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50 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA With desires that flashed like big fishes In seas that suddenly shrunk: We used to believe in the omnipotence of the body. And now the new moon had risen in embrace With the old moon; and the beautiful island lies Wounded and bleeding, the calm island, the strong, the innocent. And the bodies like broken branches And like roots torn from the ground. In both of these cases the wounding or sinking of an island is connected with an experience the protagonist now regrets or is trying to forget. By analogy, the disappearance of the beautiful islands in poem "8" of <strong>Mythistorema</strong> may also be connected with something in the protagonist's past which could be behind the failure of the present desperate journey. 9 Poem "9" begins with the indecision of the protagonist, who cannot bring himself to set out on a journey. He remains in the old harbor in spite of his unbearable loneliness and even though he feels he can no longer wait for his companions, who left each in a different direction. There is a certain ambiguity in the description of his situation: one would expect this feeling of desolation to be the result of the desertion of a single beloved person rather than of several, but the poet succeeds in this way in conveying the terror of a complete abandonment. He is trying to gather some strength in order to leave the old harbor. I stroke the rusty cannons, I stroke the oars So that my body may revive and make its decision. These two lines provide a direct connection again between love and the symbolic journey, since revival of the body would be equivalent to setting out on a journey. Yet, this is not easy for the protagonist to accomplish because, as he says in the next lines, "The sails give out only the smell/ Of the salt spray of the other storm"; the indecision is due to the memory of the previous journey, which must have ended in disaster. It is probably the journey referred to in poem "1" of <strong>Mythistorema</strong>, from which the protagonist and his companions returned "broken,/ Weak in the limb, mouths ravaged/ From taste of the rust and of the brine." His decision to live in solitude represents a negative attitude, most probably owing to a very deep wound. The situation is parallel to that of the man described by Stratis the Sailor in an earlier poem of Seferis." 40"Stratis the Sailor Describes a Man."
Love and the Symbolic Journey in Seferis' Mythisbarema 51 The pessimistic view of human relations (people seen as either wolves or sheep) and the symbolic crucifixion alluded to in that poem, the statements "We loved and found dust and ashes" and "I have reached the end," define a state of mind which is, in essence, not very different from that of a man who looks for solitude out of despair. However, the protagonist here, although he sought the solitude himself, says that he did not desire this "endless waiting," this disintegration, "the scattering of [his) soul to the horizon." He realizes now that man cannot Iive without communication. But, in his case, the symbolic resurrection he longs for is not possible. This impossibility of resurrection is also suggested by the last few lines of this poem, in which Seferis blends the myths of Odysseus and Adonis and indirectly also brings in Christ, the equivalent figure of the dead god in the Christian religion.'" The common element of all three myths is the journey to the land of the dead. Odysseus went there for instructions on how to return home, a journey he finally accomplished. Adonis, on the other hand, is resurrected every spring, and so is Christ. But the protagonist here is not successful. He wished to find the mountain glade when he moored among the asphodels, but the poem ends and he does not seem to have found it. 10 The deadly wounding of Adonis with which poem "9" ends anticipates the decay of vegetation and a period of drought and sterility. This is indeed the psychological climate of poem "10," which is permeated by what Seferis has called "the 'Waste Land' feeling." Our country is a shut-in place, all mountains And the mountains roofed by a low sky, day and night. We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no fountains, Only some cisterns, empty; they ring and are to us Objects of worship. A sound stagnant, hollow, like our solitude, Like our love and like our bodies. The prospects of a journey are here nonexistent because, as explained in the last stanza, which starts with the repetition of the opening motif ("Our country is a shut-in place"), the "two black Clashing Rocks" forbid the passage of ships. The reference to these mythological rocks is important: the only ship that was able to go through them was the Argo, with Jason and his companions on their way to recover the golden fleece, 41See Seferis comment, quoted above (n. 15).
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