Kishore Kumar
Near the brightly lit window
of the tobacconist’s shop, they stood amid a crowd of people.
By chance their gazes met
and hesitantly they half expressed
the illicit longing of their flesh.
Later, after several anxious steps along the pavement –
they smiled and gently nodded.Then the closed carriage…
the sensuous mingling of their bodies;
the hands, the lips coming together.
Sensuous, filled with passion and longing, and often culminating in fulfilment, the poetry of Constantine Cavafy elicits a variety of emotions in its reader. All of his sensuous poetry is centred on chance sexual encounters that are decidedly gay.
C P Cavafy is not as popular with Indian readers as Wilde or Forster, but we must consider the fact that he did not write in English. He was a Greek gentleman who lived in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Alexandria, Egypt, and wrote in Modern Greek. He lived a quiet clerical life, away from the limelight of published glory. So much so that little is known about his life that his poetry doesn’t tell us. Born into a rich family whose fortunes dwindled soon after his birth, he moved along with his family from England to Alexandria at a very young age. He worked as a clerk in the Public Works Department and produced a body of excellent poetry when not working.
His clothes were in terrible disrepair.
He wore the same suit all the time,
a faded cinnamon-coloured suit.Ah, days of summer, nineteen hundred and eight,
your vision of him, for beauty’s sake,
omitted that faded cinnamon-coloured suit.
Instead, your vision preserved him
just as he was taking it off, casting away
that unworthy clothing, and the mended underwear,
and he stood completely naked, flawless in his beauty; a miracle.
His hair uncombed, tossed back,
his limbs lightly tanned
from those naked mornings at the baths and on the beach.
His poetry is by turns descriptive, emotive, sad and cathartic. While once dealing with a handsome face seen on a ship which had hence faded from, at another point it deals with undying love, and at another, with a quickie in life’s alleyways.
But it is a mistake to think his poetry is confined to the romantic or sexual encounters. He also deals with mythological and legendary themes from Ancient Greece. From Cavafy’s pen have also come such enduring philosophic and moral poems as Ithaca (“…And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.”). However, with an anticlimactic feeling this reviewer read the entire collection with no trace to be found of the story of Alexander and Hephaestion.
During his lifetime, Cavafy enjoyed the admiration of such greats as E M Forster, though he only published a few of his poems in local periodicals. His first collection of about 154 poems was published posthumously. The following poem of his perfectly summarises what he has given us through his body of poetry.
An old man, stooped and spent,
crippled by the years and by excess,
walks slowly across the alley.
But as he enters his house
to hide his wretched state and his old age,
he muses on that share of youth he still claims.Young boys today recite his verses.
His fancies pass across their waking eyes.
Their healthy, sensuous minds,
their muscular, smooth limbs,
are stirred by his vision of beauty.
For readers who aren’t fortunate enough to find the book on a local bookshelf, these must-read poems are available online for free at http://cavafis.compupress.gr, and also at www.cavafy.com.
