"The Fragments from the Song to the Sun" contain some of the noblest
lines of Palamas' poetry. We cannot have a complete understanding of the
symbolism with which this part of _Life Immovable_ is filled. For, after
all, from the great hymn to the light-god, we have here only fragments.
But these fragments remind one of the gold-stained ruins of the
_Akropolis_ against the bright Attic sky. Throughout, we are aware of a
striking duality. The key to these sunlit melodies is probably found in
the "Giants' Shadows." Among the shadows whose voices ascend from
darkness "like moanings of the sea," the poet discovers Telamonian Ajax,
the giant who is utterly absorbed in the world within him, the source of
his light and life, and Goethe, the Teutonic poet, who turns to the
world about himself as a flower to the sun, and whose heart "longs and
thirsts for light." Here then, we detect the doubleness of the sun of
Palamas, a sun within, the source of his inner life and thought, and a
sun without, the source of all external beauty and growth.
Thus without detracting from the charm and power of the day-star, he
ensouls it with a higher meaning and transforms a fiery globe into a
light-clad Olympian divinity, a giver of life and death, a healer and a
slayer. In "The Tower of the Sun," we find mighty princes, sons of
kings, who had gone thither in their desire to hunt for the light,
turned into stones by the "giant merciless." Motionless they stand, a
world of voiceless statues while
From their deep and smothered eyes,
Something like living glance
Struggles to peep through its stone-veil!
Then the fair redeemer, a princess beautiful, comes from far away--the
light, it seems, of inner knowledge and inspiration--and the Sun's tower
Gleamed forth as if the light
Of a new dawn embraced its walls!
She knows where the fountain of life flows and with its waters wakes up
the sons of kings, shining
... with transcending gleam
Like a far greater Sun.
This is, then, the sun whom Palamas worships as a god. It is a sun who
possesses all the beauty and power of the actual source of light, but
who, at the same time, by the spell of mystic symbolism rises to the
splendor of a thrice-fair and almighty divinity containing all that is
beautiful and noble and powerful in the world. Upon such a sun he seeks
to find a light-flooded palace for his child in the "Mourning Song." To
such a sun he offers his hymns and prayers; and such a sun he conceives
as a vengeful blood-fed Moloch or a muse of light. He is a fair Phoebus,
who rises from pure Olympus' heights to play as a fountain of flowing
harmonies or to smite as "an archer of fiery arrows" all living things.