[ilds] A Persian Lady :: Strateira

[James Gifford]

There is much richness in this short verse (and I did raise a glass last 
night, even though there wasn't time for a posting).

My hunch at a "key" to this modern poem (ahem) runs stylistically 
through Durrell's interests in Cavafy back to Alexander the Great's 
sketchy history with Stateira, wife to Darius III, captured in 333 in 
the Battle of Issus.  Perhaps Charles can tell me if I'm going too far 
in my Classical hunt, but I think the stylistic elements that Durrell 
clearly lifted from Cavafy for other poems (I published on this 
recently) also appear here with an ambiguous past-present linking Big 
Alex to Little Larry, both standing on some beach seeing a Persian beauty.

My associations for this poem run fast & furious, and very much in 
tandem with the publications that were likely on Durrell's mind at this 
time.  First,  Claude's novel /A Chair for the Prophet/ contains just 
such a woman, very much like a Justine figure, and I think that by 
blindly equating Justine with Eve, we're missing the point.  After all, 
Durrell first dedicated /Justine/ "To the first Eve," and I think that 
figures her as one of many mentally revised and restructured creatures, 
highly composite in nature.

This Persian Lady does have ties that should make us think of 
Alexandria, ranging from the "musical city" that reminds me of the 
closing of /Justine/ with Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" (with it's 
singing choir to which Cohen refers in the novel) and the nearby lake, 
as well as the beach.  Alexandria seems a likely source, but the "code 
unbroken" seems unlike any sentiment he'd apply to Eve or even an 
Eve-stand-in.  I should think "broken" would be enacted...  After the 
1950s, Eve would always be the broken figure.

I'm with Charles on the Eliotic touches, and the diplomatic context 
strikes me as relying on some other biographical context, perhaps with 
Eve beside him, but looking at someone else, but even there I'd look 
back to Alexander as well.  That's just the way the present-ness of the 
past can be enacted in the poem, to some degree, adapting Eliot's 
influence to Durrell's sympathies with Cavafy.

The other gesture to historical context, as Charles has said, smacks of 
Cavafy to me.  I think this also parallels Cavafy's tendency to overlap 
the past and the present, so that it's not just (as Seferis points out) 
a tribute for "Those Who Fought For The Achaean League" but also for 
those who were lost in Smyrna (as an example in Cavafy).  The past and 
present overlap for Cavafy in his historical poems, repeatedly and 
forcefully, and I see that same thing in Durrell's poem here (a notion 
of time and tradition in allusion that I've argued, elsewhwere, Durrell 
uses from Cavafy to revise his own ties to Eliot).

Note too the possible kinship to LD's translation of Cavafy's "The 
City."  This is perhaps my own readerly addition to the poem, but I 
can't help relating "You say to yourself 'I'll be gone...'" to "telling 
himself 'Say what you like about it, / I have been spared very much..." 
  We know that neither is true.  The protagonist has not been spared in 
either scenario.

My hunch, if I were to imagine a biographical origin, is Durrell reading 
some lovely historical poetry, very possibly Cavafy and/or some Plutarch 
(who pops up in LD's poetry more than once), and spotting his own lovely 
Persian Lady walking past with a fleeting moment catching each other's 
eyes, his dropping back to the book of verse or a notebook...  But, I 
almost wonder if Durrell had wanted to create a vague sensation of 
Browning's ghost, without any textual echoes?  Who is this woman and why 
do we only see her from this one, vague perspective?

But most seriously, I really would look to Alexander the Great's 
relations with Darius' wife Stateira, whom Alexander reputedly would not 
even look upon because he did not want to be tempted by her beauty.  I 
think that story holds the inspiration and very likely the reason for 
the Cavafy-like invocation of a dual past and present.  That sterile 
hyphen may need to read 333-1961...

Best,
James

slighcl wrote:
> On 2/28/2008 10:34 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> Why do I think the poem is contemporary with composition?  The colloquial diction for one:  "Say what you like . . . " 
> 
>>         Next day he deliberately left the musical city
>>         To join a boring water-party on the lake.
>>         Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
>>         I have been spared very much in this business.'
> 
> 
> I think that I prefer to allow "A Persian Lady" to be ancient or modern 
> in its historical moment, with my reading swinging back and forth 
> between those ambiguous points of reference, "/his time and ours/."
> 
>>         On the other hand neither would she build him sons
>>         Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
>>         Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
> 
> 'Round and round and round she goes /  where she stops, nobody knows. . 
> . .'  At least I really cannot say.  That first person plural really 
> opens the poem up to fuller potentiality.  As if "/his/" time was not 
> difficult enough, then we must deal with "/ours/."
> 
> Eliot is there too, Bruce, and the colloquial is a sign that he is one 
> of the shadows behind the poem. 
> 
> And we should recall that Eliot used the regularly colloquial voice for 
> figures modern /and /historical--cf. 'breezy' Tiresias, who also worked 
> the typing pools of Georgian London, of course; but also the voice from 
> "The Journey of the Magi" (1936):
> 
>>         'A cold coming we had of it,
>>         Just the worst time of the year[. . . .] 
> 
> Eliot's sort of ventriloquism sets its taproots--dry or otherwise--in 
> the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.
> 
> I will post the poem again so that others might add their note, or just 
> enjoy a second dip.
> 
> Bill Godshalk has access to one of Durrell's unpublished limericks, "My 
> Parsee Maiden."  That limerick comes from somewhere near the same moment 
> as "A Persian Lady."  Perhaps Bill would transcribe it for our 
> entertainment?
> 
> C&c.
> 
> ***
>> A PERSIAN LADY
>>
>> Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' ---
>> Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
>> She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting---
>> To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
>> Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
>> By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
>> By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
>>
>> He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
>> The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
>> The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
>> How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue,
>> He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
>> When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
>> It would have been simple---three paces apart!
>>
>> Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,
>> The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
>> Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
>> Next day he deliberately left the musical city
>> To join a boring water-party on the lake.
>> Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
>> I have been spared very much in this business.'
>>
>> He meant, I think, that never should he now
>> Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
>> Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
>> The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
>> Grey temple, long slide into fat.
>>
>> On the other hand neither would she build him sons
>> Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
>> Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
>> She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
>> Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
>> In a biography the year of birth and death.
>>
>> 1964/ 1961
>>
>> **
> 
> 
> -- 
> **********************
> Charles L. Sligh
> Department of English
> Wake Forest University
> slighcl at wfu.edu
> **********************
> 
> 
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