The World Beyond Greece
Greece seems to encompass the physical world with which Palamas has come in contact. He does not seem to have travelled beyond its borders, and even within them, he has moved little about. With him scenery must grow with age before it speaks to his heart. Fleeting impressions are of little value, and the appearance of things without the forces of tradition and experience behind it does not attract him:
Others, who wander far in distant lands may seek
On Alpine Mountains high the magic Edelweis;
I am an Element Immovable; each year,
April delights me in my garden, and the May
In my own village.
O lakes and fiords, O palaces of France and shrines
And harbors, Northern Lights and tropic flowers and forests,
O wonders of art, and beauties of the world unthought,—
A little Island here I love that always lies before me.
We must not think, however, that the spirit of Palamas rests within the narrow confines of his native land. On the contrary, it knows no chains and travels freely about the earth. He is a faithful servant of "Melete," the Muse of contemplative study, a service which is very seldom liked by Modern Greeks. In his preface to his collection of critical essays entitled Grammata he rebukes his fellow countrymen for this: "On an old attic vase," he says, "stand the three original Muses, the ones that were first worshipped, even before the Nine, who are now world-known: Mneme, Melete, Aoide—Memory, Study, Song. With the first and last, we have cultivated our acquaintance; and never must we show any contempt for the fruit of our love for them. Only with the middle one, we are not on good terms. She seems to be somewhat inaccessible, and she does not fill our eyes enough to attract us. We have always looked, and now still we look, for what is easiest or handiest. Is that, I wonder, a fault of our race or of our age? And is the French philosopher Fouillée somewhat right when in his book on the Psychology of Races he counts among our defects our aversion to great and above all endless labors?" That Palamas is not subject to this fault, one has only to glance at his works to be convinced. There is hardly an important force in the world's thought and expression whether past or present, to which Palamas is a stranger. The literatures of Europe, America, or Asia are an open book for him. The pulses of the world's artists, the intellectual battles of the philosophers, the fears and hopes of the social unrest, the religious emancipation of our day, the far reaching conflict of individual and state, in short, all events of importance in the social, political, spiritual, literary, and artistic life are familiar sources of inspiration for him. With all, he shows the lofty spirit of a worshipper of greatness and depth wherever he finds them. Tolstoi or Aeschylus, Goethe or Dante, Ibsen or Poe, Swinburne or Walt Whitman, Leopardi or Rabelais, Hugo or Carlyle, Serbian Folk Lore or the Bible, Hindu legends or Italian songs, Antiquity or Middle Ages, Renaissance or Modernity, any nation or any lore are objects worthy of study and stores of wisdom for him. Indeed, very few living poets could be compared with him in scholarship and learning.
Nor does he lift his voice only for individual or national throbbings. He sings of the great and noble whenever he sees it. One of his best lyric creations is a song of praise to the valor of the champions of Transvaal's freedom, his "Hymn to the Valiant," the first of the collection entitled "From the Hymns and Wraths," a paean that has been most highly lauded by Professor D.C. Hesseling of the University of Leyden (Nederlandsche Spectator, March, 1901). Here is a fragment of it, the words which the Muse addresses to the poet:
... Awake! Thou art not maker of statues!
Awake! For songs thou singest!
And song is not for ever
The heart's lament
To fading leaves of autumn,
Nor the secret speech thou speakest,
A Soul of Dream, to the shadows of Night.For suddenly there is a clash and groaning!
The joy of birds sea-beaten,
In storms of Elements
And storms of Nations!
Song is, too,
The Marathonian Triumpher!
Over the ashes of Sodoma,
It is blown by the mouth of wrath!Something great and something beautiful,
Something from far away,
Travelling Glory brings thee
On her sky-wandering pinions.Glory has come! On her wings and on her feet,
Signs of her wanderings are shown,
Dust gold-loaded and distant;
And she brings aloes blossoming, first-seen,
From the land that feeds the Kaffir's flocks.In your aged summers,
A new-born spring has spread!
From North to South,
The Atlantic Dragon groans a groan first-heard;
To the African lakes and forests,
His groan has spread and echoed;
From the Red Sea, a Lamia's palace,
To the foam-shaped breast of the White Sea,
A Nereid's realm.Thinly the plants were growing
On the bosom of the ancient Motherland;
Winds carried away the seed
And brought it to the Libyan fields
And scattered it into deep ravines
And on the lofty mountain lawns.A new blood filled the herbs,
And even the strong-stemmed plants
Waxed stronger.
Men war-glad are risen!
And the waterfalls roar
In the mountain's heart;
Men war-glad are risen
Like diamonds rare to behold
That the earth begets!You know them, heights, winds, horizons,
High tides and murmurings of restless waters,
Golden fountains, that shall become
Their crowns!
And you, O gold-built mountain passes,
Castles fit for them, you know them;
Their fame, thou heraldest with pride
From thy verdant distant country
To Europe Imperial,
O Africa, O slave unknown!And first of all thou knowest,
O heartless tamer of continents and races,
Rider of Ocean's Bucephaluses,
Thou knowest the worth of the few,
Who dare live free ...
Within the limits of a general introduction it would be difficult to enter every nook and corner of the poet's world. We must even pass over some of the most potent influences of his life. The national dreams of the Modern Greeks have a splendid dwelling in the thought of Palamas, who follows with restlessness his people's woes and exults in their joys. A group of poems dedicated to the "Land that Rose in Arms" and published in the last volume of the poet's work, the Town and Wilderness, form his noblest patriotic expression. The present world-conflict has naturally stirred him to new compositions, of which his "Europe" is preëminently noteworthy as illustrating faithfully the various aspects of the poet's genius. This poem appeared first in the Noumas, an Athenian periodical, and was then published in the last volume of the poet's works, the Altars.[2]
Europe
I. THE WAR
Deer-like the East pants terror-struck! The West,
A flame ablaze that leaps amid the skies!
Nations are wolves! and Hatreds are afoot,
Whetting their bayonets!With force gigantic, lo, the bursting forth
Of the barbarian sweeps on, age-wrought;
Oceans are cleft and swallow Gorgon-ships,
Castles of might afloat!What sorcerers, in Earth's deep bosom buried,
Beat into shape the metal? For what kings
Slave they? What crowns forge they? The tower-ships,
The ports, the oceans quake!Lovingly the dream born of dream flies high
Air wandering amid the eagles; yet
O victory! Lord of the azure, man
Spreads horror even there.Methinks the Niebelungen of the Night
Startle sun's radiance ... And ye, the Rhine's
Water-born Nymphs, are lashed and swept away
By monstrous hurricanes.Siegfried, the hero of the golden hair,
Makes men and elements before him kneel.
War is the arbiter of rising worlds;
And Violence, arbitress.Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Alemanni, Hungars!
Europe, a viper! And the armies, dragons!
Here, Uhlans are destroyers pitiless;
And there, the Cossacks' bands!From endless sweeps of steppes, the Slav blows forth
An endless squall, the havoc's ruthless vow!
Liberty is the phantom; and the slave,
The stern reality.Helvetians, Scandinavians, Latins, Russians,
The martyr Pole, heroic Flanders' land,
All, small and great, forward to battle rush
With one man's violence!Beating thy breast, thou clingest to thy throne,
Storm-wrapped, O worshipper of gods that fade,
Hypatia thou, the Frenchman's ruling queen,
Blood-bred Democracy!The Vosgic towers tremble! And God's wrath,
Valkyrie, the awful Nymph, wind-ridden sweeps,
A rider pitiless that threatens thee,
O Paris noble-born!Our age's honored prophet, Tamerlan!
A shadow's dream, Messiah of sweet Peace!
Enthroned in judgment stands America.
While from far Asia's depths,The Indian hermits and gold-gatherers
With yellow Mongols are afoot! With them,
The sons of Oceania, Kerman,
And Africa; Semites,War-glad Turanians and Aryans,
Lands that the Adriatic kisses, Rumans,
Our brother Serb, a wall!—Let Austria's
Cataract burst and roar!Vosges and Carpathians and Balkans quake!
Ridges and mountains tremble! The oceans roar!
Five Continents' passionate wraths and hatreds
Revel in festival!But lo, the Briton with sea-battling sceptre
That binds the restless waves to his command—
What Caesars' fetters forges he anew
Upon the island rock?And there the Turk, who holds thee with dog's teeth
And makes of thee a valley of sad tears,
O paradisial land of old Ionia;
And here, our Mother Greece,Dream-weaver of unending laurel-wreaths
Beside her Cretan helmsman and her king!
Wax-pale, the world stands listening and holds
Its breath, benumbed with fright!II. THE THINKER
But lo, the thinker, whatever is his soul,
Whatever race has given him his blood,
Watches from his unruffled haunts calm-wrapped
And he stirs not.With pity's quivering and terror's chill,
In tears and ruins, he plucks a fruitful joy
From the great Drama, watching thoughtfully
The hidden law.And lo, the thinker, whatever is his soul,
Whatever race has given him his blood,
Abides in his unruffled haunts calm-wrapped
And meditates:Old age? No! Nor the youth of a new life.
All is the same, Europe and Law, the shark!
And never changes—hear ye not?—the march
Of history.A splinter in the powerful's hands, O powerless,
Yet sometimes—comfort thee—his mate and friend!
The powerful's blind hand even thou, O Science,
Often shalt be.Is War the Father of all things? And is
The lava messenger of lusty growth?
How can the creature grow from monster seed?
Who knows? Pass on!Even if some great dream be born of flesh
And the wroth tempest fling a new world forth,
Even if over the tumult Europe stand
United, one;And if the state of a new people rise
Founded upon the ruins of the world,
Still always thou wilt burn, O Fury's torch,
Amid the darkness.Even if thou wilt come to states in ruins
And empty thrones, O power of juster race,
Always the tender and the harsh shall be;
Shepherd and flocks!Unless, O man, something is destined thee
That thou, O History, foretellest not:
An evolution unbelievable
To gazing worlds.III. THE POET
The poet: Miracle-working lo, the seed
Of blessed dreams, sown in his heart, takes roots;
He is like mind entranced in ecstasy,
Born upon wings!Under his wings, all things are images
Of creatures beautiful for him to sing,
Whether they are roses April-born
Or warring legions!And neither the war's roaring gun nor yet
The river of red blood swift-flowing on
Can make the flower fade that fills my breast
With fragrances!I am the faithful friend of song; therefore,
I tremble not like child before a blackman;
Midst blood and flames and lashings horrible,
I bring thee, Love!Thy footprints mark a shining trail of lights
New-risen, guiding with their gleams my steps;
The restless gambol of thy fire, Dawn's smile
Upon my night.Thine eyes, O Fountainhead of Beauty's stream,
Mirror within them all things beautiful:
And lo, the eagles of the Czars, on wings
Sky-roaming, sail.The war, when thine eyes look on it, becomes
Under the magic of thy glance pure wine
Of holiness. The German is the wonder
Of deed and thought;Where Tolstoi lived, all things are justly blessed;
Where Goethe dwelt all things are light and wisdom;
And yet my heart's pure love flows now for thee,
For thee, O France!Though first I sucked my god-sprung mother's milk,
Still thou wert later manna unto me,
Desert-born, joy of mine and guide and teacher,
My second mother.On thy world-trodden earth, I have not stood;
Nor didst thou bathe me, Seine, in thy cold waters;
Yet is thy vision light unto my song,
O second mother!O Celtic oak-trees and Galatian-born
White lilies in lyric Paris blossoming,
With Hugo and with thee, O Lamartine,
Revels and wings!Dante and Nietzsche, Ibsen, Shakespeare, all,
Poured wine for me with their thrice-holy hands
Into thy gleaming cup of gold and bade
Me rise on high.A child: And thou didst flash before me first,
Tearing the maps of dazzled Europe's lands
With the world's Mirabeaus and with the world's
Napoleons.Thou art not for the gnawing worm of graves.
Thy gods still live with thee, Hypatia!
Glory and Victory may dwell with thee,
Democracy!
From the number of the life influences which we have scantily traced in Palamas' work we may conclude that he is a true representative of the great world and of the age in which he lives. Loving and true to his immediate surroundings, he does not localize himself in them, nor does he shut his thought within his personal feelings and experiences, but he travels far and wide with the thought and action of the universal man and fills his life with the life of his age.
It is exactly this universalism that makes The Twelve Words of the Gypsy his best expression and at the same time the most difficult to understand thoroughly. The poem is reflective both of the growth of the poet himself and of the development of the human spirit throughout the ages with the history and land of Hellas as its natural background. Consequently, its message is both subjective and objective. Although differently treated, the theme is the same as that of the "Ascrean" which appears in the latter part of Life Immovable and which may be considered as a prelude to The Twelve Words of the Gypsy. There is a flood of feeling and a cosmic imagery throughout, but they only form the gorgeous palace within which Thought dwells in full magnificence and mystic dimness. "As the thread of my song," says the poet in his preface, "unrolled itself, I saw that my heart was full of mind, that its pulses were of thought, that my feeling had something musical and difficult to measure, and that I accepted the rapture of contemplation just as a lad accepts his sweetheart's kiss. And then I saw that I am the poet, surely a poet among many—a mere soldier of the verse, but always the poet who desires to close within his verse the longings and questions of the universal man and the cares and fanaticism of the citizen. I may not be a worthy citizen. But it cannot be that I am the poet of myself alone; I am the poet of my age and of my race; and what I hold within me cannot be divided from the world without."