For Friday, read the following poems from Cafavy's Collected Poems:
From Poems 1910:
* Waiting for the Barbarians (if you haven't already)
From Poems 1905-1915:
* The City
* The God Forsakes Anthony
* Monotony
* Ithaca
* As Best You Can
* Trojans
* Philhellene
* Sculptor of Tyana
* In Church
* Painted
* Come Back
* Far Away
(Feel free to read all of them, but I particularly want to discuss these poems in class)
* As you read, consider how Cafavy often takes a literal narrative--barbarians arriving at the gates, a sculptor making a bust, the Trojans being invaded--and allows it to become allegorical of larger situations. How do the poems do this? What clues or words/utterances in the poem signal this change from specific to universal?
* Also, many of Cafavy's poems are Dramatic Monologues, which is a poetic form that he inherited from the great English poet, Robert Browning (My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, etc.). In these poems, we get a monologue as it from a play, where a speaker (usually historical) is talking to a second person, whose words are not recorded. The monologue is supposed to create a character and a psychological moment as much as a poetic thought. How can a one-sided conversation be a poem (esp. one like Philhellene and The Sculptor of Tyana)? How literally should we read such conversations--or is the speaker just a frame or an illusion that opens a larger speaker?
* If you read the Introduction, you'll learn that Cafavy was actually from Alexandria (in Egypt) and never lived in Greece at all. However, his family was Greek, so he naturally gravitated toward Greek rather than Arabic as a poet. What might it mean to write Greek poetry when you are, technically, not Greek and don't live there (and indeed, he only visited a few times)? How does he convey his mixed feelings for his exiled land and culture in his poetry?
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