One candle is enough. Its gentle light will be more suitable, will be more gracious when the Shades arrive, the Shades of Love.   One candle is enough. Tonight the room should not have too much light. In deep reverie, all receptiveness, and with the gentle light— in this deep reverie I will form visionsto call up the Shades, the Shades of Love. cavafy
With no consideration, no pity, no shame, they have built walls around me, thick and high. And now I sit here feeling hopeless. I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind— because I had so much to do outside. When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed! But I never heard the builders, not a sound.Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world. cavafy
That we’ve broken their statues, that we’ve driven them out of their temples, doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead. O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you, their souls still keep your memory. When an August dawn wakes over you, your atmosphere is potent with their life, and sometimes a young ethereal figure, indistinct, in rapid flight,wings across your hills. cavafy
Hasty and awkward creatures of the moment, it is we who interrupt the action of the gods. In the palaces of Eleusis and Phthia Demeter and Thetis initiate rituals over high flames and heavy smoke. But Metaneira always bursts in from the royal quarters, hair loose, terrified,and Peleus, scared, always intervenes. cavafy
I’d like to speak of this memory… but it’s so faded now… as though nothing is left— because it was so long ago, in my early adolescent years.   A skin as though of jasmine… that August evening—was it August?— I can still just recall the eyes: blue, I think they were…Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue. cavafy
I sit in a mood of reverie. I brought to Art desires and sensations: things half-glimpsed, faces or lines, certain indistinct memories of unfulfilled love affairs. Let me submit to Art: Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty, almost imperceptibly completing life,blending impressions, blending day with day. cavafy
I never found them again—all lost so quickly… the poetic eyes, the pale face… in the darkening street…   I never found them again—mine entirely by chance, and so easily given up, then longed for so painfully. The poetic eyes, the pale face,those lips—I never found them again. cavafy
Body, remember not only how much you were loved, not only the beds you lay on, but also those desires that glowed openly in eyes that looked at you, trembled for you in the voices— only some chance obstacle frustrated them. Now that it’s all finally in the past, it seems almost as if you gave yourself to those desires too—how they glowed, remember, in eyes that looked at you,remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices. Cavafy
Days to come stand in front of us like a row of lighted candles— golden, warm, and vivid candles.   Days gone by fall behind us, a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles; the nearest are smoking still, cold, melted, and bent.   I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me, and it saddens me to remember their original light. I look ahead at my lighted candles.   I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified, how quickly that dark line gets longer,how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate. Cavafy
And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it by too much contact with the world, by too much activity and talk.   Try not to degrade it by dragging it along, taking it around and exposing it so often to the daily silliness of social events and parties,until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on. Cavafy
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