Constantine P. Cavafy Poems

Walking yesterday in an outlying neighbourhood,
I went by the house
I used to go to when I was very young.
There Eros with his wonderful power
laid hold of my body.
...

A sailor drowned in the sea's depths
Unaware, his mother goes and lights

a tall candle before the ikon of our Lady
praying that he'll come back quickly, that the weather may be good
...

'... to be cherished even more
s a sensual pleasure achieved morbidly, corruptingly-
it rarely finds the body able to feel what it requires-
that morbidly, corruptingly, creates
an erotic intensity which health cannot know ....'
Extract from a letter
written by young Imenos (from a patrician family)
notorious in Syracuse for his debauchery
in the debauched times of Michael the Third.
...

It wouldn't have lasted long anyway
years of experience make that clear.
But Fate did put an end to it a bit abruptly.
It was soon over, that wonderful life.
Yet how strong the scents were,
what a magnificent bed we lay in,
what pleasures we gave our bodies.
...

'My end came while I was happy.
Ermotelis had me for his inseparable friend.
During my last days, though he tried to make me believe
that he wasn't worried, I often noticed his eyes
red from crying. And when he'd think
I'd fallen asleep, he'd collapse at the edge of my bed
as though out of his mind. But we were both young men
of the same age, twenty-three years old.
...

When the Macedonians deserted him
and showed they preferred Pyrrhos,
King Dimitrios (a noble soul) didn't behave
-so they said-
at all like a king.
...

But when he found himself in darkness,
in the earth's awful depths,
with a group of unholy Greeks,
and bodiless figures appeared before him
with haloes of light,
the young Julian for a moment lost his nerve:
an impulse from his pious years came back
and he crossed himself.
...

As I was going down those ill-famed stairs
you were coming through the door, and for a second
I saw your unfamiliar face and you saw mine.
Then I hid so you wouldn't see me again,
and you hurried past me, hiding your face,
and slipped inside the ill-famed house
where you couldn't have found pleasure any more than I did.
...

At least let me now deceive myself with illusions
so as not to feel my empty life.
And yet I came so close so many times.
And yet how paralyzed I was, how cowardly;
why did I keep my lips sealed
while my empty life wept inside me,
my desires wore robes of mourning?
...

The young Antiochian said to the king:
'My heart pulses with a precious hope.
The Macedonians, Antiochos Epiphanis,
the Macedonians are back in the great fight.
...