The Greeks owe a great deal to Solomos — more than could be imagined from a quick leaf through the single volume of lyrics and fragments of longer poems that comprise the Found Remains. They owe him their national anthem — the swashbuckling Hymn to Freedom of 158 four-line stanzas — and a lyrical poem in the same vein (even longer), inspired by the death of Byron.
These two, the only substantial poems to be published in the poet’s lifetime, gave Solomos overnight fame and a name as the national bard of his country. But for all his involvement in the struggle for independence and his deep grief at Byron’s death, Solomos was not an artist to be content with topical poetry. Although a great many of his poems begin with historical events, for Solomos, poetry itself had to be a great deal more than reportage or sounding rhetoric. As the poet expressed it, ‘Let the poem be a bodiless spirit which flows from God and after being made flesh with the organs of time, place, nationality, language…returns finally to God’.
Goethe said of Byron that he was the greatest among poets — ‘but he is a child when he begins to think’. This could not have been said of Solomos. The need to think, to reflect deeply before committing himself to a single line of verse, is one of the factors that made his total output so small and fragmentary. Another was his preoccupation with language.
The question of language has been the bane of modern Greek writing from the time of Independence onwards. For Solomos, writing during and after the war of 1821, the problem was acute. How was a cultured poet, educated in the Italy of the Enlightenment, to express himself in a language which had produced little written poetry or prose for several hundreds of years? Solomos reached the conclusion that almost every other Greek poet of note has come to after him: A poetic language has to be forged out of the idiom of the people, and, in particular, the idiom as expressed in a rich tradition of folk poetry. That such a man should have done so is an astonishing testimony to the vitality of the tradition.
Count Dionisio Salomon (as he frequently signs his letters) was a member of the largely Italian-speaking aristocracy on the island of Zakynthos (Zante). Like the other six Ionian Islands, Zakynthos had never been subjected to the Turks. The strongest influence for many centuries was Italian, and for most of Solomos’s lifetime the islands were ruled by the British.
That an aristocrat, who all his life spoke and wrote more easily in Italian than in Greek, should have turned with such determination to the idiom of the people seems paradoxical. By using that language to express the ideas and thoughts of a sophisticated culture, Solomos can be said to have gone a long way towards creating the modern Greek language, rather as Manzoni did in Italian and Chaucer, perhaps, in English.
Despite his upbringing, his education, and his rather shy personality, Solomos was uncompromising in his opposition to the learned circles of the day, never giving up the attempt to write in a language learned ‘from the mouth of the people.’ As he put it bluntly in a Platonic-style dialogue on the subject, ‘Submit first to the language of the people, and then, if you are able, master it’.
That was in 1825, soon after the poem on the death of Byron. Some years later, while writing the great poem, The Cretan, and already planning the fragmentary Free Besieged, he repeated the same conviction in a letter, adding, ‘It is well to have one’s roots in these songs (folk poems), but not to remain there… they do not have the same interest coming from our own mouths: the nation requires from us the treasures of our individual intelligence clothed in national forms’.
Dressing his genius in ‘national forms’ was precisely the intent and achievement of Solomos’s maturer years—roughly 1825 to his death in 1857. But the compulsion to express the people’s idiom poetically was not the only thing to preoccupy Solomos and cause him to leave unfinished his projected works.
Solomos’s genius was a lyrical one. He had neither the stamina nor the inclination to write long narrative poems. The fragments he has left were carefully collected after his death and published in numbered sequences—along with the many variants Solomos had tried before arriving at each completed line. Although these variants seem to indicate that the greatest poems — The Cretan, The Free Besieged, The Shark— are incomplete, little appears to be missing save connecting passages to make each a consecutive whole.
Once he concentrated his efforts on the passages of greatest lyrical intensity, he abandoned attempts to produce more routine verse.
The Cretan’ —narrating the flight of a Cretan and his beloved, sole survivors of a Turkish massacre— illustrates both this lyrical intensity and the unity of the supposed fragments. Though the first section of the poem is numbered XIX, it reads as an entity. Moreover, incorporated in the hero’s ‘vision’ of a figure ‘clothed in the moon’ rising from a sea suddenly becalmed, is the ideal of absolute beauty, echoing, lyrically, Solomos’s Platonic conception of poetry.
Accompanying the ‘bodiless spirit’ —an abstraction of all the Cretan’s physical experiences— is a sound more wondrous than music, and rendered as,
No young girl’s voice beneath the
spreading woods, Hour of the evening star and the waters’ darkening
Who sings to nature of her hidden love,
To the tree, the flower that bends and hears;
No voice of Cretan nightingale that sings
On the high bleak crags where he has his nest,
A song whose sweetness echoes all night long
From the sea far off and the distant plain,
Until the stars dissolve before the
Dawn, Who hearing drops the roses from her fingers…
Held in the still tension of the vision are these natural elements together with the massacre and the tempest, a tension so powerful it drains the life from nature — and even from the hero’s beloved. After their escape across the sea, the Cretan discovers his lover is dead.
Poetry, for Solomos, has this power. A ‘bodiless spirit’, it has physical roots like a plant. But it will also ‘make flesh the most substantial and highest content of true human nature — Country and Faith’.
These twin ideals are embodied in Solomos’s depiction of the siege and fall of Missolonghi— The Free Besieged, a poem which exists in three successive versions and many fragments. An intensity of physical suffering is built up until the final flash of light that unites the supreme beauties of the spring and the terribleness of the destruction:
Light that tramples smiling Hell and death.
This is not something you will find in Byron. And Solomos was deeply aware of how precarious this kind of achievement was. As he said in another poem, ‘Hell ever wakeful circles you about’ — as the Turks encircled beleaguered Missolonghi and the beauties of spring. This very quality of precarious* ?ss made the achievement virtually impossible for Solomos to sustain throughout a long work. He could never have written a Childe Harold, but neither was Byron capable of the vision, and sheer craftsmanship, of The Cretan or The Free Besieged.
