle compares Helen to the lustre of olives, which vividly describes how the Greeks hated