Analysis of George Seferis’s Engomi

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 17, 2025

First published in the slim volume …Cyprus, Where It Was Ordained for Me…, Engomi is considered one of George Seferis’s most characteristic poems. It is a free-verse ode in five uneven-length stanzas, the last one of which contains two lines deeply indented to suggest sharp mood breaks that coincide with shifts in spirit, or psyche.

The poem is named after the archeological site of Engomi, in the Bay of Famagusta, Cyprus. Seferis and Maro, his wife, visited Cyprus for a month in 1953. Their sojourn proved to be one of the most joyful periods of Seferis’s emotional and sexual life. But the visit could well have turned out differently. In the aftermath of World War II, Cyprus was still—as it had been since 1914—a British Crown colony. Some 80 percent of the population were Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians; 20 percent were Turkish-speaking Muslims, many of whom harbored nostalgia for the days when Cyprus had been part of the Ottoman Empire.

Seferis was highly conscious of the diplomatic ramifications of any words he would speak on the subject of Cypriot independence: Greece had suffered through World War II and a civil war after that, and it could ill afford to turn against its allies to support the aspirations of Cyprus for self-determination. At the same time, Cyprus represented for Seferis what was Greek about his own heritage, without the overlay of modern Greek government.

Cyprus was also the place most sacred to the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. Seferis’s visit to Engomi, to its ruins on a sparse plain, provided him with revelations about the spaciousness of the Hellenic legacy and with a memorable visionary experience: that “love transcendent had a sharply sensual edge” (Beaton 308). Filled with new inspiration, Seferis wrote to his sister that he had “fallen in love with this place. Maybe because I’ve found there things still living, that have been lost in that other Greece… perhaps because I feel that this people has need of all our love and all our support” (Beaton 310).

The poem begins with a stanza of description of Engomi as seen from a distance under curvy clouds and as the sun was setting on “arms in motion as they dug.” The second stanza reveals how the operations of the archaeologists resembled those of surgeons opening a body—“the curtains of pain spread wide open / to reveal, naked and indifferent, the tomb.”

In the next stanza the speaker focuses on “those at work” and their “taut shoulders, the arms that struck / this dead silence with a rhythm heavy and swift / as though the wheel of fate were passing through the ruins.” At this point the speaker is struck by the sudden sensation of time’s having stopped, and he experiences an image of awe-inspiring love: “an Assumption” of the Virgin Mary melded with Aphrodite.

The rest of the poem—which owes much of its rhetorical power to an allusion to the book of James (or Protevangelium), XVIII.2, of The Apocryphal New Testament (Collected Poems 286)—relates the speaker’s vision of suspended time in all its concrete detail: “girls kneaded, but they didn’t touch the dough / women spun, but the spindles didn’t turn / lambs were drinking, but their tongues hung still / above green waters,” and so on.

After the body of the Virgin / Aphrodite had finally risen into the heavens, all the suspended animations resumed, and “The world / became again as it had been, ours: / the world of time and earth.” In sum, the poem blends ancient ritual with modern perspectives, the sacred and the sensual, the scientific and the aesthetic—to celebrate a place where the continuous legacy of Hellenic civilization has reached unbroken into the present.

Bibliography
Seferis, George. “Engomi.” From Logbook III, in Collected Poems. Revised ed. Translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.