“Ithaka” is Constantine Cavafy’s best-known poem, having won him his first international acclaim when T. S. Eliot published a translation of it in The Criterion in 1924. One of the few “second-person” poems Cavafy wrote (along with “The City” in 1894 and “God Abandons Anthony” in 1911), “Ithaka” not only returns to the Odyssey to reconfigure both its framework and its purpose, but also diverges from Dante’s and Tennyson’s poetic engagements with the Odyssean theme.

“Ithaka” takes the form of a didactic monologue addressing Odysseus, in advance of his return from Troy, regarding his journey’s actual purpose and the best way to approach and to understand it. Where the Homeric epic described a grueling voyage back to a beloved home, a journey prolonged by the punishing god Poseidon, and where Dante and Tennyson had depicted Odysseus as bored with his island and eager to depart once again to foreign lands for excitement, Cavafy’s “Ithaka” guards the value of home but transforms it into a destiny rather than an origin, whose value is found in the journey of discovery it inspires.

Thus the poem begins with a seemingly counterintuitive wish for Odysseus’s pending journey to be a long one, explaining the joys to be met in its unfolding—of “coming into harbors seen for the first time,” of buying precious jewels and perfumes “at Phoenician trading stations,” of gathering knowledge from the scholars he will come across in “many Egyptian cities.” The speaker explains that the obstacles and hard times to be encountered on the journey are products of a fearful soul and not of an angry god (“Laistrygonians and Cyclops, / wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them / unless you bring them along inside your soul, / unless your soul sets them up in front of you”).

The speaker concludes by addressing the insignificance of the actual Ithaka and the real meaning of the journey: “If you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

By turning the single, literal Ithaka into a plural symbol of destinations that inspire adventurous, homeward-bound journeys, Cavafy transforms the heroism of the Odyssean myth into a romantic disposition toward the sensual expression of life and the development of the individual soul. Through the lenses of this romantic disposition, one could well perceive Cavafy’s “Ithaka” as symbolizing a further destination: death, not so much as a terrifying prospect, but as an inspiration to live every day to the fullest.

Bibliography

Cavafy, C. P. Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sheppard, edited by George Savidis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975; London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Jusdanis, Gregory. The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Keeley, Edmund. Cavafy’s Alexandria: A Study of a Myth in Progress. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

Tags: Cavafy and existentialism, Cavafy and Odysseus, Cavafy and T.S. Eliot, Cavafy and the Odyssey, Cavafy Homeric influence, Cavafy literary criticism, Cavafy modernist poetry, Cavafy poetic philosophy, Cavafy poetic style, Cavafy’s Alexandria, Constantine P. Cavafy biography, didactic monologue in poetry, Edmund Keeley Cavafy translation, Greek poetry 20th century, Ithaka and death symbolism, Ithaka and personal growth, Ithaka as metaphor for life, Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy summary, Ithaka character study, Ithaka critical summary, Ithaka literary analysis, Ithaka plot interpretation, Ithaka poem analysis, Ithaka poem criticism, Ithaka poem themes, journey as metaphor in Ithaka, modern interpretations of Odysseus, Poetics of Cavafy, second-person poetry analysis, symbolism in Ithaka