Modern American Poetry

(^390) Louis L. Martz
Egyptian Helen,which H.D. may have seen. Here the story says that Helen
never was in Troy, but that the gods sent there a phantom of Helen, while
the true Helen was transported by Zeus to Egypt, where, after the war, she
was reunited with Menelaus, or in H.D.’s version, with Achilles:
Had they met before? Perhaps. Achilles was one of the
princely suitors for her hand, at the court of her earthly father,
Tyndareus of Sparta. But this Helen is not to be recognized by
earthly splendour nor this Achilles by accoutrements of valour. It
is the lost legions that have conditioned their encounter, and “the
sea-enchantment in his eyes.”
How did we know each other?
was it the sea-enchantment in his eyes
of Thetis, his sea-mother? (H,7)
In that phrase “the sea-enchantment in his eyes” we meet in both the prose
and the poetry the leading phrase and symbol of the work, for Thetis will, as
the sequence proceeds, be merged with Aphrodite, also born of the sea, and
with Isis, called in the prose “the Egyptian Aphrodite” (H,15). Helen herself
is in the latter part of the work transformed into a living symbol of all these
goddesses: the love of Achilles for Helen, then, suggests a way of redeeming
the war-torn world, as the voice of Helen has said very early in the poem:
it was God’s plan
to melt the icy fortress of the soul,
and free the man;
God’s plan is other than the priests disclose;
I did not know why
(in dream or in trance)
God had summoned me hither,
until I saw the dim outline
grown clearer,
as the new Mortal,
shedding his glory,
limped slowly across the sand. (H,10)