Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

26 JOURNAL OP THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
Elpenor"; and throughout Seferis' work he constantly uses imagery and
symbols associated with the journey in general and the Odyssey in particular,
especially when dealing with the subject of love. This identification
of love and the journey becomes very explicit in a number of his
poems. One example is the following passage from "Stratis the Sailor
among the Agapanthi":
The first thing God made is love
Then comes the blood
And the thirst for blood
Goaded by the body's seed as if by salt.
The first thing God made is the long journey;
That house is waiting
With its blue smoke,
With the dog grown old
Waiting, that he may die, for the homecoming.
Since there can be no two "first things," the implication is that love
and the journey are one and the same thing. The poet is using the
long journey as a metaphor for the quest for fulfilment in love, a fulfilment
that is identified here with a return "home."
The same idea is expressed by two lines of poem "10" of the
Mythistorema sequence, in which the journey is presented as a failure:
The broken timbers of unfinished journeys,
Bodies that know no longer how to love.
The loss of the ability to love is equivalent here to a journey that ends
in a shipwreck; and in several other poems this identification of love
and the journey is sometimes stated explicitly, though more often implied.
Man's attitude toward love, lust, sensual pleasure, is very important in
his journey through life and determines whether he will end in shipwreck
or home. In many of Seferis' poems, the destination is not reached—
the voyager is trapped by his sensuality and is consigned to the underworld,
where he remains, unlike his Homeric prototype, unable to find
his way back home. This is a consequence of Seferis' overall conception
of love and sensuality and the role they play in man's life. In his later
poetry the persona appears on his way to return. In an essay on his poem
"The Thrush," Seferis writes about the role of sensuality:
Those old texts hide solid wisdom. Look, Circe: the senses of
the body, sensuality, send us to the underworld, to the dead,
who can show us the way of return. And it is true that what
we call sensualism weighs a lot, as many examples show, in
the nostalgia and the effort of man for a final liberation that
some call return to a lost paradise and others call union with
God.