Untitled

delivers him from his eight- or nine-year agony. 8 The opening lines
offer a metaphor for the mood he has been trying to escape:
The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.
By the end of the poem, many lines later, the poet has invoked
Socrates, the persecuted but still the quintessential just man, to
show us how to find our way home, our Ithaka. And home has
become a rejuvenating — and beyond that, a transcendent — light
that he tells Robert Levesque, his French translator, unites the
angelic and the black in our world and appears in the last lines as
“an affirmation of a moment of dazzling and eternal life.” 9 That
moment reveals the possibility of both an earthly and a heavenly
love that can transform even the tragic progeny of Oedipus:
Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing . . .
I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking
about love;
adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns,
dark girl;
the heart of the Scorpion has set,
the tyrant in man has fled,
and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae,
hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess:
whoever has never loved will love,
in the light;
and you find yourself
in a large house with many windows open
running from room to room, not knowing from where
to look out first,
8 George Seferis: A Poet’s Journal, Days of 1945–1951, translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 39–40, 51–52.
9 “Seferis” in La permanence de la Grèce (Paris, 1948), p. 338.
367