Complete Poems (5 page)

The references to long-vanished eras, places, and figures that we so often find in Cavafy’s poetry, and which indeed are unfamiliar even to most scholars of Classical antiquity, are, for this reason, never to be mistaken for mere exercises in abstruse pedantry. Or, indeed, for abstruseness
at all. A poem’s casual allusion to, say, the autumnal thoughts of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus in the year 1180 functions quite differently from the way in which invocations of arcane material can function in (to take the well-known example of a contemporary)
The Waste Land
of T. S. Eliot—where the self-consciously rarefied quality of the numerous allusions is part of the texture of the poem, part of its Modernist project. Cavafy, by contrast, may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him. Not for nothing are a striking number of his poems about nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In “Caesarion,” for instance, a poem written in 1914 and published in 1918—the intervening years, the years of the Great War, saw the publication of a number of poems on beautiful dead youths—the beautiful (as he imagines) teenage son of Caesar and Cleopatra materializes one night in the poet’s apartment:

Such apparitions do not always belong to the distant past. In “Since Nine—,” published in 1918 and written the year before, an “apparition” of the poet’s own “youthful body” suddenly materializes in front of him one evening as he sits alone in a darkened room; similarly, in an Unfinished Poem of the same period, first drafted in 1919 and bearing the provisional title “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the poet’s own soul appears in the form of a louche youth on a street in Marseille, a place he’d visited years before—this scene replacing a decor that is itself a suggestive mélange of past and present (a commonplace settee, a piece of Archaic Greek statuary). Although in the latter poem the narrator attributes his supernatural vision to the excess of wine he’d drunk
the previous night—hence the title—such apparitions are, therefore, hardly anomalous in his creative life, and symbolize a crucial theme of the entire body of work: the presence of the past in our own present. To Cavafy, figures such as those of the dead princeling and his own youthful self all inhabit the same era—the vastly arcing past that his own imagination inhabited so fully—and were therefore as alive and present to him as the whores who lived in the brothel below his apartment on the Rue Lepsius. (“Where could I better live?” he once remarked, in the worldly tone we recognize from his verse. “Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”) It is the responsibility of the reader to inhabit that past as fully as possible, too, if only during the brief space during which he or she explores these poems. Otherwise, the meaning of many of them will be obscure, if not opaque. And the reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems, is missing the point of Cavafy’s work—is, like so many of his characters both real and imagined, mistaking the clouded part for the clear and illuminating whole.

The rich tension between furious human striving (political, intellectual, or erotic) in the present and the poignantly belated ability to assess the true significance of that striving indeed characterizes the most memorable of Cavafy’s poems. It is there in “Nero’s Deadline,” in which the thirty-year-old emperor, freshly back in Rome from a trip to hedonistic Greece, never dreams that “beware the age of seventy-three,” the Delphic oracle’s stern warning to him, refers not to him but to his aged general, Galba, plotting revolt in Spain, who will replace him on the imperial throne. It is there, too, in the dazzled and uncomprehending gawking on the part of the citizens of Seleucia, in “One of Their Gods,” who can’t possibly know that the stupefyingly beautiful youth whom they see passing through the marketplace on the way to the red-light district is actually one of the Greek gods. Quite typically of the great mature poetry, the confusion of the hapless observers within the poem mirrors a purposeful and productive confusion, for the reader, as to what era we are in, and indeed what order of being—human? divine? real? mythological?—we are reading about:

Here we have another inscrutable apparition; and we have, too, the subtle, richly matured transformation of a theme from the early years: a message from the gods that only the elect can decipher.

The poet’s predilection for the historian’s perspective—his interest in the way in which the experiences of the present, always confusing as they occur, can only be properly understood in the future; which is to say, at the moment when the present has become the past—helps to explain why so many of the ostensibly erotic poems are, essentially, poems about the past, too. A significant number of poems about desire in the poet’s own time (or his recent past) are, in fact, cast as memories of love, or of desire. More often than not, when this poet speaks longingly of “skin, as if of jasmine” or eyes that are a “deep blue, sapphirine,” as he does in the 1914 lyric “Far Off,” he does so not as most conventional love poets might extol the virtues of their beloveds, but in his own distinctive way—which is to say, he speaks of them as a memory so far off that we cannot be sure whether the details of skin and eyes that he recalls are quite accurate:

Even in the most intensely erotic verses, poems in which the poet reveals that he knows “love’s body … the lips, / sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness,” as he does in the 1916 poem “One Night,” the celebration of the physical turns out to be a memory:

This poet very seldom writes what we usually think of as love poetry; his verse, which if anything tends to be about desire, is also—if not primarily—about the way in which the passage of time makes possible the poetry about desire that we are reading.

That Cavafy saw not only desirable young men but desire itself through a historian’s appraising eyes helps to account for a distinctive feature of his poetry. In sharp contrast to other Greek poets of his day, he notably shuns elaborate, exotic, or self-consciously “poetic” diction; his language, so famously plain, is striking above all for its lack of precision in descriptions of physical beauty—a choice of arresting significance in a poet greatly preoccupied with desire. More often than not he will resort to abstract adjectives—
oréos
and
émorfos,
“beautiful,”
idanikós,
“ideal,”
exaísia,
“exquisite,”
idonikós,
“sensual,” “voluptuous,”
esthitikós,
“refined,” “sensitive,” “aesthetic”—where another poet might seek to evoke greater detail.

We very seldom know, in fact, just what the beautiful young men in so many of Cavafy’s poems look like. In “One of Their Gods,” the figure seen walking through the marketplace of a great city is simply “tall and perfectly beautiful”; in “Before Time Could Alter Them,” the narrator’s reverie about a long-ago affair whose premature end may have been a blessing (since it preserves the memory of the lovers’ beauty “before Time could alter them”), the lover is described as a “beautiful boy,”
oréo pedí.
And the climactic vision to which “Days of 1908” inexorably leads—a glimpse of a ravishing youth who is the subject of the narrator’s
fascinated gaze, after the boy has stripped for a seaside bathe—reveals only that he is

What is of interest to Cavafy is not so much individual beauty, but the idea of beauty itself—what happens to it when it is filtered through the passage of many years. Significantly, one of the few poems to include some particulars of what a beautiful young man might actually look like is a poem about beauty in the abstract: the short lyric “I’ve Gazed So Much” (whose original title, it’s worth noting, was “For Beauty”):

The poet’s descriptive vocabulary, then, while narrow, has the supreme advantage of imparting to his imaginations of the beautiful an abstract, philosophical dimension—and, perhaps more important, of forcing his reader to do what the historian must do, which is to apply his own imaginative powers to subjects of which, so often, few details are extant.

Indeed, if the desire that flares in so many of these poems has, more often than not, been extinguished, the compensation for all those vanished or disappointed or broken-off love affairs is an artistic one: for we are always reminded that the poem itself is the vehicle for the preservation of desire, and of beauty, that otherwise would have disappeared. This important theme has its roots in the young poet’s debt to the Parnasse and to Baudelaire, with their elevation of the poet as a craftsman and seer whose gifts are denied to the common masses. A crucial aspect of this theme, developed as the poet evolved, was that the artistic creation
ultimately has a life more substantial than the object that inspired it. Two decades after the early poems of the 1890s, with their heavy debt to those French poets, the theme recurs with greater subtlety, in suggestive ways. In the 1913 poem “In Stock,” for instance, a jeweler—a stand-in for the poet, of course—fashions fabulous pieces that may mimic nature, but are symbols of the superiority of his creative fantasy to any vulgar needs of the public:

And in another poem of virtually the same period, “Painted,” written in 1914 and published in 1916, the theme of the superior powers of Art is again stressed. Here, however, it is not natural life but a beautiful boy who becomes the object of Art’s transformative, and in this case healing, power:

Another twenty years later, the theme of the artist’s observing gaze and creative powers as the indispensable vehicles for both an emotionally charged reverie and a creative commemoration has its most sublime
expression in the magnificent late poem “Days of 1908,” published the year before the poet’s death. Here, the beautiful but down-at-the-heels young Alexandrian, full of his schemes to make, win, or borrow money (a character we have met before, to be sure), never dreams, as he strips for his seaside swim, that the beauty by which he may well end up making his living will be immortalized in unimagined ways by the poem’s anonymous speaker. Or, rather, by Time itself, since the “you” to whom this speaker addresses himself is, in fact, the days of the long-past summer of 1908: