Among Constantine Cavafy’s latest compositions, Days of 1908 (Mεpες τoυ 1908) is one of a series of poems that name specific years in their titles and that, as such, may be called “memory poems.” The tone is suggestively autobiographical, as if the vision of this poem’s sublime youth is also part of the poet’s own store of erotic memories.

Memories are the matrix for a number of Cavafy’s love poems, many of which are unabashedly and openly homoerotic. Young men—lurking anonymously in the streets of the modern metropolis (a city often taken for Alexandria, Cavafy’s own birthplace and lifelong homing spot)—populate the public sphere of streets, cafés, theater, and cheap hotels in search of erotic gratification. These young men are also either socially displaced, as in Days of 1908 (which features a working-class but “reasonably educated young man, twenty-five years old”), or entirely marginalized, as in Days of 1896.

Cavafy’s fascination with youthful male beauty is proverbial, and here, as in other poems, it initially peeps, furtively and restrained, through the seams of the poem until it sheds all veils in celebratory exhibitionism. What begins as a third-person, objective narration of a young man’s toils to make ends meet by gambling and borrowing—because he “was out of work that year”—gradually slips (in the second stanza) into an indirect expression of the character’s own regard for his youth and education:

“He was offered a job at three pounds a month
in a small stationary store,
but he turned it down without the slightest hesitation.
It wasn’t suitable. It wasn’t the right pay for him.”

In the third stanza we are invited to sympathize with the young man’s gambling exploits, as his presentation gradually acquires ominous undertones of waste and decay, subjects that are elsewhere explicitly associated with young men of his sort. Here decay is hinted at by way of metonymy; the young man’s only suit, “a very faded cinnamon-brown,” is in a wretched state.

Although the young man of Days of 1908 is not explicitly in pursuit of erotic encounters, as others are, the wasting effects of his nightly pursuits are ameliorated by the cathartic effect of the concluding stanza. Its apostrophic turn (“O Summer days . . .”) to summer as an omniscient voyeur brings into play the Sun’s gaze upon the young man’s total nakedness “at the baths and on the beach” and invokes an awareness of the young man’s splendid physical beauty. That recollected moment suffuses the poem with a sense of gleaming redemption.

Epiphanic in tone, the concluding stanza is a veiled affirmation of art’s contention to redeem and transcend both time and place by converting memories into works of art and into celebrations of the poetic promise of immortality, just as the young man—“impeccably handsome, a miracle”—is hoisted out of the anguish of his dissolute nightlife into the sublimity of the poem’s summertime light.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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