In Helian we see a new discovery of expression not only in the irregularity of forms and organization of poems, but also in imagery, time and progression. 

 

Viewed as the first part as a whole, the narrative descends from childhood bliss and innocence to a gradual birth in the fallen world (death, decay and sadness in the present), the vacillation between memory of the idyllic (co-present with the present) and the awareness of the present, a nearly complete immersion into corruption. Overall, Helian may be a reflection of the poet himself as to find a new way that allows him to explore the intricacies of the self more fully.

 

Helian is more dynamic and dialectical, the poem charts the gradual loss of childhood vision as the poet-as-adolescent confronts reality untransformed by the creative imagination. The poem enacts the persona’s mythopoetic state of mind as seen through images suggesting the harmony and totality of the natural, human, and the divine, as well as the blurring of subject/object and past/present distinctions. 

 

Harmony and wholeness is first suggested through the pastoral images of shepherds, stillness, harvest, and the communal. In the state of primal innocence, the speaker-protagonist is at once with nature, as the poem opens: In the lonely hours of spirits, beautiful it is to walk in the sun, Beside the yellow walls of the summer, softly the footballs ring in the grass. Later, he is with his fellowmen that indicates adolescence as Stanza 2 goes: Evenings on the terrace we got drunk with brown wine. All of the “glory” converges with nature and so does the decadence, namely solitude and death, in a seemingly linear fashion, where the progressions complement each other with each following its natural course: seasonally, from summer to autumn or early winter, diurnally from day to nightfall and experientially, life fully lived followed by a peaceful death. Vistas and bright colours give way to horror and blackness; and the sense of being finally descends inward to ground oneself: “O how earnest is the countenance of the dear dead. Yet a just regard delights the soul”. // “O how lonely the evening wind desists, Fading, the head bows in the dark of the olive tree.”

 

Time is worth mentioning - the use of present tense within the poem. The poem is arranged in a typological way which takes moments (seasons and days) separated in time and relate them to one another (e.g. autumn to night time) as the intensification of the earlier time in the latest. Present tense is used to blur the past/present distinctions in order to foil the temporarity. 

 

The poem is an epic of derangement, a distillation of personal and communal suffering, the descent into an abyss of degraded innocence and eventual ascension from human chaos and bodily destruction through divine resurrection.