Summary
In this short but powerful poem, H.D. imagines what the mythology of Helen of Troy means for the Greek people, as a metaphor for the relationship between the physical and the emotional, the concrete and the abstract, and the literal and imagined in a misogynistic world. While the poem alludes to war and Greece's mythological past, the main exploration in the poem is that of the cultural tendency to repress resentment and envy while letting it drive behavior, and to denigrate women. Further, H.D.'s poem illustrates what the figure of Helen indicates about society's confused and deleterious relationship to the female subject; how people depend deeply on women, and long for them, while simultaneously objectifying, blaming, and dissecting them in a vicious, misplaced rage. H.D. also explores the paradox of figures as still, dead, or perhaps not even real to begin with, while still functioning as active, determining entities within the individual and collective psyche.
Analysis
The poem begins with the statement that "All Greece hates" certain attributes of Helen, or what may be a statue of Helen. The title, as well as the mention of Greece, solidifies that the speaker is referring to Helen of Troy. The speaker writes that the people of Greece hate her "still eyes" on her "white face," "the lustre as of olives" where she is standing (perhaps referring to her place in Greek identity, or the literal location of the statue), and her "white hands." The whiteness of her body could refer to her privilege and royalty, her vulnerability and innocence, or simply her aesthetic quality as a stone statue.
The following stanza provides more clues about why Greece hates Helen, and what this hatred symbolizes culturally. Firstly, the speaker repeats the words "All Greece," but this time uses the world "reviles," which gives a momentum to the hatred, as does the anaphora of that initial phrase. The word "reviles" also carries a connotation of contempt and disgust. At this point in the poem, the reader starts to realize that perhaps this complex hatred is unwarranted, insidious, and misplaced. When the speaker notes that Greece hates Helen when she smiles, and even more so when her face reveals nostalgia and pain, the reader encounters the much larger cultural problem of misdirected vitriol against women.
Perhaps in these initial lines, the speaker also touches on the individual and cultural compulsion to forget what is painful. Maybe the fact that Helen is a fixed part of Greek identity, that women are a fixed part of society (and a reminder of male abusers), and that Helen, like many women, will indeed recall the horrors of the past, feels alarming to the instincts of a culture that seeks to forget. Thus, Greece hates Helen because she is a symbol of cultural reckoning, representing the tensions and paradoxes in our patriarchal society. In this poem, the reader observes several simultaneities that access these tensions. One, that Helen inspires desire as a symbol of beauty, but also has a mind of her own. Secondly, she reminds men of their violence, and she both symbolizes and experiences memory, defying the temptation to forget. Thirdly, she maintains an undeniable level of status, import, and value in the Greek imagination. Embodying these qualities together threatens the misogynistic structures that seek to limit, pigeonhole, silence, or degrade women. Thus, H.D.'s use of the phrase "All Greece hates" does not necessarily indicate that all men, or all of culture, impose such pressures on women, but simply that the patriarchy operates in an all-encompassing manner—especially in its infiltration of the collective unconscious.
Notably, in the second stanza, Greece seems to hate Helen both for her human qualities, and her position as a symbol and icon of Greek identity. Greece hates her "still eyes" and "where she stands" (perhaps because they hate the permanence and recognition she has received as a mythical figure). And yet, people also hate her face when she's smiling, and even more when she remembers her past. Given the story of Helen's legendary beauty, and the fact that her kidnapping allegedly started a ten-year war, one could surmise that the intense hatred comes from a combination of factors. Perhaps, resentment from both men and women around her elusive beauty and fame, anger about how much death and war her kidnapping caused, fury that her inherent humanity resists but also provokes objectification, and frustration that she is both ever-present and completely unattainable. These different reasons for hating Helen within the paradigm of Greek mythology create a strong allegorical link to culture's treatment of women in general.
The third stanza enriches this allegory by further describing and dissecting Helen physically. Greece acknowledges but is "unmoved" by Helen, and will only love her if she is obliterated into ash. The fact that Greece will only love Helen once she is reduced to dust further reveals how Helen activates feelings that a patriarchal culture would hope to repress. To such a culture, a woman is only lovable with no voice to disrupt or demand, no body to represent unattainable desire, no power to intimidate, and no status to envy. The poem ends with the bleak prognosis that Helen, a symbol of all women, is only safe from objectification, vitriol, and contempt once she ceases to exist.
