Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see, where it flies!

These lines are spoken by Doctor Faustus near the end of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy *Doctor Faustus* (c. 1592). Having squandered his years of magical power and nearing the moment when his pact with Lucifer will be collected, Faustus asks Mephistopheles to conjure Helen of Troy—the legendary beauty whose abduction sparked the Trojan War. In a final, desperate turn from repentance, Faustus seeks transcendence through sensual and aesthetic rapture, imagining that a kiss from “Sweet Helen” can grant him immortality. The scene crystallizes the play’s late-stage mood: spectacle and desire offered as a substitute for spiritual salvation.

Faustus’s exclamation fuses classical myth with Renaissance ambition and Christian anxiety. Helen becomes an emblem of beauty so powerful it can move nations (“a thousand ships”) and destroy cities (“the topless towers of Ilium”), but for Faustus she is also a last illusion—an eroticized promise of escape from damnation. The language of immortality and the image of his soul being drawn out by her lips suggest a perverse parody of religious communion: instead of grace, he embraces a fatal enchantment. The passage highlights the play’s central irony: Faustus, who sought limitless knowledge and power, ends by surrendering himself to a beautiful image that cannot save him.

1) “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships” (common spelling/punctuation variant in editions)
2) “burnt the topless towers of Ilium” (often printed without “And” at the start of the line)
3) “Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!” (punctuation/spacing variant)