Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 is one of Constantine Cavafy’s longest and most dramatic poems, centered around the elusive character of Myres, whose appropriation by different systems of signification—the pagan-cultivated, homosexual hedonism of Alexandria and the emerging, puritanical austerity of Christianity—is central to the poem’s narrative and climactic ending.

Cavafy had admitted to a predilection for the “ancient pleasures” of the Hellenistic and late antiquity periods and for the freedom they afforded to his poetic adventures. The reference to Alexandria is also by no means coincidental. It is Cavafy’s privileged historical site and the home of many of his young eroticized poetic figures, all eponymous, as opposed to the anonymity of his modern subjects (see Days of 1908, for instance). So the mention of Myres’s origin is both a reference to the multicultural splendor of the Greek metropolis and especially to its cultivated and cosmopolitan eroticism, which seems to have fascinated Cavafy as well as a number of poetic figures featured in some of his other eponymous poems, including Ianthes, Iases, and Lanes.

The poem is a tightly structured and eloquently paced study of the disjunctions between appearance and essence, knowledge and being. The first three stanzas introduce a reluctant observer entering an alien space. Curious and intrigued, but at the same time also reserved and measured, this pagan’s account of Myres’s funeral is almost folkloric; so this is the way Christians bury their dead!

The next stanza, however, turns back in time to recount Myres’s affiliation with another social system, for despite the intimacy the narrator assumes he had with Myres, their relationship, whatever its nature may have been, was forged within the domain of a group of young Greek, or at least Hellenized, gay revelers. And from here on, the transitions from the past to the present are initiated by a series of contrasting couplets, separated and distanced by the strophic convention: from the sad memory of the happy, young beloved (l. 22) we turn to the lamenting old Christian women (l. 23); the narrator’s ignorance of Christianity (l. 30) leads on to the narrator’s admission of knowledge about Myres’s religious faith (l. 31); and as if to highlight the rising power of the new religion, Myres’s timid whispers at the pagan temple (l. 52) are juxtaposed to and drowned out by the chanting of the Christian priests at his funeral (l. 54).

There is something ominous and disturbing about the narrator’s disintegration at the end of the poem. It is not only the loss of the memory of Myres, as such, that is at stake, but also the entire Hellenic tradition of homoeroticism as “those dark-clad people, chattering about morals” (the Christians, in Cavafy’s Theater of Sidon, A.D. 400) march on to imperial recognition and eventually to official status.

But the poem Myres is also about Cavafy’s other favorite themes: times of decline and change, critical moments of opportunity and loss, when communal and personal identities are put to the test and grand historical shifts penetrate and intrude into the most intimate corners of the psyche of individuals.

Bibliography
Cavafy, Constantine. The Complete Poems of Cavafy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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