Rosenberg II: This incestuous worm

A Worm Fed on the Heart of Corinth

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome.
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To his amorphous sleep.
England! famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung.
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.

It wasn't Paris because it was sexuality, the pleasure principle which Freud, just a couple of years later, and in the context of trying to understand "shell-shock" (PTSD), was applying to what he called the death drive.

The death drive is governered by the pleasure principle, though at first it seems that it can't be. But the desire for death is a desire for sleep or for rest. As Despayre counsels in The Faerie Queene "Death is the end of woes: die soone, O faeries sonne." It was the incestuous worm who raped tall Helen -- tall because the taller she is the greater her vertical descent to the horizongal grave (Rosenberg must be thinking of Hamlet's meditation on worms in the gravedigger scene). Raped as in carried her away (as Paris did who "lured" her); raped as in forced phallic, worm-like horror onto her.

The singularity of the worm from the first line -- "A worm" -- now gets further emphasis: "this incestuous worm." Why incestuous? Amazing word, and I think it means, again recollecting Hamlet, that the worm is equally related to all living things, that its rape of Helen and of Corinth and of Babylon and of Rome establish the absolute connection among them all, all paired with the worm.

He connects them all, so that he is the embodiment of their connection, which means that his grotesque bodily intimacy with them all is the incestuous intimacy between beings so closely related by their all being equally embodied by the worm.