Complete Poems (55 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
[… … … … … … … … …]
Then of the antique flame the greater horn,
Murmuring, began to wave itself about
Even as a flame doth which the wind fatigues.
Thereafterward, the summit to and fro
Moving as if it were the tongue that spake,
It uttered forth a voice, and said: “When I
From Circe had departed, who concealed me
More than a year there near unto Gaeta,
Or ever yet Aeneas named it so,
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;
But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been.
Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain,
Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes,
And the others which that sea bathes round about.
I and my company were old and slow
When at that narrow passage we arrived
Where Hercules his landmarks set as signals,
That man no farther onward should adventure.
On the right hand behind me left I Seville,
And on the other already had left Ceuta.
‘O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,’ I said, ‘have come unto the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil
Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.’
So eager did I render my companions,
With this brief exhortation, for the voyage,
That then I hardly could have held them back.
[… … … … … … … … …]
When there appeared to us a mountain, dim
From distance, and it seemed to me so high
As I had never any one beheld.
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;
For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,
And smote upon the fore part of the ship.
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters,
At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,
And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,
Until the sea above us closed again.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson,
Ulysses:
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
[… … … … … … … … …]
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
[… … … … … … … … …]
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
An early version of this poem had the following variant for line 24, which suggests at one point that the poet had considered giving the poem an erotic flavor:
for the queen, whom he loved
the same version contained the following additional lines:
This is how the lofty effort ends
This is how the lofty effort is fulfilled
This is how much the lofty effort cost
Like “In the Cemetery” (1893) and “Voice from the Sea” (1893), this poem suggests the extent to which the idea of Christian forgiveness, and particularly of divine protection from unnamed but overwhelming temptations, appealed to the poet as he entered his thirties. Haas has drawn attention to the way in which the language of this poem, particularly in the opening lines, echoes that of the bedtime prayer said by Orthodox Christians, which entreats the Virgin for protection from “the darksome sleep of sin and from every lurid and nocturnal lasciviousness.”
This poem and “La Jeunesse Blanche” (“White Youth”) were clearly inspired by Cavafy’s reading of the Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898), whose work influenced other poems as well. (See the note on “Rain,”
here
.) Trained as a lawyer and a journalist, Rodenbach eventually moved to Paris, where he was a friend of
the Goncourt brothers. He started publishing his poetry in 1877, but it was his fourth collection of poems, “La Jeunesse Blanche” (1886), that won him broad renown outside of Belgium. His appeal for Cavafy undoubtedly lay in the rejection of positivism and “progress,” shared by Baudelaire, that is evident in the nostalgic evocation of a mystical union between the soul of the writer and the “soul” of his native city, present in both his poems and his novel
Bruges-la-Morte.
(To a fellow Belgian author he wrote: “As for producing literature in Belgium, in my view it is impossible. Our nation is above all positivistic and material. It won’t hear a word of poetry.”) Rodenbach’s poetry and prose are characterized by an obsession with solitude, loss, exhaustion, and hopeless yearning, which the writer saw as the core of all high art: “The essence of art that is at all noble is the DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.”
Cavafy’s immersion in the works of Rodenbach during the mid-1890s may well have inspired the composition of this atmospheric exercise in moody scene setting: the Belgian author often evoked the mists, canals, and rains of Bruges, particularly in his novel
Bruges-la-Morte,
whose protagonist, a middle-aged widower, finds his feelings for his dead wife reflected in the constant rains (and in virtually everything else about the haunted, rather dead old city). But rain figures prominently in the poetry as well. (“
C’est l’automne, la pluie et la mort de l’année,
” “It’s autumn, rain and the death of the year!”)
See the note on “In the House of the Soul,”
here
.
The epigraph comes from the
Logoi
(“Speeches”) of the fourth-century A.D. sophist and rhetorician H
IMERIUS
(ca. 315–386), a pagan master of the Greek style whose students included two great figures of
the early Christian church, Gregory of Nazianzus (a favorite source of Cavafy’s historical poems) and Bishop Basil the Great; among his other attainments, he acted as private secretary to the apostate emperor Julian. His career reveals much about the cosmopolitan culture of the Greek-speaking world in the years immediately following the division of the Roman Empire. Born in Prusa, in Bithynia (in the northwest of Asia Minor), he eventually settled at Athens, where his school became world renowned; in recognition of his contributions to Greek literature he was granted Athenian citizenship. Unlike his onetime employer Julian, however, Himerius showed no hostility toward Christianity, and thereby embodied the cosmopolitan breadth of culture and tolerance of the greater Greek world in Late Antiquity—one possible reason that Cavafy, implacably disdainful of the apostate, approvingly and apparently ingenuously quotes Himerius’s encomium to Athens.
The poem is based, ultimately, on a passage from the Bhagavad Gita. In this text, revered as sacred in the Hindu tradition, the divine narrator Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu, the supreme deity) converses with the warrior-hero, the Pandava prince Arjuna, immediately prior to a great battle; during the conversation, the divinity tries to soothe the young warrior, who has grown anxious prior to his trial, with accounts of various philosophical and spiritual doctrines.
Cavafy was almost certainly not familiar with the Bhagavad Gita itself, but rather with an account of the poem given in Schuré’s
Les grands initiés.
The passage that seems to have inspired Cavafy is the following, from chapter 7 of Schuré’s book, which is devoted to Krishna:
Learned men grieve neither for the living nor the dead. You and I and these captains of men have always existed and will never cease to exist in the future.… No man can destroy the Inexhaustible. All these bodies will not endure, as you know. But seers know, too, that the incarnate soul is eternal,
indestructible, and infinite. And so: go you into battle, scion of Bharat!
Diana Haas observes that the motif of the soul (the “keyword” of the 1890s), wasting away in an isolated confinement, runs through the 1889 collection
Serres chaudes
(“Hothouses”) of another of the Belgian Symbolists to whom Cavafy was drawn during the 1890s, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose
Trésor des Humbles
was in Cavafy’s library.
The date of this poem is significant. A note accompanying the manuscript indicates that the poet took his inspiration, with a typically scrupulous attention to details of the original, directly from “an antique Nubian Bible”; he goes on to cite the passage in question:
Now Salome offered the head of the Baptist on a golden platter to the young Greek scholar who disdained love. But he said: “It is your head, Salome, that I would like.” He spoke thus in jest, and the next day a slave brought to him the blond head of the Lover. The Scholar no longer remembered his Vow of the day before: he ordered the bloody thing to be taken away, and continued his reading of Plato.
The note ends with a reference to a newspaper article, dated February 11, 1896, about a performance of Wilde’s
Salome,
a work bound to be of interest to Cavafy not least because of his evident interest in the Decadents and Symbolists. What is of interest here is that the poet wasn’t, in fact, influenced by Wilde’s version, but rather seems to be responding to it. If anything, Cavafy disdained Wilde’s play, whose historical inaccuracies he ridiculed as an example of the errors to which “poetic license” with history was likely to lead.
This is the third of the three elaborate mythological poems that the poet grouped under the heading “Three Images”: see the notes on “Indian Image” and “Pelasgian Image,”
here
.
C
HALDEAN
is often a synonym for “Babylonian,” but in this context is a more specialized reference to the mythologies and cosmologies of the ancient Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Sumerian civilizations of Mesopotamia. Chaldean wizards, oracles, and astronomers figure prominently in the history and mythology of the Ancient Near East. According to the Enuma Elish (the name given to the text of the great Babylonian Creation story), A
PSU
and T
IAMAT
were the two primeval gods, Apsu the divinity of fresh waters, and Tiamat, his sister and wife, the divinity of salt waters. In the Enuma Elish, all of the gods were born of the union between Apsu and Tiamat (among them E
A
, the god of wisdom):
When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being …
Apsu, along with the vizier M
UMMU
, plans to destroy these other gods, but Tiamat foils his plan by enlisting the aid of Ea; they kill Apsu and banish Mummu. Ea becomes the greatest of the gods, and eventually fathers Marduk, who ultimately becomes the supreme god. Tiamat finally rebels against Marduk, and creates a race of monsters to do battle with him:
They banded themselves together and at the side of Tiamat they advanced;
They were furious; they devised mischief without resting night and day.
They prepared for battle, fuming and raging;
They joined their forces and made war,
Ummu-Hubur [Tiamat] who formed all things,
Made in addition weapons invincible; she spawned monster-serpents,
Sharp of tooth, and merciless of fang;
With poison, instead of blood, she filled their bodies.
Fierce monster-vipers she clothed with terror,
With splendor she decked them, she made them of lofty stature.
Whoever beheld them, terror overcame him,
Their bodies reared up and none could withstand their attack.
She set up vipers and dragons, and the monster Lahamu,
And hurricanes, and raging hounds, and scorpion-men,
And mighty tempests, and fish-men, and rams;
They bore cruel weapons, without fear of the fight.
Her commands were mighty, none could resist them;
After this fashion, huge of stature, she made eleven [kinds of] monsters …
(tr. Leonard William King, 1902)