Complete Poems (51 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
The title (“Breath of the Wind”) is the name of an annual springtime Egyptian festival that coincided, in Cavafy’s time, with Easter Monday. M
ISIRI
was the common Greek name for Egypt (from the Egyptians’ name for their own land,
Misr’
); G
ABARI
, M
AHMOUDIYA
, M
EX
, M
OHARRAM
B
EY
, and
RAMLEH
were all names of Alexandrian neighborhoods. P
TAH
was an ancient Egyptian god associated with creativity and artisanship. M
OGANNI
is a transliteration of an Egyptian Arabic term for a folksinger.
The latter part of 1892 saw the young Cavafy preoccupied more than usually with the Parnassian themes of the poet’s necessary rejection of the material, the ordinary, and the positivistic. Diana Haas has observed that, in addition to “The Hereafter” (written in August 1892), which
articulates these themes very concretely, that period saw the publication of Cavafy’s article on Keats’s
Lamia,
in which he quotes the following lines:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
About this passage Cavafy commented that “the poet describes the really destructive vandalism that science wreaks on the beauties of nature, explaining and analyzing everything in the most material fashion destroys the charm and nobility of the unknown.”
The Latin title of the poem, which means “All of them wound, the last one kills,” was a common inscription on clock faces and sundials from the Middle Ages at least into the nineteenth century.
The poem has several possible sources. Théophile Gautier’s 1865 collection
España
contained a poem called “L’Horloge” (“The Clock”) bearing the same Latin epigraph; Paul Verlaine’s
Ardennes
also cites the well-known Latin text in its description of a village clock, which Verlaine chides for failing in the “warning” and “moralistic” role promised by the inscription. Baudelaire’s
Les Fleurs du Mal
also includes a poem called “L’Horloge,” which opens with an address to the “Impassive god! whose minatory hands / repeat their sinister and single charge: /
Remember
!” and ends with the line “from all / the message comes: ‘Too late, old coward! Die!’ ” (tr. Richard Howard). Still, although the first part of the present poem is characterized by the typical fin-de-siècle ennui to be found in its possible models (Gautier’s verse contains the famously exhausted line, “To be born is merely to begin to die”), Cavafy’s poem turns in the end, like so much of his work of the early 1890s, to embrace the promise of redemption and rebirth offered by Christianity.
This is the first poem published by Cavafy that was written in demotic.
This poem was first published in an 1894 collection along with three other of the Repudiated Poems: “Athena’s Vote,” “The Inkwell,” and “Sweet Voices.”
This is the first poem that Cavafy published that is set in the ancient (as opposed to mythic) past. Timolaus himself, however, is clearly invented, as a note from Cavafy to his brother John (who planned to translate the poem into English) indicates: there Cavafy told his brother that if the name “Timolaus” proved to be metrically inconvenient, he could leave it blank for the time being and they would find another name.
The poem, which is the first that Cavafy published on a mythological theme, alludes to the founding of the Athenian law court known as the Areopagus, where, in Classical times, capital crimes were tried. The great literary account of how this court came to be founded occurs in the final play in Aeschylus’s trilogy,
Oresteia:
having murdered his mother, Clytemnestra, the young prince Orestes stands trial and is defended by the god Apollo himself. The jury of twelve Athenians, however, is evenly split, and Orestes is acquitted only after A
THENA
casts the tie-breaking vote in his favor.
This poem is one of a small number that allow us to witness, in some detail, Cavafy’s evolution as a poet. Reprinted twice in 1894, “Sweet Voices” was eventually rewritten by Cavafy late in 1903 and published in its final form in 1904 as “Voices.” Comparison between the two versions suggests the rigorous process of self-editing and paring down that transformed the poet’s mature work.
The French painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) exhibited his painting of the confrontation between Oedipus and the Sphinx in 1864. Cavafy’s poem is based on a description of the painting that appeared in a newspaper.
According to an ancient mythic tradition for which Sophocles’
Oedipus Tyrannus
and
Oedipus at Colonus
are the most famous dramatic vehicles, O
EDIPUS
was the child of the Theban king Laius and his wife, Jocasta. Fearful of a prophecy that a child of his would kill its father and marry its mother, Laius entrusted the newborn Oedipus to a servant to be exposed on Mt. Cithaeron. The servant, however, pitying the newborn child, secretly entrusted it to a shepherd who served the household of the Corinthian king, and this king subsequently raised the child as his own. Later on, the youthful Oedipus, having overheard rumors that he was not in fact the natural child of his royal father, set off to enquire about his true paternity at the oracle of Delphi; en route, he encountered the party of Laius, and during an altercation on the road Oedipus slew Laius and his attendants, thereby unwittingly fulfilling part of the prophecy.
Oedipus then made his way to Thebes, which at the time was being tormented by the Sphinx—a monster that was (in some versions) part human, part lion, with the wings of an eagle and the tail of a serpent. This creature, a sort of Turandot
avant la lettre,
asked all passersby a question, killing anyone who failed to answer it correctly. The question is traditionally given as follows: “What creature goes on four legs at morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus, perceiving that the riddle turned on a metaphorical equivalence between a day and the lifetime of a human being, correctly answered “Man,” and thereupon slew the Sphinx and liberated the city. Soon after he married the queen, Jocasta, who was, of course, his own mother. Only many years later, after they had had four children together, was the terrible secret of Oedipus’s true identity revealed. Sophocles’
Oedipus,
often dated to around 425 B.C., narrates the events of the day on which Oedipus learns who he really is. In a subsequent play,
Oedipus at Colonus
(406 B.C.), the aged playwright fleshed out the myth with an
account of the aged Oedipus’s final day on earth: blind, paupered, Oedipus wanders into the sacred grove of the Furies at C
OLONUS
, a suburb of Athens, and it is there, after a series of final confrontations with his rebellious sons and loyal daughters, that Oedipus is purged, mysteriously, of all his guilt, and after dying is elevated to semidivine status.
Moreau’s canvas is noteworthy for the dreamy, almost erotic gaze exchanged between the youthful Oedipus, perched in languid contrapposto, and the insinuating, bare-breasted Sphinx whose right hind leg presses against Oedipus’s barely concealed genitals; and for the gruesome detail of the body parts of the Sphinx’s victims that litter the landscape in which this encounter takes place.
First published in
Kosmos,
April 1896, and reprinted the following month in
To Asty.
In 1899 this poem was published in an anthology,
Aigyptiakon Imerologion tou etous
1900, along with “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent” (under its original title, “Imminent”) and “The First Step.”
The Cavafy Archive contains a note, dated October 1909, left by the poet in connection with this poem: it seems from the context (“Perhaps the best thing is to let it alone,” the note begins) that Cavafy had pondered revising the poem, but in the end he wonders whether it is better to make a selection of his “good work” written in katharevousa, including the present poem, “Walls,” and “In the Cemetery.”
The original title of this poem was “Night of a Symbolist Poet.” Certainly the poet indulges here in the elaborate synesthetic “correspondences” already evoked in “Correspondences According to Baudelaire.” Diana Haas has also noted a strong correlation between the poetic ecstasy described here and the ecstasy attributed to Pythagorean initiates in Edouard Schuré’s
Les Grands initiés: Esquisse de l’histoire secrète des religions
(“The Great Initiates: A Sketch of the Secret History of Religions”)
(1889), an inspiration for a number of Cavafy’s other early works:
Ecstasy
is defined as a vision of the spiritual world, in which good or evil spirits appear to the viewer in human form and communicate with him … Nothing can suggest, according to the accounts of the great ecstatics, either the beauty and the splendor of these visions, or the feeling of ineffable fusion with the divine essence which they bring, like a drunkenness of light and music.
This poem is based on the ballad “Auld Robin Gray,” by Lady Anna Lindsay Barnard (1750–1825), a poem that Cavafy first translated into Greek as “Vain, Vain Love” in
Hesperus
in June 1886. The text of Barnard’s ballad is worth looking at, since comparison with the original delineates the contours of Cavafy’s special preoccupations:
When the sheep are in the fauld, and the kye at hame,
And a’ the warld to rest are gane,
The waes o’ my heart fa’ in showers frae my e’e,
While my gudeman lies sound by me.
Young Jamie lo’ed me weel, and sought me for his bride;
But saving a croun he had naething else beside:
To make the croun a pund, young Jamie gaed to sea;
And the croun and the pund were baith for me.
He hadna been awa’ a week but only twa,
When my father brak his arm, and the cow was stown awa;
My mother she fell sick,—and my Jamie at the sea—
And auld Robin Gray came a-courtin’ me.
My father couldna work, and my mother couldna spin;
I toil’d day and night, but their bread I couldna win;
Auld Rob maintain’d them baith, and wi’ tears in his e’e
Said, “Jennie, for their sakes, O, marry me!”
My heart it said nay; I look’d for Jamie back;
But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack;
His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee?
Or why do I live to cry, Wae ’s me?
My father urged me sair: my mother didna speak;
But she look’d in my face till my heart was like to break:
They gi’ed him my hand, tho’ my heart was in the sea;
Sae auld Robin Gray he was gudeman to me.
I hadna been a wife a week but only four,
When mournfu’ as I sat on the stane at the door,
I saw my Jamie’s wraith,—for I couldna think it he,
Till he said, “I’m come hame to marry thee.”
O sair, sair did we greet, and muckle did we say;
We took but ae kiss, and we tore ourselves away:
I wish that I were dead, but I’m no like to dee;
And why was I born to say, Wae ’s me!
I gang like a ghaist, and I carena to spin;
I daurna think on Jamie, for that wad be a sin;
But I’ll do my best a gude wife aye to be,
For auld Robin Gray he is kind unto me.
Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” (1864) was also inspired by Lady Barnard’s ballad. For other poems in which Cavafy responds to Tennyson’s work, see “Second Odyssey” and “Simeon,” with their notes,
here
and
here
.
Another early version of one of the “canonical” poems that allows us to appraise Cavafy’s artistic development. First written probably in 1886,
according to Savidis, “Remembrance” was rewritten in July 1905 and given the title “Thessaly.” The final version, entitled “Song of Ionia,” was published in June 1911. For more on the evolution of this poem into its final, published form, see the note on “Song of Ionia,”
here
.
The Death of the Emperor Tacitus
This is the first of Cavafy’s Published Poems that takes as its subject a specific event from ancient history and features a historical, as opposed to mythological or invented, figure from the past. First published in the journal
Kosmos,
in January 1897, this poem was reprinted in
Aigyptiakon Imerologion tou etous
1899 (Alexandria, 1898) along with “Voice from the Sea” and “The Steps of the Eumenides,” and again reprinted, in 1898, in a broadsheet entitled
Ancient Days,
along with “The Tears of Phaethon’s Sisters.”
The Roman emperor T
ACITUS
(Claudius Tacitus, 200–276 A.D.), allegedly related to the great historian, was a distinguished senator who rose to the consulship in 273. In 275, within a year of the assassination of the emperor Aurelian, the Senate elected the elderly and somewhat reluctant Tacitus emperor. His brief reign was marked by attempts to restore some autonomy to the Senate, and by fierce battles with the Goths. Unpopular with his troops, he died, probably as the result of foul play, while on campaign in Tyana, in the province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, in April 276.