美国文学-Poe--TO-HELEN--最全点评-(考试专用).doc

精品文档TO HELEN Edgar Allan Poe Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, oer 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! 致海伦 海伦，你的美在我的眼里， 有如往日尼西亚的三桅船 船行在飘香的海上，悠悠地 把已倦于漂泊的困乏船员 送回他故乡的海岸。 早已习惯于在怒海上飘荡， 你典雅的脸庞，你的鬈发， 你水神般的风姿带我返航， 返回那往时的希腊和罗马， 返回那往时的壮丽和辉煌。 看哪！壁龛似的明亮窗户里， 我看见你站着，多像尊雕像， 一盏玛瑙的灯你拿在手上！ 塞姬女神哪，神圣的土地 才是你家乡！ First Stanza: Helen: An allusion to Helen of Troy in Greek mythology. Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Greece, was the most beautiful woman in the world. After a Trojan prince named Paris abducted her, the Greeks declared war on the Trojans, fighting a 10-year battle that ended in victory and the restoration of Greek honor. Helen returned to Greece with Menelaus. Nicean: Of or from Nicea (also spelled Nicaea), a city in ancient Bithynia (now part of present-day Turkey) near the site of the Trojan War. barks: small sailing vessels. End rhyme: A, B, A, B, B. Second Stanza: wont: accustomed to (usually followed by an infinitive, such as to roam in the first line of this stanza). Naiad: Naiads were minor nature goddesses in Greek and Roman mythology. They inhabited and presided over rivers, lakes, streams, and fountains. Naiad airs: Peaceful, gentle breezes or qualities the glory that . . .Rome: These last two lines, beginning with the glory that was, are among the most frequently quoted lines in world literature. Writers and speakers quote these lines to evoke the splendor of classical antiquity. The alliteration of glory, Greece, and grandeur helps to make the lines memorable. End rhyme: A, B, A, B, A. Half rhyme: Face and Greece are similar only in that they have one syllable and the same endingce. The vowels a and ee do not rhyme. Thus, face and Greece make up what is called half rhyme, also known as near rhyme, oblique rhyme, and slant rhyme. agate: a variety of chalcedony (kal SED uh ne), a semiprecious translucent stone with colored stripes or bands. The marbles that children shoot with a flick of the thumb are usually made of agate (although some imitations are made of glass). agate lamp: burning lamp made of agate. Psyche: In Greek and Roman mythology, Psyche was a beautiful princess dear to the god of love, Eros (Cupid), who would visit her in a darkened room in a palace. One night she used an agate lamp to discover his identity. Later, at the urging of Eros, Zeus gave her the gift of immortality. Eros then married her. End rhyme: A, B, B, A, B. from the regions which are Holy Land: from ancient Greece and Rome; from the memory Poe had of Mrs. StanardEdgar Allan Poes poem, To Helen, was inspired by Sarah Helen Whitman, the beautiful young mother of one of Poes boyhood friends - the first purely ideal love of my soul, according to the poet. Or was his poetic inspiration Jane Stith Stanard, as numerous Poe scholars argue? It makes little difference. Since the poem exists in two versions with minor changes, it was apparently first occasioned by his infatuation with Mrs. Stanard and then revised for Mrs. Whitman.The woman of the title is compared to Helen of Troy, possessor of the face that launched a thousand ships. That quotable quote appeared in Christopher Marlowes Dr. Faustus and refers to the kidnapping by Paris of the worlds most beautiful woman, who was the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. That abduction was the cause of the Trojan war.No one is sure why Poe chose to refer to those ships as Nicean barks. Nicea (or Nicaea) is an ancient city of Asia Minor. Probably the poet liked the quality of remoteness associated with the place name and the vowel music it produces in combination with barks. Others feel he may have been echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a favorite poet of the young Poe, who in Youth and Age wrote the line, Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore.The alliterative weary, wayworn wanderer refers to Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), who was delayed ten years on his return voyage from the Trojan War by the adventures and misadventures recorded in Homers Odyssey. Like the bark of Odysseus, Poes Helen and her beauty have transported the poet on the sea of life.Ever a romantic, Poe believed that classical images and allusions were the best ways to capture the glory and grandeur of the past. His subjects hair is hyacinth, or the reddish-orange of zircon. The term has often been poetically descriptive of hair since the mid-17th century. Her face is classic, and Naiad airs allude to the graceful nymphs of mythology, who inhabited streams and lakes.In the concluding stanza, Helen becomes a statue, and we recall the serene facial expressions and flowing garments of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. The agate lamp in her hand connects to his mention of Psyche, the female personification of the human soul in Greek mythology. Psyche was forbidden to look at her beloved Cupid. One night she did so by the light of this kind of lamp and earned his prolonged anger.The Holy Land of the final stanza is the realm of ideal beauty removed both by time and space from the workaday world. In sum, his poem of adoration of a beautiful woman whom he met as an early teenager bespeaks a Platonic, transcendent form of sexuality. It seems consonant with his marriage to Virginia Clemm, a thirteen-year-old first cousin who died at 25 and who is immortalized in Annabel Lee.There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,/ Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge quipped James Russell Lowell in the Poe and Longfellow section of his satirical poem, A Fable for Critics. TS Eliot compared Poes mind with that of a highly gifted young person before puberty. Edgar Allan Poes poetry, whatever its limitations, was a catalyst. The current of his imagination flowed on into Europe and helped nurture the French symbolist movement. Stphane Mallarm in Le Tombeau dEdgar Poe hailed him as the poet whose angel gave a purer meaning to the dialect of the tribe. Poe may have seemed to Eliot an intellectual adolescent, but we could retort that he was in fact the grandfather of one of Eliots most famous lines, To purify the dialect of the tribe.A child-like quality is certainly present in his verse. Its in the diction and the idealised childhood eroticism of Annabel Lee. The Gothic imagination generally seems formed out of nursery shadows and nightmares, infused with adolescent sexual guilt. Poes vision of love tainted and destroyed reaches an almost ecstatic pitch in The Raven and in Ulalume: A Ballad (a superbly made poem, better than The Raven, I think). Poe enjoyed writing burlesque, and these narratives enjoyably teeter on, and draw back from, its brink.In more lyrical, less Gothic mode, Poe might be a decadent reincarnation of William Blake. His simple rhythms and rhymes are asserted with an emotional directness that renders the simplicity trustworthy. Poes idealism is purely aesthetic, however. His angels are jealous or demonic; he sings his liebestod in a fallen world. In an essay, The Poetic Principle, Poe explains his aesthetic, and weaves into it an instructive anthology of poems he admires. Classics were an important influence, as the skill of his versification testifies. In this weeks poem, To Helen, classicism and aestheticism seamlessly fuse. Its an atypical poem, perhaps, with its air of calm concentration, its almost imagistic focus. Poe, like Yeats later on in Sailing to Byzantium tries to transfix a notional Golden Age in verse that itself is timeless and hard. Whoever his personal Helen may have been, she is more than an earthly beloved; partly the Helen of classical legend, she is also, the last stanza suggests, a Beatrice-like figure of moral or, at least, untainted illumination. A little patience is required of todays readers, not only with those Nican barks of yore. There is a perfumed sea to compound the decorative fantasy. But why not? This sea is perfumed because its an ideal sea, sniffed on board the ideal boat of imagination. The adjective prefigures the flower which, in the next stanza, will give us both the seas colour and a lovely image of scented, curling hair: the hyacinth.In the second stanza, a slightly dislocated, Latinate grammar floats the poem towards symbolism. The speaker is the literal subject of long wont to roam. But, metaphorically, the hair, face and Naiad airs have shared the voyage. The roam/Rome rhyme that book-ends this verse is a subtle touch a miniature history in a pair of homophones.The variation in each stanzas closing lines deserves comment. The trimeter line that follows the tetrameter in The weary, way-worn traveller bore/ To his own native shore, has the cadence of homecoming. To the glory that was Greece./ And the grandeur that was Rome are regular trochaic four-beat lines, planted so firmly as to transform the banal thought and the perhaps rather vague distinction between glory and grandeur.The last stanza is the amazing one. We dont expect to see Psyche at this point but there she is, in a silhouette as clear-cut as her agate lamp. If she is the self, or soul, perhaps the regions which/ Are Holy-Land denote the Unconscious. The poem ends on its only dimeter line, a curtailment suggesting perfect sufficiency. This is the limit past which poets and readers travel only in silence. Unusually, for Poe, To Helen leaves a lot unsaid. But, personally, Id rather have this one exquisite lyric than any number of his narratives.Edgar Alan Poe：To Helen It is one of Poes most famous lyrics, inspired by Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a schoolmate of Poe, in Richmond, Virginia. Poe described the poem as “lines written in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul.” The Helen of Greek myth was the beautiful daughter of Zeus. Her abduction by Paris was the cause of the Trojan War and the source of the Iliad of Homer. Psyche was the daughter of an unknown king. Her beauty was so extraordinary that men would worship her instead of courting her. Aphrodite then, out of jealousy for her beauty, sent Eros to make Psyche fall in love