The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Daniel Mendelsohn

loves. But a great deal of the excitement generated by the Unfinished Poems derives, even more, from the new “light,” as the poet put it, that they now shed on existing work—on our knowledge of the poet, his techniques, methods, and large ambitions.

      Of these thirty texts, nine treat contemporary subjects that will be familiar to readers already at home in the poet’s world. There are evocative treatments of the memory of a deliciously illicit encounter on a wharf (“On the Jetty”), and an elderly poet’s reverie about long-past days in which he was a member of a gang of rough young men living at the fringes of society—and on the wrong side of the law (“Crime”). One has as its subject a photograph that elicits thoughts of a bygone love (“The Photograph”); it is a crucial addition to a small but vivid group of poems already known (“That’s How,” “From the Drawer,” “The Bandaged Shoulder”) that indicate how intrigued the poet was by photography and how suggestively it could figure in his work. A short but vivid lyric, entitled simply “Birth of a Poem,” casts a gentle, lunar light on our understanding of the way in which the poet imagined his own creative process to have worked (“imagination, taking / something from life, some very scanty thing / fashions a vision. …”).

      A striking longer work, “Remorse,” takes its place beside the most emphatic of Cavafy’s philosophical poems—“Hidden Things,” “Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto”—while expanding their moral vision, adding a new note of gentle forgiveness for the unwitting cruelties to which fear and repression condemn us. Surely two of the most remarkable of these contemporary poems are “The Item in the Paper,” where the melodramatic donnée—a young man is reading an item in a paper about the murder of a youth with whom he’d had a liaison—becomes the vehicle for a tender and devastating exploration of a favorite theme, the soul-destroying effects of taboos against illicit love, and the hypocrisy of those who impose them; and “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the lyric (discussed above, p. XXXVII), about the nocturnal apparition of Cavafy’s younger self, a work in which, as in some of Cavafy’s greatest poems with this motif—“Since Nine—,” “Caesarion”—past and present, the quotidian and the intensely erotic, become disorientingly, thrillingly blurred.

      The remaining twenty-one lyrics are historical in nature, although here, as with the best of Cavafy’s work, this label is often a matter of convenience. They have familiar Cavafian settings. There are Hellenistic powers teetering—often unbeknownst to the poems’ smug narrators—on the brink of implosion (“Antiochus the Cyzicene,” “Tigranocerta,” “Agelaus,” “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians”); the corrupted Egypt of the incestuous Ptolemies (“The Dynasty,” “Ptolemy the Benefactor [or Malefactor]”); the Greek-speaking margins of the Roman Empire (the setting of “Among the Groves of the Promenades,” the fourth and last of Cavafy’s Apollonius of Tyana poems, this one about the sage’s sudden, telepathic apprehension, in Ephesus, of Domitian’s murder back in Rome). The early Christian era is vividly represented (“Athanasius,” about the Christian bishop who was ill treated by Julian the Apostate, a recurring Cavafian character), as are the peripheries of the Greek-speaking world during the twilight of Late Antiquity (“Of the Sixth or Seventh Century”). And of course there is the vast arc of Byzantium, from Justinian (the subject of the spooky short lyric “From the Unpublished History”) to the empire’s final days.

      To the latter epoch, poignant to any Greek, belongs what is surely one of the most striking of any of Cavafy’s poems, finished or unfinished: “After the Swim.” Here the poet, as often in his greatest mature creations, dissolves the distinctions between “historical” and “erotic” poetry, seducing the reader into thinking that the setting is, in fact, that of the late masterpiece “Days of 1908”—a hot Mediterranean day, a seaside swim, naked ephebic bodies—only to reveal, somewhat disorientingly, that we are in the waning days of Byzantium, haunted by the memory of the great scholar Gemistus Plethon, whose own identity (loyally Christian? covertly pagan?) was itself rather vexed.

      Of these historical poems, two groups in particular are worthy of special attention because of their immense value to our understanding of the poet’s imaginative world. The first is a pair of poems, “The Patriarch” and “On Epiphany,” both written in the first half of 1925, whose subject is the fourteenth-century Byzantine ruler John VI Cantacuzenus, “the reluctant emperor”—the regent who felt compelled to take the throne after the foolish widow and conniving ministers of the late emperor, his bosom friend, staged a coup d’état and dragged the empire into a devastating civil war. We know from two Published Poems that date to almost exactly the same period, “John Cantacuzenus Triumphs” and “Of Colored Glass,” that this figure evoked a particularly strong emotion in Cavafy, who deeply admired Cantacuzenus’s steadfast loyalty, devotion to principle, and—once he had been forced to abdicate, after his enemies’ ultimate triumph—great dignity in defeat, along with an impressive piety. The existence of the two Unfinished Poems now makes it clear that during the mid-1920s the poet was hard at work on what amounts to an entire cycle of poems on this poignant and noble figure, a small but significant lyric corpus whose celebration of “the worthiest man whom our race then possessed, / wise, forbearing, patriotic, brave, adroit” sheds greater light on our understanding of the qualities that the mature Cavafy associated with the unique Greek identity for which Byzantium was the conduit. This Cantacuzenus cycle may now take its place alongside the previously known cycles of poems about certain historical figures who similarly evoked a particularly strong response in the poet, not least because of the way their lives shed light on something about what it was to be Greek, or a poet, or both: Marc Antony, Apollonius of Tyana, the apostate emperor Julian.

      The other group of historical poems worthy of special note consists, in fact, of no less than four new texts about Julian, now revealed as the figure from the ancient past to whom the poet returned with greatest frequency and intensity: a total of eleven poems in all. (An embryonic twelfth is one of the four fragments in the Cavafy Archive; see here in this volume.) Cavafy’s poetic engagement with this complex and enigmatic emperor, who wanted to return the empire to pagan worship not long after it had been converted by his uncle Constantine to Christianity, began early in his creative life, with the Unpublished Poem “Julian at the Mysteries” (1896), and continued virtually to his last days: he had just finished correcting the proofs to “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” about Julian’s contemptuous treatment of the Antiochene Christians, when he died. The four Unfinished drafts give expression to a wide range of favorite themes and motifs, all clustered around the figure of the emperor, who, in his scheme to impose a dour, humorless, and rigid paganism on the newly Christianized empire, embodied an intolerance, a rigidity of thought, and, worst of all, a profound hypocrisy that to Cavafy represented everything the true Hellenic spirit was not.

      And so we have “The Rescue of Julian,” with its terse closing reminder, bare of any editorial comment whatever, that the emperor owed his life to the Christian priests he later tormented—a poem that savors of the tart ironies that give works like “Nero’s Deadline” their jaundiced effectiveness. “Athanasius,” which dramatizes the moment in which two Christian monks in Egypt have a vision of the death of Julian half a world away, in Persia, returns us to the milieu of telepathic perception that had so fascinated the young poet thirty years before. “The Bishop Pegasius,” about the still secretly pagan young Julian’s encounter with a secretly pagan bishop at an ancient Trojan shrine to Athena, is memorably irradiated by the aura of illicit homosexual attraction that haunts a masterpiece like the Published Poem “He Asked About the Quality.” And the perplexed narrator of “Hunc Deorum Templis” must grope in helpless ignorance like the unlucky masses in the early poem “Correspondences According to Baudelaire,” which owes so much to the Parnassians’ vision of the poet as someone granted a special vision. Contemplating the scene in which, during Julian’s triumphant entry into Vienne, an old woman cries out that “here is the man who will restore the [pagan] temples” (the exclamation to which the title refers), this narrator is forced to wonder, rather querulously, whether she is speaking in elation or despair—whether, that is to say, she is a secret pagan sympathizer or a loyal Christian. More secret identities.

      The foregoing overview of these rich and quite beautiful works is, of necessity, brief. But in sketching