The second collection of _Life Immovable_, entitled "The Return," is
dedicated to the poet's country. It bears under its title the
significant date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war
which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair.
After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a
degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of
the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For
some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a
hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound the reveille. He
conceives of his collection of songs as an expression of faith in the
country's future. With perfect love and assurance "he comes to place the
crowns of Art" "dream-made and dream-engraved" upon her shattered
throne....
Only with harmony sublime and pure,
Which, though it rises over time and space,
Turns the world's ears to his native land,
The poet is the greatest patriot.
Nevertheless even the poet's spirit cannot help reflecting the gloom
through which it tries to rise. The general depression about him weighs
upon him, too, in spite of his effort. This shadow haunts him
constantly. Life becomes a Fairy, with a Fairy's dangerous charms and
fearful mysteries. "Something like a madman pursues life." The poet
hears this madman's falling steps and is horror-haunted:
And lo, blood of my blood the madman was!
A past, ancestral, long-forgotten sin,
That bursting forth upon me, vampire-like,
Snatched from my hand the dewy crown of joy!
This madman grows from within the individual's and the nation's life.
The wings of joys and dreams are clipped. One feels like a night-owl
upon glorious ruins, the beauty of which makes the night even darker.
Tradition, like a majestic temple, seems to choke life by its solemnity.
The present, which seems to be symbolized by the little hut, is in the
relentless grip of "a monstrous vision, the Fairy Illness, stripped in
the silver glimmer of the moon." There is always the mingling of
gleaming beauty and of bitter sorrow. There is always before us a
"cord-grass festival," the amber fragrant flowers budding upon the
piercing spikes of the cord-grass and luring man to the deadly bog where
there is no redemption. One might say that the poet verges on morbidity.
But such an assumption would be unjust. Palamas may have a clear vision
of the tragedy of life. But in the light of this revelation, with his
unfettered contemplation, he builds, like Bertram Russell, a "shining
citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of
his highest mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and
arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls, the
free life continues while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair and
all the servile captains of tyrant Fate afford the burghers of that
dauntless city new spectacles of beauty." In like manner, the world of
Greece, in which Palamas lives, "our home," as he calls it, may have its
dreadful silences that are "full of moans," moans vague and muffled as
if coming from a distant world
Of bygone ages and of times unborn.