Yannis Keats

By Angelos Sikelianos

A branch, the hand of Apollo,

The plane tree’s polished, broad bough,

Spread above you, may it bring you

The universe’s immortal peace.

You’d meet me on the broad and shining shore

            Of Pylos, so I’d planned,

With Mentor’s tall ship pulled up on the beach

            Snug in the sand.

We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods,

            In the winged friendship of youth,

And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time

            And custom had made smooth

And meet that man who still in the third generation

            Reigned serene, a sage

Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened

            In his mind with age—

At dawn, we’d attend the sacrifice to the gods,

            The ritual slaughters

Of the three-year-old heifers, and hear the single cry

            That rose from his three daughters

When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye

            Drowned in a swoon

Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle,

            A hazy half moon.

My love imagined you, as a sister her brother,

            In your virginal bath,

How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you

            In a robe of fine cloth.

I thought to prod you a little with my foot

            As dawn was about to break:

The gleaming chariot’s yoked for us and ready.

            No time to lose! Awake!

And to spend all day in the talk that comes and goes,

            Or silence, when no one spoke,

While we drove the horses who were always leaning one way

            Or another against the yoke,

But most of all I wanted to see your eyes,

            Your deer-like eyes, behold

The palace of Menelaus, and forget themselves

            In bronze and the gleam of gold,

Unwavering gaze, sinking the sight so deep,

            You’d never remember

The figured silver, the ivory, gilded or white,

            The heavy amber,

And I thought that I would say in a hushed voice

            Leaning close to your ear,

Watch out, my friend, because in a moment, soon,

            Helen will appear

Before our very eyes, the one and only

            Daughter of the Swan,

And then we will sink our eyelids in the river

            Of Oblivion.

                 * * *

So brightly I saw you; but what grassy roads

            Have led me to your tomb!

And the blazing roses with which I strew your grave

            And make all Rome abloom,

Light the way unto your golden songs

            As though they were the brave,

Armed bodies that turn to dust before one’s eyes

            In an ancient, new-breached grave,

And all the worthy treasure of Mycenae,

            The golden plunder

I thought to lay before you—goblet, sword,

            And diadem—past wonder,

A mask on your dead beauty like the mask

            That covered the face

Of the king of the Achaeans—all gold, all artifice,

            Hammered upon Death’s trace.

" Translated from the modern greek by A.E.  Stallings

“Yannis Keats” (from 1915) is a very different use of the Classical past. Sikelianos maintained a life-long interest in John Keats, delivering a lecture on him at the British Council in Athens towards the end of his life. What first grabs our attention is the title: not John Keats, but Yannis Keats (not even the formal “Ioannis”). He is making Keats a Greek and an equal, a friend. Strangely, the poem is set not in the present nor in Keats’s nineteenth century, but in Homer’s Bronze Age. In fact, we find ourselves smack in the midst of the Odyssey, with Keats as Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, at the brink of manhood, and the speaker as Pisistratus, his young friend and companion, son of Nestor. The details (such as the nudging of the foot) are taken straight out of Homer, and the scenes have a freshness and sparkle, not the old world traversed by long-suffering Odysseus, but a new world of adventure just opening up to young heroes. In a sleight of imagination, this vividly present ancient world also partakes of Keats—when we go to see the ritual sacrifice of the heifers, are we not the citizens who have emptied the town one pious morn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? Together the young companions make a road trip to see Menelaus and, especially, the bewitching Helen (daughter of aforementioned Leda and Swan). Yet the poem closes with a rejection of all this—Keats is in fact dead, in Rome.

In the last stanzas, Sikelianos performs yet another feat of connections. Keats’s death mask at the Spanish Steps becomes the gold mask exhumed at Mycenae in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann, who said, “I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon.” The distance between Sikelianos and Keats suddenly widens into an impassible and impossible gulf—if “Ode on a Grecian Urn” projects into a future, “midst of other woe/Than ours,” “Yannis Keats” plumbs into the past—death has made Keats as ancient as a Mycenean tomb, and the marvels with which the speaker wanted to dazzle him, dusty grave goods of antiquity. —aes

* A.E. (Alicia) Stallings studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University.