The History Man

28 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
strate that the metaphor is also present in the poetry. This is in effect an
imaginative treatment of Cavafy parallel to Eliot's of the Thames or
Seferis's of the Aegean: namely, to integrate the poetry into a preexisting
mythical pattern. The crucial difference remains that Eliot, Seferis, and
Joyce themselves reveal this process as an organizing force within their
texts, while there is no real evidence that Cavafy's texts, singly or as a
whole, attempt this kind of integration. Myth in this reading of Cavafy
becomes a "way of controlling and ordering" Cavafy's texts, rather than
a device used within the texts for the controlling and ordering of history
or personal experience.'
We must now turn to those poems of Cavafy which make explicit use
of myth; and, like the "moral allegory" poems, these turn out to be far
fewer in number than might have been supposed from the importance
given to this element in Cavafy criticism. Allowing for a somewhat
generous definition of myth, that includes stories of literary origin either
based ultimately on mythical sources or having acquired a currency and
symbolic status since first being written which goes far beyond their
explicit historical context, or both, there are no more than twelve of these
poems, of which two have already been encountered under the heading
of "moral allegory." 4 All were written very early in Cavafy's career, in
the decade between 1893 and 1903 (assuming the dating of 1894 for the
3Both Keeley and Dallas bracket the name of Eliot with that of Ezra Pound in
their comparisons with Cavafy. It does not seem to have been noticed that Pound
comes significantly doser to Cavafy's perception of history than any of his Englishlanguage
contemporaries. The Cantos stand as a monument to the attempt to treat
history, in all its random diversity, as the raw material for myth; an attempt which
is finally seen in the text as a qualified failure ("does it cohere?"). And there is
probably nothing in English poetry that so closely approximates Cavafy's intense
feeling for the past as part, as do such early poems of Pound as "Papyrus,"
"Provincia Deserta," and "Near Perigord." The final lines of "Provincia Deserta,"
in which the poet traverses the landscape in which the Provençal troubadours once
sung and which lives in their songs, could serve as an epigraph for all of Cavafy's
historical poetry:
So ends that story.
That age is gone;
Pieire de Maensac is gone.
I have walked over these roads;
I have thought of them living.
4"Priam's Night Journey" (1893: Anekdota, 51); "Salome" (1896: Anekdota,
87); "Chaldaean Picture" (1896: Anekdota, 89); "The Horses of Achilles" (1896/
1897: A113, tr. 5); "Lohengrin" (1898: Anekdota, 103); "Suspicion" (1898:
Anekdota, 107); "The Funeral of Sarpedon" (1898?/1908: A111, tr. 7); "King
Claudius" (1899: Anekdota, 113, tr. 134); "When the Watchman Saw the Light"
(1900: Anekdota, 123, tr. 137); "Bad Faith" (1903/1904: A109, tr. "Unfaithfulness,"
13). It should be noted that only three poems out of this list were ever
published by Cavafy. In addition to the above, the following two poems from the
previous list refer to the mythical rather than the historical past, as the basis for
moral allegory: "Ithaca" (1894 ?/1910/1911) and "Interruption" (1900/1901).