From: filippou@cs.mcgill.ca (Dimitrios FILIPPOU)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: soc.CULTURE.greek: 2 poems by L. Durrell
Keywords: Lawrence Durrell, poetry
Date: 22 Dec 92 15:47:00 GMT
Organization: SOCS - McGill University, Montreal, Canada


Here are two poems written by Lawrence Durrell, a contemporary of 
George Seferis, Stratis Tsirkas, Henry Miller, and other Greek and 
non-Greek men of literature of the 1930s to 1960s.

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           (1) GREEK CHURCH: ALEXANDRIA

     The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
     Indeed all half asleep; their coming was
     No eloquent proposition of natures
     Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.
     But a propitiation by dreams of belief
     A relief from the changing ropes of thought.

     Piled high in Byzane like a treasure-ship
     The church heels over, sinking in sound
     And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys
     And blazing crockery of the orthodox God
     Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,
     A sorcery to the black-coated rational,
     To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.

     Now however all hums and softly spins
     Like a great top, the many-headed black
     Majority merged in a single sea-shell.

     Idle thoughts press in, amazing one---
     How the theologians with beards of fire
     Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,
     Or with dividers spun for us a fine
     Conniving cobweb---traps for the soul.

     Three sailors stand like brooms.
     The altar has opened line a honeycomb;
     An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.
     Surely we might ourselves exhale
     Our faults like rainbows on this incense?

     If souls did fire the old Greek barber
     Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,
     Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward
     Child at this sill of pomp,
     Moved by a hunger money could not sate,
     Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.

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                (2) THE ANECDOTES

                         IV

                     At Rhodes

     If space curves how much the more thought,
     Returning after every conjugation
     To the young point of rest it started in?

     The fulness of being is not in refinement,
     By the delimitation of the object, but
     In roundness, the embosoming of the Real.

     The egg, the cone, the rhombus: orders of reality
     Which declaim coldly against the reason:
     We may surround and view every side,

     We may expound, break into fields of thought,
     But qualifying in this manner only spoil:
     On this derogatory wheel stands Man.

     Now who is greater than his greatest appetite?
     Who is weaker than the least of his fears?
     Who claims that he can match them perfectly,
     Apprehended without to unapprehended within?

     We Greeks were taught how to exhaust ideas,
     Melissa, but first begin with people. There we score!
     No Roman understood our sunny concupiscence,
     The fast republican colour of our values.

     Philosophy with us was not worked out.
     We used experience up. The rest precipitated.
     Soon we were still alive: but nothing else was left.


From: Lawrence Durrell, "Collected Poems," E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
      New York, U.S.A. (1960).

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Re-typed and posted on the USENET by

Dimitrios Filippou

ps. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek