Life Immovable Part 5

Where Tolstoi lived, all things are justly blessed; Where Goethe dwelt all things are light and wisdom; And yet my heart's pure love flows now for thee, For thee, O France!

Though first I sucked my G.o.d-sprung mother's milk, Still thou wert later manna unto me, Desert-born, joy of mine and guide and teacher, My second mother.

On thy world-trodden earth, I have not stood; Nor didst thou bathe me, Seine, in thy cold waters; Yet is thy vision light unto my song, O second mother!

O Celtic oak-trees and Galatian-born White lilies in lyric Paris blossoming, With Hugo and with thee, O Lamartine, Revels and wings!

Dante and Nietzsche, Ibsen, Shakespeare, all, Poured wine for me with their thrice-holy hands Into thy gleaming cup of gold and bade Me rise on high.

A child: And thou didst flash before me first, Tearing the maps of dazzled Europe's lands With the world's Mirabeaus and with the world's Napoleons.

Thou art not for the gnawing worm of graves.

Thy G.o.ds still live with thee, Hypatia!

Glory and Victory may dwell with thee, Democracy!

From the number of the life influences which we have scantily traced in Palamas' work we may conclude that he is a true representative of the great world and of the age in which he lives. Loving and true to his immediate surroundings, he does not localize himself in them, nor does he shut his thought within his personal feelings and experiences, but he travels far and wide with the thought and action of the universal man and fills his life with the life of his age.

It is exactly this universalism that makes _The Twelve Words of the Gypsy_ his best expression and at the same time the most difficult to understand thoroughly. The poem is reflective both of the growth of the poet himself and of the development of the human spirit throughout the ages with the history and land of h.e.l.las as its natural background.

Consequently, its message is both subjective and objective. Although differently treated, the theme is the same as that of the "Ascrean"

which appears in the latter part of _Life Immovable_ and which may be considered as a prelude to _The Twelve Words of the Gypsy_. There is a flood of feeling and a cosmic imagery throughout, but they only form the gorgeous palace within which Thought dwells in full magnificence and mystic dimness. "As the thread of my song," says the poet in his preface, "unrolled itself, I saw that my heart was full of mind, that its pulses were of thought, that my feeling had something musical and difficult to measure, and that I accepted the rapture of contemplation just as a lad accepts his sweetheart's kiss. And then I saw that I am the poet, surely a poet among many--a mere soldier of the verse, but always the poet who desires to close within his verse the longings and questions of the universal man and the cares and fanaticism of the citizen. I may not be a worthy citizen. _But it cannot be that I am the poet of myself alone; I am the poet of my age and of my race; and what I hold within me cannot be divided from the world without._"

WASHINGTON, D.C.

July 5, 1919.

LIFE IMMOVABLE

FIRST PART

_In Palamas, we have found every trait of the Greek character: He is religious and superst.i.tious; a skeptic, a pagan, and a pantheist.... He is a poet and a philosopher.... He abandons himself to every impulse of the Greek soul. But he is always fond of drawing back, of concentrating, of trying to encompa.s.s in a general form the sensations and ideas which sway him. His princ.i.p.al and latent care is to a.n.a.lyze himself and his world.

A poet and a thinker, Palamas does not attract the mult.i.tudes....

With him everything is a mingling of lights and shadows.... But through his work Greece of today is most clearly set forth._

TIGRANE YERGATE, "Le Mouvement litteraire grec; La Poesie."

_La Revue_, June, 1903, vol. xlv, p. 717 f.

With _Life Immovable_, the poetic genius of Kostes Palamas reaches its full strength. The poet, who, from his very first work, _The Songs of my Country_, had shown his power in selecting his sources of inspiration and in weaving the essence of purely national airs into his "light sketches of sea and olive groves and the various sunlit aspects of Greek life,"[3] continues to broaden his vision and art through an unquenchable eagerness for knowledge, for an understanding of things beautiful, whether present or past, concrete or abstract. He makes broad strides from his _Hymn to Athena_, to _The Eyes of My Soul_, _Iambs and Anapests_, and _The Grave_. In all "the pathetic and the common meet inseparably with an art exact and full of grace, an art that knows its purpose."[4] But in _Life Immovable_ Palamas rises above the h.e.l.lenic horizon, and strikes the strings of the universal heart in the same degree as the towns of Patras, Missolonghi, and Athens expand into Greece and Greece into the world. After all there is both realism and symbolism in the fact that the first poem of the volume reflects the atmosphere of the poet's native town while one of the latter ones "The Ascrean" is filled with an all-including world-vision.

The present volume contains only the first half of _Life Immovable_. It consists of five collections of poems: The "Fatherlands," "The Return,"

"Fragments from the Song to the Sun," "Verses of a Familiar Tune," and "The Palm Tree." On the whole, a careful study of these collections would furnish the key to an adequate understanding of the rest of the poet's works for which these poems are faithful preludes. For this reason I am tempted to give an a.n.a.lysis of the translated parts as a guide to their understanding. But it is by no means my wish to lay down a fast rule; poetry is no exact science and there should be always ample room for freedom of suggestion and of view.

1. FATHERLANDS

A series of sonnets, the "Fatherlands," make the opening of the book and, at the same time, symbolize most clearly the growth of our poet.

Each sonnet describes a fatherland, adding another link to a chain of worlds that dawn, one after another, upon the poet's being. The first is Patras, his birthplace. Then follows Missolonghi with its calm lagoon and the haunts of his boyhood. The splendor of the violet-crowned city of Athens is succeeded by the island of Corfu, the cradle of the literary renaissance of Modern h.e.l.lenism, which again fades before the vision of Egypt, whence the earliest lights of civilization shone upon the land of the Greeks. Christianity in its extreme form of asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen h.e.l.las," the cla.s.sic age of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of h.e.l.lenism spreading triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden Gate of imperial Byzantium.

But "imagination, like the Phaeacians' ship, rolls on," and the poet sings:

In my soul's depths loom many lands ...

And where the heavens mingle with the sea, A path I seek for a sphere beyond ...

Oceans are crossed, ages are brought forth from the past, and continents are joined in making the poet's spirit. Finally even Earth becomes too narrow and the greater universe opens its gates to the ultimate fatherland, the elements of the world which will at the end absorb the being of the poet:

Fatherlands! Air and earth and fire and water, Elements indestructible, beginning And end of life, first joy and last of mine, You I shall find again when I pa.s.s on To the grave's calm. The people of the dreams Within me, airlike, unto air shall pa.s.s; My reason, firelike, unto lasting fire; My pa.s.sions' craze unto the billows' madness.

Even my dust-worn body, unto dust; And I shall be again air, earth, fire, water; And from the air of dreams, and from the flame Of thought, and from the flesh that shall be dust,

And from the pa.s.sions' sea, ever shall rise A breath of sound like a soft lyre's complaint.

2. THE RETURN

The second collection of _Life Immovable_, ent.i.tled "The Return," is dedicated to the poet's country. It bears under its t.i.tle the significant date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair.

After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound the reveille. He conceives of his collection of songs as an expression of faith in the country's future. With perfect love and a.s.surance "he comes to place the crowns of Art" "dream-made and dream-engraved" upon her shattered throne....

Only with harmony sublime and pure, Which, though it rises over time and s.p.a.ce, Turns the world's ears to his native land, The poet is the greatest patriot.

Nevertheless even the poet's spirit cannot help reflecting the gloom through which it tries to rise. The general depression about him weighs upon him, too, in spite of his effort. This shadow haunts him constantly. Life becomes a Fairy, with a Fairy's dangerous charms and fearful mysteries. "Something like a madman pursues life." The poet hears this madman's falling steps and is horror-haunted:

And lo, blood of my blood the madman was!

A past, ancestral, long-forgotten sin, That bursting forth upon me, vampire-like, s.n.a.t.c.hed from my hand the dewy crown of joy!

This madman grows from within the individual's and the nation's life.

The wings of joys and dreams are clipped. One feels like a night-owl upon glorious ruins, the beauty of which makes the night even darker.

Tradition, like a majestic temple, seems to choke life by its solemnity.

The present, which seems to be symbolized by the little hut, is in the relentless grip of "a monstrous vision, the Fairy Illness, stripped in the silver glimmer of the moon." There is always the mingling of gleaming beauty and of bitter sorrow. There is always before us a "cord-gra.s.s festival," the amber fragrant flowers budding upon the piercing spikes of the cord-gra.s.s and luring man to the deadly bog where there is no redemption. One might say that the poet verges on morbidity.

But such an a.s.sumption would be unjust. Palamas may have a clear vision of the tragedy of life. But in the light of this revelation, with his unfettered contemplation, he builds, like Bertram Russell, a "shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and a.r.s.enals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls, the free life continues while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty." In like manner, the world of Greece, in which Palamas lives, "our home," as he calls it, may have its dreadful silences that are "full of moans," moans vague and m.u.f.fled as if coming from a distant world

Of bygone ages and of times unborn.

But he does not lose sight of that

Harmony fit for the chosen few, ...

A lightning sent from Sinai and a gleam From great Olympus, like the mingling sounds Of David's harp and Pindar's lyre, conversing In the star-spangled darkness of the night.

At times the poet even raises his song to rapture. Certainly the past becomes a source of happiness in his "Rhapsody," and life is agleam with joy in his "Idyl." But most reflective of this power of the poet to conquer darkness with light and to turn ruins into gleaming palaces of beauty and of song, is the poem ent.i.tled "At the Windmill."

The local color which is by no means a rare characteristic of the poetry of Palamas is particularly rich in this collection. Many of its songs are vivid and clear pictures of Greek life. Yet with the touch of symbolism, he makes such local flashes world-flames. In "The Dead," we have a faithful description of the Greek custom of exposing the open coffin with the body in a room whence all furniture is removed. Friends and relatives are gathered about the dead; even children are not excluded from paying this last honor to the departed. The windows are closed, and in the gloom tapers and candles are burning before the images of the saints and over the flower-covered body, while the smoke of the incense and the fragrance of the wreaths fill the air. Yet somehow in the verses of the song one catches the moving sounds of mourning humanity, the image of death against life.

3. FRAGMENTS FROM THE SONG TO THE SUN

"The Fragments from the Song to the Sun" contain some of the n.o.blest lines of Palamas' poetry. We cannot have a complete understanding of the symbolism with which this part of _Life Immovable_ is filled. For, after all, from the great hymn to the light-G.o.d, we have here only fragments.

But these fragments remind one of the gold-stained ruins of the _Akropolis_ against the bright Attic sky. Throughout, we are aware of a striking duality. The key to these sunlit melodies is probably found in the "Giants' Shadows." Among the shadows whose voices ascend from darkness "like moanings of the sea," the poet discovers Telamonian Ajax, the giant who is utterly absorbed in the world within him, the source of his light and life, and Goethe, the Teutonic poet, who turns to the world about himself as a flower to the sun, and whose heart "longs and thirsts for light." Here then, we detect the doubleness of the sun of Palamas, a sun within, the source of his inner life and thought, and a sun without, the source of all external beauty and growth.