my memories, my visions of voluptuousness.
It is the world within. And since the poet cannot hope to escape from this world, he should at all costs arrange and rule it sensibly. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” sang the Elizabethan, and so is Cavafy’s; but his is a real, not a conventional, kingdom, in which there may be mutinies and war. In “The City” he sketches the tragedy of one who misgoverned, and who hopes to leave the chaos behind him and to “build another city, better than this.” Useless!
The city shall ever follow you.
In these same streets you shall wander,
and in the same purlieux you shall roam,
and in the same house you shall grow grey....
There is no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.
You have so shattered your life here, in this small corner,
that in all the world you have ruined it.
And in “Ithaca” he sketches another and a nobler tragedy—that of a man who seeks loftily, and finds at the end that the goal has not been worth the effort. Such a man should not lament. He has not failed really.