swaying as before the mast,
“the season is different,
we are far from — from —”
let him forget,
Amen, All-father,
let him forget.
[7]
Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carriage of battle, this is a “carrion creature” but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is “instructed,” she is enchanted, rather. For from the depth of her racial inheritance, she invokes (as the perceptive visitor to Egypt must always do) the symbol or the “letter” that represents or recalls the protective mother-goddess. This is no death-symbol but a life-symbol, it is Isis or her Greek counterpart, Thetis, the mother of Achilles.
We huddled over the fire,
was there ever such a brazier?
a night-bird hooted past,
he started, “a curious flight,
a carrion creature — what—”
(dear God, let him forget);
I said, “there is mystery in this place,
I am instructed, I know the script,
the shape of this bird is a letter,
they call it the hieroglyph;
strive not, it is dedicate
to the goddess here, she is Isis”;
“Isis,” he said, “or Thetis,” I said,
recalling, remembering, invoking
his sea-mother;
flame, I prayed, flame forget,
forgive and forget the other,
let my heart be filled with peace,
let me love him, as Thetis, his mother,
for I knew him, I saw in his eyes
the sea-enchantment, but he
knew not yet, Helen of Sparta,
knew not Helen of Troy,
knew not Helena, hated of Greece.
[8]
She is afraid, too. So she needs this protection. She has tried to conceal her identity with mockery, “I am a woman of pleasure.” She knows what the Greeks think of her, and here is Greece-incarnate, the hero-god; true, he is shipwrecked; nevertheless, though wounded, he carries with him the threat of autocracy. She has lost caste. He is still Achilles. Or who is she? She says that Helen upon the ramparts was a phantom. Then, what is this Helen? Are they both ghosts? And if she is convinced of this, why does she entreat the flame that Achilles kindled, “let me love him, as Thetis, his mother”? Is she afraid of losing even her phantom integrity? And what of it? Thetis — Isis — Aphrodite — it was not her fault.
O—no—but through eternity, she will be blamed for this and she feels it coming. She will blacken her face like the prophetic femme noire of antiquity. But it does not work. Achilles is here to impeach her. Why? We must blame someone. Hecate—a witch—a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of common invective, he taunts her — a hieroglyph. This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all, the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born-of-the-sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin, “O child of Thetis.” This is quite enough. Can you throttle a phantom? He tries. The end is inevitable.
How could I hide my eyes?
how could I veil my face?
with ash or charcoal from the embers?
I drew out a blackened stick,
but he snatched it,
he flung it back,
“what sort of enchantment is this?
what art will you wield with a fagot?
are you Hecate? are you a witch?
a vulture, a hieroglyph,
the sign or the name of a goddess?
what sort of goddess is this?
where are we? who are you?
where is this desolate coast?
who am I? am I a ghost?”
“you are living, O child of Thetis,
as you never lived before,”
then he caught at my wrist,
“Helena, cursed of Greece,
I have seen you upon the ramparts,
no art is beneath your power,
you stole the chosen, the flower
of all-time, of all-history,
my children, my legions;
for you were the ships burnt,
O cursèd, O envious Isis,
you—you— a vulture, a hieroglyph”;
“Zeus be my witness,” I said,
“it was he, Amen dreamed of all this
phantasmagoria of Troy,
it was dream and a phantasy”;
O Thetis, O sea-mother,
I prayed, as he clutched my throat
with his fingers’ remorseless steel,
let me go out, let me forget,
let me be lost .......
O Thetis, O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak,
let me remember, let me remember,
forever, this Star in the night.
Book Two
[1]
But Helen seems concerned not only with the mystery of their reconciliation but with the problem of why he had, in the first instance, attacked her. There seems this latent hostility; with her love, there is fear, yet there is strength, too, and defiance not only of Achilles, but of the whole powerful war-faction.
Perhaps he was right
to call me Hecate and a witch;
I do not care for separate
might and grandeur,
I do not want to hear of Agamemnon
and the Trojan Walls,
I do not want to recall
shield, helmet, greaves,
though he wore them,
for that, I might recall them,
being part of his first
unforgettable anger;
I do not want to forget his anger,
not only because it brought Helen
to sleep in his arms,
but because he was, in any case,
defeated; if he strangled her
and flung her to the vultures,
still, he had lost
and they had lost —
the war-Lords of Greece.
[2]
But this host of Spirits, the Greek heroes? Without the Trojan War, she would never have found them or they would never have found her. Nor, we may presume, would she and Achilles have met in this out-of-time dimension. But Helen seems divided in her loyalties. She speaks of the “burning ember,” the funeral pyre of the Greek heroes, and in her thought, dismisses Achilles, but we feel that she is really concerned with that other “burning ember … the flint, the spark of his anger.”
It is the burning ember
that I remember,
heart of the fire,
consuming the Greek heroes;
it is the funeral pyre;
it is incense from the incense-trees,
wafted here through the columns;
never, never do I forget the host,
the chosen, the flower
of all-time, of all-history;
it was they who struck,
as the flint, the spark
of his anger, “no art is beneath your power”;
what power drew them to me?
a hieroglyph, repeated endlessly,
upon the walls, the pillars,
the thousand-petalled lily;
they are not many, but one,
enfolded in sleep,
as the furled lotus-bud,
or with great wings unfurled,
sailing in ecstasy,
the western sea,
climbing sea-mountains,
dividing the deep valleys of the sea;
but now, go, go,
Achilles from me;
I feel the
lure of the invisible,
I am happier here alone
in this great temple,
with this great temple’s
indecipherable heiroglyph;
I have “read” the lily,
I can not “read” the hare, the chick, the bee,
I would study and decipher
the indecipherable Amen-script.
[3]
We were right. Helen herself denies an actual intellectual knowledge of the temple-symbols. But she is nearer to them than the instructed scribe; for her, the secret of the stone-writing is repeated in natural or human symbols. She herself is the writing.
I said, I was instructed in the writ;
but I had only heard of it,
when our priests decried
papyrus fragments,
travellers brought back,
as crude, primeval lettering;
I had only seen a tattered scroll’s
dark tracing of a caravel
with a great sun’s outline,
but inked-in, as with shadow;
it seemed a shadow-sun,
the boat, a picture of a toy;
I was not interested,
I was not instructed,
nor guessed the inner sense of the heiratic,
but when the bird swooped past,
that first evening,
I seemed to know the writing,
as if God made the picture
and matched it
with a living hieroglyph;
how did I know the vulture?
why did I invoke the mother?
why was he seized with terror?
in the dark, I must have looked
an inked-in shadow; but with his anger,
that ember, I became
what his accusation made me,
Isis, forever with that Child,
the Hawk Horus.
[4]
Helen is a Greek, a Spartan, born from a sea-faring people. Although in Egypt, it is not the primitive caravel, as she calls the shadow or death-ship of Osiris, that she visualizes, when she would recall the host of Spirits. Her vision is wholly Greek, though she returns to the sacred Egyptian lily for her final inspiration.
This is the spread of wings,
whether the Straits claimed them
or the Cyclades,
whether they floundered on the Pontic seas
or ran aground before the Hellespont,
whether they shouted Victory at the gate,
whether the bowmen shot them from the Walls,
whether they crowded surging through the breach,
or died of fever on the smitten plain,
whether they rallied and came home again,
in the worn hulks, half-rotted from the salt
or sun-warped on the beach,
whether they scattered or in companies,
or three or two sought the old ways of home,
whether they wandered as Odysseus did,
encountering new adventure, they are one;
no, I was not instructed, but I “read” the script,
I read the writing when he seized my throat,
this was his anger,
they were mine, not his,
the unnumbered host;
mine, all the ships,
mine, all the thousand petals of the rose,
mine, all the lily-petals,
mine, the great spread of wings,
the thousand sails,
the thousand feathered darts
that sped them home,
mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,
the thousand-and-one, mine.
[5]
But Helen returns to the caravel, the death-ship, as a suitable attribute of Osiris, “King and Magician, ruler of the dead.” She senses the parallel. Has her knowledge made her happier? Perhaps. In any case, if Achilles has taunted her with her resemblance to Isis, and related the Isis-magic to a Hecate or witch-cult, so she sees clearly the duality of the legendary héros fatal.
The inked-in sun
within the caravel,
was symbol of Osiris,
King and Magician,
ruler of the dead,
and he was torn asunder
by his brother,
so they said,
the Whirlwind, Typhon;
so with the whirlwind
of the chariot-wheels,
the clang of metal
and the glint of steel,
Achilles lorded Simois plain,
as Typhon, the Destroyer;
destroyer and destroyed,
his very self was lost,
himself defeated;
the scattered host
(limbs torn asunder)
was the Osiris,
“the flower of all-time,
of all-history,
my children, my legions”;
he lived, the immortal son
of the sea-goddess,
but anger made him sterner,
anger enclosed Osiris
within the iron-casement
of the Whirlwind, War;
they were not two but one,
Typhon-Osiris
to the initiate.
[6]
As Isis seeks to reclaim Osiris with the help of their Child, the sun-god Horus, so Helen, with the aid of “the unnumbered host” (symbolized by “the Hawk with the fiery pinions” or “the thou-sand-petalled lily”) would gain spiritual recognition and ascendency over “Typhon, the Destroyer.”
O Child, must it be forever,
that your father destroys you,
that you may find your father?
O Child, must the golden-feather
be forever forged by the Spirit,
released in the fury of war?
O Child, must you seek your mother
while your father forever
attacks her in jealousy,
“I begot them in death, they are mine”;
must death rule life?
must the lily fade in the dark?
is it only the true immortals
who partake of mortality?
who but Helen of Troy
and Achilles, shipwrecked and lost,
dare claim you and know the Sun,
hidden behind the sun of our visible day?
does he speak of this?
does he acknowledge the thousand-petalled lily
that claimed its own,
the Hawk with the fiery pinions?
does he say, Helen,
you brought them to me?
not he — he comes, he goes —
back to the darkness?
called by a Spirit-master
to drive out the darkness,
to free the imprisoned,
even as God set him free?
[7]
But if she accuses Achilles of weighing “a feather’s weight with a feather, ” she herself seems equally introspective. She seems to doubt her power, or the magic of the goddess Isis (Aphrodite, Thetis). She is jealous of “man, alone,” the flight from laughter to the trumpet’s call. She seems to doubt her power to lure Achilles from this, or the power of women in general. There is no good in this postulate. She will get nowhere. She knows this.
Will he forever weigh
Helen against the lost,
a feather’s weight with a feather?
does he dare remember
the unreality of war,
in this enchanted place?
his fortress and his tower
and his throne
were built for man, alone;
no echo or soft whisper
in those halls,
no iridescent sheen,
no iris-flower,
no sweep of strings,
no answering laughter,
but the trumpet’s call;
does he still wait the dead,
to challenge the celestial hierarchy?
whose are the dead
/>
and whose the victory?
the light grows dim,
the riddle of the written stone
suddenly weighs me down;
why do I doubt, why wonder?
[8]
So being Helen of Troy, whether or not she ever walked upon the ramparts, she flings knowledge away. Let the temple walls flower with “the indecipherable Amen-script.” It is not necessary to “read” the riddle. The pattern in itself is sufficient and it is beautiful.
Is Fate inexorable?
does Zeus decree that, forever,
Love should be born of War?
O Eros of flaming wings,
O Horus of golden feathers,
let my heart be filled with peace,
let me draw him back to this place;
alone, does he pace the beach,
does he question the wandering stars,
swaying as before the mast,
“the season is different,
we are far from — from —”
what heart-break, what unappeasable
ache, burning within his sinews,
as he remembers the arrow
Helen in Egypt: Poetry (New Directions Paperbook) Page 2