George Seferis

I Rose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us yet you bent like the secret about to be released and the command you chose to give us was beautiful and your smile was like a ready sword. The ascent of your cycle livened creation from your thorn emerged the way’s thought our impulse dawned naked to possess you the world was easy: a simple pulsation. II The secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores the darkness of the depths is forgotten in the surf; the corals of memory suddenly shine purple. . . O do not stir. . . listen to hear its light motion. . . you touched the tree with the apples the hand reached out, the thread points the way and guides you. . . O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves if it were but you who would bring the forgotten dawn! May lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation may days open mature, the embrace of the heavens, may those eyes alone shine in the glare the pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute. Was it night that shut its eyes? Ashes remain, as from the string of a bow a choked hum remains, ash and dizziness on the black shore and dense fluttering imprisoned in surmise. Rose of the wind, you knew but took us unknowing at a time when thought was building bridges so that fingers would knit and two fates pass by and spill into the low and rested light. III O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves! Come forth sleepless form in the gathering silence raise your head from your cupped hands so that your will be done and you tell me again the words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace; and let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend and flood us with your lavish hair from the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart. You lowered your eyes and you had the smile that masters of another time humbly painted. Forgotten reading from an ancient gospel, your words breathed and your voice was gentle: ‘The passing of time is soft and unworldly and pain floats lightly in my soul dawn breaks in the heavens, the dream remains afloat and it’s as if scented shrubs were passing. ‘With my eyes’ startling, with my body’s blush a flock of doves awakens and descends their low, circling flight entangles me the stars are a human touch on my breast. ‘I hear, as in a sea shell, the distant adverse and confused lament of the world but these are moments only, they disappear, and the two-branched thought of my desire reigns alone. ‘It seemed I’d risen naked in a vanished recollection when you came, strange and familiar, my beloved to grant me, bending, the boundless deliverance I was seeking from the wind’s quick sistrum. . .’ The broken sunset declined and was gone and it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky. You lowered your eyes. The moon’s thorn blossomed and you became afraid of the mountain’s shadows. . . .In the mirror how our love diminishes in sleep the dreams, school of oblivion in the depths of time, how the heart contracts and vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace

The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’s waning the great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels the jar that refused to go dry at the end of day and the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair golden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran. I’ve kept a rein on my life, kept a rein on my life, travelling among yellow trees in driving rain on silent slopes loaded with beech leaves, no fire on their peaks; it’s getting dark. I’ve kept a rein on my life; on your left hand a line a scar at your knee, perhaps they exist on the sand of the past summer perhaps they remain there where the north wind blew as I hear an alien voice around the frozen lake. The faces I see do not ask questions nor does the woman bent as she walks giving her child the breast. I climb the mountains; dark ravines; the snow-covered plain, into the distance stretches the snow-covered plain, they ask nothing neither time shut up in dumb chapels nor hands outstretched to beg, nor the roads. I’ve kept a rein on my life whispering in a boundless silence I no longer know how to speak nor how to think; whispers like the breathing of the cypress tree that night like the human voice of the night sea on pebbles like the memory of your voice saying ‘happiness’. I close my eyes looking for the secret meeting-place of the waters under the ice the sea’s smile, the closed wells groping with my veins for those veins that escape me there where the water-lilies end and that man who walks blindly across the snows of silence. I’ve kept a rein on my life, with him, looking for the water that touches you heavy drops on green leaves, on your face in the empty garden, drops in the motionless reservoir striking a swan dead in its white wings living trees and your eyes riveted. This road has no end, has no relief, however hard you try to recall your childhood years, those who left, those lost in sleep, in the graves of the sea, however much you ask bodies you’ve loved to stoop under the harsh branches of the plane trees there where a ray of the sun, naked, stood still and a dog leapt and your heart shuddered, the road has no relief; I’ve kept a rein on my life. The snow and the water frozen in the hoofmarks of the horses.

fools, who ate the cattle of Helios Hyperion; but he deprived them of the day of their return. — Odyssey Since we still had some hardtack how stupid of us to go ashore and eat the Sun’s slow cattle, for each was a castle you’d have to battle forty years, till you’d become a hero and a star! On the earth’s back we hungered, but when we’d eaten well we fell to these lower regions mindless and satisfied.