Poetry Annual · Fall 2003
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Helen of Troy
Kevin Bezner
No war was ever fought for this ghostly demon,
Skin of a cadaver, lips and eyes of a boy.
Not even the wavy golden hair
Would have convinced Paris
That this was the woman Aphrodite promised.
If his eyes had painted a true Helen,
Agamemnon might have spared Iphigenia,
And so spared himself a death
At the hands of grieving Clytemnestra.
Here, Rossetti is more slanderer than Stesichorus.
But perhaps he paid for his bold lie,
And with each stroke of his brush became more blind.