Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

38
JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
light, which makes him realize that he has lived up to that point according
to an illusion. Seferis' protagonist, however, when he becomes aware
of his own illusion, finds the reality disappointing and the truth bleak:
Again another well inside a cave.
Once it was easy
To bring up from its depth idols and ornaments
To give pleasure to the friends who still remained faithful to us.
The ropes have broken now; only their marks on the well's
mouth
Remind us of our departed happiness.
He knows now that what he used to bring up from the well were
"idols and ornaments," but he can no longer draw them up, because "the
ropes have broken" now for him. In contrast to Plato's ideas, according
to which man passes from meaningless illusion to enlightenment, the protagonist
in Seferis' poem passes from illusion to despair. Awareness is
distressing for him because he discovers his self-deception, but this is
essentially his tragedy. As Oedipus sees the truth and the truth blinds
him, or as one of Ibsen's heroes in the Wild Duck discovers the truth
and this has a devastating effect, here the protagonist, who in the past
used to bring up idols from the well's depths "to give pleasure to the
friends who still remained faithful," now that the ropes are broken
feels betrayed—the truth is painful. He puts his fingers on the rim of the
well, and the marks on its mouth remind him of his "departed happiness."
In Plato's view, the man who is exposed to the light of true knowledge
is intoxicated by it; the shadows of the phenomenal world do not
satisfy him anymore because his world has been expanded. Seferis' poem,
with all its ambiguity, implies that the happiness imparted by the illusion
to which the protagonist seems still to cling cannot be disregarded so
easily.
In contrast to Plato's conception, according to which the physical
world, as a mere reflection of the superior world of ideas, is to be rejected
by the enlightened matt, Seferis suggests with his poem—especially
the second half of it—that the physical aspect of this world cannot be
underestimated. This is emphasized by the sensuous handling of the last
image of the poem, the interaction of the soul and the body:
The fingers on the rim, as the poet says.
The fingers feel for a moment the cool of the stone
And the body's fever passes into the stone
And the cave stakes its soul and loses it
Every second, full of silence, without a drop.
Seferis wrote in the first volume of his Journals that he considered