The poem
Half past twelve. Time has gone by quickly since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp and sat down here. I've been sitting without reading, without speaking. Completely alone in the house, whom could I talk to?
Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp the shade of my young body has come to haunt me, to remind me of shut scented rooms, of past sensual pleasure - what daring pleasure. And it's also brought back to me streets now unrecognizable, bustling night clubs now closed, theatres and cafes no longer here.
The shade of my young body also brought back the things that make us sad: family grief, separations, the feelings of my own people, feelings of the dead so little acknowledged.
Half past twelve. How the time has gone by. Half past twelve. How the years have gone by.
E M Forster said that Cavafy was "a man in a straw hat standing at a slight angle to the universe". His brilliance lay in the quite personal use he made of his classicism, turning the ancients into his familiars, like someone he once met in the streets of Alexandria. One of his poems, "And he lounged and lay on their beds" makes his homosex explicit by revealing what pride he clearly took from it. It is, after all,…
Read the whole commentE M Forster said that Cavafy was "a man in a straw hat standing at a slight angle to the universe". His brilliance lay in the quite personal use he made of his classicism, turning the ancients into his familiars, like someone he once met in the streets of Alexandria. One of his poems, "And he lounged and lay on their beds" makes his homosex explicit by revealing what pride he clearly took from it. It is, after all, an ancient practice, made furtive and unspeakable today. I sometimes balk at some of his imagery, since, as Spinoza claimed, "sex is the feeling of pleasure accompanied by our knowledge of its cause." Knowing the cause of Cavafy's pleasure makes me uncomfortable at times. But his maginificent evocation of a sensual experience now lost is timeless and universal.