Helen Women and Femininity Quotes

Bam. The poem begins with hate, and its hate is directed towards Helen's famously beautiful body (even if her body is not seeming all that beauty here). Helen appears as an object of other people's hate here, and not as an agent, or someone with control over her own life. It ain't easy to be a dame in mythological Greece.

When the poem hints at Helen's backstory—her "past enchantments / and past ills"—we get just a glimpse of what Helen might be thinking about (instead of just what Greece thinks of her). This is the only moment of subjectivity in the poem, when we get a hint of Helen-the-person (as opposed to Helen-the-female-object-of-deathly-beauty).

In these final lines, we discover that Helen can only be loved once she's dead. Nice sentiment, Greece. But when we look closer, we see a pretty ominous sexual reference going on. There is a subtle pun on the word "laid," which acts here both as a euphemism for sex and as a reference to being "laid to rest." In that sense, you could argue that the poem blames the Greeks for conflating sex with death. A beautiful woman can only be loved if she's dead. Nice work, Grecians.