Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

52 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
which, as already mentioned," is considered by the poet as a symbol of
the erotic impulse.
Seferis, describing here his country, full of mountains, roofed by a
low sky, with a complete absence of water—no rivers, no wells, no fountains—and,
above all, blocked by the mythological rocks, creates a picture
of absolute sterility. Even the cisterns are empty, and their symbolic
"stagnant hollow sound" resembles "our love" and "our bodies."" Thus,
the association of the absence of water with this love and with the impossibility
of a journey to recover the golden fleece becomes here explicit.
As already mentioned in the introduction to this sequence, Seferis
wrote in his Journals that if he had read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets at
the time he wrote Mythistorema, he would have used a passage from it
as an epigraph." In the light of this remark, one can understand better
why love here is a "stagnant hollow sound" for his persona while "our
marriages,—the dewy garlands, the marriage fingers,/Have become insoluble
riddles for our souls." They cannot even imagine a past with love
and spring. The rhythm of the sensuous body, what Seferis elsewhere
calls "the lovely dance,'" and what Eliot implies when he says "the
intense moment," has here been extinguished.
Demetrios Nikolareizis, in his essay "The Presence of Homer in
Modern Greek Poetry," refers to poem "10" of Mythistorema as an
example of the journey that has not even been attempted. He writes that
the poet suggests this idea by using as narrators "Mysterious persons who
live a sterile life near the shore, dying from longing for the sea but
unable to embark on a journey—as if the seaways were closed or the drive
for voyage had been drained inside them.""
The poem ends not only with this nostalgia for a journey that cannot
be realized and remains an impossible dream but also with the image of
the "broken timbers," suggesting voyages that ended in shipwreck and
never reached their destination.
'See above, p. 42.
43Seferis wrote a long allegorical poem with the title The Cistern, in which this
central symbol, described as "a den of secret water," most probably stands for sterile
love.
"Journal E, 59. The passage, from "East Coker," is:
... As we grow older
The world becomes stranger the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
""The Thrush." Compare also "And a dance among the oleanders" (Mythistorerna,"6").
"Nikolareizis, 231.