Helen of Troy and Other Poems

by Sara Teasdale Narrated by LibriVox Community

Overview

Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s second collection, published several years before she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Helen of Troy and Other Poems revels in the mystery of existence itself. “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.” As Troy burns, Teasdale imagines an impassioned monologue given from the ramparts by the infamous Helen, whose faithlessness in marriage was the catalyst for war in Homer’s Iliad. Although she is often seen as a minor character, more an object of male desire than an autonomous subject in her own right, Teasdale refuses to follow the template passed down by generations of poets—mostly men. Her Helen is meditative and intelligent, capable of immense sorrow and full-throated rage alike: “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.” While acknowledging her role in Troy’s destruction, Helen is a tragic figure in Teasdale’s poem, a woman who never asked for beauty, let alone for the troubles that beauty brought down on the world. Containing monologue poems from such figures as Sappho, Beatrice, and Guenevere, alongside a series of love poems and finely-crafted sonnets, Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a brilliant collection by a gifted American poet. This edition of Sara Teasdale’s Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

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Product Details

BN ID:	2940169277890
Publisher:	LibriVox
Publication date:	08/25/2014

Read an Excerpt

GUENEVERE A little kind, and gowned wondrously, And surely it were little praise to me If I had pleased them well throughout my life. I was a queen, the daughter of a king. The crown was never heavy on my head, It was my right, and was a part of me. The women thought me proud, the men were kind, And bowed down gallantly to kiss my hand, And watched me as I passed them calmly by, Along the halls I shall not tread again. What if, to-night, I should revisit them? The warders at the gates, the kitchen-maids, The very beggars would stand off from me, And I, their queen, would climb the stairs alone, Pass through the banquet-hall, a hated thing, And seek my chambers for a hiding-place, And I should find them but a sepulchre, The very rushes rotted on the floors, The fire in ashes on the freezing hearth. I was a queen, and he who loved me best Made me a woman for a night and day, And now I go unqueened forevermore. A queen should never dream on summer nights, When hovering spells are heavy in the dusk: I think no night was ever quite so still, So smoothly lit with red along the west, So deeply hushed with quiet through and through. GUENEVERE And strangely clear, and sharply dyed with light, The trees stood straight against a paling sky, With Venus burning lamp-like in the west. I walked alone among a thousand flowers, That drooped their heads and drowsed beneath the And all my thoughts were quieted to sleep. Behind me, on the walk, I heard a step I did not know my heart could tell his tread, I did not know I loved him till that hour. The garden reeled a little, I was weak, And in my breast I felt a wild, sick pain. Quickly he came behind me, caught my arms, That ached beneath histouch; and then I swayed, My head fell backward and I saw his face. All...

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