the incommunicable one of taste. His own poems are in Demotic, but in moderate Demotic.
They are all short poems, and unrhymed, so that there is some hope of conveying them in a verbal translation. They reveal a beautiful and curious world. It comes into being through the world of experience, but it is not experience, for the poet is even more incapable than most people of seeing straight:
Here let me stand. Let me too look at Nature a little,
the radiant blue of the morning sea,
the cloudless sky and the yellow beach;
all beautiful and flooded with light.
Here let me stand. And let me deceive myself into thinking that I saw them—
(I really did see them one moment, when first I came)
—that I am not seeing, even here, my fancies,
my memories, my visions of voluptuousness.
It is the world within. And since the poet cannot hope to escape from this world, he should at all costs arrange and rule it sensibly. "My mind to me a kingdom is," sang the Elizabethan, and so is Cavafy's; but his is a real, not a conventional, kingdom, in which there may be mutinies and war. In "The City" he sketches the tragedy of one who misgoverned, and who hopes to leave the chaos behind him and to "build another city, better than this." Useless!
The city shall ever follow you.
In these same streets you shall wander,
and in the same purlieux you shall roam,
and in the same house you shall grow grey. . . . .
no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.
You have so shattered your life here, in this small corner,
that in all the world you have ruined it.
