This evening I've been reading in The Complete Poems of [Constantine] Cavafy (the 1976 Rae Dalven translation) in between innings of the Mets-Nationals game. I first encountered his poetry in J.D. McClatchy's anthology Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems and enjoyed it enough to desire more.
Cavafy's poems are almost all either love poems (the majority of them clearly homoerotic) or retellings of ancient Greek myths or history. The latter are not very good (compared, for instance, with the skillful way in which H.D. writes about the same subject matter), but the love poems are excellent. They tend to be short vignettes, beautifully crafted, about brief liaisons and the former lovers of the speaker's youth.
"On Painting" especially stands out to me:
I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark. It continues to blow and rain.
I would sooner see than speak.
In this painting now, I am looking at
a beautiful lad who is stretched out
near the fountain, probably worn out from running.
What a beautiful child; what a divine noon
has now overtaken him to lull him to sleep.--
I sit and look so for a long time.
And again it is in art that I rest from its toil.
That last line is spectacular: the idea that the turmoil caused by the struggle to create beauty ("the languor of composition disheartens me") can only be assuaged by beauty's calming influence.
I love the depiction of visual art in poetry. Cavafy describes the path to the sublime that the best paintings reveal to viewers in a way that is reminiscent of Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which also speaks of the mysterious beauty of painting from a sideways angle, using a painting as an illustration of this beauty rather than attempting a straightforward description of its essence.
No comments:
Post a Comment