C. P. Cavafy's "Days of" Poems

C. P. Cavafy (NewBioImage)

From the C. P. Cavafy Archive

From Langdon Hammer, James Merrill: Life and Art. New York: Knopf, 2016 p. 366.

The title—“ Days of 1964”— alludes to Cavafy’s similarly titled love poems. Limpid, refined, and dry, Cavafy’s “Days of . . .” poems are disenchanted modern love stories that honor passion as its own good, in memory. The allusion to Cavafy specifies the sex of the beloved as clearly as “he” or “him” would, even while the poem remains unspecific about the lover’s gender. (Mouflouzélis is always “you” in the poem; he is seen from too close up to require his name or gender to be mentioned.)