Cavafy Read online

  Cavafy likewise counsels appropriate response by way of Mark Antony as Antony’s time runs out. It is the time Shakespeare imagined when he had Antony saying, ” “Call to me all my sad captains.” (Antony and Cleopatra Act III, scene 13). In “The God Leaves Antony.” the title a quote from Plutarch, Antony, the scene is Alexandria, the time 31 BCE. Antony has lived virtually as a king, and kings were at the time represented as having been invested with their majesty by a god. For Antony the god would have been Dionysos. But now his god is passing audibly away from him and out of Alexandria. Cavafy can unhesitatingly recommend grace and rational acceptance of that departure, because he knows the true value of kingship, assumed divinity, riches and power. Does he feel sympathy for Antony, that great riotous soldier and lover? Yes, he may, and that is why he wants Antony (and us) to measure appropriately the dimensions of his loss.

  A sense of propriety and correct behavior under stress had to be an important control in the life of a male homosexual brought up in a genteel Alexandrian Greek family. But the physical act of making love, no matter whether between lovers of the same or opposite sex, or when autoerotic, turns the notion, dignity, into an irrelevance. Any attempt to connect that notion with the act would change the “love” of love-making into something else: theatrics, possibly, or hypocrisy, or grim duty, or martyrdom. But for a homoerotic male of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a Judeo-Christian world, love-making often had to be enacted as a criminal enterprise: secret, coded, fearful.

  While no one would want to think of dignity when making love, which brings on an abandonment of self-consciousness, evocations of such acts, cast as poetry, have invested them over the course of millennia with dignity and grace. The distillation by poetry is wholly proper and appropriate. And Cavafy in his erotic poems reaches that poetic distillation when remembering what in the eyes of the majority was an improper passion. “The Chandelier” illuminates as metaphor homoerotic sensibility, desire, and situation in society. “Afternoon Sun” creates a scene that any two lovers in the world could want to commemorate. “Bandaged Shoulder,” which Cavafy did not allow to be published in his lifetime, comes close to exaltation and at the same moment debasement. And in that structured abandonment there is truth and dignity.

  “Before the House” tells of a self-induced climax, but so discreetly that it is not easy to be sure of an exact meaning. This same consummation can be divined in other poems such as “One Night,” “For Them to Come,” “Grey,” “Half Hour” and “Body Remember.” Cavafy found the act of composing poetry physically arousing, especially when his poetry had a memory as its prompt. There situation and circumstance are recorded in words and phrases that attest rapture and at the same time transmute an electrical/chemical reflex into a lasting aesthetic experience. The reflex itself, wished for, consummated, not consummated, is poetry now, hence beautiful, appropriate, and enshrined.

  An indirect admonition closes “The City,” one like that in Horace, Epistles 1.11.27: caelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt. “They change their sky not their spirit, people who run away across the sea.” Cavafy’s tone is darker than Horace’s silky remonstrance, and he may be counseling himself as well as his readers. Both poets are providing useful, practical advice. They tell us that there is an appropriate way to live in a place, namely to perceive how we live there: a change of abode has no value in itself.

  A different but complementary instruction for living, “Proceed with caution,” ends with: “Take and read that message when it is offered you,” an urgent and futile appeal to Caesar on the last day of his life (“The Ides of March”). The poem begins:

  Be afraid, my soul, of grandeurs

  and if your love of glory

  you cannot overcome

  pursue it with doubt and caution:

  the more you go on,

  test and attend the more.

  George Seferis observes that this is the only poem in which Cavafy addresses his soul (Savvides, Ὁ Καβάφης του Σεφέρης, p. 190). Plutarch (Life of Caesar 65) tells the story behind the poem: Caesar was unable to read the message that might have saved his life, because the crowd was pressing him too hard. “On the Way to Sinope” touches on the same theme. In both poems, readers know or can guess the outcome, one that neither Caesar nor Mithridates could ask for. “Theodotus” also presents Caesar and the reader with a mistrust of temporal security.

  Cavafy often used an instrument of comic writing, namely paradox. The aim was to provoke a smile and with that smile an openness to instruction. Witness “Ithaca” again, and “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Alexandrian Kings” and “Footsteps” and “King Demetrios.” In these poems a scene unfolds, in telling detail; in “Alexandrian Kings” it is glowing detail. At close a lesson caps the poem against one’s expectation: it is a paradox. “They Should Have Concerned Themselves,” a bleak look at how some personnel of a local political organization are evaluated, is a slightly rougher example of comic writing, and not one that employs paradox. The projected bosses cannot be said to have much in the way of value. “The Beneficence of Alexander Vala” is a pointed footnote to Cavafy’s overall assessment of those who rule.

  Cavafy’s surprises figure in his two poems about Nero. In “Nero’s Limit,” the Emperor reposes comfortably, not at all disturbed by god’s warning that he is to fear the number seventy-three. He is after all only forty-three years old. But at the end of the poem, Cavafy reminds readers that in Spain Galba, a general seventy-three years of age, is assembling and training an army. A Roman biographer, closer to Nero’s time, gave the Emperor enough serenity even in his last moments to preen: “What an artist dies with me.” (Qualis artifex pereo. Suetonius, Nero 41) Also in “Footsteps,” a second version, published as one of the 154, and not much changed from an earlier version entitled “Footsteps of the Eumenides,” Cavafy is close to positing a universal; he is warning that there is a punishment for murderers: the Furies are on their way.

  “Young Men of Sidon, 400 AD” shows Cavafy at his most provocative. What are we to understand from a confrontation, a young aesthete facing up to the ghost of an ancient poet, in an atmosphere strongly suggestive of a hothouse? The date in the title has its own resonances. Civilization is under siege. As the poem begins, perfumed young men sit in a hall, enjoying poetry readings by an actor they have hired. The actor, after reading poems by other earlier poets, comes to a four-line epigram, attributed to the Athenian tragic poet, Aeschylus. The epigram in its entirety runs as follows: “This grave-monument of wheat-bearing Gela covers Aeschylus, an Athenian, son of Euphorion. The Marathonian grove might tell of his famous valor and so too in full awareness, the bushy-haired Mede.”

  While the actor is still reading, a young man jumps up and interrupts. He challenges Aeschylus directly. How can the poet talk about his soldiering and not about the tragedies he composed? One senses that Cavafy could happily have been with those young men in the hall, listening to that poetry from olden times, breathing in a garden’s fragrance, and the spoors of the young men. His young protagonist is a kindred spirit in one dimension, an unworldly aesthete, the litterateur who would die for art. Cavafy could love the young man’s fire and approve his stance but at the same time perhaps find him comic. How could this perfumed young man, this connoisseur of letters evaluate the contributions of a soldier, one who, let it be added, helped to save western civilization in one of the earliest key battles against Persia? Are there conditioning stories to help a reader appreciate Cavafy’s lively scene ? Well, for one thing, the Athenian claim that Marathon helped save western civilization was a favorite theme in Attic oratory but Cavafy as historian and clear-eyed reader could have doubted the perfect validity of that claim . There is also the question of authorship. Did Aeschylus himself compose that epitaph? Some believe he did not. It may be enough to say that Cavafy was smiling when he wrote this poem. The poet, Fernazes, shows in another contest that a poet’s mind is on his poetry, no matter that he is bein
g given news that means the end of his civilization as he knows it (“Dareios”).

  Cavafy was often, but not always, an ironist. Irony is implicit in the perspective when he sets up a scene or situation in which characters behave in a way they believe to be wholly proper or realistic, but which Cavafy knows, and his readers know, is improper or unrealistic. There is the Syrian student, for instance, who announces that he can taste all the carnal pleasures and thereafter by means of self-discipline and study relinquish them and become an ascetic. But the vigor of his assertion is sapped by his qualification. He enters a possibly stormy sea dragging what he conceives to be a lifeboat behind him. Will that lifeboat save him? Cavafy permits us to doubt (“The Dangers”).

  Julian, a Roman emperor (361–363 ce) later surnamed Apostate, became, in his opposition to Christianity, a figure of enduring interest for Cavafy. Julian once laconically presented himself as a competent critic of Christianity. In “You Do Not Comprehend,” a Christian, as competent critic of Julian, rebukes him with a brief punning response: Julian read, to be sure, but did not understand.

  Christians too can reveal shallowness, arrogance, and misdirection. In “A Great Train of Priests and Laity” Julian is dead. A Christian displays all too human pleasure as he gloats on the consequent discomfiture of his pagan neighbors. In tone, he could be a distant cousin to that monk who growls in Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” The Christian closes with a pious hope: “Let us wish most reverent Jovian well.” We readers know that Jovian, Julian’s immediate successor as Emperor, soon decreed a general freedom of worship that would not please our self-satisfied narrator.

  Compare “Priest at the Serapeion”: The Christian son’s agony is real while his Christianity is flawed. In “The Saving of Julian,” Cavafy, as the historian he could be, questions the historicity of a Christian account. In “Julian Observing Too Little Esteem,” a Christian takes Julian at his own word and reminds him that Greeks believe in their old adage, “Nothing too much.” In “Julian and the Men of Antioch,” Cavafy, speaking in the voice of a contemporary of Julian’s, asks how anyone could possibly expect the men of Antioch to prefer Julian’s posturing to Christianity, a system of belief and practice that does not interfere in any way with their pursuit of pleasure.

  But Cavafy is not always ironic: In “Myres” he creates a pagan young man from long ago, full of love and human feelings, who is excluded from his dear friend Myres’s obsequies, as they are being performed by Myres’s family and fellow Christians. His pain and puzzlement are genuine. The situation instructs. There is no place for irony. The speaker is profoundly aware of the power of Christian belief. Readers will recognize Myres’s inability to enter into a truly loving relationship.

  The speaker in “Symeon” also discovers the power of Christianity. He is an influential poet, living in Syria in the fifth century ce. He is accustomed to being asked to appraise and judge the work of other poets of the day, but now he has seen Symeon Stylites. Symeon was an ascetic who lived all by himself on a pedestal which he finally raised to a height of sixty feet from the ground.Christians came from all around to gain inspiration from Symeon’s witnessing, and it was in the midst of such a crowd that our speaker, a pagan, recently found himself. Now he finds it hard to think about ranking contemporary poets. He has been unsettled by his experience.

  “At Church” is a good example of inappropriate response. The speaker is alert, perceptive, capable of getting outside of himself and at the same time misdirected. He dwells not on God but on the glories of Hellenism, which is, like Christianity, an absolute with ambivalent attributes throughout Cavafy’s poems. Cavafy was not a church-goer in his lifetime, and when he lay dying he refused last rites at first. He did, however, at last agree to receive them before he died.

  Jews get a sympathetic hearing in the few poems in which they play a part. When they are doing wrong it is not because they are Jews; it is because they are not being true to their teachings. Eurion wrote a history that would last, and moreover, or most important, he was beautiful (“Eurion’s Grave”). Ianthes Antoniou in “Of the Jews” wanted passionately to be a Jew, and said so repeatedly, but the Alexandrian life claimed him at last. Herod mourned the drowned Aristoboulos, and so did Alexandra, his wonderful, grieving, helpless, raging mother. Alexander Jannaeus and his Queen Alexandra have all the appearances and appurtenances of success, and yet they must tell themselves that they are peers of the Greek monarchs around them, and in so doing they reveal that they are not. They cannot finally be themselves. Cavafy does not even hint at the ghastly slaughter of his fellow Jews that Alexander supervised and enjoyed at another time. Josephus (Jewish War 1.4.6) provides details.

  Cavafy finds one Jew, Eurion, good and beautiful, and another, Ianthes, fallible, in that he fell short of what it meant to be a Jew. Aristoboulos was a victim, and his princess mother as well. Alexander Jannaeus could easily have been portrayed less sympathetically.

  As for “Hellenism,” again and again a character in one of Cavafy’s poems wants to be Greek. Some base their claim on a myth, some had it and lost it, some have it but misconstrue it. Still there remains at the end a quality, a sense of being Greek that is an absolute, no matter what extravagances or hopes or fears accompany it. And it is something precious and real.

  To sum up, Cavafy honored courage and wisdom, and found inspiring examples in all phases and times of the Greek past, which he knew as well as any historian, and the Greek present, in which he languished, suffered, worked, made love, and consecrated himself to poetry and beauty. The seemingly peculiar angle from which he viewed the world was in part due to a healthy philosophical assessment of most things most people want. He had also the sort of humor that enabled him to laugh at himself, as in his confessional “Morning Sea”:

  Let me stand and let me look for a little at nature

  morning sea and cloudless sky

  bright violet-blue and lemon banks

  beautiful all and grandly lit.

  Let me stand here and let me fool myself that I see them

  (I did for a second really when first I took my stand)

  and not here too my fantasies

  my recollections, the images of pleasure.

  Poems

  Walls

  Without regard, compasssion or shame,

  they built around me great high walls.

  And I sit here now and despair.

  No other thought: my fate eats me.

  Because I had so many things to do outside.

  Alas, when they were building the walls

  how could I not pay attention?

  But I never heard noise from the builders, not a sound.

  Without my notice they closed me in from the world outside.

  An Old Man

  Inside a noisy kappheneion

  bent over his table an old man sits

  newspaper in front of him, no company.

  Among hateful aspects of a wretched old age

  he thinks how little he enjoyed the years

  he had energy, something to say, and looks.

  He knows he’s too old: feels it, watches it

  and yet the time when he was young seems

  like yesterday, What a little time! What a little time!

  And he reflects how Prudence mocked him

  and how he always believed her—how crazy!—

  the liar who said, “Tomorrow. You have lots of time.”

  And he remembers impulses he held in

  and how much joy he sacrificed. His mindless wisdom,

  every lost chance teases him now.

  . . . But from much thought and remembrance

  the old man grows light-headed. He goes to sleep

  leaning on the kappheneion table.

  Achilles’ Horses

  When they saw Patroklos dead

  who had been so brave and strong and young

  Achilles’ horses began to weep:

  their immortal nature was
distressed

  at this work of death they saw;

  they shook their heads and

  set their long manes in motion,

  they struck the ground

  with their hooves and mourned

  a Patroklos recognized as lifeless—disappeared—

  base flesh now—spirit lost—

  defenseless—breath gone—

  given back from life to the great Nothing.

  Zeus saw the tears of the immortal

  horses and grieved. “At Peleus’ wedding,”

  he said, “I should have thought better

  not to give you, you horses of mine,

  unhappy as you are. What did you look for down on the ground

  in wretched humanity, destiny's plaything,

  you whom death does not ward nor age’s

  timely disasters rack? In their torments

  mortals implicated you.”

  But their tears for that death’s pervasive

  disaster they poured, the two, the noble beasts.

  Prayer

  The sea took a sailor below.

  His mother—she does not know—

  takes a tall candle to burn

  before Virgin Mary for safe return,

  for good weather, and always her ear

  she keeps to the wind, and yet to her prayer,

  while she asks, the icon attends,

  serious and sad, and apprehends

  he will not come back any more,

  the son she is waiting for.

  Sarpedon’s Funeral

  Zeus is weighted with sorrow: Patroklos killed

  his Sarpedon. And now Menoitiades

  and the Achaians are charging

  to seize and debase the body.

  But Zeus does not at all consent:

  his beloved child—whom he left,