A series of sonnets, the "Fatherlands," make the opening of the book
and, at the same time, symbolize most clearly the growth of our poet.
Each sonnet describes a fatherland, adding another link to a chain of
worlds that dawn, one after another, upon the poet's being. The first is
Patras, his birthplace. Then follows Missolonghi with its calm lagoon
and the haunts of his boyhood. The splendor of the violet-crowned city
of Athens is succeeded by the island of Corfu, the cradle of the
literary renaissance of Modern Hellenism, which again fades before the
vision of Egypt, whence the earliest lights of civilization shone upon
the land of the Greeks. Christianity in its extreme form of asceticism
is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy
mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming
beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the
intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," the classic age
of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of Hellenism spreading
triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden
Gate of imperial Byzantium.
But "imagination, like the Phaeacians' ship, rolls on," and the poet
sings:
In my soul's depths loom many lands ...
And where the heavens mingle with the sea,
A path I seek for a sphere beyond ...
Oceans are crossed, ages are brought forth from the past, and continents
are joined in making the poet's spirit. Finally even Earth becomes too
narrow and the greater universe opens its gates to the ultimate
fatherland, the elements of the world which will at the end absorb the
being of the poet:
Fatherlands! Air and earth and fire and water,
Elements indestructible, beginning
And end of life, first joy and last of mine,
You I shall find again when I pass on
To the grave's calm. The people of the dreams
Within me, airlike, unto air shall pass;
My reason, firelike, unto lasting fire;
My passions' craze unto the billows' madness.
Even my dust-worn body, unto dust;
And I shall be again air, earth, fire, water;
And from the air of dreams, and from the flame
Of thought, and from the flesh that shall be dust,
And from the passions' sea, ever shall rise
A breath of sound like a soft lyre's complaint.