To Helen

“To Helen” is a lyric poem with three quintains. A quintain, also called a quintet and a cinquain, is a stanza of five lines. In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe writes about the length of a poem: “[T]he brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect.” Unlike his longer poems, such as the famous “Raven,” “To Helen” is only 15 lines. This brevity is part of Poe’s project to convey the power of Helen’s beauty.

Poe turned to music as a way to consider meter in poetry. In his essay “The Poetic Principle,” he writes that “Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” In “To Helen,” Poe uses tetrameter, which is four metrical feet of two syllables each, for a total of eight syllables in the first three lines of each stanza. Sometimes the lines are iambic, which means the metrical feet follow an unstressed-stressed pattern of syllables.