Seferis's Turning Point: A Textual Analysis

Seferis's Turning Point:
A Textual Analysis*
by C. CAPRI-KARKA
Turning Point is Seferis's first collection of poems. Even in this early

work, published in 1931, one can find signs of his profound conscious-
ness of the classical Greek tradition and at the same time of his thorough
assimilation of the Greek and European poetic techniques of the time,
most notably of the French Symbolists. It is all written in rhyme and,
-
although not as fine in form as his later work, it employs the same com-
plex imagery and symbolism encountered in the collections that followed.
Some of the recurrent motifs in his work appear for the first time here,
providing the basis for further variation and development in his later
poetry of certain essential themes which he keeps reiterating.
The collection opens with the poem "Turning Point," which has the
same title as the whole collection. It refers to the persona's change of
attitude toward life, presumably as a result of a betrayal in love. This
change is also implied in the epigraph of Turning Point,' and it is also
referred to in the poem "Denial" of the same collection. A moment of
terror comes to the protagonist, and the delightful journey of love becomes
abortive, as betrayal poisons, like a snake, the heavenly garden.
In contrast to the "Turning Point," in which the protagonist acknowl-
edges his love for the person who later betrayed him, in most of the
*This article is taken from C. Capri-Karka's recently-published book, Love and
the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot and Seferis. [Quotations of
the poems of the collection Turning Point are from G. Seferis, Collected Poems
1924 1955, tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, New Jersey:
-
Princeton University Press, 1967). Unless otherwise noted, quotations of poems

from other collections are from G. Seferis, Poems, tr. Rex Warner (Boston,
Mass.: Little Brown & Co., 1960), except for quotations from the Three Secret
Poems, tr. Walter Kaiser (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
On some occasions, one or two words of the translation were changed because
a more literal rendering better supported the interpretation proposed by the
author. In these cases, the modified words were enclosed in brackets. Unless
otherwise noted, translations of Seferis's prose writings and poems not induded
in the above collection are by the author.)
'But everything went wrong for me and upside down,
the nature of things was reborn for me.
(Erotokritos)
7
8 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
poems that follow, "Slowly you spoke," "The Sorrowing Girl," "Auto-
mobile," "Comments," "In Memoriam," he suffers from an inability to
love or he experiences an ephemeral emotion which quickly fades away,
leaving him exhausted.
Turning Point
Although the poem "Turning Point" refers to a very important mo-

ment in the protagonist's life, as far as time is concerned it represents
a mere "grain of sand" in the hourglass. The protagonist does not spell
out exactly what the moment was. He says only that it was ominous: it
reached him "like a black pigeon" and it was comparable to seeing "the
Hydra/in the heavenly garden."' Although the poet alludes here to the
snake in paradise, the fact that Hydra is also a constellation suggests
another way in which the protagonist saw "the Hydra" in the heavenly
garden. In terms of the symbolic journey, the "return to a lost paradise,"
as Seferis puts it,' is frustrated.
The protagonist also tells us that this moment reached him "at the
close of a last supper," 4 which implies the anticipation of a betrayal and a
crucifixion. This same ominous moment, again referred to as a tiny "grain
of sand," appears once more in a later poem, "Stratis the Sailor Describes
a Man." Here again the nature of this terrible experience is not made
dear but it is obvious that it was a catastrophe of some magnitude. In this
poem he picks up the same idea he left off from in the "Turning Point."
After the "last supper" and the implied crucifixion, in "Stratis the Sailor
Describes a Man" he suggests that he does not believe in the miracle of
resurrection.
Using the metaphor of the hourglass in "Turning Point," the pro-
tagonist refers to his life as a "tragic clepsydra" and he dramatizes the
terrible moment as a tiny "grain of sand" which "kept the whole/tragic
clepsydra dumb." Thus, he isolates the important moment but avoids any
specific explanation of it. The tremendous consequences of this moment
in the protagonists's life are also evident in the two lines from the seven-
teenth-century Greek romance Erotokritos, which are used as an epigraph
for the collection Turning Point.
But everything went wrong for me and upside down,
the nature of things was reborn for me.
'Hydra was a poisonous water snake with nine heads that grew in number when
severed—unless cauterized, as Hercules proved in destroying it. It is also a southern
constellation, represented as a snake on maps of the heavens .
'G. Seferis, Aosititag [Essays] 3rd ed., 2 vol. (Athens: Ikaros, 1974) 2:49.
4 G. Seferis, Mips c [Days] (Athens: Ikaros, 1973-77) A:135. Only one of
the five volumes of this series of journals has been translated under the title
A Poets Journal: Days of 1945-1951, tr. A. Anagnostopoulos (Cambridge,
Seferis's Turning Point 9
He is even more specific in his Journals, written at about the same time,
where he says that "one grain of sand can change a whole life." This
grain of sand in "Turning Point," and in the section "Man" of "Stratis
the Sailor Describes a Man," is also a symbol of sterile love.
Slowly You Spoke
The abrupt disappearance of love due to an unexplained change forms

the substance of the second poem of this collection. How intense this
love must have been and how important to the poet we are told both
directly and indirectly: the poet tells us that this woman used to be his
"fate's woof," and he contrasts the sunshine, which was bright when
she spoke, to the darkness which has fallen upon the world now that
love has gone. He wonders with surprise what happened to the whole
universe within "five moments.' A metamorphosis seems to have taken
place, something that appears again and again in Seferis's work. For
instance, in his novel Six Nights on the Acropolis, his hero Stratis, alone
in his room, is thinking: "And you are only watching: a coat that has
become unwearable since yesterday; a wrinkle that was invisible this
morning, a love that was still eternal a moment ago." In this poem, the
metamorphosis "rubbed out" his love after a very brief existence. This
rubbing out is similar to the situation described in another more complex
poem, "Denial":
On the golden sand
we wrote her name;
but the sea-breeze blew
and the writing vanished.
The absence of love and the feeling of emptiness and sterility that
goes with it is symbolized by a "dry pitcher." Seferis uses this symbol
several times in similar situations, as for instance in "The King of Asine,"
where he even extends the image by describing the hollow sound given
off by the empty pitcher:
. . . remember its sound? Hollow in the light
like a dry jar in dug earth.'
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). The Greek series will be referred to
hereafter as Journal A, Journal B, etc.
°The more exact meaning of the word Seferis uses in the Greek text is
"moments," not "seconds."
°George Seferis, °Ebl v:5x.re ario 'AxplyrcoAll (Six Nights on the Acropolis]
(Athens: Hermes, 1974) 100.
'Keeley and Sherrard's translation is used here, because the word "sound"
brings out better the point I wish to make.
Also, in poem "10" of the Mythistorema sequence, the lack of love is

symbolized by the empty cisterns with a hollow sound:
Only some cisterns, empty; they ring and are to us
Objects of worship.
A sound stagnant, hollow like our solitude,
Like our love and like our bodies.
In the last stanza of "Slowly You Spoke," there is again the darkness
that is usually associated with the absence of love. The question, "Where
is the place?" is best understood by reference to a sentence that appears
twice in Seferis's novel Six Nights on the Acropolis. There, a young
woman tells the protagonist: "I am not the place where your body exists,"
and on another occasion the hero himself asks, "Which is the place
where our body exists ?" Also, in the Three Secret Poems the voice of
Proteus is heard saying:
I am your land;
perhaps I am no one,
yet I can become what you wish.°
With this in mind, we realize that the question in the poem, "Where is
the place?" does not mean that he cannot locate the actual place where
he once was happy but that without love he feels as though his body has
lost its place. Another reference very relevant to the next line, "and your
nakedness to the waist," is found in the poem "Memory II":
Our life itself, yet different, just as when
Woman's nakedness is revealed and her face changes
And yet is the same face. Those who have loved
Know this. The world, in the light of other people,
Withers away. But this you must remember:
Hades and Dionysus are the same.
Love fades after its consummation and a woman's face appears less attrac-
tive after she strips naked. In "Slowly You Spoke," the poet carefully
specifies that the nakedness is "to the waist"; in other words, he recalls,
in his wonder and despair, the happy moments of expectation, before
the illusion had vanished, when she excited his imagination. Now his
tragedy is that he no longer sees a "style" in the woman's "soul," as he
did before. She is now like every other woman. Love is so ephemeral
("An unwritten love rubbed out") that it is almost absurd, for the
Six Nights on the Acropolis, 117, 111.
8
G. Seferis, Tpice Kpucpdc, HorInscrca, (Three Secret Poems) tr. W. Kaiser
9
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969) 27. Although the word
"land" appears here instead of "place," the original Greek word is again sktoc, as in
the other two quotations.
bewildered protagonist who wonders "what's happened" in "Five sec-
onds."
The Sorrowing Girl
In "The Sorrowing Girl," the poet describes the suffering of a young

woman in love and he is moved by her emotional restraint.
The girl appears "On the stone of patience," but, as the images that
follow indicate, this patience is actually a slow torment. The black of her
eye reveals her pain, and on her lips there is a line "that's naked and
trembles."
The description moves inward to her mind, where there is a "music
from which the tear starts.' Her body, on the other hand, "returns from
the [edge], to the [fruity Fruit in Seferis has rich symbolic connota-
tions; "to reap the fruit" usually means erotic fulfilment." Thus, this
image, although ambiguous, must imply that she is not only a romantic
person but a passionate woman with sensual desires. And yet, as the last
stanza indicates, her anguish is "unmoaning"; she is suffering in a dis-
creet, restrained manner. In this stanza, Seferis brings together two very
different ideas, the unmoaning anguish of the heart and the star-filled sky:
but your heart's anguish
was unmoaning, became
what a starfilled sky
gives to the world."
The star-filled sky gives to the world a feeling of harmony and balance,
and this is also what the restraint of the sorrowing girl inspires.
Looking at the poem as a whole, we can see that the poet values her
restraint very highly. He is touched by the dignity she shows in her un-
"'Keeley and Sherrard translate this phrase as "the motive/that starts tears."
The word axond6 used here usually means "purpose" or "motive," but often refers
also to a musical line or tune. In my view, the latter meaning is what the poet
had in mind here.
"See, for instance, the words of Logomanos in Six Nights on the Acropolis:
"The time will come when I'll initiate her, and well reap together the gentle
fruit" (124).
'The word order has been changed here, because as it stands in the published
translation the impression is created that the star-filled sky is given to the world,
which is not what the Greek original says. A word-by-word translation would be:
"became the meaning given to the world by a star-filled sky." Seferis refers to this
meaning of the star-filled sky in one of his Journals. Speaking about "this special
element of Hellenism," which is difficult to define but can only be felt, he gives a
series of persons, places or things that can help us follow its direction: "Homer,
Aeschylus, Herodotus—and Bach, Shakespeare and all the other great ones—and
Attica, the waves of the Aegean and the star-filled sky." "Because," he concludes,
"among other things, Hellenism means humanism" (Journal D, 134).
happiness. It is evident that there must have been an erotic involvement

between the girl and the narrator which has come to an end. He could
now be indifferent or cynical. The fact that he values the girl's silent
suffering as well as her capacity for love reveals something about the
narrator's own problem. As in some of Seferis's other poems, such as
"Comments," "Rocket," "Automobile," and "In Memoriam," the persona
is unhappy because he remains detached. Of course, if one examines his
poetry as a whole, the poet's attitude toward love is much more com-
plicated than that.
Automobile
"Automobile" describes a journey, both literal and symbolic. It con-

veys the emptiness and the tedium following an erotic encounter. The
two lovers are leaving together in a car. They feel remote and separate.
It is interesting that in order to emphasize this separation, Seferis uses
the image of a pair of compasses, the same image that was used by Donne
for exactly the opposite effect." What is stressed in Donne's poem is
the connection between the two feet of the compass, which makes them
interdependent. Seferis, on the contrary, sees the two feet of the compass
as parallel but separate; he compares them to a highway separated in the
middle by a line, and he tells us, in the last stanza, that the hearts of the
two lovers travel separately, one on the left side of the road and the
other on the right.
The first stanza has a light tone. The idea of speed is conveyed by
the two original images:
fingers of wind in the hair
and miles in the belly.
But with the first line of the second stanza the feeling of emptiness is
introduced:
the two of us were leaving, empty,
whiplash for the mild gaze;
the mind make up, the blood make up
naked, naked, naked !
The protagonist feels that the beautiful illusion created by the mind
before the erotic encounter is like maquillage covering up reality. Also,
the blood's radiance was "make-up" and has worn off, leaving them
"naked." The repetition of this word three times in the last line empha-
sizes the fact that the protagonists feel empty, stripped of any meaning.
13 "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning."
Seferis is more explicit on this point in another poem, "The Thrash,"
where he says:
Flesh's delirium, the lovely dance
That ends in nakedness.
What he was writing in his Journals at about the same time is also char-
acteristic: "This feeling of the ephemeral freezes me and paralyzes my
strength. I know that this feeling was (and is now) probably my worst
enemy. 14"
The next stanza, as emphasized by the use of italics, is a flashback to

the erotic moments. The sensuous handling of this transient experience
makes the contrast between this scene and the tedium that follows it
more intense. The elevated feeling conveyed by the dizziness suggests a
complete abandonment to the senses. The transient nature of this feeling
is conveyed by the image of a fish slipping away in the sea. Both the fish
and the sea are symbols very often connected with an erotic experience
in Seferis's poetry. Here the protagonist is sunk into the light and trans-
parent element of water, midway between illusion and reality.
As far as the journey is concerned, on the literal level it continues,
while on the symbolic level it has reached a dead end.
Denial
"Denial" is an important poem, which deals with what Seferis has
called in Greek "Kcap. c -co() ataariacezavoili" (the sorrow and longing
of sensuality)." It is one of the very few poems about which the poet
wrote some comments. The protagonists are Elpenors," a character who
appears often in his poetry. In an essay, referring to another poem of this
collection, the "Companions in Hades," Seferis wrote: "The unaware and
the satiated who have eaten the oxen of the sun are Elpenors. The same
thing I would say about the patient people of Denial.' " 17
In the first stanza, the Elpenors appear on a "secret seashore"; they
are thirsty but the water is brackish." The unpleasant taste of the water
suggests that the erotic experience was unsatisfying; love was spoiled.
"Journal A, 10.
15"A Staging for 'The Thrush,'" Essays, 2:36.
"In a later poem, "The Thrush," Seferis calls this character "lustful Elpenor."
As will be discussed in connection with the "Companions in Hades," Seferis
borrows this character from Homer but modifies him. In Homer, Elpenor is
presented as drunk, while in Seferis he is a more general symbol of the sensualist.
The common characteristic, however, is a weakness, an inability to control their
impulses.
""A Staging for 'The Thrush,'" Essays, 2:38.
"Compare the phrase in Six Nights on the Acropolis: the brackish taste of
uncertainty" (15).

In the next stanza, a different experience follows the first, as they

write a woman's name on the sand but the sea-breeze blows and erases
the writing. The implication here is that this love was ephemeral. The
sand is also a symbol of barrenness. Like "a castle built on the sand," this
love could not endure, as it probably would have if the protagonist had
carved the name on a tree or a stone. Again, there is no fulfilment.
The last stanza is a recapitulation followed by the decision to deny
passion:
With what spirit, what heart,
what desire and passion
we lived our life: a mistake !
So we changed our life.
The Elpenors realize that although these loves are superficial and
ephemeral, they can become an obsession. This vulnerability to passion
may be fatal. They become "patient," as Seferis tells us, and this change
in direction is in line with the title of the collection Turning Point.
The Companions in Hades
The epigraph of this poem comes from the opening passage of the
Odyssey:
fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;

but he deprived them of the day of their return."
It is of particular significance that Homer, from the very beginning,
singles out this sacrilege, attributing to it the failure of Odysseus' com-
panions to return home. In his essay, "A Staging for The Thrush,' "
Seferis writes that the "unaware and satiated" who ate the oxen of the
sun in the "Companions in Hades" are Elpenors." The Homeric Elpenor
had died before his companions ate the oxen of the sun, but here Seferis
refers to the more generalized character of modern Elpenor, who plays
a central role in his poetry." Because of their uncontrolled sensuality,
their inability to curb their animal appetites, they violated the sacred law
and were deprived of access to the lost paradise.
Seferis makes a special point in his commentary about Homer's Tire-
The Odyssey, I. 8-9.
19
"Essays, 2:38.
21 Edmund Keeley, in his essay "Seferis' Elpenor," discusses this subject exten-
sively, emphasizing that "the hedonistic violation of the just order of things
literally precludes the return of these modern Elpenors to a lost Paradise. The
implication is that no man can aspire toward spiritual liberation until he learns to
control his animal appetites, the beast in him that Homer's Circe exploited so
cruelly." The Kenyon Review (Summer 1966) 389.
sias warning Odysseus and his companions to respect the oxen of the sun
as a condition for their return. Tiresias talks to Odysseus about the light
and the sun. Seferis adds:
The whole question is how one can honor the oxen of the sun,
how one can honor the light of every day that God gives one.
The companions did not respect them, they devoured them, the
fools, and they were lost . . . Scattered, wasted, they can no longer
face either the sun or man:
Lands of sun, where you cannot face the sun.
Lands of man, where you cannot face the man."
The meaning of Seferis's words, "how one can honor the light of every
day that God gives one," becomes clear if one bears in mind that
light is used by the poet as a complex symbol, meaning, among other
things, love. 23 When he writes that the companions did not honor the
light, did not respect the oxen of the sun," he implies that they com-
mitted a sacrilege, they spoiled love.
In the first stanza, the modern Elpenors confess that they have eaten
the cattle of the sun, not because they did not have anything else to eat—
they had "some hardtack"—but out of mere "stupidity." They blame
themselves for this thoughtless act.
In the second stanza, they compare each ox to a castle. In order to
understand this unusual simile it is necessary to refer to a sentence in
Seferis's novel Six Nights on the Acropolis, attributed to one of the
leaders of the Greek War of Independence, Makriyannis, whom the poet
considered the embodiment of the "just man": "The fortress [Acropolis]
now wants to destroy those who wanted to destroy it." Makriyannis, who
was defending the Acropolis—which was a fortress at that time—against
the Turks, saw this act, this attempt to conquer the fortress, as an in-
justice that would lead to punishment." In this sense, eating the sacred
oxen is as unjust as conquering a fortress, and in both cases one becomes
"a hero and a star," an ironic way of saying that one loses his life.
22"A Staging for The Thrush,' " Essays, 2:52.
'The identification of light with love is more explicit in a later poem, "The
Thrush."
The sun, according to C.G. Jung, is considered "a fructifier and creator."
Symbols of Transformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967)
100.
'Six Nights, 137. Also in the essay about Makriyannis, Seferis mentions the
hubris committed by the Persian King Xerxes, who whipped the sea, as a conse-
quence of which his fleet was destroyed and all hands perished in it. Similarly,
Seferis here implies that as Aeschylus used a personification of the sea, which
punishes Xerxes' hubris, Makriyannis (without knowing about Aeschylus because
he was uneducated) uses the personification of the fortress which destroys those
who attack it. Essays, 1:257.
In the third stanza, the poet returns to the story in a sort of flashback
and narrates what happened:
On the earth's back we hungered,
but when we'd eaten well
we fell to these lower regions
[unaware) and [satiated].
Thus, the companions end in the underworld, with no hope of return.
They fail to complete their journey.
An important element, which comes out of this description, is that
these modern Elpenors committed consciously the hubris which cost their
lives, just as Odysseus' companions did in Homer, ignoring Tiresias'
warning. Thus, their fall from grace—to the "lower regions"—is the
result of conscious defiance. The word "unaware" in the last line of
the poem refers to the fact that they do not know how serious the punish-
ment for their act will be.
There is some similarity between the "Companions in Hades" and
T.S. Eliot's "Marina," although the central idea is different. Eliot's lines:
Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death,
convey the same idea of the fatal inability to control animal appetites.
However, Seferis refers to the punishment of excess, while Eliot's attitude
toward sensual pleasure in general is critical.
There is also a similarity in technique between the two poems. Seferis
is using here what Eliot called the "mythical method," the establishment
of a continuous parallel between a myth and a contemporary situation.
As Edmund Keeley comments, however, Seferis wrote the "Companions
in Hades" before he became acquainted with T.S. Eliot's poetry. 2°
Fog
The seventh poem in this collection, "Fog," is probably the first poem
Seferis wrote, at least among the first that he published. The poem deals
with a conflict which the protagonist solves by choosing to live a life "cold
as a fish" after rejecting both alternatives presented to him: to start an
affair with a woman who obviously does not inspire him, or to yield to
the dangerous temptation of a paradise, offered by an "angel," which
would eventually lead him to disaster. In contrast to their traditional
28 Edmund Keeley, "T.S. Eliot and the Poetry of George Seferis," Comparative
Literature (Summer 1956) 216.
meaning, angels in Seferis's poetry are usually—but not always—danger-
ous. There is a similarity in this respect between Seferis and Rainer
Maria Rilke, who also presents angels, especially in the Duino Elegies,
as sometimes austere, aloof, and perilous' and sometimes "affirmative.'
The poem opens with a fragment of an English song," which urges
a young man to confess his love to a girl.
"Say it with a ukulele . . ."
grumbles some gramophone. 3 °
The protagonist's response to the urging of the song leaves no doubt that
he is absolutely incapable of loving the young woman:
Christ, tell me what to say to her
now that I am used to my loneliness?
Following the stream of consciousness, he is led from this song to some
other, rather similar songs played by beggars in the streets, on their
accordions, calling on the angels of a supposed paradise:
And the angels opened their wings
but below the mists condensed.
The protagonist, however, is grateful for the fog, because without it
those angels who "are hell" would trap him and catch his poor soul as
though it were a thrush.
The poem continues with an imaginary dialogue. "And life's cold as
''If the dangerous archangel
took one step now
down toward us
from behind the stars
our heartbeats
rising like thunder
would kill us.
("The Second Elegy")
Duino Elegies, tr. David Young (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978) 27.
'Sing out jubilation and praise to affirmative angels" ("The Tenth Elegy").
Duino Elegies, tr. C.F. MacIntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1961) 75.
"In early editions, the epigraph of this poem, "Say it with a ukelele," was
followed by the explanation "English Song."
"In a later poem, "In the Kyrenia District," the same song appears, sung this
time by a person who later dies. The motif of a dead friend whose voice returns
from the past appears often in Seferis's poetry as a tyrannical memory, as for
instance in the Haiku:
Is this the voice
of our dead friends
or of the gramophone?
a fish"; but the persona says flatly that he prefers it this way. To the
question, "Is that how you live?" he answers, "Yes," and he justifies his
way of life by pointing out that
So many are the drowned
down on the sea's bed.
They are, presumably, those who sought the paradise of the "angels" and
whose promised happiness ended in disaster. Love appears as some sort
of hunt, and many are caught in its trap, like thrushes—an image that
appears again and again in Seferis.
The motif "Say it with a ukulele" is repeated, and this time the pro-
tagonist makes an appeal for real love instead of shallow talk:
Words for words, and more words?
Love, where's your church,
I'm tired of this hermitage."
We learn here, in contrast to the fourth stanza, that the protagonist longs
for a genuine love and is not made for a life as "cold as a fish," which
he is now leading. The stream of consciousness brings him now to con-
sider his whole life, wishing that it were "straight":
Ah, were life but straight
how we'd live it then !
But it's fated otherwise,
you have to turn in a small corner.
This ties in with the first poem of the collection, "Turning Point," when
he saw the snake in the heavenly garden. He does not seem to know
where this compulsory turn will lead him. This idea of a life which is
"straight," "right," "whole," etc., is very important to Seferis. It is met
again in the poem "An Old Man on the River Bank":
Not like us ...
Caught in the gaudy nets of a life which was right and turned
to dust and sank into the sand.
What Seferis obviously has in mind when he speaks of a "straight" or
"right" life is the Aeschylean idea that any excess constitutes a hubris
that is to be punished.
81 The Greek word used here, p.stOxta, is not fully conveyed by the term
"hermitage." Me'skt is an outlying farm or estate run by a monastery, i.e., a place

away from the center of worship. The protagonist does not complain that he is
tired of living in solitude, as the word hermitage suggests, but of experiencing
many ephemeral affairs, as implied by the fact that its-c6xcix is in the plural.
The poem ends in a very low mood, as the persona is searching in
despair for some consolation. The same fragment of the song haunts him:
"Say it with a ukulele . . ."
I see her red nails—
how they must glow in firelight—
and I recall her coughing. 32
The protagonist does not hide his uneasy feelings toward this woman,
since the only things he mentions about her are her red nails"—suggesting
a kind of sensual danger—and her unpleasant cough. The poet uses this
image of coughing later in the poem "The Thrush," pointing out how
changeable a love is:
The golden barrel is done
And a rag is what was the sun,
A rag on the neck of a woman in middle age
Who coughs and who never stops coughing.
The Mood of a Day
The memory of a lost paradise is conveyed by the first four lines of

"The Mood of a Day," while the rest of the poem refers to an absurd
present, a meaningless life from which love is absent. This life is symbol-
ized in the last part of the poem by a ghost-ship which continues its
journey while all its passengers are doomed never to reach their destina-
tion, since they are already dead.
The first stanza starts with the "mood of a day," which the protago-
nist lived ten years ago in a foreign country, and also with a unique
moment that "took on wings and vanished like an angel of the Lord' —
imagery related to a lost paradise.
Seferis presents here in quick succession the "mood of a day," "the
airy spirit of a moment," "the voice of a woman" hard to forget, and "an
end inconsolable, the marble setting of some September." Although one
cannot be sure that the four lines are connected and refer to the same
event, it seems probable that the poet is trying here to convey the feeling
of a separation. He is intentionally ambiguous in this stanza, which brings
to mind his admission in his Journals, write in order to postpone a
confession."" The return to a lost paradise is the purpose of the journey
"The correct translation should have the woman coughing in the past.
aaEven when describing a very attractive, sensual woman later in his Journals,
a "half negress with black curled hair like a fur cap," he mentions that her nails—
she was apparently wearing red nail polish—were "bloodthirsty." He then adds
that she was "a kind of Salome without decapitations, a kind of castrated
Semiramis." Journal B, 104.
34/ournal A, 76.
in Seferis's symbolism. But the return is not realized in this poem, any
more than it is in most of his other poems. The lost paradise is only a
source of despair, as he wrote in his Journals at about the same time the
poem was written: "I can discern at certain times of unbelievable solitude
an unexpected lost paradise that has left its traces on us only to torture
us without leading us anywhere." 33
Seferis is not clear in this poem about whether the loss of the paradise
was the result of death or of a separation or occurred for some other
reason. The woman was forgotten "with such care" (the Greek word is
"prudence," which usually has an unpleasant ring in Seferis), represent-
ing a contradictory mood, suggesting that the "inconsolable end" was
the result of a decision rather than of death. However, Seferis has warned
us in his Journals that one should not try to "attribute everything to a
separation." 3 " It is possible that the loss of the paradise was a consequence
of seeing in it the snake that was mentioned in the first poem of this
collection, "Turning Point."
Whatever the reasons may be, one can see the disastrous consequences
of the loss of paradise in the description of the dreary present, which
follows in the next few lines. New but strange houses, dusty clinics,
coffin shops, the suffering of a sensitive pharmacist on night duty, and
the disorder of the protagonist's room reflect his inner chaos. Sickness
permeates the whole scene; the protagonist is fatigued and lost, unable
to face reality. Life has become a disjunctive series of absurd words and
empty gestures, and the persona asks:
Where is love that with one stroke cuts time in two and stuns it?
'The whole passage in which this sentence appears is somewhat more reveal-
ing, because in its context the lost paradise is connected with the memory of the
poet's dead friends. The first sentence of this passage appeared also, slightly
modified, in a haiku:
Is this the voice
of our dead friends
or the gramophone?
The passage, dated Sunday, September 30, 1931, is as follows:
Is it the voice of our dead friends?—the gramophones insist. One of
them in every room, they serve on their black trays [afoxoc in Greek means
both "tray" and "record"—C.K.] Spanish or Negro nostalgias. I feel that
I am subjected to a systematic mechanical process which brings me suc-
cessively from the lower to the upper world, and I have the impression that
this will continue forever. Where have our own soft, human lines gone?
Now I think of the lines without the human beings. I can discern at certain
times of unbelievable solitude an unexplained lost paradise that has left
its traces on us only to torture us without leading us anywhere.
On the other hand, in another poem, "Stratis the Sailor Describes a Man," the lost
paradise is related to the memory of a dead woman: "You know, I love a woman
who's gone away perhaps/to the other world."
3 Vournal B, 13.
This takes us back to the beginning of the poem, as if life had stopped
ten years ago, leaving the memory of a lost happiness.
The poem ends with the image of a ghost-ship," which continues its
voyage although not a soul is alive in it—the symbol of a life that goes
on while one feels dead inside.
Comments
The poem "Comments," which was omitted from the translation of

Seferis's Collected Poems, is another expression of the same psychological
climate that characterizes most of the poems in this collection.' The sym-
bolic journey toward fulfilment is terribly frustrated because the effort at
communication between the protagonist and the woman fails. Deep in
their hearts a confession of love is hidden, but it remains suspended; their
lips move but pronounce the wrong words. The only hope is the response
of the body, which they expect as a blessing. But the miracle does not
take place. The angel who would bring it about never approaches. The
poet remembers such an angel from a lost paradise in his past. In contrast
to "Fog," where the angels were threatening, here the angel would bring
happiness. In Seferis, as mentioned before, the angels are sometimes good,
sometimes evil. Here, had the angel appeared, the "quick rings," like
concentric waves on the surface of the water, would have opened up and
the noose would have loosened." The communication is not realized . The -
woman is very attractive but remains "a stranger to [his) soul." The
protagonist feels empty; he finds the evening absurd.
"As the epigraph of this poem indicates, it is the ship met by Arthur Gordon
Pym, the hero of Edgar Allen Poe's story The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
'The following literal translation of the poem is presented here, to help the
reader follow the discussion:
Comments
Darkness had fallen upon the veranda/something flew by in a hurry/a
suppressed confession/was nested in our hearts.
The voice withered, fruitless;/on our lips a flock of wrong words/and
only from the depths of the body/0 Lord, we expected a blessing.
Darkness hummed inside the house/and from the light of the evening
star/to the magnet of your hair/remember the unapproachable angel.
With the rapid rings/fallen suddenly two fans/to the thought which
we read/like a prayer from a gospel book.
Woman stranger to my soul/your surprise is what I am left with/
beautiful, beloved woman/this senseless evening.
And the black rings of your eyes/and the airy horror of the night ... /
Bend and get back into the sheath/Blade of my silence, chimera.
"This process is described in more detail in one of the three versions of a
never-published poem included in Seferis's Journal A (114), from about the same
time that Turning Point was written:
In the last stanza he reverts to the darkness of loneliness. The black

color of her eyes is now associated with the horror of the dark night—
although the poet leaves the point a bit ambiguous since he simply places
the two images in juxtaposition and does not conned them explicitly.
He had hoped for some communication, which would have cut his silence
like a blade, but now this hope has proved to be an illusion, a "chimera,"
and the blade goes back into the sheath. A blade going into a sheath usu-
ally connotes sexual intercourse; here, however, the whole context suggests
that the return of the blade into the sheath signifies the decision not to
proceed with sexual intercourse. There is a certain similarity between this
poem and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," although "Comments"
concerns both partners. The impulse of the lovers to reach out for one
another is frustrated by a psychological block at the outset. The difference,
however, is that in "Comments" this block is due more to some kind of
subconscious reluctance of the protagonist, who finds the evening sense-
less and foolish, whereas in Eliot's poem it is due more to a lack of
daring, a maimed virility.
Rocket
This poem was published in 1931, at a time when the only rockets
widely known were fireworks, which travel with great speed, leaving a
trail of light and culminating in a brilliant display of stars and golden
lines illuminating the sky. This display lasts a very short time, as the
scattered stars and bright lines are quickly extinguished.
Seferis uses the rocket as a symbol of the phantasmagoria created by an
intense and ephemeral love that momentarily elevates the protagonist
above the sphere of everyday life. The magic is described with such
images as "the blue light on our fingers" and the "thousand antennae"
that "grope giddily to find the sky." The culmination is reached in the
stanza:
there was a deer
yellow as sulphur
there was a tower
built of gold.
Seferis uses the image of a deer or antelope to describe a slender young
Set your ear and listen to the sounds
that buzz in a house full of darkness
Let your sense of touch and hearing
fall on the skin of the black drum
drop them like a plumbline in the ocean and hold your breath
cling to the darkness which creates rings like the circles of a target
and loosens the tightness of the noose.
body in other poems as well, for instance in "Stratis the Sailor Describes
a Man" ("a young woman whose transparent dress revealed the lines
of her body, slim and full of spirit, like a gazelle's") and in an unpub-
lished poem." The bright color, "yellow as sulphur," that the poet ascribes
to the deer represents the impression one gets when one walks in a wood
and sees this delicate animal, while at the same time it is also related to
the rocket, since sulphur is one of the inflammable chemicals used in
manufacturing rockets. The critic Minas Demakis characterizes "Rocket"
as "a modern erotic poem" and explains: "love is here like a rocket; it
has the same transient quality—which reaches the sphere of the soul and
illuminates the heavens." 41 He then points out that the view of love at
its prime, when it was "a tower/built of gold," lasts only for a moment
and then shifts immediately to the time of decline, when "lilies whitened/
the beloved's hair."
In the fifth stanza we come to the point where the fireworks are
extinguished, when the spell of love dies. Five black crows, symbols of
death, quarrel and scatter in five directions after they had "counted their
years," which implies aging and decay. Their black color is the color of
the smoke that remains after the fireworks are extinguished.
The emphasis in this poem is on the speed of the rocket and on the
abrupt disappearance of the magic. The "red carnation" (a symbol of
love) is quickly replaced by the white lilies that cover the woman's hair,
suggesting abrupt aging. The protagonist finds himself in the sad position
of writing books about the "beautiful woman's body,' and he ends by
complaining that he is tired of living "only with peacocks"—in other
words, with the abstract beauty of art—and traveling "always/ in the
mermaid's eyes." George Savidis feels that the sixth stanza is "one of the
few direct references Seferis makes to his art; most of them are associated
with a sense of futility and of doubt about the fruitfulness of the poetic
act."" As for the reference to the mermaid, which appears often in
Seferis's poetry, the poet has written in his novel that he considers her
"And yet you loved the comrade whom you left
to take the dark path
As you stretch your hands
as you fix your eyes
as you don't know anything, walking along
his hands follow you
his eyes follow you
his loss follows you like a shadow
with that grace of a gazelle he had in the sun.
(Journal C, 34)
41Minas Demakis, "Micc eVntrcpoatimeugtxt cowvii T63v xplivm par ("A Rep-
resentative Voice of our Times"), Nea Hestia 92 (1972) 1427.
The original Greek word used here, bp,opvt), means "beautiful," not "be-
loved."
"George Savidis, "Mt& Ilaptairifictaii" ("A Wandering"), 1\& 'Eby Iscpipli
[Por Seferis) (Athens, 1961) 386.
"half woman, half myth." 44 In another part of the Journals he asks "will
the body of the mermaid ever come to life?" 45—a question which shows
that traveling always "in the mermaid's eyes" one never reaches his
destination, a fulfilment. This aimless wandering, which fascinates Ca-
vafy, Seferis finds dreadful. As he says in the passage of his Journals
quoted before, "the ephemeral makes me freeze";" and poems like "Auto-
mobile" and "Rocket" express his frustration at not being able to feel
real love for these women. "At my age," he writes in his Journals, "I
am ashamed to write it, I have nothing else besides instincts,' and in
another instance, "How many women promised you the same king-
dom?"" This kingdom, this paradise, is what the protagonist has in
mind: real communication. The ephemeral affair of which the "Rocket"
is a symbol usually takes one out of the sphere of communication. The
continuous transfers and traveling associated with Seferis's profession
played a serious role in this respect, preventing him (until he was in his
late thirties) from relating to people and environments. But this was
not the whole problem. As he himself wrote in his Journals in 1931:
I don't like to delude myself or to deceive others. It would be
simpler, and I think this is what all people do with a little
compromise, to attribute everything to separations."
It is also interesting to note the context in which Seferis uses the
word "rocket" in his novel Six Nights on the Acropolis. In it a character
says:
I have been driving a streetcar for so many years now. Patissia-
Ampelokipi, Ampelokipi—Patissia; a bell to start, a bell to stop;
and all over again. What has my life been? A wheel! Have I
known anything else? The other day my streetcar stalled and I got
down. Behind us another streetcar was coming. I saw it climbing
up the rails, coming up fast, how can I say it, like a rocket. Since
then, I think that maybe I am also coming up fast like that ...
"Watch out that you don't get any crazy ideas!" Visaniaris
said. "I had a colleague who was, like me, making the rounds with
a gramophone; one day he told me, 'I am a noble man and sym-
pathetic too. I am not like you, like some hashish addicts, some
brims who run around with the gramophones; I am a musician, I
have dignity. I play at the Tuberculosis Hospital. The records that
the tuberculosis patients ask for, the Traviatas, the Toscas, are in-
"Six Nights, 41.
°journal B, 31.
"Journal A, 10.
"Journal A, 47.
"Journal A, 112.
"Journal B, 13.
expensive. I make good money.' In the end he caught the Traviata

and passed away.""
The gramophone player is a typical case of a man overstepping his
bounds and paying the price for it. And the friend of the streetcar driver
uses the incident to warn him that the excessive speed of the rocket is
dangerous. Although the conversation sounds simpleminded, the Aeschy-
lean overtones cannot be missed.
Rhyme
"Rhyme" is written in the same mood as most of the poems in the

collection Taming Point (the "Automobile," the "Rocket," "Slowly You
Spoke," the "Sorrowing Girl"), whose main theme is a love that fades
away, leaving the protagonist with a feeling of emptiness.
From the beginning the protagonist remembers the lips of the beloved
person as "guardians" of love, but he immediately undercuts this idea
with the words "that was to fade," which suggest the futility of the
effort and imply a strange tendency to escape on his part. This tendency
appears more clearly in the next poem of the collection, "In Memoriam.'
The same sense of futility is conveyed by the second line of "Rhyme":
"hands, bonds of my youth that was to go." Here again the hands of the
beloved person that could have held him and saved him from aging fail
to do so. If one recalls that Seferis wrote this poem when he was only
twenty-nine, one realizes that he speaks here in symbolic terms: love,
which could have prevented him from decay, is gone. In his Jo:meals,
the poet wrote a few lines which are very relevant in this context.
This distress appears in the form of a dim river that flows unim-
peded and dominating. Et de ce fleuve de mains fugitives qui se
perd dans le calme de la mer—as your friend Stratis the Sailor
would say. I feel an unbearable need for love, physical love,
because it holds me and takes me out of this condition. It is the
only thing that can keep me out of this confusion and of this
flight."
The "fugitive hands" in this case are the thousands of wild hands
that are trying to carry him away and not the hands of love that could
"Six Nights, 83. The novel was written at the same time as "Rocket" and
revised many years later. The expression "caught the Traviata" means contracted
tuberculosis, the disease that causes the death of the heroine in the opera.
"This poem was not included in the Collected Poems. See below, note 55, for
my literal translation.
njournal B, 96. The phrase in French, "Et de ce fleuve ..." is from a small
poem in French, "Etude," which appeared in Seferis's Journal B a few months
before the quoted passage (69-70).
save him. But the overall picture is the same: he is going down a river
and physical love is the only thing he can hold on to. This is also the
meaning of his dramatic appeal in the poem "Mycenae": "Give me your
hands, give me your hands, give me your hands," and of several other
references to the hands of beloved persons in his writings.
In this case, however, the hands could not save him, presumably be-
cause love faded away. This idea of the disappearance of love is rein-
forced by the third line, "color of a face lost in nature somewhere," while
in the fourth, "trees . . . birds . . . hunting . . ." we see something very
often encountered in Seferis: love presented with images of hunting or
trapping. George Savidis refers to several places in the poet's work where
the senses are compared to nets in which man can be trapped," as has
already been mentioned in discussing the poem "Fog."
The second stanza starts with a strong sensuous image, as the pro-
tagonist addresses his body:
Body black in the sun's heat like a grape
body, my rich ship, where are you traveling?
However, the stanza as a whole contains an antithesis because the "rich
ship" is on a voyage with no direction, and this hopeless wandering
conveys a sense of waste.
George Savidis suggests that the question the protagonist asks is
"rhetorical" at a time when he "believed in the omnipotence of the
body."" In my view, the poet no longer believed in the omnipotence of
the body when he wrote this poem. He did believe in it at an earlier
period, before the crucial moment he describes in the "Turning Point,"
the very first of his published poems, where he says that he saw "the
Hydra/in the heavenly garden." Here there is fatigue and psychological
deterioration. The persona confesses that "twilight drowns" and that he
is tired searching for love in the darkness. This is an agonizing search,
and there is no fulfilment in sight—hardly what one would have expected
from someone believing in the omnipotence of the body. The question
is not rhetorical, and it implies an aimless wandering. This rich ship is
not essentially very different from the ship of the "Mood of a Day." The
crew there is already dead, but here also "Our life [keeps shrinking]
every day."
In Memoriam
The symbolic journey of love in this poem is an escape without a

destination; an escape from a love that seemed nearly perfect for the
fastidious protagonist."
53 For Seferis, 401-2.
For Seferis, 324.
55 This poem was also omitted from the Collected Poems. The following is my
Addressing the woman he loved, the persona tells her that she was
"the divine silence." In Seferis's Journals we find some passages that help
us understand the meaning this divine silence had for the poet. On
February 8, 1933, he wrote:
... Like the insistent memory of this act, many years later, when
a man has seen a lot, and is slowly returning from the bitter jour-
ney that is called love; when he has learned that love is not moon-
light and little cries—except only for the cats—but silence, some-
times unbearable silence, and a rock exposed to the sun at high
noon"
Earlier, on July 31, 1930, in another passage which is also interesting
because of its treatment of love as a journey, he wrote :
Such was our silent fate, even before, in the good days, when a
glance, an embrace, made us taste the gifts of God. We saw each
other seldom, once a week, once in ten days because such was the
social order. Two or three hours. And then we forgot. We forgot
our troubles and with them the images and ornaments which our
souls had separately gathered on the surface of the world. Do you
remember how much we were afraid of words? We did not know
where they would lead us. Once or twice, in the beginning, we did
speak, and after we said whatever we didn't want to say—mostly
that—we embraced each other. Since that time, no confession, no
complaint stirred the hours that we were given to live together.
We spent two or three years of a secret and silent love, and I can't
really say how long the magic lasted. When I look back at those
hours, our hours, I see them outside the passing of time, like a
ghost-ship that would travel on the river of change, and that we
had boarded and unboarded without explanation. This is how I
imagine eternal life, like that journey."
We can see, then, that the woman he calls "divine silence" must have
responded to his deepest longing; yet, the protagonist felt "the shivering
for flight." And it is not an escape which brings relief, but, as he says in
literal translation of this difficult poem, which will help the reader follow the
discussion:
In Memoriam
You were the divine silence/and as white as rice/but the shivering for
flight/always keeps coming back.
You got into the whirlpool/centrifugal soul/that leaves us/in a remote
bitterness.
When night falls, I see in the foliage/the eyes of our friends, closed.
"journal B, 104.
"journal A, 122.
the second stanza, addressing himself this time, it is as if he were carried

away by a vortex that left him with a bitter feeling of abandonment and
dejection. A similar vortex appears in a poem with the tentative title
"Journey," which was published only in Seferis's Journals (January 18,
1931).
Aeolus' island, I returned with the winds
that your master gave me, closed in a sack.
My companions cut the silver strings
cut short my sleep, cut short the sleep of the sea
and let me loose at the root of the vortex
alone with my exhaustion and my dejection ..."
This vortex is also reminiscent of the whirlpool in which Phlebas was
drowned in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land."
Thus, the symbolic journey in "In Memoriam" again has no end. It
is the protagonist's constant tendency for escape, described later in more
detail in the poem "Flight," the reason for which is implied in the title
"In Memoriam" and in the last two lines of the poem:
When night falls I see in the foliage
the eyes of our friends, closed.
The same image of the eyes in the foliage was used by Seferis in another
poem, "For One Available Rose," which appeared in the collection "Book
of Exercises II":
What weighs heavily upon us is the thirst of the others the
altered ones
we bring them flowers in the morning fooling ourselves
what use are the flowers to them? And they breathe the cypress
trees
with those lips, and at night the eyes in the foliage ...
In a later poem, "The Last Stop," he wrote: "Our mind is a virgin forest
of murdered friends." The memory of those dead friends, together with
the traumatic experience of the destruction of his hometown Smyrna,
played a crucial role in the poet's inner life, although it was not the
only source of his unhappiness.
Erotikos Logos
The collection Turning Point ends with the long poem "Erotikos
58 1n Seferis's draft (Journal A, 134) a question mark appears after the title
"Journey."
S ef eris had not yet read the Waste Land when he wrote these lines.
"
Logos" ("Love Song"). In this poem, as in most of this collection, the
symbolic journey of love does not reach Ithaca because the return is
blocked by the memory of a past erotic experience. In spite of its over-
whelming passion, this experience, conveyed by the allusion of two snakes
making love, may have been associated with a betrayal or a violation. This
impression is supported by the fact that in it the poet uses the snake
imagery, as he does with the Hydra in the opening poem of this collection.
The first part of the poem starts with the protagonist expressing a
complaint to the "Rose of fate" which deliberately wounded him. The
rose is a symbol of love, but the addition of the words "fate" and
"wound" and the whole context of the first stanza suggest that the course
of this love was predetermined, as if a secret law of nature had to be
followed. The woman was simply an agent delivering a "command"
which originated somewhere else: "and the command you [agreed) to
give us was beautiful." Her smile was like a "ready sword"—another
indication that this was going to be a painful experience.
The second stanza is euphoric, describing the phantasmagoria created
by the approaching love and culminating in the optimistic statement, "the
world was easy: a simple pulsation." Since we already know from the
first stanza what is to follow, we realize that this is a bitter irony.
In Part II, the poet uses another symbol for love, the sea. Although
there is an optimistic surface again as he assures us that
The secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores
the darkness of the depths are forgotten on the surf,
this awareness of the existence of secrets and dark depths creates a sense
of vague danger. Suddenly the "purple" "corals of memory" shine bright.
This must be the memory of a lost paradise. The protagonist remains
motionless, hoping that the mysterious process will start again, like magic.
He will touch again "the tree with the apples" and experience again the
paradise of his memory, toward which a thread is guiding him. The
sensuous experience, which he describes as a "dark shivering in the root
and the leaves,"" works here as an invocation, a wish and a longing for
"the forgotten dawn." The wish is expanded in the whole next stanza,
which presents a picture of anticipated harmony and happiness.
May lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation
may days open mature, the embrace of the heavens,"
may those eyes alone shine in the glare
the pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute.
But this euphoria does not last long. The symbolic night falls, the
The word "root" is used here in the singular, because the original Greek
Acc is in the singular. Seferis refers to the human body as if it were a plant
or a tree—an imagery that he uses very often and in various contexts.
'The image is from the seventeenth-century romance Erotokritos.
eyes that shone bright are closed and only ashes remain. Instead of "the
song of a flute" he hears a "choked hum" and a "dense fluttering," as if
something he cannot see were flying away. The poet is left with the same
taste of decay he described in several poems of this collection ("Turning
Point," "Automobile," "Slowly You Spoke," "Comments") and in his
Journals. Love disappears, leaving behind only ashes, just at the moment
he had hoped that the "bridges" would be built and a more complete
communication would be established.
Part III starts with a repetition of the line "0 dark shivering in the
root and the leaves" and continues with a new invocation to the woman
and her sensuous beauty:
and let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend
and flood us with your lavish hair
from the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart.
What he longs for is to experience again the unique sensation and
return to the lost paradise. The key word here is "again"; he wants to
hear the same words he heard in a similar situation from someone else
in the past.
As she speaks about the way she feels, she uses words and images
that remind one of a heavenly garden. The passing of time has become
"soft and unworldly," "scented shrubs"" are around them, "a flock of
doves" descends and the stars are a human touch on her breast." As
far as she is concerned, everything seems ideal. She feels resurrected,"
because her past was lifeless without love.
With the end of the quotation, however, we return to the disillusion-
ment.
The broken sunset declined and was gone
and it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky.
The dawn is replaced by the "moon's thorn" and the "mountain's
shadows."
The last stanza in Part III is in italics, as if it were not a continuation
of the preceding but a quotation from something else, interjected here.
It is not the voice of the narrator but an inner voice.
"In his essay, "A Staging for 'The Thrush,'" Seferis, referring to a similar
expression in "The Thrush," writes: "the cool leaf, the leaf that respires, in the
sense of fulfilment of desire," and then cites as another example the "scented
shrubs" of "Erotikos Logos." Essays, 2:42.
"As Walter Kaiser remarks in his Introduction to the Three Secret Poems, this
kind of image "although comprehensible, achieves its full impact only for someone
who has experienced the palpable closeness of stars in those Mediterranean
latitudes" (xi).
"The term "resurrected" is a more precise equivalent of the Greek avoccrrnOet,
which is used here.
...In the mirror how our love diminishes
in sleep the dreams, school of forgetfulness
in the depths of time, how the heart contracts
and vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace.
Seen in the light of this passage, the line "In the mirror how our
love diminishes" becomes clear: other images and persons intervene and
little by little he drifts apart from her. His dreams also teach him to forget
her. As the next line indicates, those images and dreams come from "the
depths of time," from his past. A "foreign embrace"—foreign in relation
to the present one, most probably the love he experienced in the lost
paradise—comes slowly back and makes his heart contract and the present
love disappear. In other words, his subconscious, which is awake while
he is asleep, suggests the idea of forgetfulness.
The next part (IV) refers, in my view, to this past experience. The
poet presents two serpents, which are separated and which crawl in a
dark forest in search of each other for "a secret love in hidden retreats."
Their longing is so strong that they do not sleep, do not drink, do not eat.
There is some ambiguity in the choice of the snakes to represent the
two lovers. There are two references to the snakes of "Erotikos Logos"
in the poet's Journals. At one point it is suggested that the two snakes
were actually one and at another that there are ten snakes.° The snake
is a symbol of evil and betrayal, and Seferis has used it in this sense in
his poetry. In the first poem of this collection, "Turning Point," the
crucial moment he describes kept "the whole/tragic clepsydra dumb,/as
though it had seen the Hydra [the snake)/ in the heavenly garden."
Although he avoided any specific explanation of it, there is no doubt that
it was an ominous moment. Also, when Seferis does not use biblical sym-
bolism but the Aeschylean idea of hubris, as in the poem "Mycenae," the
snake is again connected with evil. The perpetuation of crime is evident
in the following passage from "Mycenae," in which the protagonist iden-
tifies with the Atridae. There is most probably a connection here with
Clytemnestra's vision in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers. She dreamed that
she gave birth to a serpent and that she suckled it as if it had been a
baby; but together with the milk the serpent drew dotted blood from her
breast. The dream was an omen anticipating Clytemnestra's slaying by
Orestes.
Tortured by my own garment
Condemned by my own gods,
I
Who have so often followed
The path that leads from murderer to victim
From victim to the punishment
°Journal B, 90.
And from the punishment up to another murder;

Groping my way
Over the purple welling inexhaustible
That night of the return
When the whistling began
Of Furies in the scanty grass—
I have seen snakes crossed with vipers
Knotted about the accursed generation
Our fate.'
Thus, by choosing the snakes as symbols of the lovers in the lost para-
dise, Seferis certainly wanted to imply something—most probably that
their love, in spite of its overwhelming passion and ecstasy, was related
to a betrayal or a violation.
The erotic encounter of the two lovers is described in very sensuous
terms:
Circling, twisting, their insatiable intent
spins, multiplies, turns, spreads rings on the body
which the laws of the starry dome silently govern,
stirring its hot, irrepressible frenzy."
The erotic moments fall like magic drops of water in the silver cup
of silence. Their echoes are like those of a chisel curving the lines of a
statue. Then,
The statue suddenly dawns. But the bodies have vanished
in the sea in the wind in the sun in the rain.
The image of the statue is rather enigmatic. Three passages from
Seferis's writings throw some light on the meaning of the symbol of the
statue. The poet himself has suggested" that the first of them is parallel
to the above lines of "Erotikos Logos."
Oh it is true the fragments
Are not the statues. You are yourself the remains
They haunt you with their strange virginity."
The statues symbolize nothing else but the human bodies which
"Cassandra, in Agamemnon, referring to the boldness of Clytemnestra in
slaying her husband, says: "What odious monster shall I fitly call her? an
amphisbaena?" (a fabulous snake which moves both backward and forward, 11.
1230-3).
"The Greek word ecqmppeil, which is rendered here as "frenzy," literally trans-
lated means "primary cause," "motive" or "origin."
"Essays, 2:43.
"From "The Thrush."
have been hardened by insensitivity, are bent by love or are muti-
lated by the waste of time."
Look how our gestures, our movements, our acts, our emotions,
our thoughts turn instantaneously into marble as soon as they
enter the past, as if they had sunk in "liquified" air. And all these
remain motionless there, for ever; nothing can change their pose.
We give birth to statues every passing moment. This struck me
like a sudden vision three days ago. Since then I have been follow-
ing this process with anxiety.'
These passages help to illuminate to a certain extent the symbolic
meaning of the statues, which appear often and are very significant in
Seferis's poetry. Some ambiguity, however, still remains. In the case of
the two lovers of "Erotikos Logos," for instance, the question remains
why instead of the dawn the protagonist was wishing for ("if it were
but you who would bring the forgotten dawn") it is "the statue [that)
dawns," while "the bodies have vanished." It is true that the next two
lines,
So the beauties nature grants us are born
but who knows if a soul hasn't died in the world,
suggest the creation of a work of art, at the cost of the artists's soul."
But this is only part of the explanation. In my view, the reason why at
the end of sensual pleasure the protagonist of "Erotikos Logos" finds,
not fulfilment, but the body's transformation into marble, must lie in
the fact that in his imagination the two separated snakes return, as we
see in the next stanza:
The parted snakes must have returned" in fantasy
(the forest glitters with birds, shoots, blossoms)
their wavy searching still remains,
like the turnings of the cycle that bring sorrow.
This is the memory of a lost paradise, as the description in parentheses
above indicates. The mutual longing of the two snakes "still remains"
and becomes a source of sorrow. And the poet, haunted by this memory,
cannot reach fulfilment in the present.
The last part (V) starts with an insistently nostalgic tone:
"From a letter to his French translator, Robert Levesque (Por Seferis, 268).
"journal 4, 75.
"See also Robert Levesque's Introduction to his French translation of Seferis's
poems, Seferis: Choix de Poemes traduits et accompagnes du texte grec avec une
preface (Athens: Ikaros, 1945).
"The Greek y64cxv means both "circle" and "return." For my intepretation
of the poem it is crucial to render it here as "return."
Where is the double-edged day that had changed everything?

he wonders, in despair, although he has just failed to revive the paradise
of his youth.
In his essay, "A Staging for 'The Thrush,' " Seferis himself refers to
some poems where this unique moment of love is described."
Where is love that with one stroke cuts time in two and stuns it?
("The Mood of a Day")
The night perhaps: which opened, a blue pomegranate,
Dark breasts, filling you full of stars,
Cutting down time.
("The Thrush")
Part V continues with the poet expressing himself in terms of a
symbolic journey and using a direct reference to the Homeric myth.
Won't there be a navigable river for us?
Won't there be a sky to drop dew
for the soul benumbed and nourished by the lotus ?
This exotic and dangerous fruit deprived some of Odysseus' companions
of their day of return. By confessing here that his soul was "nourished""
by this fruit, the poet implies that there is no hope for him either. He is
probably referring here to the time in his life when he "believed in the
omnipotence of the body" and his senses had benumbed his soul. Now
he is longing for "the dawn of heaven," which remains unforgettable
in his memory, but he realizes that there is no return to Ithaca. The ques-
tion "Won't there be a navigable river for us?" is rhetorical. Only a
"miracle" could save him. He waits for the messenger" "On the stone of
patience," but miracles do not happen often.
As the poem ends, he addresses again—as he did in the beginning—
the "red rose of the wind and fate," admitting with fatigue that the
only thing that remains from it in his memory is a "heavy rhythm" like
an undulation of the sea.
Red rose of the wind and of fate
you remained in memory only, a heavy rhythm
rose of the night, you passed, undulating purple
undulation of the sea . . The world is simple.
74Essays, 2:42.
"The Greek word riviepscin, which Seferis uses here, literally translates as
"reared."
"The word used by Seferis here, lkyysAog, means "messenger" in ancient Greek
and "angel" in modern Greek. Seferis very effectively combines the two meanings
here, in a manner reminiscent of the mysterious messengers in Waiting for Godot.
The "undulating purple" represents the reflection of the red rose on the
water, and since in the beginning of the poem the rose was about to
wound the protagonist, this purple, on the symbolic level, is the pain and
the blood of this love."
The ending of the poem, "The world is simple," can only be seen as
a tragic irony. The Italian critic Lucia Marcheselli, in a discussion with
the poet, asked him specifically whether this statement about the sim-
plicity of the world was indeed ironic. Seferis asserted that this was his
intention by the comment: "But isn't there xrx-vbc [deep sorrow] in
sarcasm r
"Compare, for instance, Odysseus Elytis's phrase, "The blood of love has robed
me in purple." The Axle's Esti, trs. Edmund Keeley and George Savidis (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) 97.
"I am indebted to Lucia Marcheselli for this information.

Seferis's Turning Point: A Textual Analysis

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Seferis's Turning Point: A Textual Analysis

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Seferis's Turning Point:

Turning Point is Seferis's first collection of poems. Even in this early

Princeton University Press, 1967). Unless otherwise noted, quotations of poems

Although the poem "Turning Point" refers to a very important mo-

Slowly You Spoke

The abrupt disappearance of love due to an unexplained change forms

Also, in poem "10" of the Mythistorema sequence, the lack of love is

The Sorrowing Girl

In "The Sorrowing Girl," the poet describes the suffering of a young

happiness. It is evident that there must have been an erotic involvement

"Automobile" describes a journey, both literal and symbolic. It con-

The next stanza, as emphasized by the use of italics, is a flashback to

In the next stanza, a different experience follows the first, as they

The Companions in Hades

fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion;

"hermitage." Me'skt is an outlying farm or estate run by a monastery, i.e., a place

The Mood of a Day

The memory of a lost paradise is conveyed by the first four lines of

The poem "Comments," which was omitted from the translation of

In the last stanza he reverts to the darkness of loneliness. The black

expensive. I make good money.' In the end he caught the Traviata

"Rhyme" is written in the same mood as most of the poems in the

The symbolic journey of love in this poem is an escape without a

the second stanza, addressing himself this time, it is as if he were carried

And from the punishment up to another murder;

Where is the double-edged day that had changed everything?

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