This song is one of those rare moments when an actual vibration from the past stirs within the listener. Anyone even remotely familiar with The Iliad or The Odyssey will take to this song and remember all the words almost immediately.
There are many things that stand out about this track and one is the odd way that the singer is telling about this epic tale in two parts as of each character in the title. He opens with the lead in that we are about to hear a tale that's at the fringes of our memory, i.e. we've all heard about it before. As he begins the first part, the character he introduces is Helen and he tells her tale. But he's singing about her in the third person as he lays out the events that lead up to the Trojan War and then ties it off in a sort of musing that perhaps none of it ever happened.
But when he introduces the second character from his title, he doesn't speak of her, he speaks to her. He's talking directly to her and asking her what she knew and what she saw. And it's in this part of the song that the music is changed just enough to match his more saddened tone. He sounds as if he's speaking or channeling such a mistreated character that his own voice is a bit more somber and compassionate. Then closes with how it's a long ago history, and everything that once was is now long gone in the ancient dust. That the ancient places are now ruins that we can touch but there's nothing there anymore to drive home the point of how tragic it is or was.
The singer is definitely sympathetic to the two women he features, seeing Cassandra as a tragic figure and Helen as someone who only wanted her lover and had no interest in being the central figure of that war. Also a tragic figure, of course.
But I have to say that the lyric does tend to be a bit clumsy in that Al Stewart could have written something in place of the famous line "The face that launched a thousand ships" as he rhymes that up with words that end more on the hard consonants and breaks the flow just a little, as they end the various lines that go into the famous line about the ships.
I honestly don't know why he couldn't have spent a bit more time on the lyrics since the rest of it flows and indeed the stanzas about Cassandra flow far more naturally. The story would not have changed at all if he left that line out completely. It wasn't needed as the line isn't even from any of Homer's writings. It's actually from Christopher Marlowe in a work called Doctor Faustus. Written sometime around 1590. Almost three millennia after the the events of the Trojan War. But Al Stewart is brilliant and I'm not dissing him at all!
This song is one of those rare moments when an actual vibration from the past stirs within the listener. Anyone even remotely familiar with The Iliad or The Odyssey will take to this song and remember all the words almost immediately.
There are many things that stand out about this track and one is the odd way that the singer is telling about this epic tale in two parts as of each character in the title. He opens with the lead in that we are about to hear a tale that's at the fringes of our memory, i.e. we've all heard about it before. As he begins the first part, the character he introduces is Helen and he tells her tale. But he's singing about her in the third person as he lays out the events that lead up to the Trojan War and then ties it off in a sort of musing that perhaps none of it ever happened.
But when he introduces the second character from his title, he doesn't speak of her, he speaks to her. He's talking directly to her and asking her what she knew and what she saw. And it's in this part of the song that the music is changed just enough to match his more saddened tone. He sounds as if he's speaking or channeling such a mistreated character that his own voice is a bit more somber and compassionate. Then closes with how it's a long ago history, and everything that once was is now long gone in the ancient dust. That the ancient places are now ruins that we can touch but there's nothing there anymore to drive home the point of how tragic it is or was.
The singer is definitely sympathetic to the two women he features, seeing Cassandra as a tragic figure and Helen as someone who only wanted her lover and had no interest in being the central figure of that war. Also a tragic figure, of course.
But I have to say that the lyric does tend to be a bit clumsy in that Al Stewart could have written something in place of the famous line "The face that launched a thousand ships" as he rhymes that up with words that end more on the hard consonants and breaks the flow just a little, as they end the various lines that go into the famous line about the ships.
I honestly don't know why he couldn't have spent a bit more time on the lyrics since the rest of it flows and indeed the stanzas about Cassandra flow far more naturally. The story would not have changed at all if he left that line out completely. It wasn't needed as the line isn't even from any of Homer's writings. It's actually from Christopher Marlowe in a work called Doctor Faustus. Written sometime around 1590. Almost three millennia after the the events of the Trojan War. But Al Stewart is brilliant and I'm not dissing him at all!
[Edit: Typo.]