LIFE IMMOVABLE

FIRST PART

In Palamas, we have found every trait of the Greek character: He is religious and superstitious; a skeptic, a pagan, and a pantheist.... He is a poet and a philosopher.... He abandons himself to every impulse of the Greek soul. But he is always fond of drawing back, of concentrating, of trying to encompass in a general form the sensations and ideas which sway him. His principal and latent care is to analyze himself and his world. A poet and a thinker, Palamas does not attract the multitudes.... With him everything is a mingling of lights and shadows.... But through his work Greece of today is most clearly set forth.

Tigrane Yergate, "Le Mouvement litteraire grec; La Poesie." La Revue, June, 1903, vol. xlv, p. 717 f.

With Life Immovable, the poetic genius of Kostes Palamas reaches its full strength. The poet, who, from his very first work, The Songs of my Country, had shown his power in selecting his sources of inspiration and in weaving the essence of purely national airs into his "light sketches of sea and olive groves and the various sunlit aspects of Greek life,"[3] continues to broaden his vision and art through an unquenchable eagerness for knowledge, for an understanding of things beautiful, whether present or past, concrete or abstract. He makes broad strides from his Hymn to Athena, to The Eyes of My Soul, Iambs and Anapests, and The Grave. In all "the pathetic and the common meet inseparably with an art exact and full of grace, an art that knows its purpose."[4] But in Life Immovable Palamas rises above the Hellenic horizon, and strikes the strings of the universal heart in the same degree as the towns of Patras, Missolonghi, and Athens expand into Greece and Greece into the world. After all there is both realism and symbolism in the fact that the first poem of the volume reflects the atmosphere of the poet's native town while one of the latter ones "The Ascrean" is filled with an all-including world-vision.

The present volume contains only the first half of Life Immovable. It consists of five collections of poems: The "Fatherlands," "The Return," "Fragments from the Song to the Sun," "Verses of a Familiar Tune," and "The Palm Tree." On the whole, a careful study of these collections would furnish the key to an adequate understanding of the rest of the poet's works for which these poems are faithful preludes. For this reason I am tempted to give an analysis of the translated parts as a guide to their understanding. But it is by no means my wish to lay down a fast rule; poetry is no exact science and there should be always ample room for freedom of suggestion and of view.

1. Fatherlands

A series of sonnets, the "Fatherlands," make the opening of the book and, at the same time, symbolize most clearly the growth of our poet. Each sonnet describes a fatherland, adding another link to a chain of worlds that dawn, one after another, upon the poet's being. The first is Patras, his birthplace. Then follows Missolonghi with its calm lagoon and the haunts of his boyhood. The splendor of the violet-crowned city of Athens is succeeded by the island of Corfu, the cradle of the literary renaissance of Modern Hellenism, which again fades before the vision of Egypt, whence the earliest lights of civilization shone upon the land of the Greeks. Christianity in its extreme form of asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," the classic age of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of Hellenism spreading triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden Gate of imperial Byzantium.

But "imagination, like the Phaeacians' ship, rolls on," and the poet sings:

In my soul's depths loom many lands ...
And where the heavens mingle with the sea,
A path I seek for a sphere beyond ...

Oceans are crossed, ages are brought forth from the past, and continents are joined in making the poet's spirit. Finally even Earth becomes too narrow and the greater universe opens its gates to the ultimate fatherland, the elements of the world which will at the end absorb the being of the poet:

Fatherlands! Air and earth and fire and water,
Elements indestructible, beginning
And end of life, first joy and last of mine,
You I shall find again when I pass on
To the grave's calm. The people of the dreams
Within me, airlike, unto air shall pass;
My reason, firelike, unto lasting fire;
My passions' craze unto the billows' madness.

Even my dust-worn body, unto dust;
And I shall be again air, earth, fire, water;
And from the air of dreams, and from the flame
Of thought, and from the flesh that shall be dust,

And from the passions' sea, ever shall rise
A breath of sound like a soft lyre's complaint.

2. The Return

The second collection of Life Immovable, entitled "The Return," is dedicated to the poet's country. It bears under its title the significant date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair. After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound the reveille. He conceives of his collection of songs as an expression of faith in the country's future. With perfect love and assurance "he comes to place the crowns of Art" "dream-made and dream-engraved" upon her shattered throne....

Only with harmony sublime and pure,
Which, though it rises over time and space,
Turns the world's ears to his native land,
The poet is the greatest patriot.

Nevertheless even the poet's spirit cannot help reflecting the gloom through which it tries to rise. The general depression about him weighs upon him, too, in spite of his effort. This shadow haunts him constantly. Life becomes a Fairy, with a Fairy's dangerous charms and fearful mysteries. "Something like a madman pursues life." The poet hears this madman's falling steps and is horror-haunted:

And lo, blood of my blood the madman was!
A past, ancestral, long-forgotten sin,
That bursting forth upon me, vampire-like,
Snatched from my hand the dewy crown of joy!

This madman grows from within the individual's and the nation's life. The wings of joys and dreams are clipped. One feels like a night-owl upon glorious ruins, the beauty of which makes the night even darker. Tradition, like a majestic temple, seems to choke life by its solemnity. The present, which seems to be symbolized by the little hut, is in the relentless grip of "a monstrous vision, the Fairy Illness, stripped in the silver glimmer of the moon." There is always the mingling of gleaming beauty and of bitter sorrow. There is always before us a "cord-grass festival," the amber fragrant flowers budding upon the piercing spikes of the cord-grass and luring man to the deadly bog where there is no redemption. One might say that the poet verges on morbidity.

But such an assumption would be unjust. Palamas may have a clear vision of the tragedy of life. But in the light of this revelation, with his unfettered contemplation, he builds, like Bertram Russell, a "shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls, the free life continues while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty." In like manner, the world of Greece, in which Palamas lives, "our home," as he calls it, may have its dreadful silences that are "full of moans," moans vague and muffled as if coming from a distant world

Of bygone ages and of times unborn.

But he does not lose sight of that

Harmony fit for the chosen few, ...
A lightning sent from Sinai and a gleam
From great Olympus, like the mingling sounds
Of David's harp and Pindar's lyre, conversing
In the star-spangled darkness of the night.

At times the poet even raises his song to rapture. Certainly the past becomes a source of happiness in his "Rhapsody," and life is agleam with joy in his "Idyl." But most reflective of this power of the poet to conquer darkness with light and to turn ruins into gleaming palaces of beauty and of song, is the poem entitled "At the Windmill."

The local color which is by no means a rare characteristic of the poetry of Palamas is particularly rich in this collection. Many of its songs are vivid and clear pictures of Greek life. Yet with the touch of symbolism, he makes such local flashes world-flames. In "The Dead," we have a faithful description of the Greek custom of exposing the open coffin with the body in a room whence all furniture is removed. Friends and relatives are gathered about the dead; even children are not excluded from paying this last honor to the departed. The windows are closed, and in the gloom tapers and candles are burning before the images of the saints and over the flower-covered body, while the smoke of the incense and the fragrance of the wreaths fill the air. Yet somehow in the verses of the song one catches the moving sounds of mourning humanity, the image of death against life.

3. Fragments from the Song to the Sun

"The Fragments from the Song to the Sun" contain some of the noblest lines of Palamas' poetry. We cannot have a complete understanding of the symbolism with which this part of Life Immovable is filled. For, after all, from the great hymn to the light-god, we have here only fragments. But these fragments remind one of the gold-stained ruins of the Akropolis against the bright Attic sky. Throughout, we are aware of a striking duality. The key to these sunlit melodies is probably found in the "Giants' Shadows." Among the shadows whose voices ascend from darkness "like moanings of the sea," the poet discovers Telamonian Ajax, the giant who is utterly absorbed in the world within him, the source of his light and life, and Goethe, the Teutonic poet, who turns to the world about himself as a flower to the sun, and whose heart "longs and thirsts for light." Here then, we detect the doubleness of the sun of Palamas, a sun within, the source of his inner life and thought, and a sun without, the source of all external beauty and growth.

Thus without detracting from the charm and power of the day-star, he ensouls it with a higher meaning and transforms a fiery globe into a light-clad Olympian divinity, a giver of life and death, a healer and a slayer. In "The Tower of the Sun," we find mighty princes, sons of kings, who had gone thither in their desire to hunt for the light, turned into stones by the "giant merciless." Motionless they stand, a world of voiceless statues while

From their deep and smothered eyes,
Something like living glance
Struggles to peep through its stone-veil!

Then the fair redeemer, a princess beautiful, comes from far away—the light, it seems, of inner knowledge and inspiration—and the Sun's tower

Gleamed forth as if the light
Of a new dawn embraced its walls!

She knows where the fountain of life flows and with its waters wakes up the sons of kings, shining

... with transcending gleam
Like a far greater Sun.

This is, then, the sun whom Palamas worships as a god. It is a sun who possesses all the beauty and power of the actual source of light, but who, at the same time, by the spell of mystic symbolism rises to the splendor of a thrice-fair and almighty divinity containing all that is beautiful and noble and powerful in the world. Upon such a sun he seeks to find a light-flooded palace for his child in the "Mourning Song." To such a sun he offers his hymns and prayers; and such a sun he conceives as a vengeful blood-fed Moloch or a muse of light. He is a fair Phoebus, who rises from pure Olympus' heights to play as a fountain of flowing harmonies or to smite as "an archer of fiery arrows" all living things.

4. Verses of a Familiar Tune

In the "Verses of a Familiar Tune" the poet conceives of himself as of a wedding guest who travels far away to join the festival. The bride, "thrice-beautiful" seems to be Earth; and the bridegroom, the Sun. The journey to the festival is the span of mortal life. The poet, who must travel over this path, endeavors to brighten it with dreams and shorten his way's weary length

With sounds that like sweet longings wake in him
Old sounds familiar, low whisperings
Of women's beauties and of home-born shadows ...
The flames that burn within the heart, the kisses
That the waves squander on the sandy beach,
And the sweet birds that sing on children's lips!

The second poem of this group, "The Paralytic on the River's Bank," recalls the notes verging on despair which we have found in "The Return." Again the gleaming past, appearing here as the other bank of the river, revels

In lustful growth and endless mirth
With leafy slopes and forests glistening.

At the sight of such splendor, the poet lies palsy-stricken on this bank of the river, the "graceless, barren, and desert bank" unable to rise and sing. Then Life, like a merciful Fairy, takes him into the humble hut of the present and makes him forget the other bank and nourishes him until, at last, waking into the new world, he weaves the whole day long with master hand all kinds of laurel crowns and pours into the unaccustomed air a flute's soft-flown complaint. But again from his bed he raises his eyes and sees once more the world beyond the river, nodding luringly at him; and even there, in the midst of the new life, he falls palsy-stricken, "the paralytic of the river bank."

This note of hopelessness is immediately counteracted by the "Simple Song," in which Life opens again her gorgeous gardens of the past to pluck the fairest of flowers; and when he weeps over the newly reaped blossoms that fill his basket, Life rebukes him by facing them unmoved "a life agleam!" With like wholesomeness he greets the early dawn that brings him "thought, light, and sound, his sacred Trinity," and enters the chapel's garden

To see the children beautiful,
Children that make the grassy beds a heaven
And rise like miracles among the flowers.

But on the whole, man, the wedding guest, must travel on while the winds of uncertainty blow about him. Riddles face him everywhere; questions stern and unanswerable spring before him; and the life of the whole human race seems to be that of Thought likened to "an angel ever wrestling with a strong giant flinging his hundred hands about the angel's neck to strangle him." For who knows if a good act unknown shines more than the most splendid monuments of marble or verse? Who knows if vice is wiser than virtue? Is Fair Art, War's Triumphs, and great Thoughts expressed costlier in the Temple of the Universe than the mute Thought and Glory of the flower,

... at whose birth
The dawn rejoices and whose early death
The saddened evening silently laments?

The thoughtful sage high-rising smites the gates
Of the Infinite and questions every Sphinx;
Yet who knows if the soldier with no will,
Obeying blindly, is not nearer Truth?

O struggle vast! Who knows what power measures
The measureless and creates the great?
Is it the matchless thought of the endowed,
Or the dim soul of the multitude that bursts,
Thoughtless of reason, into life? Who knows?

We know not "whether the holy man's blessing" is the best, nor whether there is more light of Truth in the Law, "that is all eyes," or in some blind love. Thus entangled in the meshes of life's sphinx-like wonders, we spend our day, little particles of the great world-struggle, wedding guests at Life's strange festival!

5. The Palm Tree

In tenderness and delicacy of thought and expression, no part of Life Immovable can be compared with the smoothly flowing stanzas of "The Palm Tree." There is no ruggedness in the meter, no violence in the stream of images. We are led without knowing it into a modest garden. A few flowers, a palm tree, some bushes, and the sky make our world, a world, it seems, of things small and common and trivial. But the poet passes by, listens to the humble flowers of dark and light blue, and puts their talk into rhythms.

At once, the flowers become a world of beauty, life, and thought. They are our kin, sons of the same parent Earth, and dreamers of strangely similar dreams. The Palm tree over them becomes a great mystery of power and grace lifting it to the realm of gods. The flowers, like little mortals, wonder at the things they see about them. Their own existence beneath the palm tree's shade is full of riddles, and they face the world with questionings. In the very midst of a clear sky's festival that succeeds a rain, the little flowers suffer the first blows of pain, dealt by the last drops that fall from the palm leaves, and they feel the agony of sorrow until they come to realize that even pain brings its reward, knowledge, which makes them glory, like victors, over death. Their being expands and they sing a song which is the essence of the world's humanity:

Though small we are, a great world hides in us;
And in us clouds of care and dales of grief
You may descry: the sky's tranquility;
The heaving of the sea about the ships
At evenings; tears that roll not down the cheeks;
And something else inexplicable. Oh,
What prison's kin are we? Who would believe it?
One, damned and godlike, dwells in us; and she is Thought!

Thus their song continues carrying them from thought to thought, from dream to dream, from joy to joy, and from sorrow to sorrow. Swept away by the charms of life, they raise to their strange god a hymn of exultation. At the sight of the thrice-fair rose, they sing a song of love and admiration. Their experiences stimulate their minds, and they seek to solve the dark problems that teem about them. With the eagerness of living beings they listen to the tales of new worlds and miracles brought to them by bees and lizards. Illness and night frighten them with fearful images; and, at last, they pass away with a song of hope and regret:

We shall die,
Nor will there be a monument for us
That might retain the phantom of our passing!
Only about thee will a robe of light
Adorn thee with a new and deathless gleam:
And it shall be our thought, and word, and rime!
And in the eyes of an astonished world,
Thou wilt appear like a gold-green new star;
Yet neither thou nor others will know of us!

Harvard University,

June 3, 1917.

LIFE IMMOVABLE

INTRODUCTORY POEM

And now the columns stand a forest speechless
And motionless; and among them, the rhythms
And thoughts move in slow measures constantly;
And in their depths, light-written images
Show Love that leads and Soul that follows him.

From the "Thoughts of Early Dawn."

I labored long to create the statue for the Temple
On stone that I had found
And set it up in nakedness; and then to pass;
To pass but not to die.

And I created it. But narrow men who bow
To worship shapeless wooden images, ill-clad,
With hostile glances and with shudderings of fear,
Looked down upon us, work and worker, angrily.

My statue in the rubbish thrown! And I, an exile!
To foreign lands, I led my restless wanderings.
But ere I left, a sacrifice unheard I offered:
I dug a pit; and in the pit I laid my statue.

And then I whispered: "Here lie low unseen and live
With things deep-rooted and among the ancient ruins
Until thine hour comes. Immortal flower thou art!
A Temple waits to clothe thy nakedness divine!"

And with a mouth thrice-wide, and with the voice of prophets,
The pit spoke: "Temple, none! Nor pedestal! Nor light!
In vain! For nowhere is thy flower fit, O Maker!
Better forever lost in the unlighted depths!

"Its hour may never come! and if it come, and if
Thy work be raised, the Temple will be radiant
With a great host of statues, statues of no blemish,
And works of thrice-great makers unapproachable!

"Today, was soon for thee; tomorrow will be late!
Thy dream is vain! The dawn thou longest will not dawn;
Thus burning for eternities thou mayest not reach,
Remain cloud-hunter and Praxiteles of shadows!

"Tomorrow and today for thee are snares and seas!
All are but traps for drowning thee and visions false!
Longer than thy glory is the violet's in thy garden!
And thou shalt pass away—hear this!—and thou shalt die!"

And then I answered: "Let me pass away and die!
Creator am I, too, with all my heart and mind!
Let pits devour my work! Of all eternal things,
My restless wandering may have the greatest worth!"

FATHERLANDS

I[5]

Where with its many ships the harbor moans,
The land spreads beaten by the billows wild,
Remembering not even as a dream
Her ancient silkworks, carriers of wealth.

The vineyards, filled with fruit, now make her rich;
And on her brow, an aged crown she wears,
A castle that the strangers, Franks or Turks,
Thirst for, since Venice founded it with might.

O'er her a mountain stands, a sleepless watch;
And white like dawn, Parnassus shimmers far
Aloft with midland Zygos at his side.

Here I first opened to the day mine eyes;
And here my memory weaves a dream dream-born,
An image faint, half-vanished, fair—a mother.

II[6]

Upon the lake, the island-studded, where
The breeze of May, grown strong with sea-brine, stirs
The seashore strewn with seaweed far away,
The Fates cast me a little child thrice orphan.

'Tis there the northwind battles mightily
Upon the southwind; and the high tide on
The low; and far into the main's abyss
The dazzling coral of the sun is sinking.

There stands Varassova, the triple-headed;
And from her heights, a lady from her tower,
The moon bends o'er the waters lying still.

But innocent peace, the peace that is a child's,
Not even there I knew; but only sorrow
And, what is now a fire, the spirit's spark.

III

Sky everywhere; and sunbeams on all sides;
Something about like honey from Hymettus;
The lilies grow of marble witherless;
Pentele shines, birthgiver of Olympus.

The digging pick on Beauty stumbles still;
Cybele's womb bears gods instead of mortals;
And Athens bleeds with violet blood abundant
Each time the Afternoon's arrows pour on her.

The sacred olive keeps its shrines and fields;
And in the midst of crowds that slowly move
Like caterpillars on a flower white,

The people of the relics lives and reigns
Myriad-souled; and in the dust, the spirit
Glitters; I feel it battling in me with Darkness.

IV[7]

Where the Homeric dwellers of Phaeacia
Still live, and with a kiss meet East and West;
Where with the olive tree the cypress blooms,
A dark robe in the azure infinite,

E'en there my soul has longed to dwell in peace
With towering visions of the land of Pyrrhus;
There dream-born beauties pour their flood, Dawn's mother
Lighting the fountain of sweet Harmony.

The rhapsodies of the Immortal Blind
In the new voice of Greece are echoed there;[8]
The shade of Solomos[9] in fields Elysian

Breathes rose-born fragrance; and master of the lyre,
A new bard sings,[10] like old Demodocus,
The glories of the Fatherland and Crete.

V[11]

Lo, dreams strange-born among my dreams are mingling;
A lake, the ancient Mareotis, where
The Goddess spreads with ever hidden face
Her wedding couch to greet Osiris Lord.

As if from graves, from laughless depths, before me
Life brightly glitters with her gentle smile;
A Libyan thirst burns in my heart; and Ra,
The fiery archer, battles everywhere.

Something sow-like before me gnashed its teeth,
The slavish soul and savage of the Arab;
World-nourishing the Nile rolled on its waters;

And lotus-crowned, in the cool shade of palms,
I loved as beasts that dwell in wilderness
A Fellah lass full-breasted and sphinx-faced.

VI[12]

A sinner hermit on the Holy Mountain,
I burn in Satan's fire and pine in hell;
My soul is ruins and woe; and in a stream
Deep-flowing, I sink, a traveller beguiled.

The blue Aegean spreads a sapphire treasure;
Like Daphnis and his Chloe stand sky and earth;
Quivering, lo, the seed of life blooms forth;
In swarms, the living beings suck the sap

Of all. Olympus, Ossa, Pelion,
And every lap of sea, and every tongue
Of land, lake-like Cassandra, Thrace's shores

Are clad in wedding garb; and I? "O Lord,
Be my Redeemer!" and with floods of tears
I bathe the god-child Panselenus[13] wrought.

VII[14]

Rumele is a royal crown of ruby;
Moreas is a glow of emerald;
The Seven Isles,[15] a jasmine sevenfold;
And every Cyclad, a Nereid sea-born.

Even the chains of rugged Epirus laugh;
And Thessaly spreads far her golden charms.
Hidden beneath her present waves of woe,
Methinks I look on Hellas, Queen of lands.

For still the ancient fir of valor blooms;
And from the pangs and sighs of ages risen,
The breath of Digenes[16] fills all the land

Breeding a race of heroes strong and new;
And in the depths of green and golden Night
Sings on Colonus Hill the nightingale.

VIII

From Danube to the cape of Taenaron,
From Thunder Mountain's End to Chalcedon,
Thou passest now a mermaid of the sea
And now a statue of marble Parian.

Now with the laurel bough from Helicon
And now with sword barbarian, thou sweepest;
And on the fields of thy great labarum,
I see a double headed image drawn.

The sacred Rock gleams like a topaz here;
And virgins basket-bearing, clad in white,
March in a dance and shake Athena's veil;

But far the sapphires shine of Bosporus;
And through the Golden Gate exulting pass
Victors Imperial triumphantly.

IX

Like the Phaeacians' ship, Imagination
Without the help of sail or mariner
Rolls on; in my soul's depths loom many lands:
Thrice-ancient, motionless like Asia,

And others five-minded and bold like Europe's realms;
Despair like Africa's black earth holds me;
Within me a savage Polynesia spreads;
And always I trail some path Columbian.

All monstrous things of life, the fields aflame
Under a tropic sun, I knew; I wore
The shrouds of the poles; and on a thousand paths,

I saw the world unfurled before my eyes.
And what am I? Grass on a clod of earth
Scorned even by the passing reaper's scythe.

X

A traveller, I found in waveless seas
Calypso and Helena thrice-beautiful;
And on the Lotus Eaters' shores, I drank
The blissful waters of oblivion.

In the sun-flooded land, I stood by him,
The god of the Hyperborean race;
One night—in strange and peerless radiance—
The Magi showed to me the mystic star.

I saw the Queen of Sheba on her throne,
O Soul, light flowing from her fingers' touch;
My eyes beheld Atlantis Isle, that seemed

An Ocean flower beyond a mortal's dreams;
And now the care and memory of all
These things are rhythm to me and verse and song.

XI

About the chariot of the Seven Stars,
Sky-racers numberless, whole worlds of giants
And beasts: Ocean of suns, the Milky Way,
Orion, and the monsters of the spheres—

The fearful Zodiac. The Lion roars
Amidst the wilderness ethereal;
The Lyre plays; and trophy-like, the Lock
Of Berenice gleams; and rhythms and laws

Fade in the space of mysteries. Sun, Cronus,
Mars, Earth, and Venus sweep in swift pursuit
Towards the world magnet of great Hercules.

Only my soul like polar star awaits
Immovable, yet filled with dreamful longings;
And knows not whence it comes nor where it goes.

XII

Fatherlands! Air and earth and fire and water!
Elements indestructible, beginning
And end of life, first joy and last of mine!
You I shall find again when I pass on

To the graves' calm. The people of the dreams
Within me, airlike, unto air shall pass;
My reason, fire-like, unto lasting fire;
My passions' craze unto the billows' madness;

Even my dust-born body, unto dust;
And I shall be again air, earth, fire, water;
And from the air of dreams, and from the flames

Of thought, and from the flesh that shall be dust,
And from the passions' sea, ever shall rise
A breath of sound like a soft lyre's complaint.

THE SONNETS

From their foreign land and precious,
From their nest in green, I took
Red-plumed birds; and then I closed them
In a cage of woven gold.

And the cage of woven gold
Then became a second nest;
On our shores the birds have found
A new, precious fatherland.

Softly here they shake their feathers;
Swiftly sing of worlds and souls
Deep and spacious; or they mingle

Lightning-like their tears and smiles.
And though small and as of coral,
Yet they sing with accents loud.

1896.

EPIPHANY

With chariot drawn by star-plumed peacocks, lo,
The goddess of desires before her people
Is revealed! She passes on, youth's joyful shout
And torture, dragging my eighteen years behind.

Snowflakes became a world; and, taking life
As substance, made her body and her thought.
Upon her royal brow, birds strange and wild,
Scorn's breed, have built their nest and there abide.

Upon her path, in vain I build the palace
Of virgin dreams with virgin gold for her,
Raising a throne of diamonds in its midst.

She passes on her starlit chariot;
And as if filled with golden dreams divine,
She does not even look upon my palace!

1895.

MAKARIA[17]

To you, who dawned before me, offspring of
The great abyss and flower of foaming billows!
To you, whom with their love all things embrace,
And who stir tempests in a statue's depths!

To you, O woman and O virgin, myrrhs,
Fruit, frankincense, I offer recklessly!
To you, the music of the world! To you,
My songs' pure foam, songs that your vision fills!

For you can love, remember, understand.
Before I saw you in the world's great night,
You shone upon my mother's lighted face.

Your worshipper into the world I came;
Your name I knew not, and in love's sweet font
I called you with the name Makaria!

1895.

THE MARKET PLACE

Just as dry summers pant for the first rain,
So thou art thirsty for a happy home
And for a life remote, like hermit's prayer,
A corner of forgetting and of love.

And thirsty for the ship upon the sea
That ever onward sails with birds and sea-things,
Filling its life with our great planet's light.
But unto thee both ship and home said: "No!

"Look neither for the happiness remote
That never moves, nor for the life that ever finds
In each new land and harbor a new soul!

"Only the panting of a toiling slave
For thee! Drag in the market place thy body's
Nakedness, strange to the strangers and thine own!"

1896.

LOVES

Some people love things modest and things small,
And like to feed in cages little birds;
They deck themselves with garden violets
And drink the singing waters of the brooks.

Others delight in tales told by the embers
Of the home hearth or listen to the songs
Of the nightbirds with rapture; others, slaves
Of a great pain, burn incense to the stars

Of beauty. And some thirst for the forest shades
And for a nacreous dawn, and for a sunset
Dipped in red blood, a barren wilderness

Light-burned. But thee no love with nature binds;
And where the heavens mingle with the sea,
A path thou seekest for a sphere beyond.

1896.

WHEN POLYLAS DIED[18]

With wings and hands ethereal, rhythms and thoughts
Lifted thy soul, redeemed from its dust frame,
And led it straightway to the stars; and there
The sacred escort halts and ends its journey.

In summers paradisiac beyond,
Where on the Lyre's star the bards and makers,
Like doves with breath immortal, dwell in gleams,
The shade of Solomos like magnet draws thee,

And leading thee before a double Tabor,
Thus speaks to thee: "Here is thy glory! Here
Dwell and behold the giant pair that stand

Before thee never setting, with diamonds dark;
And like a breath of worship pass, embracing
Thy Homer and thy Shakespeare, blessed One!"

1896.

TO PETROS BASILIKOS[19]

O bard, whose songs unto the vernal god
Of idyls rang from the same gladsome flute,
April's sweet-breathing air is mingled now
With martial sounds of savage trumpetings.

A crown is woven for our motherland:
Is it life's laurels or the martyr's thorns?
Oh see beyond: the wild vine's flowers now
Are shaken on a lake of blood and tears!

Has the war phantom blown upon thee too?
Or hast thou with the force of lightning winds
Flown where for ages sacred hatreds burn

In flames? Or has an evil wound thrown thee
Upon the earth where now in vain the god
Of idyls tries to raise thee with his kisses?

1897.

SOLDIER AND MAKER

Soldier and maker swiftly I
Seized with my hand the spear and spoke:
"Fall on the beast of the world beyond
And strike the eagle-wingèd lion!"

Before me with God's grace, I saw
Soulless the griffin seven-souled,
Blood spurting from a hole hell-like
And scorching with its heat the grass!

And then restored with calm, I saw
The savage strife like a day's dawn;
And the destroyer, I, became

A maker; and with this same hand,
I carve on ivory the man
Who slew the beast and make him deathless.

1896.

THE ATHENA RELIEF

Why leanest thou on idle spear?
Why is thy dreadful helmet bent
Heavy upon thy breast, O virgin?
What sorrow is so great, O thought,

As to touch thee? Are there no more
Of thunder-bearing enemies
To yield thee trophies new? No pomp
Athenian to guide thy ship

On to the sacred Rock? I see
Some pain holds Pallas fixed upon
A gravestone. Some great blow moves her:

Is it thy sacred city's loss,
Or seest thou all Greece—alas—
Of now and yesterday entombed?

1896.

THE HUNTRESS RELIEF

Whither so light of garb and swift of foot, O Huntress?
Is it the sacred gifts of pure Hippolytus
That make thee leave Arcadia's forest land behind,
O shelter of the pure, and slayer of the wild?

Wild lily of virginity raised on the fields
Olympian, O mountain Queen of gleaming bow,
I envy him who in a careless hour did face
Thy beauty's lightning with thy heartless vengefulness.

And yet white like the morn, thou openest in secret
Thy lips thrice fragrant with divine ambrosia
And sayest: "Latona's deathless grace has moulded me

Under the sacred tree upon Ortygia;
But now once more upon the noble stone, the new
Maker has moulded me with a new deathlessness."

1895.

A FATHER'S SONG

O first-born pride and joy of my own home,
I still remember thy coming's sacred day:
The early dawn was breaking as from pearls,
Whitening the sky that spread star-spangled still;

Thou wert not like the fresh and budding rose
In its green mother's clasp before it opens;
Thou camest like a victim pitiful
And feeble cast by a rude hand among us.

And as if thou wert seeking help, thy wail
Rose sadder than the sound of a death knell;
And thus the last of thy own mother's groans

Was mingled with thy first lament. Life's great
Drama began. I watch it, and I feel
Within me Fear's and Pity's mystic wail!

1894.

TO THE POET L. MAVILES[20]

Thy soul is seeking tranquil paths
Alone; thou hatest barking mouths;
And yet thy country's love enflames thee,
O maker of the noble sonnet.

In the white alabaster vase
Filled with pure native earth, a flower
Of dream that only few can see
Trembles and scatters fragrances.

Thy verse, the vase; thy mind, the flower.
But a hand broke the vase, and now
The azure beauty of the flower

Has found a mate in the powder's smoke
Upon Crete's Isle, the blue sea's crown,
Mother of bards and tyrant slayers.

1896.

IMAGINATION

Time's spider lurks and lies in wait;
And on its poisoned claws, the beast
All watchful glides, assails, and grasps
The ruin. O thrice-holy beauties!

In vain all props and wisdom's arts!
In vain a tribe of sages seek
To save it! Time's remaining crumbs
Are scattered far and melt like frost.

Then from the lofty land of Thought,
Imagination came, a goddess
Among the gods, and made again,

Even where until now the ruin
Crumbled, what only its hands can make—
Deathless the first-born Parthenon.

1896.

MAKARIA'S DEATH

To die for these, my brothers, and myself;
For by not loving my own life too much,
I found the best of finds, a glorious death.

Euripides, Herakleidae, 532-534.

On Athens' earth, Zeus of the Market place
Sees Hercules's children kneeling down
On his pure altar, strange, forlorn, thrice-orphan.
Fearful the Argive sweeps on; duty's hand

Is weak. The king of Athens pities them,
But cruel oracles vex him with fear:
"Lo, from thy blood, thrice-noble virgin, shall
The conquerless new enemy be conquered."

None stirs, alas! Orphanhood is forsaken
By all. Then, filled with pride of heroes, thou,
Redeemer of a land and race, divine

Daughter thrice-worthy of the great Alcides,
Plungest into thy breast the victim's sword
And diest a thrice-free death, Makaria.

1896.

TO PALLIS[21] FOR HIS "ILIAD"

From cups that are both ours and strange,
Enameled, and adorned with leaves
Of laurel and of ivy green,
We quaff the wine both pure and mixed.

The liquid that within us burns,
Or poured in cups about us gleams
And bird-like sings, brings us away
To the far Isle of dreams. But thou

Enviest not the path of dreams,
Nor sharest in our drunken revel;
For with our fathers' spacious cup,

The strong and simple, thou hast brought
Immortal water from the spring
Of Homer, thou O traveller!

1903.

HAIL TO THE RIME

Cyprus's shores have not beheld thee born of foam;
A foreign Vulcan forged thee on a diamond anvil
With a gold hammer; and the bard who touches thee,
Bound with thy magic beauty's charms, remains thy thrall.

The yearning prayers of a lover fondly loved
Cannot accomplish what thou canst, strange nightingale!
Thy song wafts me upon the tranquil fields of calm
When jackals born of woeful cares within me howl.

Thy might gives even sin a garment beautiful;
And thought divine before thee bows in reverence.
Imagination's ship sails with thy help straight on

Where Solomon and Croesus have their treasuries.
To thee I pray! Answer my greeting lovingly,
Thou new tenth Muse among the nine of old, O Rime!

1896.

DEDICATION

Mother thrice reverend, O widowed saint,
Upon thy shattered throne I come to place
The crowns of Art, dream-made and dream-engraved.
With war storms desolate, my native land,
Trod by the Turk and by strangers scorned thou wert;
Even thy child beholding thee in ruins,
As if the waters of Oblivion
In dark Oblivion's Dale had touched his lips,
Left thee; and thou didst writhe like a whole world
Engulfed in sounds of woe: Hair-tearings and
Breast-beatings, groans of sad despair, night-bats
Wandering restlessly, unheeded prayers
Of souls condemned, loud thunder peals, fierce glares
Of lightnings, and the laughter of the fiends!

But lo, unknown and humble I, with calm
Upon my countenance and storm in mind,
Far from the panic-stricken market place,
Beneath the plane trees' shade, and far away
By the blood-tinctured settings of the suns,
Unruffled, in another land I travelled,
And deep I dug in distant treasure mines.
And with my hand, that knows no rifle's touch,
Slowly I hammered on the crowns of art;
And if thou findest nowhere on their gleam
Thine image painted, or thy blessed name
Written, thou knowest still, O motherland,
Though in thy woe's abyss they seem unlike,
And though a strange and careless glimmer shines
On them, they were created out of thee;
For thee I made them; and for thee I raised them.

Perhaps, when in the midst of wilderness
And ruins thou first openest thine eyes,
O hapless One, my humble offerings
Will not appear like thy wrath's threats, nor like
The joyful trumpetings of thy reveille,
Nor like an image of thy passion's cross,
Nor like thy sorrow's dirge, nor like glad hymns;
But like soft songs and trembling lights and fondlings
Of lily hands, black birds, and stars unknown.

Thus when, smitten with Charon's knife and sunk
In death's dark swoon, a hapless mother feels
Life's tide return, she hears again, like first
Life-summons, the anxious voice of her fond child,
A voice that comforts her and tenderly
Tells of a thousand tales of love his fancy
Weaves or his memory recalls, and drowns
His faintest sigh not to remind his mother
Of the unerring blow of Charon's knife.

Mother thrice-reverend, O widowed saint,
Upon thy shattered throne I come to place
The crowns of Art dream-made and dream-engraved.
Though they will echo not thy sorrow's groans,
A child of thine has bound them on thine earth
With gold; upon their circles thine own speech
Is shown with master tongue; their light is drawn
From thy sun's gleaming fountain; seek no more!

Only with harmony sublime and pure,
Which, though it rises over time and space,
Turns the world's ears to his native land,
The poet is the greatest patriot.