To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn 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!
"To Helen" is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem was first published in 1831 in Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It was republished in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe's inspiration was Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of his childhood friend Robert Stanard.
The poem consists of three stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme scheme is irregular: the first stanza is ABABB, the second is ABABA, and the third is ABBAB. The poem includes the well known lines, "... the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome".
