he was utterly alone after 1923 when a brother died.

These are the formal biographical facts. His poetry tells us far more. The personal poems are inspired by his own memories, just as his poetry on historic themes derives from Hellenistic literature. "The years of my youth, my youth," he tells us, "my life of pleasure-how clearly I see the meaning of them now." Well he might, for yesterdays remembered are the stuff of all his personal verse as they were that of Proust's prose.

"Under the dissolute living of my youth

Were being formed the intentions of my poetry.”

A wall seals him off from today. It is always a long-spent passion that he is capturing in his mind and fixing in verse. He muses:

"Of course it is like him, this little

Drawing of him in pencil.

"Quickly done, on the deck of the ship;

An enchanting afternoon.

The lonian ocean all around us.

"It is like him.

But I remember him as better looking,

He was sensitive to the point of morbidness,

And that illuminated his expression.

Better looking he appears to me

Now that my mind recalls him, out of Time.

"Out of Time. All these things are very oldThe sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon."

And he knows too, in the anguish of his solitary musing, that memory alone preserves what time has all but obliterated. In one poem he asks:

"For a month we loved each other.

Then he went away, I think to Smyrna,

To work there; we never saw each other again.

"The grey eyes -if he liveshave lost their beauty; The beautiful face will have been spoiled.

"O Memory, preserve them as they were.

And, Memory, all you can of this love of mine Whatever you can bring back to me tonight.

Examples of this strange refusal of the present can be multiplied many times. In almost every single poem of Cavafy appears this obsession with continual evocation of past times, past experiences, past loves. In all of Cavafy there is not a single attempt to capture a moment in present time for its own sake, and rarely even for the sake of its relation to the past.

Cavafy is not for those who never look back, though others will find this poet, whose cultural and geographic environment seems so distant, a revelation. In his quiet, sad understatements there is a spirit that transcends time and race and erotic temperament. Cavafy will not inspire us to move mountains, for cavafy's historical imagination is peopled with anti-heroes whose theatrical flourishes merely hide their emptiness within. But so much of life is like that! Cavafy's personal verse is, in the final anaylsis, another echo of "vanitas vanitarum," but life, again, is all too often just that. Yet the journey through life is priceless for its own sake, and the final reward is merely to have lived it. This is the sum of Cavafy's message, if it can be called that. As such, it is perhaps worth pondering over as each of us slowly travels toward his Ithaka.

"''What a distillation can be found from herbs

Of enchantment,' said a certain sensualist, 'What distillation according to the prescriptions Of ancient Grecosyrian sorcerers made

Which for a single day (if for no more

Its power suffices), or even for a little while

My three and twenty years should bring me back Again; my friend at two and twenty years

Should bring me back again his beauty, his love.

"'What distillation can be found by the prescriptions

Of ancient Greco syrian sorcerers made

Which, in accordance with that turning-back, Our little room should also bring again?""'

In another poem, he himself answers his tormented question by a pathetic appeal:

"Looking at an opal a half grey opal

I remembered two beautiful grey eyes

I had seen it must have been twenty years before. ...

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