CLASSICS REVISITED
Lost worlds
RAVI VYAS
How can you gather together
the thousand fragments
of each person?
What's wrong with the rudder?
The boat inscribes circles
and there's not a single gull.
The world sinks:
hang on, it'll leave you
alone in the sun.
You write:
the ink grew less,
the sea increases.
The body that hoped to flower like a branch,
to bear fruit, to become like a flute in the frost —
imagination has thrust it into a noisy bee-hive
so that musical time can come and torture it.
From Sixteen Haiku, George Seferis, (1900-1971)
THE purest poetry, it can be argued, springs not from a quarrel with ourselves, or from urban angst or cloistered academics, nor from a passionate contemplation of nature. Its originality comes from the soil, not the seed, and, like earth itself, best expressed in the dreams and disappointments of ordinary people. For the Nobel prize-winning poet and diplomat, George Seferis, "the servant of two masters", as he put it, poetry meant reflections on the traumatic history of Greece in the 20th Century — defeats, dictatorships, occupation and the agony of the civil war — that expressed the "woundedness" of being a Greek. But these reflections were metaphors on the general human condition, offering insights that carry with them the weight of universal truths and that serve to reveal the deeper meaning of our times.
An exile at heart
But for all his identification with the Greek people, Seferis was at heart an exile. The world of his childhood in Smyrna (modern-day Izmir in Turkey) was smashed with Greece's catastrophic defeat by Turkey in 1922. There was no going back; Seferis never lost his sense of being uprooted because exile is an unhealable rift between a human being and his native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness that seeps through his poetry is never surmounted.
All I want is to speak simply; for this grace I pray,
For we have overloaded even the song with so many kinds of music
That gradually it sinks.
How can a man speak simply when he has eaten the bread of exile.
Seferis wrote as the conscience of a people struggling to reorient themselves in a chaotic world, the singular pronoun "I" of his earlier poems giving way to the collective, "we". But Seferis's politics are never simply the restricted politics of a nationalist — though he was very much a national poet in the choice of his themes and visions put across through the Greek landscape, its literature and mythical past.
Larger implications
Seferis's politics has an acute sensitivity to the larger implications of contemporary history. Its distinguishing character — which Seferis shares with Yeats and Eliot — is to make out of politics, out of personal history or mythology, some sort of general statement or metaphor. His long Odyssean voyage on the "broken timbers of unfinished journeys" to those islands ever slightly out of reach, or "bodies that know no longer how to love" have the same general insight that we find in Yeats' voyage to Byzantium or Eliot's journey over desert country to some kind of salvation.
Seferis's metaphors are the voices of quiet despair. He knows that knowing something isn't the same thing as experiencing something that leads to understanding, that they are two very different things like breathing and eating.
I don't understand these faces
I don't understand them.
Sometimes they imitate death and then again
Gleam with the humble life of the glow-worm.
And again,
I can't explain it, you said, I can't explain.
I find people impossible to understand.
Play with colours as they will.
They are all black.
Or, again:
And the roses come down with
Me. They are excited;
They have something in their
Manner of that voice
At the root of the cry,
at the point where man begins
To shout out `mother' or
`help'.
Or the small white cries of love.
It is Seferis's capacity to transform a personal experience or insight into a metaphor that defines the character of our times. For example, the metaphor of that "presentable and quiet man" who walks along weeping in "Narration", the "instrument of a boundless pain/ that's finally lost all significance"; or the couple at the end of "The Last Day" who go home to turn on the light because they are sick of walking in the dusk; or the messengers in "Our Sun" who arrive, dirty and breathless, to die with one intelligible sentence on their lips: "We don't have time". These are metaphors that project Seferis's vision beyond the strictly local or strictly personal history that together bring images that are as definitive, as universal, as any offered by Seferis's contemporaries in Europe and America.
Seferis's sensibilities may have been too specifically Greek but they share the "Waste Land" feeling common to Anglo-American and European poets after World War I. In "Thrush" Seferis's persona is aware how much this world has achieved only to find everything suddenly ruined by "war, destruction, exile" — aware of how much and how little individual creative effort signifies in a world so vulnerable.
The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn't hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go to the shelters.
Seferis's poetry is the poetry of the end of the journey, as he puts it in "Last Stop":
"The same thing over and over again," you'll tell me, friend.
But the thinking of a refugee, the thinking of a prisoner, the thinking
of a person when he too has become a commodity —
try to change it; you can't.
Annotating life
In one of the entries in his Journal, Seferis says that he had attempted to "accommodate in my mind the mechanism of catastrophe", in other words, to "annotate life"
Like a copybook which has
Wearied us, remains
Full of words crossed out, pen
Strokes scribbled in the margin
And question marks,
and, in the same poem, he says
I have loved men unknown
Encountered suddenly at the
End of the day
Speaking to themselves like
Captains of a sunken armada
An indication that the world is wide, the metaphor that in the final reckoning defeat faces all. All we would be left with are memories and it is up to us to make the best of them, good or bad.
Collected Poems, 1924-1955, George Seferis, translated, edited and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Jonathan Cape, 1969.
A Poet's Journal, 1945-1951, George Seferis, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Nobel Prize Lecture, George Seferis, 1963.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
