The Song of the Seven Islands

I came across this poem, on the way to looking up something entirely different. I guess that's the beauty of the Internet... anyway this is excerpted from near the bottom of a rather long page.

"Kostis Palamas once wrote a poem called "Song of the Seven Islands", which was translated by Ian Scot-Kilvert and quoted by Arthur Foss at the beginning of The Ionian Islands. I've always liked it:

"Song of the Seven Islands"

by Kostis Palamas

"Your waters dazzle like a floor of diamonds

Westward your tides

Grope and caress the shores of Italy.

In a circumference of blue the seven islands

Foam-chiselled, rise, dissolve,

Join hands and dance upon the waves.

Zakynthos drowned in flowers

Cephalonia seamed with toil

Kythera and Paxoi

Corfu the enchantress of the mind and heart

Ithaka a mariner's ryhme in stone

Levkas the watch-tower of the Armatoli.

From the Ionian shore

From the Ionian sea

Since Homer, since Solomos,

The poet's song, the statesman's art

Haunted these islands like sea-birds......................."

a poem by Odysseas Elytis

Helios o Protos only a selected part
(The Sovereign Sun)

by Odysseas Elytis


(XVI) From what rocks, from what blood, from what iron from what fire, we are made of While we appear to be just made of cloud and they throw stones at us, yelling: "dreamers!"... How we get on, in our days and our nights, only a God can know...


[Odysseas Elytis (Greek: Οδυσσέας Ελύτης) (November 2, 1911—March 18, 1996) was a Greek poet regarded as a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.]

a poem by Cavafy

Ionian

Just because we've torn their statues down,
and cast them from their temples,
doesn't for a moment mean the gods are dead.
Land of Ionia, they love you yet,

their spirits still remember you.
When an August morning breaks upon you
a vigour from their lives stabs through your air;
and sometimes an ethereal and youthful form
in swiftest passage, indistinct,

passes up above your hills.

Constantine P Cavafy (April 29, 1863–April 29,1933)

Greek poet, published only about 200 privately printed poems.
Cavafy has come in recent years to be regarded as a the greatest Mediterranean poet of modern times.