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66 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
This view is reinforced if one compares poem "18" with another poem,
"The Last Dance" (1934) of the collection Book of Exercises II
(published after the poet's death)." Both poems present the decline
of the senses, but in poem "18" there is an ambiguity with respect to
the waste of love that leads to petrification—only an indirect allusion
is made to the death of a beloved person—while in the "Last Dance"
the deadening of love follows after a hubris has been committed. This
is suggested by the references to Oedipus (the old men with their
canes) and Agaraemnon (the murky bath, the net, the knife and the
purple). The bitter conclusion is that the bad roots do not wither
easily, the miasma of frenzy does not disappear and thus love dies.
The "Last Dance" has a general level referring to the excesses of
Greek history and contemporary experience. On the personal level,
it implies that once a hubris has been committed, love loses its spell—
it may become a dangerous lust, and then even restraint does not lead
to balance but to a deadening of the senses. "We drank love little by
little/a mithridatic drug it seemed/until it reached the point of
deadening." This is also implied by the title of the poem the "Last
Dance." An analogous situation is suggested in "Days of June 1941"
by the lines "Our thirst/a mounted guard, become marble/ at the dark
Gate of the Sun/he cannot ask for anything/he's on his guard."
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The landscape in poem "19" is very similar to that in part I of T.S.
Eliot's Waste Land ("The Burial of the Dead"). The protagonist is
The collection Book of Exercises II has not been translated into English. The
following is a literal rendering of the poem for the purposes of this discussion:
THE LAST DANCE
An old tale slightly altered is what we are all paying off/both we and
the others/like the old men reduced to ashes/who held canes in their hands
and spoke calmly./The murky bath, the net, the knife/the purple and the
voice which was asking about the sea,/who will drain it dry,/nurtured our
life./Our love, we drank it little by little/it seemed like a mithridatic drug/
until at the end it reached a point of deadening./Indeed, we were always
guided wisely/by our people.
Enough of life, this life/between Penteli, Hymettus and Parnitha./Yet the
roots,/the roots do not wither easily,/the miasmas of frenzy, of injustice, of
shallowness do not easily disappear./Three thousand years and more/on the
same rocks/we pay off an old tale slightly altered./Have pity on those who
are waiting.
The motif of dance appears often in Seferis' poetry—for instance, in "Gymnopaedia,"
"Nijinsky," Mythistorema, "Hampstead," "The Thrush," Three Secret
Poems—always connected with sensuous imagery.