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lips and fingers that hunger for a white breast
eyes that half-close in the radiance of day
and feet that would run, no matter how tired,
at the slightest call of profit. . . .
when the harvest comes
some call out to exorcize the demon
some become entangled in their riches, others deliver
speeches.
But what good are exorcisms, riches, speeches
when the living are not there? 7
Exactly two years later, Seferis, still spiritually exhausted and in
search of renewal, took leave from the Foreign Ministry in order
to find peace and solitude on the island of Poros where his sisterin-law
owned a villa called “Serenity.” His journal reports: “I came
here last Wednesday, when a long period of my life in service had
come to a close — eight or nine years, starting from the period of
the Anschluss. The Ministry has given me two months’ vacation.
. . . I’m thinking of spending it here or wherever they will leave me
in peace. I want to be able to think . . . I carry much filth within
me that must go.” He begins to serve his muse again, reading and
writing during the day with the shutters closed and the electric
light on because the beauty outside constantly interrupts his work.
It takes three weeks for the poet to find the serenity he longs for,
and it comes with a kind of mystical experience. On the morning
of October 21, he is wakened by voices calling “The sun! The sun!”
and he opens the shutters to see the “the huge disk of the sun”
colored as he has never seen it: a bit lighter than blackberry juice.
When he goes out on the veranda sometime later, the sun now
high, he tells us that it “was impossible to separate the light from
the silence, the silence and light from the calm. . . . The sea had
no surface; only the hills opposite didn’t end at the earth’s rim, but
advanced beyond, below, starting all over again with a fainter image
of their shape which vanished softly into faraway emptiness.
There was a sense that another side of life exists.” After he returns
to his room “almost a visionary” and closes the shutters again to
allow in only “the dim light of the north,” he begins the poem that
7 George Seferis: Collected Poems, p. 155.
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