Complete Poems (53 page)

Skilitsis died on April 8, 1886, at the age of nineteen; Cavafy saved a copy of the death notice that appeared in the Alexandrian paper
Telegraphos.
Ralli died in October 1889 of typhoid; Cavafy kept a short journal of his friend’s illness.

Correspondences According to Baudelaire

As noted in the Introduction, the last decade of the 1890s marked a period of intense interest on Cavafy’s part in the “Esoteric” movement in European letters. Much influenced by his reading of Schuré’s
Les grands initiés,
and of writers such as Viatte, Mercier, and Michaud, as well as Mallarmé, Pater, Swinburne, Maeterlinck, Arthur Symons, and many others, Cavafy was particularly attracted to the notion of the poet as a kind of seer whose special insight gave him access to visions of the hidden beauties of the cosmos—beauties appreciated, moreover, by the kind of synesthesis to which this poem refers, and which is present as well in Baudelaire’s poem, which Cavafy’s both paraphrases and cites verbatim. Although Cavafy was eventually to shrug off the stylistic influence of the writers he so fervently read in his late twenties and early thirties, his interest in special sight and insight, and particularly in figures (whether poets or bona fide mystics, such as Apollonius of Tyana, on whom see
this page
), persisted throughout his creative career.

Since the extent to which the present poem borrows from its French model may only be gauged by direct comparison, I quote the Baudelaire in its entirety:

On September 22, 1907, Cavafy wrote the following note:

[Fragment of an untitled poem]

This rather exotic fragment provides an early glimpse of Cavafy the “poet-historian” at work, as he attempts to integrate a fictional narrative into a complex historical setting—a setting that, moreover, is characterized by a clash of ancient cultures, another theme that would dominate his mature work. The poem imagines the fate of an Ancient Egyptian girl, R
HAMANAKTI
, who had been murdered. The second stanza makes it clear that the poem is set in a rather late phase in the history of Ancient Egypt: either the Achaemenid Period (525–402 B.C., and then again from 343 to 332), when Egypt was ruled by Persian monarchs, or the period of Greek domination, which lasted from Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in 332 until the death of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, in 30 B.C.

“Nous N’osons Plus Chanter les Roses”

The title of the poem is a quotation of lines from “Printemps Oublié” (“Forgotten Spring”) by René-François-Armand Sully Prudhomme (1839–1907), the French poet and essayist who was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1901. The poem, which appears in Sully Prudhomme’s first published volume,
Stances et Poèmes
(1865), is preoccupied with the dangers of writing poetry on hackneyed themes:

Sully Prudhomme was associated with the Parnassian movement, which exerted such a strong influence on the young Cavafy. An 1868 entry from Sully Prudhomme’s
Journal Intime
nicely sums up the Parnassian’s aesthetic ideology: “Compression seems to me more elevated, more worthy than expansiveness. To repress the heart’s élan is to better count its beats, and a considered suffering is more noble than a suffering about which one cries aloud.” The Parnassians’ emphasis on formal polish led them, ultimately, back to the Ancient Greeks, always admired as the masters of form; a backward-looking antiquarianism, moreover, simultaneously served the Parnassians’ ideological belief in separating poetry from vulgar utilitarian, political, or social concerns.

The extent to which Cavafy was preoccupied with Parnassian concerns for poetry’s formal elements is clear from an article he published in October 1891, six months before composing “Nous n’osons plus chanter les roses.” In a review of a work by P. Gritsanis called
Stichourgiki
(“Versification”), he argued that

Parnassianism ultimately served as an important stage in the evolution (some would say devolution) of nineteenth-century poetry toward Symbolism and Decadence, movements that also held great interest for Cavafy.

Indian Image

This is the first of the group of three poems treating ancient myths of Creation that Cavafy listed under the heading “Three Images”: see the notes on “Pelasgian Image,”
here
, and “Chaldean Image,”
here
.

A certain fascination with Indian culture and history reveals itself in this poem and in a few others written in the early 1890s: “Eternity,” which lifts an episode from the Bhagavad Gita; “A Samian’s Epitaph,” in which the poet imagines the life of a Greek who ends his life as a slave on the banks of the Ganges; and “Coins,” in which Indian history (rather than that of Asia Minor, as is more typical in the poet’s work) becomes the vehicle for a poetic reverie about the clash of Western and Eastern culture.

Although Cavafy’s interest in India at this time surely owes something to his reading of Schuré’s
Les grands initiés,
with its lengthy chapter on Krishna (for which see the note to “Eternity,”
here
), it is worth remembering that India—at least, mythic India—was of considerable interest for the Parnassian poets. Ever since the publication of Victor Hugo’s
Orientales
(1829), India and the East more generally, thought to be appealingly “exotic,” had exerted considerable allure for a generation of French poets eager to break with a stale Romanticism (Sainte-Beuve waxed lyrical about the “
éclat éblouissant
” of Hugo’s Orientalist verses); among the foremost of these indophile writers was Leconte de Lisle, Hugo’s successor at the Académie Française and a leader of the Parnassians. The French poet’s desire to anchor a poetics in the past (“
temps où l’homme et la terre étaient jeunes et dans l’éclosion de leur force et de leur beauté,
” “a time when man and earth were young and in the full flower of their power and beauty”), and even more his specific interest in seeing connections between the Hindu epics and Homer and the Greek tragedians, must have had an especially strong appeal for the young Cavafy.

The poem’s particular interest in precious stones (shared by the other “Image” poems in the same group) is also noteworthy, recalling as it does a similar preoccupation on the part of the Parnassian and Decadent poets of the mid- to late-nineteenth century; the embrace of “Art for Art’s sake,” with an emphasis on emotional restraint and technical
perfection, often found expression in elaborate praise of precious
objets d’art
and jewelry. This particular Parnassian motif occurs, in addition to the other two “Image” poems, in “Artificial Flowers” (originally composed 1894–96) and “In the House of the Soul” (1894); moreover, a chronological list of the poet’s output makes reference to an 1891 composition called “Precious Stones,” which does not survive. The interest in precious stones was to continue throughout his career: we find it in the descriptions of Nero’s bed in “The Steps,” for instance (1908–09), and of the amethyst and pearls adorning the costume of the half-Egyptian, half-Roman prince Caesarion in “Alexandrian Kings” (1912), and in the poignant detail of the Byzantine monarch so impoverished that he was reduced to using coronation regalia made of the eponymous materials in the 1925 poem “Of Colored Glass.”

Not all of the poet’s interest in this subject can be ascribed to the influence of the Parnassians, however. In his
Genealogy,
Cavafy noted that he was descended on his mother’s side from prominent jewel merchants; in January 1886, at the age of twenty-two, partly in response to what he felt were insufficiently erudite press reports about an exhibition about coral that had taken place in London three years earlier, he published an article on the mythological significance of coral, the precious substance that more than any other appears in his work.

Pelasgian Image

The poet grouped this poem, along with “Indian Image” and “Chaldean Image,” under the heading “Three Images.” Each part of this triptych of poetic evocations of arcane myths of creation is dedicated to a different realm of ancient culture: India, Greece, and Babylonia.

P
ELASGIAN
was the term used by Ancient Greek authors from Homer to Herodotus and by the later historians to refer to the indigenous ancient people who inhabited Greece prior to the arrival of the tribes who would become the Hellenic peoples; in Classical Greek thought, the Pelasgians were associated with a primitive or “barbaric” phase of culture, and the Pelasgian language in particular was thought to be barbarous.

The title’s reference to a primitive stage of culture is mirrored in its
concern with a primitive phase of mythological history. The G
IANTS
were a race of enormous creatures sprung from Earth (Gaia), fertilized by the fluids released by the castration of Uranus (Sky). The poem seems to refer to the most famous of the Giants, Enceladus, who during the great battle between the Gods and the Giants was struck down by Athena and buried in Sicily under Mount Etna (whose eruptions were thought to be caused by the giant’s movements). E
PHIALTES
, according to Homer and other authors, was another giant and a classical type of outrageous hubris: together with his twin brother, Otus, he attempted to reach heaven by piling Mounts Pelion and Ossa on top of Mount Olympus. They were also said to have attempted to rape Hera and Artemis, and imprisoned the war god, Ares, in a brazen vessel. Still (as Cavafy was undoubtedly aware), for all their outrageousness, the twins were also associated in myth with the Muses.

The Hereafter

This poem was written in August 1892, the month in which Cavafy published “Bard”: for the theme of the poet’s rejection of the material world, see the note on that poem,
here
. The notion of one corporeal eye closing in death, even as the eye of the soul is opened to behold a greater vision, recurs frequently in Schuré’s
Les grands initiés;
for the influence of this work on Cavafy, see the notes on “Correspondences According to Baudelaire,”
here
, and “Eternity,”
here
.