Complete Poems (59 page)

It is interesting to compare Gibbon’s contempt for monastic fanaticism to the almost ecstatic note of Cavafy, whose concluding special emphasis on the word “man” (“so wonderful a man”) is surely a riposte to Gibbon’s snide dismissal of monks as undeserving of the name of “man” (“I abuse the name”):

Two things are worthy of our attention here. First, in his own poem Cavafy solves the problem he observed in Tennyson by making the narrator of the poem not Simeon, but an observer: in this way the poet emphasizes the remarkable
effect
of Simeon’s solitude and suffering. Second, the reading note makes plain both his profound admiration for Simeon, particularly his fearlessness in the face of solitude—something that Cavafy sought himself, and which he explored in his poetry—and his awareness of the difficulty of creating a work worthy of such a figure (“a very difficult task … for some mighty king of art”). Both, it seems safe to say, help explain why Cavafy felt he could not publish his own poem about Simeon.

A fascinating element of Simeon’s biography connects this figure to another for whom Cavafy had profound feelings: Apollonius of Tyana, the mage whose telepathy and ability to see into the future so intrigued Cavafy. Simeon’s fifth-century biographer Theodoret reports that the Stylite was able to sense “what, in the future, was close at hand, what was imminent,” and cites as an example a drought that Simeon had predicted two years in advance.

Coins

As in “Epitaph,” this poem reveals a fascination with the reaches—or perhaps the limits—of Hellenism, following the conquests of Alexander the Great. The names on the coins belong to various members of the dynasty of Indo-Hellenic kings who ruled in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent during the second and first centuries B.C. The civilization of the Indo-Hellenic kingdoms were showcases for the hybridization set in motion by Alexander’s Asian campaigns: Hellenic elements permeated the local arts, the various Indian languages were combined with Greek, and Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist elements combined in religion as well. One of the kings referred to here, M
ENANDER
I, converted to Buddhism.

It Was Taken

Cavafy’s interest in popular folk songs is well attested. In 1914 he published a long review-article on the subject, and between 1919 and 1920, immediately before he wrote this poem, he collaborated on an anthology. In the 1914 article, he writes at length about the “marvelous expressive power” to be found in folk songs about the Fall of Constantinople (“the C
ITY
”). As so often with Cavafy, the philological and the emotional are here inextricably entwined under the rubric of Hellenism: the beginning of this poem, with its glimpse of the poet indulging his arcane interests only to come across an item that has a powerful emotional effect on him, is strongly reminiscent of “Caesarion,” which charts a similar shift from an ostensibly scholarly and wholly cerebral interest in some episode of Hellenic history (one in which, indeed, something Greek was ultimately destroyed) to intense emotion.

T
REBIZOND
was a medieval Hellenic empire, located on the southern shore of the Black Sea, which had once been part of Byzantium; because it was the last of the former Byzantine realms to fall to the Ottoman Turks (in 1461), it is referred to as “the last Greek Empire.” As he often does with Classical Greek, Cavafy here cites passages of a text—in this case, songs in the Trapezuntine dialect, which retains many aspects of
the grammar and pronunciation of Classical Greek, and hence has an “archaic” flavor—in the original. R
OMANY
(
Romanía,
in Greek) was the name by which the Byzantine empire was popularly known during the Middle Ages.

[More Happy Thou, Performing Member]

Because the original manuscript gives no title, the first line of the poem, bracketed, traditionally provides the name of the poem. However derivative its content and primitive its prosody, this poem is interesting inasmuch as it suggests that already in his late teens and early twenties, certain themes—the special knowledge of the elect; the uncanny power of strong gazes—had appeared in the poet’s work.

Leaving Therápia

The poem was written in July 1882. Therápia was a town near Yenikoÿ, where Haricleia Cavafy’s father had a house. She and five of her sons fled to safety with her family in Constantinople after the anti-European riots of 1882 in Alexandria; they stayed briefly in Therápia before moving to a small house in Cadíkoy that her father rented for them.

Darkness and Shadows

The manuscript is written in the hand of Cavafy’s brother John, who translated a number of the poet’s Greek poems; the subtitle indicates that this text is an English “transcription” of a poem that Cavafy had written in French. Cavafy occasionally used his mother’s maiden name, Photiades, as his middle name, instead of Petrou, a form of his father’s first name; hence the use of the initials “C. F. C.” here, where the letter “F,” in John’s transcription, stands for “Photiades.” Savidis suggests that the basis of this poem was the introductory poem “Fonction du Poète” (“The Poet’s Function”) in Victor Hugo’s collection
Les rayons et les
Ombres
(“Sunlight and Shadows,” 1840), which Cavafy owned; that poem exalts poetry as the “star that leads kings and shepherds to God!” The epigraph of this poem indicates that Cavafy wrote verse in French as well as English, although the original of this poem, “L’Ombre et les ombres,” written sometime before January 1883, has been lost.

The Item in the Paper

The title and date appear on the first of the five sheets comprising the dossier. The relatively large number of papers associated with this poem, and their evidence of many additions, corrections, and revisions, amounting to what Lavagnini has identified as three discrete forms (of which the third is the one reproduced in the main text), offer a particularly intriguing glimpse into Cavafy’s creative thinking. The significance of these earlier versions justifies reproducing one of them here—the first, which differs most significantly from the last form. As reconstructed by Lavagnini, it reads as follows:

The second form preserves the basic structure and narrative sequence of the first, adding (after “The paper, rightly / abhorred …”) the detail that the victim’s death was “moreover, an accident, it wasn’t intentional”: an element that recurs in the last version.

The most important change to both earlier drafts—important for the tone and meaning of the final version, certainly, and also for our appreciation of Cavafy’s self-editing—is the displacement, as Lavagnini notes, of the emotionally charged reverie (“His disdain.… And he, mourning inwardly, / recalled the sweet lips; the exquisitely / white, sublime flesh that he hadn’t kissed enough”) from the end of the poem, in the two earlier versions, where it has a more obvious emphatic effect, to the central stanza: a revision that gives the final version greater impact through the imposition of greater restraint.

It Must Have Been the Spirits

The first of the six sheets comprising the dossier for this poem gives the title—with a parenthetical indication that it is a temporary title only—along with the date. Sheets 2, 3, and 4 offer evidence of sketches for two discrete early forms; sheet 5 contains the text of the last form, with few corrections, as well as a few lines from the second of the earlier forms. On sheet 6 the poet had written, in English, the word “Superseded,” almost certainly referring to the two early sketches.

Here again, evidence for earlier forms provides insight into the process by which the poet made his poem. The task of reconstruction,
in this case, was a particularly daunting one, given the number of revisions appearing on each of the sheets and the difficulty of determining a precise order for the verses appearing on them. Lavagnini has constructed the sketches as follows:

Sketch 1 (the text written on sheets 2 and 3) consists of eight lines of a poem that was, at one point, going to feature, prominently it would seem, a mirror:

Lavagnini has further identified two lines the poet had composed for this poem and later crossed out:

Lavagnini stresses the significance of the recurrent motif, eventually discarded here, of the mirror as the instrument of (or perhaps inspiration for) the poet’s rumination on the past—a device that he would employ, with great success, in the 1930 poem “The Mirror in the Entrance.” Here, Cavafy evidently abandoned the mirror motif and turned to another favorite: the sudden, usually nocturnal appearance of ghostly apparitions from the past—either the poet’s past or, indeed, the distant past of ancient history. This striking element is a thread that runs consistently through his work: from the earliest phase of his career (in a ghost story he wrote around 1895, “In Broad Daylight,” a black-clad male figure appears to a character in the dead of night) through the first
decade of the new century (in “January 1904”—the title refers to the date of composition—the poet describes how visions of the past suddenly melt away) and the great production of his middle years. In “Caesarion,” for instance, written in 1914 and published four years later, the narrator imagines that he sees the figure of Caesarion, the murdered son of Caesar and Cleopatra, in his study, a figure that becomes the vehicle for a reverie at once erotic and historiographical. As the present poem demonstrates, this fascination persisted into the final period of the poet’s creative life. For more on this theme, see the note on “Since Nine—,”
here
.

Another theme familiar from Cavafy’s mature poetry makes itself felt here as well: the way in which memory, and poetry, can be the vehicle for the preservation of a beauty encountered long ago, the physical reality of which will have faded with time. Lavagnini has reconstructed sketch 2 (the text that appears on sheet 4) as follows:

With these we might compare, for instance, these lines from “Days of 1908” (1921?; 1932; 1932) which exhibit a similar preoccupation: