Complete Poems (57 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
For the plot of Wagner’s 1850 opera
Lohengrin,
on which this poem is based, see the previous note, on “Lohengrin.”
Commenting on this poem, Cavafy wrote the following note in English: “This is a good poem, but the second quotation is objectionable.” Like a number of other poems of the 1890s—for instance, “Builders” (1891; 1891), “The Bank of the Future” (1897), “Trojans” (1900; 1905)—this poem develops the theme of the futility of progress and of human action. Here, the theme is given a notionally classical Greek cast: the reference to the theatrical convention of the “god from the machine” (
deus ex machina
) in line 11 evokes the world of Greek tragedy, in which insoluble complications of destiny, fate, and plot were resolved by the eleventh-hour appearance of a god (
deus
) who often makes a closing pronouncement meant to put things right. (The phrase
deus ex machina
refers to the mechanical crane,
mêchanê
in Greek and
machina
in Latin, used to raise and lower the actor playing the god.) Here, the allusion to the
deus ex machina
is of course ironic; nothing is put right by the intervention of the gods, all is futility.
The first epigraph comes from Emerson’s 1846 poem “Give All to Love,” an exhortation to devote ourselves passionately to love that ends, somewhat startlingly, with an allusion to the fickleness of the beloved and the inevitable disappointment of the lover. A few stanzas will suffice to provide useful context:
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse,
Nothing refuse.
… … …… …
Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.
… … …… …
Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When the half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
It is easy to see why the resonant final lines (quoted by Kipling, too), with their suggestion that life’s cruel disappointments and separations lead nonetheless to an apprehension of a deeper truth, appealed to the Cavafy of the 1890s, which as we know was a decade of devastating personal loss for the poet.
This solemn vision may explain Cavafy’s later objection to the second quotation, which he could well have seen, on reflection, as unduly frivolous: the lines come from Dumas’s rather sensational 1876 play
L’Etrangère
(The Foreign Woman), which treated infidelity, daringly modern marital arrangements, and race (the title character, played by Sarah Bernhardt in the original Paris production, is the illegitimate daughter of a Carolina planter and a mulatto slave), all set among the higher echelons of the French aristocracy. Savagely dismissed by Henry James in a review, the play nonetheless inspired his novel
The Americans.
This is the longest extant poem in Cavafy’s corpus. His interest in Shakespeare was already apparent in his articles “Shakespeare on Life” and “Greek Traces in Shakespeare” (see the note on “Voice from the Sea,”
here
).
Hamlet
in particular seems to have fired his imagination, since in addition to the present poem he wrote two other poems based on that play, of which we have only the titles: “Lights, Lights, Lights” (1893) and “The Downfall of Denmark” (1899).
Several of Cavafy’s poems of the 1890s take the form of a (usually ironic) rewriting of well-known literary or historical episodes: see also “When the Watchman Saw the Light” (Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon
), “The Naval Battle” (Aeschylus’s
Persians
), and “Lohengrin” and “Suspicion” (Wagner’s
Lohengrin
).
Like “When the Watchman Saw the Light,” this poem takes an Aeschylean subject as the starting point for a rewriting; in this case, the play in question is
Persians,
Aeschylus’s 472 B.C. dramatization of the unlikely Greek defeat of the vast Persian expeditionary forces in the Second Persian War of 480–479. The climactic battle of this conflict was the Greek victory over the Persian fleet in the narrow straits of Salamis, where the superior Persian numbers were of no avail. The inarticulate exclamations of the Persian chorus in this poem are direct borrowings from Aeschylus’s text.
E
CBATANA
, S
USA
, and P
ERSEPOLIS
were all great cities under the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia, to which both Darius I and his son Xerxes, leaders of the two invasions of Greece from 490 to 479 B.C., belonged.
When the Watchman Saw the Light
The poem takes its inspiration from Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon,
which opens with a watchman on the roof of Agamemnon’s palace in Mycenae describing the lonely years he has spent, on Clytemnestra’s orders, looking for the beacon that will signal the fall of Troy and the return of her husband, Agamemnon (leader of the Greek forces that had set sail for Troy ten years earlier). As we know, the queen, now the lover of her husband’s cousin, Aegisthus, and bitter still over Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, eagerly awaits her long-absent king so that she might kill him. The present poem assumes the voice of the play’s chorus, composed of elders of the strife-riven city.
A
RACHNAEUM
(or Arachnaion) was a mountain in the Argolid plain where Mycenae is situated; its twin peak would have been an ideal location for the last of the signal fires that the Watchman looks for. A
TREIDS
refers to the royal family of Mycenae: Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus, were the sons of Atreus, from whom the dynastic name derives. By referring to the family in this way, Cavafy invokes a broader history of internecine violence that runs in this particular family: Atreus had murdered the children of his brother Thyestes, of whom the sole survivor was Aegisthus, who later usurped Agamemnon’s throne and bed.
The poet’s interest in flowers, particularly as a vehicle for expressing alienation from Nature, is evident here as well as in “Garlands”: among his unpublished texts he left what he called a “paraphrase” in Greek of the following two lines of the British poet Arthur Symons:
Where under hot-house glass the flowers forget
How the sun shines and how the cool wind blows.
The rejection of Nature in favor of exquisite artistic fabrications is a trope familiar from the Decadents of the 1890s; the most famous example is in Huysmans’s 1884 novel
À rebours,
in which the hero inlays his pet tortoise’s shell with flowers made of jewels.
In the margin of the manuscript of this poem and of “December 1903” and “January 1904,” the poet penciled the initials “A. M.,” almost certainly a reference to Alexander Mavroudis, a young man with literary ambitions whom Cavafy met during his 1903 visit to Athens, and who seems to have been the object of an intense but unconsummated crush. In November 1903 the poet wrote the following note in English, which refers to “2 Ms”—that is, two poems whose titles are the names of months:
No poems were sincerer than the “2 Ms” written during and immediately after the great crisis of libidinousness succeeding on my departure from Athens. Now say that in time Ale.
Mav. comes to be indifferent to me, like Sul. (I was very much in love with him before my departure for Athens), or Bra.; will the poems—so true when they were made—become false? Certainly, certainly not. They will remain true in the past, and though not applicable any more in my life, seeing that they remind me of a day and perhaps different impressions, they will be applicable to other lives.
In the context of Cavafy’s relationship with Mavroudis, whatever form it may have taken, it is interesting to note that the Greek word in line 7 that I have translated as “wear black mourning,”
mavroforoun
(literally, “wear black”) bears more than a passing resemblance to the surname
Mavroudis.
See the note above on “September of 1903.”
See the note above on “September of 1903.”
The favorite themes of once-great civilizations that are ultimately superseded and, in particular, of peripheral cultures eagerly trying to stake a claim to Hellenism, haunts this poem in a number of ways. The P
OSEIDONIANS
were the inhabitants of Poseidonia, a significant Greek colony in Italy, which was founded in the seventh century B.C. by settlers from Sybaris and became a Roman colony in 273 B.C., at the time when Rome was consolidating its hold on the coastal cities of southern Italy—the same historical event that inspired “The Tarentines Have Their Fun.” Under the Romans, Poseidonia was known as Paestum. The reference to T
YRRHENIANS
similarly evokes superseded cultures: this was the name by which the Greeks referred to the Etruscans, the indigenous people who inhabited the Italian peninsula until they too were effaced
by the Romans (also called L
ATINS
). I
TALIOTES
refers to the Greek population of southern Italy, which during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. was heavily colonized by Greek settlers.
The epigraph is of some interest. Much has been made of the differences between the original text of Athenaeus (who is here quoting Aristoxenus, a musician from Tarentum in Italy who in this passage invokes the decay of the Poseidonians as a parallel to what he saw as the decay of music) and Cavafy’s citation of it here, which elides certain elements. Interestingly, save for the elision of one final sentence, the text as Cavafy cites it reproduces exactly the text of Athenaeus as it is quoted in John Addington Symonds’s
Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece
(1883), in a passage about a visit to Paestum:
“We do the same,” said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies, “as the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It befell them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterly barbarized, changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering their language, together with their other customs. Yet they still observe one Hellenic festival, when they meet together and call to remembrance their old names and bygone institutions; and having lamented one to the other, and shed bitter tears, they afterwards depart to their own homes. Even thus a few of us also, now that our theatres have been barbarized, and this art of music has gone to ruin and vulgarity, meet together and remember what once music was.”
The similarity of the two citations suggests that the passage in Symonds—the homosexual English writer whose work Cavafy knew—rather than a reading of Athenaeus himself, was what inspired the present poem. This is, I think, borne out by the way in which Symonds presents the Athenaeus citation, emphasizing a cultural pathos that would have had great resonance for the poet:
This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned, and how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark
indifferent stream of time. The Aristoxenus who wrote it was a pupil of the Peripatetic School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar with the vicissitudes of Magna Graecia. The study of music was his chief preoccupation; and he used this episode in the agony of an enslaved Greek city, to point his own conservative disgust for innovations in an art of which we have no knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenus have perished, and the fragment I have quoted is embedded in the gossip of Egyptian Athenaeus. In this careless fashion has been opened for us, as it were, a little window on a grief now buried in the oblivion of a hundred generations. After reading his words one May morning, beneath the pediment of Paestum’s noblest ruin, I could not refrain from thinking that if the sprits of those captive Hellenes were to revisit their old habitation, they would change their note of wailing into a thin ghostly paean, when they found that Romans and Lucanians had passed away, that Christians and Saracens had left alike no trace behind, while the houses of their own
—down-facing deities—were still abiding in the pride of immemorial strength.
If Cavafy’s source was, in fact, Symonds, the Englishman’s triumphant conclusion must surely color our interpretation of the poem as a whole.