Constantine Cavafy, “Comes to Rest”

Many years ago I encountered the notion that T. S. Eliot greatly admired the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.  Not liking Eliot’s influence on poets and readers, I filed that away and read other poets.

Then, teaching a course in the ‘poetry of witness,’ I encountered Cavafy’s poems directly.  He is not, except in very large terms, a political poet.  He is, I discovered, one of the great poets of modernity.  One of the great poets, period.

What Cavafy witnesses, what he testifies to, is the life of gay men.  I am not trying to be politically correct here: Cavafy’s modest reluctances have little to tell us about our current era of the acceptance of gay marriage, our contemporary recognition that men and women who choose same-sex partners are as ‘normal’ as heterosexuals.  Although I would insist, as I do at the very end of this essay, that if we want to understand how we got from ‘there’ (the closet) to ‘here’ (our widespread acceptance of homosexuality) we will find that Cavafy played a major role.

What I want to talk about, before embarking on the essay, is what Cavafy has done for me.  It is hard to talk about, not because I am so reluctant to say these things but because none of us wants to appear foolish or uninformed.  But let me talk about Cavafy’s effect on me nonetheless.  If this reveals me to be woefully stupid or even a bigot, so be it. 

I am not a homosexual, and even though I have had friends who are, we have never discussed sex.  Never.

There.  I have said what I feel might embarrass me before some of the people I know.  Maybe they won’t be judgmental.  Maybe they will think me terribly uptight.

I’ve written before in these essays that I believe poems have two central functions.  One is that they can and do reveal us to ourselves.  When a poet is especially attentive or especially honest, we can see about ourselves things we have not seen or maybe just things we have been reluctant to acknowledge.  Poems represent an escape from the prison of the self.  We are not alone in the world.  Others are like us and we can be like them as well.

But there is another side to literature.  We are trapped in another prison of the self.  Others are different from us.  The imagination can create bridges out of the narrowness of our own experience to the often quite different experiences of others.  I am not black, but in reading novels or poems by black Americans I can understand and, more, empathize with a dimension of American experience I have not had. 

For me, Cavafy’s poems are a bridge.  He writes, as you will see, about brief bursts of passion, of gay passion.  His poems work in both ways for me.  I learn, on a profound level I think, of what a gay man who lived a hundred years ago felt when he thought about sex.  I also learn, and this may be equally salutary, that gay passion and heterosexual passion are both forms of human passion, not nearly as different as I might have expected, me with my limited experience.

What I am saying is that Cavafy has helped me move into a larger sense of my own humanity.  Both of the difference between my experience and that of others, and of the links between myself and others. 

Comes to Rest

It must have been one o’clock at night
or half past one.
 

                        A corner in the wine-shop
behind the wooden partition:
except for the two of us the place completely empty.
An oil lamp barely gave it light.
The waiter, on duty all day, was sleeping by the door.
 No one could see us. But anyway,
we were already so aroused
we’d become incapable of caution.
 
Our clothes half opened—we weren’t wearing much:
a divine July was ablaze.
 
Delight of flesh between
those half-opened clothes;
quick baring of flesh—the vision of it
that has crossed twenty-six years
and comes to rest now in this poetry.

 

[Translated  from the Greek by Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard]

The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, where he lived almost the entirety of his life.  It may be fruitful to compare him to Walt Whitman, who in 1863 had written many of the greatest of his poems, although his best Civil War poems (in a collection called Drum-Taps) and his great elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” would be written in the following several years.

  Cavafy was born, then, in the final years of Whitman’s genius.  Like Whitman, he began publishing poems late – he was in his mid-thirties when his first small book of poems appeared, just as Whitman was in his mid-thirties when the first slim edition of Leaves of Grass appeared.

  The fifty years which passed between the first publication for each poet were significant.  Like Whitman, Cavafy was in some ways a 19th century figure, though in his life, not his poetry.  Both were working men.  Cavafy’s family had been wealthy merchants, but the early death of Cavafy’s father was devastating to the family’s fortunes and Cavafy took up a position as a clerk in the Irrigation Service of the office of the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, where he stayed for thirty years.  Whitman, son of a contractor, worked as a journalist, primarily in New York. 

  Yet whereas Whitman – bold for his time – addressed his sexual longings and conflicted sexual identity in poems full of hints of secret significance, Cavafy was exceptionally straightforward about his sexual preferences.  Whitman in the “Calamus” section of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, going down what he recognized were “paths untrodden,” explored areas of “manly attachment.”  But those paths were full of revelations that were what we might   today call ‘closeted.’  "I proceed for all who are or have been young men, / To tell the secret of my nights and days, / To celebrate the need of comrades” he proclaims in the first poem of the “Calamus” sequence, only to declare in a following poem (this is the entire poem, with my italicizations for emphasis):

Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting:
Here I shade and hide my thoughts – I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems. 

How different is “Comes to Rest” by Cavafy!  There is no hiding, not shading, no fear of exposure: the poem is about a homosexual experience[1] in a Greek tavern on a summer night.  There is no prurient description of the specific nature of the sexual encounter.  The poem is frank in its recollection of two adults, “aroused,” opening one another’s clothes, so caught up in their physical passions that they had “become incapable of caution.”  

  One of the things I love about Cavafy is stylistic.  There is a directness and clarity to his poems that is so strong that they seem almost ‘unpoetic.’  There are no metaphors here, no poetic tropes, no rhetoric.  The poem is descriptive.  Almost like a journalist, he gives us, in the first four lines, time and place:

It must have been one o’clock at night
or half past one.
 
                        A corner in the wine-shop
behind the wooden partition

He describes the place: “completely empty,” except for a sleeping waiter; dim, so that “no one could see us.”

except for the two of us the place completely empty.
An oil lamp barely gave it light.
The waiter, on duty all day, was sleeping by the door.
 No one could see us.

And yet, of course, the wine-shop is not empty at all: the two figures in the poem are overfull of passion, “already so aroused/we’d become incapable of caution.”

Cavafy reveals how strong the passionate attraction is by that wonderfully telling phrase, “incapable of caution.” 

  The two men, in the dim obscurity of the back corner of the wine-shop open one another’s clothes:

Our clothes half opened—we weren’t wearing much:
a divine July was ablaze.

The heat of the summer, the heat of their attraction, are commensurate with each other.  Is the ‘ablaze’ metaphorical?  I think not: it is a hot summer night, and the shape of one thing – a sweltering July night – is the shape of the other, a heat of sexual excitement.   The night, the experience, are rendered in two words, “divine” and “delight.”  Although the partners to this experience are in hiding – they are in the corner, in dim obscurity, virtually alone, usually (though not tonight) cautious – the verses themselves do not hide at all[2].  The poem is about physical desire, about sexual passion, between men.  It is about “half-opened clothes; the quick baring of flesh.”

I do not think we can underestimate the power of Cavafy’s directness.  I began with a comparison with Whitman because he, like Cavafy, writes about his attraction to men.  But for Whitman, any revelation must be accompanied by a pulling back.  Homoeroticism drives him in many poems, but he is not comfortable about revealing it.  He’s compelled to take as his subject what he cares so deeply about, but deeply ingrained cultural fears prevent him from the kind of directness that we often associate with the poet who begins his greatest poem, “Song of Myself,” with  an assertion of ego dramatically at odds with his Judeo-Christian culture, “I celebrate myself.”

Cavafy, on the other hand, brings a simple directness to this lyric poem.  There is no hiding, no embarrassment on the poet’s part, as he sings about a homoerotic experience.   That, along with the relatively simple and ‘unpoetic’ way in which the poem’s language comes to us, comprises one of the trinity of things that, it seems to me, comprises Cavafy’s voice as a unique and essential element in the creation of modernity. 

E. M. Forster, the British novelist, famously described Cavafy (whom he met and became friends with when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War) as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.”  The “slight angle” Forster says later in this essay, which introduced Cavafy to the English-speaking world, is characteristic of the stance of any poet.   It is also an accurate portrayal of a consciousness always meditative, always related to the world but not quite immersed in the world.  And it is, I think we can recognize, a coded way of saying that Cavafy is gay, not straight.  Though of course neither of those two terms – gay and straight – existed in Forster’s day as words for characterizing sexual choice.

I mentioned there are, to my mind, a trinity of things that define Cavafy’s voice.  One I have already addressed, his ‘unpoetic’ language.  Forster recognized this use of language long ago when he spoke of a loose group of new poets he associated with Cavafy, a younger generation which “shocks the stodgy not only by its writings but by its vocabulary: expressions are used that one might actually hear in a shop.” 

Another defining mark is something we have just seen, but that requires reading several poems by Cavafy to become aware of: that in writing about homosexual attraction and experience, he is the poet of the one-night stand.  The relationships he describes are always brief, momentary, fleeting. That does not mean they are not intense, or satisfying.  But they are momentary, bright blazes – to cite the poem we have been looking at – in the long continuity of time and consciousness.

I use the term ‘one-night stand’ because it is so blunt.  In some ways, it was likely a major constituent of homosexual experience in a time when homosexuality was derided and publicly denied: to be male and homosexual meant one often engaged in transitory relations, pick-ups and consummations.  In other ways, the term diminishes: it reduces the claims of passion, of the sensual excitement of a moment, to something tawdry and dismissive.  For Cavafy, I think, it is both: a testimony to what his life was like when he was young and in pursuit of secret pleasures which tended toward the single sexual encounter, and a celebration of passion so strong that all else pales before its needs and its glorious satisfactions.

This leads to the third constituent of Cavafy’s poetry: it is always retrospective.  It looks back. The poems are not written about present experience, but are rather reflections of what remains from the passage of time[3].

The passage of time.  That is, of course, where “It Comes to Rest” ends.  In this poem, the ending defines the subject of the poem.  Yes, it is about homoerotic desire and a moment of delirious fulfillment.  But that moment is in the past, literally 26 years ago: the poem reflects on itself as the vehicle for consciousness to retain what has passed in the ongoing rush of time.

Delight of flesh between
those half-opened clothes;
quick baring of flesh—the vision of it
that has crossed twenty-six years
and comes to rest now in this poetry.

I myself am attracted to poems about the intensity of the present moment; that’s one reason why I am so enamored of William Carlos Williams, for instance.  But there are other poets who reflect on what has passed and how it remains with us; their poems are meditations on not just the past, but the power of poetry to retrieve that past and show its continuation into the present.  The short poem of Wordsworth’s we considered, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” is about memory[4]; so is the poem of Whitman’s we looked at, “The Wound-Dresser.” 

Cavafy, whether he writes about passion or about history, is unceasingly concerned with what remains for us after time has moved us along, and the memory in which it remains.  The ‘what’ is not more important than the ‘where.’  Cavafy sees poems as the living repository of what would otherwise be forgotten.  To write a poem is to retrieve, from the past, something which is central to life, something which must neither be lost nor forgotten.  Although he is in no way a psychoanalytic poet, Cavafy’s work is equivalent to psychoanalysis in that it sees the poem as the place of retrieval.  What we retrieve defines us.   “The vision of it/that has crossed twenty-six years/and comes to rest now in this poetry.”

One of the things I love about Cavafy – there are many things about his poems that I love – is in part that his poems are not ‘hard.’  I dislike the approach to poetry that often dominates high school (and college!) teaching: ‘See if you are smart enough to get this!  Can you get the symbols and what they stand for?  Can you understand these strange words and poetic constructions?  Can you find the hidden meaning?’  I think, as I have said before in these essays, that poems are written to speak to people.  Yes, sometimes, life being hard and complex and multifaceted, poets use language and devices that are hard or complex.  But it need not be that way.  Poetry can reflect on the complexity of life without shoving the reader away, without setting itself up as a literary IQ test.  In fact, I think most poets are very far from wanting their poems to be an IQ test.  Sometimes, as we briefly saw at the beginning of this essay with Whitman and his approach to homoeroticism, poets are difficult because they are in hiding, both wanting to speak and being embarrassed by what they have to say.  Sometimes, as we saw with Emily Dickinson, they ask us to focus with great intensity so that we can see what we might usually overlook. 

Cavafy is often ironic, especially in his historical poems.  And I do not, in fact, think his poems are ‘easy.’  But they don’t push us, his readers, away.  He allows us entry to his poems with a generosity that I find unusual among poets.  That generosity is all the more surprising – courageous, shocking – when we recall that he was writing only a decade after Oscar Wilde, in one of the most publicized of all literary trials, was arrested and sent to prison for his homosexuality.  If what was in Wilde’s case called “the love that dare not speak its name” crosses the threshold into modern discourse plainly and clearly, it is likely that the point of ingress occurred in the lines of the quiet poet of Alexandria, Constantine Cavafy. 

Here is a poem for you to read without any assistance from me.  I love this poem also, in part because it tells me about an aspect of life I have not experienced, but which is no less real for that. 

I think in reading this poem you will find that the generosity of entrance – Cavafy’s ability to enable you to read a poem which, like the one we have just read, is about passion and the “caution” which so often accompanies sexual desire, especially homosexual desire in a closeted world  -- is remarkable. 

He Asked About the Quality[5]

He left the office where he’d taken up
a trivial, poorly paid job
(eight pounds a month, including bonuses)—
left at the end of the dreary work
that kept him bent all afternoon,
came out at seven and walked off slowly,
idling his way down the street. Good-looking;
and interesting: showing as he did that he’d reached
his full sensual capacity.
He’d turned twenty-nine the month before.
 
He idled his way down the main street
and the poor side-streets that led to his home.
 
Passing in front of a small shop
that sold cheap and flimsy things for workers,
he saw a face inside there, saw a figure
that compelled him to go in, and he pretended
he wanted to look at some colored handkerchiefs.
 
He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and how much they cost, his voice choking,
almost silenced by desire.
And the answers came back the same way,
distracted, the voice hushed,
offering hidden consent.
 
They kept on talking about the merchandise—but
the only purpose: that their hands might touch
over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips,
might move close together as though by chance—
a moment’s meeting of limb against limb.
 
Quickly, secretly, so the shopowner sitting at the back
wouldn’t realize what was going on.

Footnotes

[1] When I sent this out by email, several colleagues, close readers of the sort I admire, wrote me to say that nothing in the poem indicates that the couple, the “us…we” in the poem, is comprised of two males.  Their point was well-taken: not only in the translation but in the Greek.  A scholar I consulted tells me that “verbs in Greek don’t require pronouns that show gender.”  But so many of Cavafy’s poems indicate that his passion is directed toward other men, and not women, that I feel justified in reading this poem in that context. 

[2]  It should be acknowledged that there is no precise physical description of what they do once, unseen and their “clothes half opened,” they revel in “delight of flesh.”.  Is this a narrator engaged in a form of hiding?  Or is the narrator speaking in and of a time before our own clinically exact age, speaking in a way that leaves certain details to the imagination?  I opt for the latter. 

[3] It is worth noting here that Cavafy primarily wrote poems on two subjects: some, the ones I find most compelling, are lyrics about love.  The others are meditations on history, especially the long history of Greece during the Hellenistic period – which followed the dominance of the classical Greece of Athens and Sparta – and during the long Byzantine era which ensued.  What yokes the two subjects is time.  And, of course, language.  Often, in reading the historical poems, both their subjects and their diction remind me of one of my favorite late twentieth century poets, Zbigniew Herbert, about whom I wrote one of these descriptions in an earlier chapter.  Another of Herbert’s poems, this even more a meditation on the past, will be the subject of a later chapter. 

[4]  The greatest poem about memory in English is, I think, Wordsworth’s astonishing epic, The Prelude.

[5] Should you want to see an etching by famed British artist David Hockney loosely based on this poem, click on Hockney.  In addition to seeing this etching, you can see his entire “Illustrations for Fourteen Poems by C.K. Cavafy here.