Reading/Questions for Cavafy's Poems, Part I

NOTE: I'll post a video soon to help you think about ways to read and approach poetry, and specifically, how to get the most out of Cavafy's poems. If you're not experienced in reading poetry, don't fret; just read slowly and try not to worry about the 'story' as much as the metaphors: how does the poet relate one things in terms of another? What is he trying to make us see in a new light? A poem is almost always a meditation on or a contemplation of something naturally occurring in life--clouds drifting past the moon, candles flickering in a darkened room, etc. A vivid image always reminds the poet of something else, something larger, and the point of them poem is to help us see it, too. 

READ THE FOLLOWING POEMS: Voices, Desires, Candles (3-5), An Old Man (5), Supplication, The Souls of Old Men (7), The First Step (7-9), The Windows, Walls (13), Waiting for the Barbarians (15-17). 

Answer 2 of the following:

Q1: Does the poet-narrator of each poem seem consistent, or do they seem to be coming from different people? If you had to characterize the speaker of several poems, who would he (or she) be?

Q2: How does Cavafy take a completely ordinary object in one of these poems and transform it into a metaphor for something larger? Which poem made you see the object in a completely different light? Why is the object/metaphor so effective?

Q3: In his famous poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” he imagines the tension and despair as Romans await the arrival of invading Barbarians. Yet the poem ends with the news that “there are no barbarians anymore.” They seem disappointed, because “Those people were some sort of a solution.” What do you think he means by this? How does the poem try to explain why barbarians could be a “solution”? And what ‘problem’ are they answering in the first place?

Q4: In the poem, “The First Step,” a young poet complains to an accomplished poet that he will never climb very high on the “stairway of Poetry.” How does the poem challenge the conception of poetic success and the ultimate aims of being an artist? Is going ‘higher’ necessarily better? Why or why not (according to the poem)?