Leda and Helen

Geoff Page

Strange times they must have been,

the age of bronze and heroes,

the age of gods and their begettings,

a prayed-for wind across the sea,

the slaughtered girl who made it happen,

those old gods with their vagaries,

their petulance and sheer self-interest.

Why is it they beguile us still?

Marlowe with his errant Helen,

her face that launched a thousand ships,

and Yeats, who conjured her conception

and wrote of Leda as a girl

who, as her rapist wings away

slips back to the marriage bed

and in due course gives birth to four,

among the half-gods, Helen,

acme of the ancient world,

demigoddess to be hymned

or written off as whore.

Ovid in Heroides

has his bet each way,

shows her thinking quick affair,

slick and with an equal,

the princely Paris who, as shepherd,

had had three lissome goddesses

display themselves au naturel

seeking his opinion.

Ovid though is more than clear

Helen never really sought

that ten-year misadventure,

queenly though it was amid

the topless towers of Ilium

and bearing kids with Paris.

Could she really have foreseen

the corpses with their splendid names

and lances in the throat?

A feathered glory, Yeats proposed

of what the mortal Leda

endured one afternoon with Zeus.

GEOFF PAGE grew up on a cattle station on the Clarence River in northern NSW. In addition to twenty-four collections of poetry, Geoff has published two novels, five verse novels, several anthologies, two books of translation and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He has reviewed Australian poetry widely since 1967 and has run monthly poetry readings in Canberra continuously since 1994. His awards include the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award and as well as the 2017 and 2020 ACU Poetry Prize. A substantial review of his later work, 101 poems: 2011-2021, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2021.