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George Seftris
SEFERIS is a poet of sighs. I do not know the cadence, the breath of the original Greek rhythm. But if something of that tone and temper has been carried over into English, what can be more like a heave of sigh than –
Stoop down, if you can, to the dark sea, forgetting The sound of a flute played to naked feet That tread your sleep in the other life, the submerged one.¹
It is the Virgilian "tears of things" – lacrimae rerum – the same that moved the muse of the ancient Roman poet, moves the modern Greek poet. Seferis' poetry sobs – explicit or muffled – muttering or murmuring like a refrain – a mantra:
Oh the pity of it all!
What else is it, I repeat, but sobbing:
I look for my old house, The house with the tall windows Darkened by the ivy, And for that ancient column The landmark of the sailor. How can I get into this hutch?2 ....................................................... We are reminded of Jeanne d'Arc, the little maid who
¹ "Santorin" a – Gymnopaedia, in Poems, by George Seferis translated from the Greek by Rex Warner (The Bodley Head, London). ²
"The Return of the Exile", From Log Book I.
Page – 192 melted with great pity (grande pitié) at the sight of the misery _ll around, ravaging her sweet France like a pest and which drove her in the end to a more than classical tragic end: Seferis too in the same manner wails
Great pain had fallen on Greece.!
Great pain, ruin everywhere... Greece is but a sign, a symbol of the whole earth, the whole humanity. All around ancient – sempiternal – ruins...
.......walls, streets and houses there stood out, Fossilised muscles of Cyclopean giants, Spent power in its anatomy,.. .²
As if these were not sufficient, we must add new ones, fresh and bleeding-and not only material but moral ruins also– the dreadful results of our inhuman cruelties of war: When you look round and you find All about you swathes of feet All about you dead hands All about you darkened eyes; When there is no longer any choice Of the death you wanted as your own, Listening to a great cry, Even to a wolf that yells – "³
Indeed a great cry shoots out of your heart; an indescribable pity, the upsurge of a divine Pietà, seizes upon your being and you are another person, you become a poet, a prophet, a God's warrior. Seferis too became in this way a poet and something of a prophet. His poetry fulfils perfectly the function of the tragic drama, in the Aristotelian way – purification by evoking terror and pity – evoking terror, for example in these lines:
¹ "Helen", From Log Book III. ² "Engoroi", Ibid. ³
"Santodn".
Page – 193 On our left the south wind blows and drives us mad, This wind that bares bone, striping off the flesh.¹
Or the whole story of diabolical cruelty, the "Three Mules" , with these tremendous lines:
...those jolting breasts Ripe as pomegranates with murder. . .²
This is terror, in excelsis. As for pity-his lines on Greece:
Great pain had fallen on Greece. So many bodies thrown To jaws of the sea, to jaws of the earth; So many souls Given up to the mill-stones to be crushed like corn.
And the muddy beds of the rivers sweated with blood. .
.³ or O nightingale, nightingale, What is god? What is not god? What is in-between?4
Or this truly pitiful invocation:
But they have eyes all white without eyelashes And their arms are thin as reeds.
¹ "South Wind", Mythistorema. ² "Three Mules", From Log Book III. I quote here the whole passage in Warner's translation: "The glorious animal of Queen Eleanor. Against her belly those eperons of gold, On her saddle those insatiable loins, In her amble tottering those breasts Bursting like pomegranates, with murder. And when Neapolitans, Genoese and Lombards Brought to the royal table on a silver tray The shirt all bloody of the murdered King And made away with his pitiable brother, I can imagine how she neighed that night, – Something beyond the impassivity of her race – Like the howling of a dog, Doubly caparisoned, golden-rump ed, in the stable, Margarita, that mule."
³ "Helen".
4 Ibid.]
Page – 194 Lord, not with these. I have known The voice of children at dawn Running on green hillsides Happily coloured, like the bees And like the butterflies. Lord, not with these, their voice Cannot even leave their mouths.
It stays
there glued on yellow teeth.¹
But as I have said terror and pity are invoked not for themselves but for the sake of purification. They serve to wash and cleanse the troubled sentiments and bring in a purer clearer atmosphere. When we have passed through those heavy and cruel feelings, we arrive at a kindlier note. Thus,
Then I heard footsteps upon the pebbles I saw no faces. They had gone when I turned my head. Still that voice heavy upon me like the treading of cattle Stayed in the pulses of the sky and in the sea's roll Over upon the shingle again and again:²
Or this superb picture of the Holy Ascension:
Suddenly I was walking and not walking. I looked at the flying birds: they had turned to stone. I looked at the shining sky: there was amazement in the air I looked at the struggling bodies: they stood still. And in their midst was a face ascending into the light. Over the neck the black hair flowed, the eyebrows Had the beat of a swallow's wing, the nostrils Curved back over the lips, and now the body Was rising out of the labour, naked, with the unripe breasts Of a virgin, Leader of Ways; A dancing but no movement.³
Indeed, this is beauty cleansed and translucent, a beauty of the eternal Ionian sky. How limpid and serene, yet pulsating with a coursing life is this pastoral:
¹ "Postscript", From Log Book II. ² "Salamis in Cyprus", From Log Book III.
³ "Engomi", Ibid.
Page – 195 In the sky the clouds were ringlets; here and there A trumpet of gold and rose: the approaching dusk. In the scanty grass and among the thorns there roamed Thin breaths that follow the rain; it must have been raining Over there at the edge of the hills that now took on colour.¹
Yet was he a Christian in mood or feeling or faith in the wake of his friend and comrade, kindred in spirit and in manner, the English poet T. S. Eliot? There was a difference between the two and Seferis himself gave expression to it. The English poet after all was an escapist: he escaped, that is to say, in, his consciousness, into the monastery, the religious or spiritual sedative – opium? Seferis speaks approvingly of a poet of his country, alike in spirit, who declared that he was no reformer in this sad world,² he let things happen, he was satisfied with being a witness, seeing nature unroll her inexhaustible beauty. Eliot's was more or less a moral revulsion whereas the Greek poet was moved rather by an aesthetic repulsion from the uglinesses of life. It was almost a physical reaction. This reaction led him not to escape the reality but to detach himself and rise to heights from where he could see a clearer beauty in earthly things. He says:
Just a little more And we shall see the almond trees in blossom The marbles shining in the sun The sea, the curling waves.
Just a little more Let us rise just a little higher.³
Nor was he, we may now observe, a pagan, a secular aesthete. He has himself risen enough to glimpse and name his soul. It was not perhaps as clear a sight as that of Eliot that had a
¹ "Engomi". ² This is what exactly Seferis says about this "old man" of Greece. "He has no inclination to reform. On the contrary, he has an obvious loathing for any reformer. He writes as though he were telling us: if men are such as they are, let them go where they deserve to be. It is not my business to correct them." – Poetry (Chicago), October 1964.
³"Just a
little more", Mythistorema. Page – 196 touch of the Upanishadic assurance. Still the sense of an immortal thing unrepressed by mortalities came to him, in an authentic manner. For such is his final vision:
And those bodies Created from a land unknown to them Have their own souls. Now they assemble tools to change these souls. It will not be possible. They will only undo them, If souls can be undone.¹
Neither wholly an earthbound poet nor clearly an otherworldly prophet his question still remains:
What is god? What is not god? What is in-between?
Seferis is a being of this in-between world, his consciousness a golden seam joining two hemispheres.
¹â€œSalamis in Cyprus.†Page – 197
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