SOURCE: "Eros: His Power, Forms and Transformations in the Poetry of Odysseus Elytis," in Odysseus Elytis: Analogies of Light, edited by Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, pp. 45-58.

[Below, Decavalles explores one of Elytis's principle themes, the "progressive story of Eros's nature … his external and internal discoveries in the process of building a world at once natural, human esthetic, earthly and universal, timely and timeless, finite and infinite, mortal yet immortal. "]

I have conceived my figure between a sea that comes to view right behind the whitewashed little wall of a chapel and a barefoot girl with the wind lifting her dress, a chance moment I struggle to capture, and I waylay it with Greek words.

If I spoke at the beginning about a girl and a chapel, at the risk of sounding less than serious, I had my reasons. I would have liked to draw that girl into the chapel and make her my own, not to scandalize anyone, but to confess that the eros is one, and also to make more dense the poem I wish to make out of the days of my life.

I would then see pomegranate branches sprouting from the iconostasis, and the wind singing at the little window together with the sea-wave, when the South Wind, blowing stronger, would help that wave jump over the stone parapet. Once, such a parapet touched my naked body, and I felt my innards purified, as if the lime, with its disinfectant qualities, had passed through all the folds of my heart. This is why I was never afraid of the wild look of the Saints, like anybody who ever reached the inapproachable: I knew that I was just enough to decode the Laws of my imaginary republic and to reveal that that was the seat of innocence. Do not take this as arrogance. I do not speak about myself. I speak for anyone who feels like myself but does not have enough naïveté to confess it.

If there is, I think, for each one of us a different, a personal Paradise, mine should irreparably be inhabited by trees of words that the wind dresses in silver, like poplars, by men who see the rights of which they have been deprived returning to them, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and on saying "eros, eros, eros!"

(Open Book)

To speak of Eros in Elytis's poetry, Eros in the fullness of his meaning, is tantamount to excluding very little. Elytis the poet has been above all Elytis the lover of the beauty in his "girls" and in nature, particularly that Aegean world of purity, serenity and love. He has been the lover of life and its poetry, of the tangibles and the intangibles, of earth and its ascent to the sky, and has ultimately been forced to become the passionate defender of them all. Eros has been the force that has driven both his life and pen, the earthly yet transcending power that has aspired to accomplishing the happy marriage of earth and heaven. We cannot afford not to think of Blake, his innocence, his experience and his eventual marriage of heaven and hell. Elytis's progress has been identical, even to the point of his turning himself into the prophet of a new Paradise. Their differences lie, of course, in their different times and worlds. In the place of Blake's northern New Jerusalem there is Elytis's sun-drenched Aegean, the day and its light, the summer and its noon and a youth that never ends. Much like Blake, Elytis shaped his own personal myth. Onto his pagan and Christian inheritances, the coexistent and inseparable products of the same racial genius, the same frame of mind, he put his own creative stamp. With the exception of the all-ruling sun, his divinities have stayed nameless in an animistic world. They are the natural and the inner forces that once gave birth to ancient myth.

The passage quoted above, a retrospective self-portrait, contains almost the entire essence of Elytis. Commenting and expanding on its parts, we could give a picture of the whole; for Elytis, like most significant poets and creators, has had one basic story to tell, the progressive story of Eros's nature, his longings, his advancement and conquests and his external and internal discoveries in the process of building a world at once natural, human, es thetic, earthly and universal, timely and timeless, finite and infinite, mortal yet immortal. The taking of that girl into that whitewashed chapel by the sea brings together the pagan and the Christian worlds in the purity of the erotic act, with Dionysian pomegranates of fertility and ecstasy sprouting from the iconostasis. It is this purity which counts, the sacredness of Eros, the transformation of what was wrongly deemed sin into virtue, Arete, and the concomitant raising of the earth to the heights of the sky or heaven (the Greek ouranós means both). In the process the poet-lover is not frightened by the wild-looking, ossified faces of the saints. Those faces, after all, have in them the familiarity of the barren and rocky Greek soil.

Our gothic century has not ingratiated us with beauty. Beauty has long been out of fashion and respect, much as has been goodness, the other half of that blessed ancient couple, kalón and agathón. We have long abided with the anguished Baudelairean version of beauty, and it is certainly a solace to witness in Elytis a rejuvenation of that old pair under the cascading light of a sovereign sun, to rediscover an Eros of beauty in both matter and spirit, in both body and soul. A declared Platonist, Elytis, in his own manner, has stood faithfully by Diotima's words, yet with a slight but significant difference. If, for the somewhat dualistic Diotima, the beauty of the body was there to lead the way to the beauty of the soul, the same is true for Elytis; but the body is not left behind. The two types of beauty exist as one.

Who have been the lovers in Elytis, his erotic males and females? The dominant lover has certainly been the poet himself, representing as well all the honest lovers of his kind, the human and the elemental. His universal alter ego has been the sun, a sun that stood active on both sides of Plato's divided line. And how else could it be in a world primarily visual, one of images, of parallels embracing in a constant fruitional and fructifying exchange? As for his beloved ones, we have mentioned the "girls"—for the most part anonymous, archetypal, occasionally called Myrto (for the myrtle and its sexual connotation in one of Archilochus's fragments), or Marina for her sea association, or Helen or Eva. Other lovers, alternating with the girls, are the sea, the mother earth, the boats, the pomegranate trees, the islands (Santorini above all), Greece, a "sunray" in "her" variations of colors, "drops of pure water" turning into maids (Arete is one of them), the Virgin Mary as Panayia or Evangelistra (Our Lady of the Annunciation) or the Unfading Rose, and incarnated abstractions such as Hope, Purity, Freedom and the Platonic Ideas.

No short survey could adequately cope with the immense variety of Eros's pervasive presence in Elytis's work. As we enter his world, Eros or "Erotas" greets us from the opening page, as the initial word in the very first of his "First Poems" in the collection Orientations, the poem entitled "Of the Aegean." Here Eros is framed by the standard elements of his setting:

Love
The archipelago
And the prow of its foam
And the seagull of its dream

…..

Love
Its song
And the horizons of its voyage
And the echo of its nostalgia

…..

Love
Its ship
And the freedom from care of its etesian winds
And the jib of its hope

…..
(The Sovereign Sun)

The only sorrow that at times reaches this early, erotic world of Elytis, the only "cloud" of darkness upon it, is the absence of the beloved, as in the "Climate of Absence," with its "knot of sorrow" and the torment of memory. But even here "hope" is always present to disperse the sadness with happiness and fulfillment.

Widely known and very popular among Elytis's earliest poems has been the epigrammatic, Platonic quatrain in which the girl grows as an incarnation of Ideas: "Prior to my eyes you were the light / Prior to Eros you were Eros himself / And when the kiss took you / You became Woman." The same motif is repeated in the "Windows to the Fifth Season," wherein the poet says of the girl, "How beautiful she is! She has taken on the form of that thought which feels her when she feels it devoted to her." As for the power of the erotic embrace: "Two arms are waiting. An entire earth supports itself on their elbows. An entire poetry on their expectation." And then, as if in sympathetic magic, nature is creatively affected by the girl's beauty: "In the touch of your palms the fruit will repose that hovers now without purpose. In the translucent abutment of your body's stature, trees will find the long-lived fulfillment of their whispered isolation. In your first freedom from care herbs will multiply like hopes. Your presence will cool the dew." As for Eros himself, the creator, he too has to be given form: "And when the sky runs under the bridges of our woven hands … we shall create the form of love lacking from these visions / It is then we shall / To the ritual of difficult dreams a sure restoration." In the later works The Axion Esti and the Six and One Remorses for the Sky the dreams will be restored to "take their revenge upon reality."

Eros aspires to rise, to ascend to sky/heaven—a transcendence which finds its earliest fullest, most traditional, most Platonic-Dantesque version in the early "Orion," one of Elytis's very few night poems. Let us notice, by the way, that in contrast to most love poets Elytis is a daytime, noontime lover. In "Orion" the world comes to terms with bitterness as night falls and is liberated from noise and worry. "Our head is in the hands of God." A prayer transforms the heights, we become "the descendants of the perishable tears," we leave behind us our earthly skin, and "our foreheads neighbor the stars." A shower of light dresses every notion in the air, which brings our "hope" closer to serenity. Our souls advance to their meeting with heaven. The pure moment shines. Within us "silence is dissolved," and memory rolls into "an uninhabited chaos, when we granted ourselves to an unbelievable shore, a shore of light shades, once dreamed of through tears … We detached ourselves from our weight as we detached ourselves from sin." Our new dream "palpitates pure. An invisible hand pulls our own to where Calm becomes an innocent heaven where the soul masters itself unchangeable."

Furtively present in several of Elytis's early love poems is a sense of sin, sin which is to be purified. As if to cancel the quasi-metaphysical, traditionally spiritual ascent in "Orion," the poet in his "Anniversary" poem posits an earthly, a marine paradise within human, earthly access "Where a man may go / Who is nothing else but a man." The poet himself brought his life "To this spot that struggles / Always near the sea / Youth on rocks, breast / To breast against the wind" to grow there from childhood to manhood and to learn from the elements, where "A few years, a few waves" are a "Sensitive rowing / In the bays surrounding love." It should be noticed that here as well as in several other instances, youth and erotic growth, erotic adolescence and its earthly teleology involve a sea-journey, on which the poetlover, "a stone pledge to the watery element," sails "Further off than the islands / Lower than the waves," where "hope is resplendent with all its dolphins / The sun's gain in a human heart" and where the eyes can certainly uphold "infinity."

In its concern for the heights and depths in the erotic sea-journey of exploration and discovery, "The Clepsydras of the Unknown" prophesies a union of opposites, a constant, insistent Heraclitean/neo-Platonic expectation: "A day will come when the cork will imitate the anchor / and will steal the taste of the deep / A day will come when their double self will be united." In moments of quandary the poet painfully wonders what might be the key of that "other gate," the gate to that "other world." Is it Eros? Life is certainly measured with pulses, joy and "desperate gesticulations." Toil is needed. Youth passes, despair prevails, but there also comes the promise of sunrise to discard darkness. Merry lips kiss girls, a boat sets sail full of songs, and there are "marble mansions of naked women / Each one of them was once a drop of water / Each one now is light." Swarms of erotic visions follow: "Earth is simple and leading / Layers of kindness, one by one, like florins cut in the sun / in the lips, in the teeth, one by one, the sins / Of life are peeled into goods." Noon brings callings of purity; the poet is ready "to go out to the white gates of noon, to ring with voices the blue bells of resurrection / And all the cold islands will set their hair afire and promenade / With innocent flames and pebbles the erotic open seas." The day, then, whose "nocturnal past" is "purified" by the dawn, comes into its full glory. "Darkness owes me light," the poet exclaims, contemplating the "Blond day, reward of the sun and of eros." Twenty-one short subsequent pieces, under the title "Serenities," are "earthly fragments of happiness," poems of love, of admiration and praise of girls and nature in their mutual exchange and fruition that render Death "useless."

In contrast to the Apollonian clarity and equanimity of "Anniversary" and "The Clepsydras," the orgiastic "Dionysus" brings a high sensualism, lust, inebriation and frenzy, and teems with monsters and wild beasts. This is one of Elytis's richest pieces, one of Asiatic splendor, with its "swift schooners of desire," with the expectations of "eternity' in sight, with women that "beautify clarity," with rainbows sailing through crystal skies and sending amber boats down to earth.

In the longish "Concert of the Hyacinths" we overhear the intimate whisperings, the complaints and admonitions, of a lover to his beloved. He is her initiator into the world of Eros and its mysteries. This and other early poems by Elytis bring to mind the "carpe diem" tradition, yet without the traditional simplicity that reached its highest sophistication in John Donne. The lover's complaint here concerns his beloved's dangerous playfulness, her high airs, her irresponsibility, her remoteness and her disregard of the value and depth of his feelings and of her own power. "You leave and disappear, conquering your presence, creating a divine solitude, a turbulent and incomprehensible happiness … I did nothing else but what I found and imitated in You!" He proclaims her "the only reality," but hastens to add, "When you leave those who are assimilated within nonexistence and offer yourself again as a mortal woman, I awaken in your transformation from the beginning … Do not play any longer. Cast the ace of fire. Break open the human geography."

Sun the First came out in 1943, during the time of the Nazi Occupation of Greece, when the war experience was already past. Might we assume that the poems in this book were conceived in an earlier day? Or were they a reaction to darkness with recollected light? War does not appear in them, nor does its ugly immediate aftermath; but there is, to some extent, a maturity born of the Greek war experience, an awareness of suffering in life and of the need to transcend that suffering. Eros in these poems widens his embrace beyond the Aegean innocence to reach a world less private. The cure for evil lies in the recollection of that bright Aegean sun. As if in retrospect, the poet says:

I spoke of love, of the rose's health, the sunray
That alone finds the heart straightway
Of Greece that walks the sea with surety
Of Greece that takes me on voyages always
To naked snow-glorious mountains

I give my hand to justice
Translucent fountain, spring on the mountain summit
My sky is deep and unchanging
Whatever I love is born unceasingly
Whatever I love is always at its beginning.
(The Sovereign Sun)

Wasn't Ezra Pound, too, to exclaim in Pisa, "What thou lovest well remains"? Justice and heroic Greece herself now enter the gallery of Elytis's loved ones. The closer familiarity with suffering and pain, even death, evokes a greater effort from Eros. "Pain rounds the good cape / No voice gets lost in the bays of the sky."

In an art that had achieved a better mastery of its means through compact simplicity and meaningful selectivity, the poems in Sun the First reproduce in a more sculpturesque manner the quintessence of the Aegean world found in Orientations. The love of a girl and of nature brings the poet to enter the surrounding procreative processes more deeply. He becomes another element, a driving force, to fructify and aid the world creatively, to help it achieve its physical and supernal function, its destination and rebirth. Negatives are turned into positives ("I know the night no longer that is a night only"), and inimical elements are now viewed as contributory to that creation in which Eros is the primum mobile. Yeats's "Adam's Curse" comes to mind as we read the concluding poem of this group: "With what stone, what blood, what iron / What fire we are made." We poets, says Elytis, may be called idealists, woolgatherers or visionaries when "our arms open under an all-white Idea" which we entreat but which "never descends." However, "the desire's vision wakes up in flesh one day / And where, before, a naked wilderness shone / A City is now laughing, as beautiful as you wanted it." This initial plea for the poet-creator was eventually to develop into a passionate self-defense in Elytis's later poetry.

Closer to his erotic theme and very ingeniously conceived is the seven-poem sequel to Sun the First entitled Variations on a Sunbeam The Variations are the colors of the spectrum, slightly shuffled in their order and increased in number from six to seven—Elytis's ever-present mystical number (there are seven heavens in Greek tradition)—to serve his symbolism. The colors of the sunray, we easily realize, are the seven stages of the day from dawn to evening; but they are also the seven stages in a girl's erotic experience and growth, from the birth of Eros in her virginal girlhood to his decline at the end of her youth. The "red" is for her lips: "Your mouth speaks with four hundred roses / Beats the trees, raptures all the earth / Pours into her body the first shuddering." The "green" represents physical greenness or immaturity, "the girl who has not yet entered eros fully / But keeps in her apron an acrid grove of fruit"; the lover tells her: "My girl / I have an untouched grass in my heart / A rain of newborn trefoil / And a cascade that has not yet pounced / It lies deeper, lower, it will pounce / Like a wild beast of day upon your April." The "yellow" is that of the day as it approaches fullness, of girls with uncovered breasts that "Go and blow gibbets of fire with trumpets in the threshing floors / Burn hay, melt gold coins …" We reach the climax when the girl, inebriated by the sun, consents to be called the "Orange Girl" and is surrounded by the "seven heavens glittering" and by crystals and swallows. Her inebriation seizes the vine, the heron and the whole world, all of them whispering her secret name further and further. She is now told that "No one knows you as the kiss does." Through the "light blue" color of her eyes the poet contemplates the sky, the stars and Hope, in an ascent to the heights; and the "deep blue," being the color of infinity, indicates the depths revealed. The wind acquires deep-blue lips, the girl's glance grows endless, the blue of the sea becomes a revealing light, and the poet sees "a deep-colored bird drunk with the riddle of her embrace." The cycle closes with a Baudelairean "violet," the mournful color of the evening and of death.

One would not expect the erotic element to have a major part in the Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). The theme here is the acquaintance with, the knowledge, conquest and transcendence of death. The brilliant Aegean is for the hero a world now lost but affectionately recollected, a solace in the midst of suffering. The hero was indeed a lover once: "Love was so huge within him," and "In the arms of bitter-orange girls at night / He would soil the large garments of the stars." Yet even the hero's ascent to heaven in part XII has an erotic touch in an idealistic, solemn sense. Eros again enhances the ascent: "With a morning stride on the growing grass / He ascends alone and blazing with light … / Flower tomboys wave to him secretly / And speak to him in high voices that turn to mist on the air / Even the trees bend toward him lovingly"; and the crystal bells tolling in part XIII "tell of him who burned in life / … / who was not given time to weep / For his deep longing for the Love of life." The last part, a Gloria, with a vision of Liberty shining in the firmament, transforms the erotic aspect: "Rainbow-beaten shores fall into the water / Ships with open sails voyage on the meadows / The most innocent girls / Run naked in men's eyes / … / He is continually ascending; / Around him those passions glow that once / Were lost in the solitude of sin." The Liberty that the hero's sacrifice accomplishes brings a purification of passions, along with a resurrection and a life reborn.

It took several years of silence, meditation and study for that rebirth to find its elements and form. A poetic "genesis" was needed, however, if that life was to rise from darkness into life again, a recollection, an introspection, a sense that the restoration of things lost would be worth our effort, our love and our praise, worth our life. This restoration required a deeper awareness of all that was involved. Eros, above all else, was again the Demiurge, and The Axion Esti (1959) is, in fact, an account of Eros's doings: his shaping the world anew; his battle with hatred, enmity, misunderstanding and their darkness; his victory, justification and praise. Like the biblical God, the poetlover is the vocal shaper of the Aegean universe as a world without and a world within, physical and spiritual, a microcosm that is a macrocosm, "THIS WORLD / this small world the great!" Platonically, the poet is "still tied to heaven." He identifies himself as "the One I really was, the One of many centuries ago / the One still verdant in the midst of fire" (we get here a triple reference: to Plotinus, to the burning bush in which God appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and of course to Greece's eternal youth despite her age), and he creates in obedience to the sun, whose axis is in him and whose voice, like Fate above the poet's crib, comes "like memory become the present," like Hesiod's and Plato's Mnemosyne. The world to be created is "written" in the poet's entrails and thus takes form as a self-projection. And since creation is a battle against chaos in which one is to use "his own weapons," the poet's weapons at the outset are "Pomegranates or Zephyrs or Kisses."

Light is already present when the earth is created, first as a female, as a woman's naked body shaped in an erotic embrace: "the curves gentle / one inside the other / land masses that made me feel / the smell of earth like understanding." The constant exchange in later Elytis, the inter-fusion of the concrete with the abstract, of the esthetic with the ethical, of the physical with the mental, the deeper common identity of kalón and agathón, presents us with a moment of joyous exultation as the poet-creator shapes and populates the earth:

Eros with its purity in an Eden.

The sea is created next and is likewise a female, the equivalent of purity, "innocent and tremulous like a vineyard / deep and unscarred like the sky's other face, / A drop of soul amidst the clay." And in the midst of the sea he plants the islands, "little worlds in [his] image and likeness." The names of the plants and herbs he creates next are " Secret syllables through which I strove to utter my identity." The sun tells him at this point: "Good, … you know how to read / and you'll come to learn a great deal / if you study the Insignificant in depth," echoing Blake's "To see a World in a Grain of Sand."

Next the girls are created, shaped in the image of "red jugs lined up on the quay / … / Maidens beautiful and naked and smooth like pebbles / with that touch of black in the delta of the thighs / … / some upright sounding the Conch / others spelling out in chalk / words strange and enigmatic: / ROES, ESA, ARIMNA / NUS, MIROLTAMITY, YELTIS," anagrams of Eros, Sea, Marina, Sun, Immortality and Elytis—in short, no less than the essentials of the poet's erotic-spiritual paradise.

Wilderness, too, will have to be encountered, conquered, made fertile and thereby transcended: "But first you will see the wilderness and give it your own meaning … / The wilderness will precede your heart / and then again the wilderness will follow it." In the process, positives need to be drawn out of negatives: "night after night / I sought whiteness to the utmost intensity / of blackness, hope to the point of tears / joy to the outer limit of despair." Through this ascetic exercise purity is reached, purity that is "the same on the slopes as in your entrails"; and as the sun heats mint, lavender, verbena, his "light threads of silver / falling from the heights" become the "cool hair of a girl I saw and wanted / Tangible woman / 'Purity,' he said, 'is she' / and full of yearning I caressed the body / kisses teeth to teeth; then one inside the other." Eros with Purity, and in that embrace Good and Evil meet at a point reminiscent of Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Finally, necessity, too, the "other element," the "monstrous Duty" with its "four voids," the concern for the other people, the experience with the "black men," the enemies, would have to be confronted, accepted, understood and transcended by the Sun of Justice that becomes human, becomes the poet himself. "Necessity" is that which takes us into the second section of The Axion Esti, "The Passion"—the poet's and the world's war experience which turned the poet into a fighter and eventually a missionary of his world and message. In darkness and suffering, the soul, taken unawares, is temporarily disoriented, until it discovers the redeeming value of its experience. In his loneliness the poet sings of himself as a single swallow still unable to bring in the difficult spring. There is fighting on the mountains and fighting at sea, where, miraculously, however, "Small craft rounding the cape / suddenly turn over and vanish, / emerge again among the clouds / on the other side of the deep." In this small craft's re-emergence is symbolized the spirit of an entire people, the brave fighters conquering death with death, and of the poet's own spirit in a pattern of death and resurrection so prominent in Elytis. At the center of it all, the poet wonders where he can find his "soul, the four-leaf tear" and appeals to the "Intelligible sun of Justice" (recalling Plato's Republic?) not to forget his country.

Several parts of this section of The Axion Esti turn into a passionate self-defense by the poet against the charges of the "young Alexandrians":

Possessed of a world view diametrically opposed to the modern existential anguish, Elytis has been attacked by those who have failed to see the depth below his surface, to realize his tragic awareness and the world-redeeming qualities of his Eros and his Purity. As Plato himself believed, one does not cure evil with evil, nor sorrow with sorrow. The noblest remedy is Eros, Love. Recollecting his youth, the poet exclaims:

He laments the loss of that youth, and his voice grows softer and nostalgic in what sounds like a love complaint to God, he tells Him how to His creation he brought "lasting Rose," that quintessence of virginal girlhood and femininity as well, which has always been more human, more intimate and accessible to the Greek Orthodox Christian than the awesome and remote Holy Trinity. Then, in what sounds like a love complaint to God, he tells Him how to His creation he brought his own, as a gift to a gift, but that God's creation, with the element of evil contained in it, destroyed the poet's creation, his pure world of dream.

God's response is a restoration: "You blew and my entrails yearned, / one by one the birds came back to me!" The recovery ushers in a new joy with which the earthliness of the Aegean world rises now to a quasi-metaphysical level, from mortality to deification, where the poet assumes an almost sacred mission to serve what is new, to worship the innocent, the naked, the virginal creatures. His chastity will have the "purity of the instinct" of reproduction, ready to pass the test of sin, which in turn will be purified. There the "eleventh Commandment" will emerge from his eyes: "Either this world or none other shall be."

The prose "Prophetic" that follows foretells of the time when "Many years after Sin—which they called Virtue in the churches and gave it their blessing—and after the storm—which will be given birth by the mind of man—will have swept relics of old stars and cobwebbed corners of the heavens, then Creation … shall shudder." Hades shall be shaken by the sun, a sign that "the time has come for dreams to take their revenge." This ascent, this glory, must first be preceded by a descent into the abyss of darkness. The "way up" will follow the "way down." First, "beauty will be surrendered to the flies of the Marketplace." The men of power will be dethroned, and against all will sail forth "the gunboats of Love." And in the superb and inspired conclusion, the poet foresees the coming of new creators to a new Eden.

And then the last of men will say his first word: that the grass shall grow tall and that woman shall rise at his side like a sun's ray. And again he will worship the woman and lay her upon the grass, as was ordained. And dreams will take their revenge, and they will sow generations forever and ever.

The "Meadows of Bliss" will eventually appear, emerging from the breast of the poet himself, who will then advance into "a far and sinless country," accompanied by airy creatures with trees walking by his side, a world of transcendence where, like Christ returning to Jerusalem, he will be welcomed with "Hosanna to the coming one!" and proclaimed "holy, holy / He, the conqueror of Hades and the savior of Eros," for

The third and final section of The Axion Esti is its triumphant "Gloria," a hymn to all the elements that compose the new Paradise, the things worthy of praise, all set in a piece of exquisite beauty and harmony of imagery, music and symbolic devices. We would naturally again expect the position and role of Eros to be central in this creation of an ideal-yet-earthly world out of the insignificant yet beautiful things in nature and in man, this union of the physical with the spiritual, of the earthly with the universal. This hymn to an earthly heaven is interspersed with salutations to the Girl, the Female and femininity, echoing the Orthodox Church's "Salutations" to the Virgin in the Mass of "The Akathist Hymn": "Hail Girl Burning and hail Girl Verdant / Hail Girl Unrepenting, with the prow's sword / … / Hail Ο Wild One of the depth's paradise / Hail Ο Holy One of the islands' wilderness." particularly expressive is the passage delineating the archetypal variety of femininity:

Light is praised, human creation, the power of the sun, the islands, the sea, the winds, the house on the shore, sun's inebriation, noon, sleep, love, the girls, marriage, family, the living and the dead—in short, all things of the "now," which are also the things "forever."

Contemporary with, and in a sense parenthetical to The Axion Esti, the Six and One Remorses for the Sky (1960) was to contrast the longer poem's declarative, solemn, triumphant, often lyrical voice with some few private meditations and whisperings, yet within the same climate. The poet's remorses are for a sky, the transcendent summit of his Eros, which had lost its earlier innocence through the poet's and the world's war and postwar experience. These poems are inner questionings and efforts to pass from a common and personal sense of guilt to a new and liberated awareness, to draw from experience a new knowledge and hope and so help a new sky—now more emphatically an inner one—attain a new purity on a higher and more conscious spiritual level.

In "Beauty and the Illiterate" the poet comes to learn of a feminine beauty of a different kind: the deeper beauty of the suffering soul, a beauty beyond matter, beyond even life itself, the beauty born out of love's tears. The "Autopsy" reveals in the poet's corpse elements and substances testifying to his erotic life and foretelling and promising the fertility of the land: "We shall have early fruit this year." Among the things springing from "The Sleep of the Valiant," who sacrificed their lives to the noble cause of life, is "One drop of clear water, hanging courageously over the abyss, they named Arete, and gave her a lean, boyish body." "The Other Noah" is the poet himself considering what is to be saved in the Ark of his asceticism "for lust to begin its holy career." Among the things found and saved are "bread, longing, love …" As in The Axion Esti, an ascent is to follow a downfall, when "the holy day of sensual pleasure may emit its fragrance, / That the Lady, Bearer of Verdure, may ascend naked the stream of Time" accompanied by "The trills of Paradise." The "Seven Days for Eternity" are seven short lyrical pieces, considerably erotic and transfigurative, which serve as steps leading again toward a resurrection and paradisiacal blessedness.

Praise of his more recent Monogram (1971) pertains primarily to its accomplishment as an art form, the ingenuity of its prosody and its intricate "mathematical" structure. Its thematic content and imagery—where the lonely "I" of the lover addresses softly, affectionately, nostalgically, the ghostly "You" of a lost and recollected beloved now summoned back to enter a paradise to be born within—mark, to some extent, a return to the poet's earlier, idyllic world, enhanced by a craft that has perfectly mastered the simplicity of depth. In its twilight world, the word agape (not in the Western theological sense of the term) replaces the word eros, and the lover's speech has a hallucinatory quality in addressing a Beatrice-like figure raised to the realm of Ideas. Natural, earthly beauty is still present and is viewed now in the more ethereal light of the beyond.

The pieces in The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty (1971) might be called fragments of the new paradise. They are generally lighter, less lonely and less nostalgic in mood than those in The Monogram. The sky of Palm Sunday brings a young girl who "paused without reason leaving her blouse unbuttoned." In "The Girl the North Wind Brought" the poet is seeking a little chapel as a respite from the wilderness, when the girl appears in a shower of signs and oracles, again Beatrice-like, a recollection "as beautiful as can be," an apparition longed for but elusive and soon to disappear. "Three Times the Truth" presents the poet's search for the "Something else [that] must be found," leading first to the discovery that inner man is "Nobody Nobody!" and soon devolving into a version of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father who art in heaven I who have loved I who have kept my girl like a vow who could even catch the sun by its wings like a butterfly Our Father I lived on nothing.

The poet then concludes by stressing again the simplicity of his Paradise: "Until at last I felt and let them call me crazy that out of nothing is born our Paradise."

In his Open Book (1974) speaking at length about the significance and value of dreams for poetry—a value that surrealism was to take ample advantage of—Elytis recounts some of his own revelatory dreams, and we suspect that some of the poems in The Light Tree are essentially dream-poems in nature. In "On the Republic" (another name for his Paradise), for example, the poet builds a Temple out of "four stones and a little sea-water" and sits there waiting. As noon approaches, much as in Mallarmé's "L'après-midi d'un faune," he falls asleep and is visited by a dream (a wet dream) that mixes the four horses of the Apocalypse with a bearded man approaching sexual intercourse with a woman. The dream transforms the world as the poet awakens. In another poem he beckons a thirteen-year-old "Little Green Sea" (the Ionian Sea of his childhood), wanting to sleep "secretly" with her and find in her embrace "Broken stones: the words of God / Broken stones: fragments from Herakleitos." As for "The Light Tree" poem, that tree (we suspect, a sunray), grown in his backyard, bursts suddenly into blossom through the moisture of his spit, bringing the answer of "truth" to all of his childhood questionings with regard to the meaning of the world and the end of happiness. Evil times have intervened, he finds his beloved island now deserted, and he wonders what has happened to that tree "Now when no one mourns the nightingales and all write poems."

In attempting to detect Eros's steps through a bird's-eye view in the expanse of Elytis's verse, we have certainly missed a great deal. We have seen numerous sights shining bright and different, yet springing from the same ground, illumined and nurtured by the same core of light. They are enlivened by a highly active Eros, who has stood at the heart of Elytis's verse from its very beginning. Other themes and forces have been related to that one theme and force, of which they become extensions in the widening of its meaning and creative functions. In terms of origins, Elytis's Eros was already present in the Hesiodic Theogony as "that fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them," but with one significant exception: rather than overcoming, this new Eros has continued composing and creating. Also, according to Sappho (to whom our poet owes much), Eros was the child of Uranus, the Sky; hence his constant longing to rise, with earth, to his father's realm. Elytis's Platonism further expanded the concept and functions of Eros. For Plato's Eros—a daimon rather than a god, by the way—the beauty of the body was to serve as tinder, as bait for the higher aspiration, the beauty of the soul. In Elytis, as we have already remarked, there is a longing for a comparable ascent, a transcendence of matter into spirituality; but for him the two worlds are far from being mutually exclusive. They are together and inseparate, the one an extension of the other and its spiritual completion. In Plato, there stood behind Eros, leading the soul downward into the depths, the spirit of memory, Mnemosyne, the recollection of an ancient, prenatal happiness in the company of the gods, a eudaimonia we lost when we entered time. The pain of that loss was to spur us toward the recovery of that world of eternal purity. Elytis, too, is full of recollection of a perfect world, not prenatal but earthly, his Aegean, the loss of which causes him his utmost pain; and the effort of his verse is to recover this world imaginatively and to transcend it. Seen in this light, his poetry reflects three gradual stages, the first being that of an innocent, erotic youth in the arms of an Aegean blessedness. The next stage brings the loss of that world and its purity, the loss of youth, the ugly experience of war and the taste of death, where that early world is passionately recollected as a solace. The third stage draws from this experience the elements not only for the recovery of that lost world, but its spiritual justification and transcendence as well. The value of suffering is discovered, together with the heroic and the tragic elements in life. Not only the heavenly heights, but the depths, too, are reached, and all this for the building of a new paradise, as intuitive as the early one, yet also highly conscious. Opposites are reconciled and unified in the light of recollection of that splendid old summer, the realm of the Sun, of Beauty and of Eros, where now Purity and a sun-like Justice are triumphant. This is his paradise within.

Orientations and Sun the First expressed the first stage. Elytis may later have discredited that early poetry of his from an artistic viewpoint, but we beg to disagree with him to some extent. Some of his loveliest and most cherished poems are in those early collections. The solid foundations of his entire creation are already present. The Heroic and Elegiac Song brought in the second stage, that of loneliness, pain and estrangement, with its simultaneous effort to transcend that state through understanding and recollection. The years of silence that followed were also years of meditation and study, as well as years of worldly experience, during which Elytis's intuitive familiarity with his Greekness evolved into a deeper, more intellectual awareness of its ancient, Byzantine and modern tradition and wealth—elements now thoroughly assimilated by his lyrical genius and his prevalent view of life. Time and its tragicality entered his world, and with them came maturity. His symbols gained in breadth and scope. The product was The Axion Esti, the core of his work, which in its three parts encompasses all three stages: a "Genesis" to rebuild the universality of the Aegean world, "The Passion" to come to terms with time and experience and set the foundations for a resurrection, and the concluding "Gloria," singing the praise of the resulting new world of Purity and Love, which the Six and One Remorses then further refine. As for Elytis's more recent books, they have all centered more or less on his concern for the building of this new inner paradise. Eros had built that first world, in all its innocence, but then vanished for a time in the archetypal, heroic descent into darkness, the archetypal Nekyia. But he remained active even there—in the dark where gold shines, to borrow from Pound—regathering his cosmogonic resources for a new and more powerful rise, a rise full of wisdom.