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I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted
that grace.
Because we’ve loaded even our song with so much music
that it’s slowly sinking
and we’ve decorated our art so much that its features
have been eaten away by gold
and it’s time to say our few words because tomorrow our
soul sets sail. 2
It took Seferis half a lifetime of perfecting his style, of assimilating
influences from French Symbolism and T. S. Eliot’s modernism
and of making these new in a Greek way, before he arrived at the
grace he sought. And he did so by following the prescription he
reveals in one of his last poems, presumably set in the patio garden
of his Athens home:
Accept who you are.
Don’t
drown the poem in deep plane trees;
nurture it with what earth and rock you have.
For things beyond this —
to find them dig in this same place. 3
Henry Miller was among the first to discern the secret source of
Seferis’s developing genius. During his one visit to Greece in 1939,
Miller was fortunate enough to be introduced to both the poet and
the poetry by George Katsimbalis, who became Miller’s hero in
The Colossus of Maroussi, as Seferis became among his intimate companions
on the voyage of discovery that the American recorded in
what many consider his best book. Miller found that Seferis’s poems
of the prewar period were becoming “more and more gemlike,
more compact, compressed, scintillating and revelatory,” and
he felt that he had “begun to ripen into the universal poet by passionately
rooting himself in the soil of his people.” That rooting
was more complex than Miller could have seen in his brief visit,
2 George Seferis, “An Old Man on the River Bank,” translated by Edmund Keeley and
Philip Sherrard, in George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995) pp. 146–147.
3 George Seferis, “Three Secret Poems: Summer Solstice, 7,” in George Seferis: Collected Poems,
p. 209.
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