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<p class="paracenter">
<b>GEORGE SEFERIS </b>
</p>
<p class="paracenter"></p>
<p class="para">
<i>Poet and essayist in modem Greek. Translated poems of the English poet, 
George Eliot, into modern Greek; was in diplomatic service, now retired and 
settled in Athens. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963. An Elder, ma</i>î<i>tre, 
now in the literary world of modem Greece.</i>
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">
<i>References: &quot;Poetry&quot; (Chicago); Greek Number, June 1951; &quot;Poetry&quot;, Greek 
Number, October 1964; '&quot;Poems&quot; translated by Rex Warner (the Bodley Head. 
London)</i>
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
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 sign than—
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
	&quot;Bend if you can to the dark sea forgetting </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	The flute's sound on naked feet </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	That trod upon sleep in the other, the sunk life.&quot; </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
It is the Virgilian &quot;tears of things&quot;—<i>Lacrymaererum—</i> the same that moved 
the muse of the ancient Roman poet, moves the modern Greek poet.</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Seferis' poetry sobs—explicit or muffled—muttering or murmuring like a refrain—a 
mantra:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
	'Oh the pity of it all!' </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
What else is it, I repeat, but sobbing:
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-47</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
	I look for my old house, </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	The house with the torn windows </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	Darkened by the ivy, </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	And for that ancient column </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	The landmark of the sailor. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	How can I get into this hutch? </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
We are reminded of Jeanne d'Arc, the little maid who melted with great pity <i>(grande 
pitié) </i>at the sight of the 
misery stalking all 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</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">
	&quot;Great pain had fallen on Greece.&quot; </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Great pain, ruin everywhere...Greece is but a sign, a symbol of the whole earth, 
the whole humanity. All around ancient—sempiternal—ruins...
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">
	&quot;Walls, streets and houses stood out </p>
	<p class="para">
	Fossilised muscles of Cyclopian giants, </p>
	<p class="para">
	Spent power in its anatomy...&quot; </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
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:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">
	&quot;When you look around and you find </p>
	<p class="para">All 
	about you swathes of feet </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-48</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">All 
	about you dead hands </p>
	<p class="para">All 
	about you darkened eyes; </p>
	<p class="para">
	When there is no longer any choice </p>
	<p class="para">Of 
	the death you wanted as your own, </p>
	<p class="para">
	Listening to a great cry, </p>
	<p class="para">
	Even to a wolf that yells...&quot; </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Indeed a great cry shoots out of your heart; an indescribable pity, the upsurge 
of a divine <i>Pieta, </i>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.</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
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:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">On 
	our left the south-wind blows and drives us mad, </p>
	<p class="para">The 
	wind that bares bones, stripipng off the flesh,... </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Or the whole story of diabolical cruelty, the three Mules, with these tremendous 
lines:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
	...those jolting breasts </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	Ripe as pomegranates with murder...<sup>1</sup> 
	(P.108) </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
 <sup>1</sup> I quote here the whole passage in 
a little different translation: 
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">
	The glorious animal of Queen Eleanor. </p>
	<p class="para">
	Against her belly those eperons of gold, </p>
	<p class="para">
	On her saddle those insatiable loins, </p>
	<p class="para">
	In her amble tottering those breasts.</p>
	<p class="para">
	Bursting like pomegranates with murder. </p>
	<p class="para">
	<i>(Contd. on P. 50)</i> </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-49</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">This 
is terror, in excelsis. As for pity—his lines on Greece:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
	Great pain had fallen on Greece </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	So many bodies thrown </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	To jaws of the sea, to jaws of the earth, </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	So many souls </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	Given up to millstones to be crushed like com. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	And the muddy beds of the rivers sweated with blood. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
	(Pp.115-116) </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
or</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<p class="para">
O Nightingale, Nightingale, </p>
<p class="para">
What is God? What is not God? What is in between? </p>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">Or this 
truly pitiful invocation:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<p class="para">
But they have eyes all white without eyelashes</p>
<p class="para">
And their arms are thin as reeds. </p>
<br>
<p class="para">
Lord, not with these. I have known </p>
<p class="para">
The voice of children at dawn </p>
<p class="para">
Running on green hill-sides </p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">
	And when Neapolitans, Genoese and Lombards 
	</p>
	<p class="para">
	Brought to the royal table on a silver tray 
	</p>
	<p class="para">
	The shirt all bloody of the murdered king </p>
	<p class="para">
	And made away with his pitiable brother </p>
	<p class="para">
	I can imagine how she neighed that night,— 
	</p>
	<p class="para">
	Something beyond the impassivity of her race— 
	</p>
	<p class="para">
	Like the howling of a dog. </p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-50</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Happily coloured, like the bees</p>
	<p class="para">And like the butterflies. 
	</p>
	<p class="para">Lord, not with these, 
their voice </p>
	<p class="para">Cannot even leave their mouths, 
	</p>
	<p class="para">It stays there glued on yellow 
teeth. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
(P.78)
</p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
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,
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Then I heard footsteps upon the pebbles; 
	</p>
	<p class="para">I saw no faces. They had gone when I 
turned my head. </p>
	<p class="para">Still that voice heavy upon me like the treading of cattle
	</p>
	<p class="para">Stayed in the pulses of the sky and the seas rolled
	</p>
	<p class="para">Over upon the shingle again 
and again. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
(P.110)
</p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Or this superb picture of the Holy Ascension:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Suddenly I was walking and not walking. 
	</p>
	<p class="para">I looked at the flying birds; they had 
turned to stone. </p>
	<p class="para">I looked at the shining sky; there was amazement in the air.
	</p>
	<p class="para">I looked at the struggling bodies; they stood still. 
	</p>
	<p class="para">And in their midst was a 
face ascending into the Light. </p>
	<p class="para">Over the neck the black hair flowed, the eyebrows
	</p>
	<p class="para">Had the beat of a swallow's wing, the nostrils
	</p>
	<p class="para">Curved back over the lips, and 
now the body </p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-51</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">Was rising out of the labour, naked, with the unripe breasts
</p>
<p class="para">Of a virgin, Leader of Ways;
</p>
<p class="para">A dancing but no movement. (Pp.120-121)
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
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:</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">In the sky the clouds were ringlets; here and there
	</p>
	<p class="para">A trumpet of gold and rose: 
the approaching dusk. </p>
	<p class="para">In the scanty grass and among the thorns there roamed
	</p>
	<p class="para">Thin 
breaths that follow the rain; it must have been raining </p>
	<p class="para">Over there at the edge of the hills that now took on colour. (P. 120)
	</p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
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,<sup>1</sup> he let things 
happen, he was satisfied with being a
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> <sup>1</sup> This is what exactly Seferis says about this &quot;old man&quot; of 
Greece. &quot;He has no inclination to reform. On the contrary, he has an 
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-52</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">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.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
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:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
Just a little more </p>
	<p class="para"> 
And we shall see the almond trees in blossom </p>
	<p class="para"> The marbles shining in the sun
	</p>
	<p class="para"> 
The sea, the curling waves. </p>
	<p class="para"> 
Just a little more </p>
	<p class="para"> Let us rise just a little higher.
	</p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
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 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:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<p class="para">And those bodies
</p>
<p class="para">Created from a land unknown to them
</p>
<p class="para">Have their own souls.
</p>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
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.&quot; 
</p>
<p class="pararight">
—Poetry (Chicago), Oct., 1964<b>.</b>
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-53</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<p class="para">Now they assemble tools to change these souls. 
</p>
<p class="para">It will not be possible. They 
will only undo them. </p>
<p class="para">If souls can be undone.
</p>
<p class="para"> 
(P. III) </p>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Neither wholly an earthbound poet nor clearly an otherworldly prophet his 
question still remains:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<blockquote>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
What is God? What is not God? What is in between?
</p>
</blockquote>
	</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Seferis is a being of this in-between world, his consciousness a golden seam 
joining two hemispheres.
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-54</p>
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