Great poet, friend of my later days, you first
I would honour. Driven from shore to shore
Like Odysseus, everywhere you had nursed
The quivering spark of freedom, your heart’s core
Loaded and lit by your country’s tragedies,
Her gods and heroes. These inhabited
Your poetry with a timeless, native ease
But they moved there among the living dead
Of recent times, so myth and history
Became one medium, deeply interfused.
I recall, in London or in Rome, you welcoming me –
Warm growl, the Greek ‘my dear’ – a spirit used
To catching voices from rock, tree, waves, ports,
And so always a shade preoccupied.
Hearing you were dead, I remembered your Argonauts,
How ‘one after another the comrades died
With downcast eyes’, having become reflections
And articles of the voyage: as you, whose quest is
One now with theirs. My lasting recollections –
Your grace before necessity, your passion for justice.
And you no less, dear tutor of my young days,
Lover of Greece and poetry, I mourn.
To me you seem then the exorbitant blaze
Of Aegean sun dispelling youth’s forlorn
Blurred images; the lucid air; the salt
Of tonic sea on your lips. And you were one
Whom new poetic languages enthralled
(After I’d stumbled through a Greek unseen,
You’d take The Tower or The Waste Land from a shelf
And read me into strange live mysteries.)
You taught me most by always being yourself
Those fifty years ago. For ever Greece
Remained your second country, even though
You were self-exiled latterly, touched by the same
Indignation which made that other know
Exile was not for him. Yearly your fame
Grew as administrator, scholar, wit:
But my best memory, the young man whose brilliance
Lit up my sombre skies and kept them lit,
Drawing dead poets into the ageless dance.
I miss these men of genius and good sense,
In a mad world lords of their just enclave,
My future emptier for the one’s absence,
So much of my youth laid in the other’s grave.
Hellene and Philhellene, both gone this year,
They leave a radiance on the heart, a taste
Of salt and honey on the tongue, a dear
Still-warm encampment in the darkening waste.
1 First published in Cornhill (winter 1971–1972). Maurice Bowra had been CDL’s tutor when he read Classics at Wadham College. Oxford. We had last been reunited with our friend George Seferis – the great Greek poet and Nobel Prizewinner – in Rome in 1968, before the Colonels confiscated his passport. On principle. Maurice would not now travel to Greece. It was a sacrifice. On a fiercely hot day, Cecil, himself now mortally ill, had gone from Greenwich to Oxford to follow Maurice’s coffin to the graveside.