In this article, the five poems with the word ‘Μέρες’ in their titles are discussed, and possible explanations for the dates in the titles suggested. The poems were written and revised between 1909 and 1932, but it is argued here that their initial composition dates are closer together than previously thought. The article examines revisions to the five poems; their positions, where applicable, in Cavafy’s thematic collections, and the dates in their titles in relation to events in the poet’s life and other writings from the same period. A history of composition and publication, including an account of all extant published revisions, is provided and the implications of this kind of bibliographical and biographical approach are discussed.

The three strange poems in English which constitute the section ‘Foreign Language Verse’ in Cavafy’s Unpublished Poems present problems of authorship, interpretation and preservation. Who wrote them? What are they about? Why did Cavafy, who destroyed so much, trouble to keep them? The purpose of the present note is to provide plausible, if not definitive, answers to these three questions. The poems under discussion are, ‘Leaving Therápia’, ‘Darkness and Shadows’ and the untitled poem that begins, ‘More happy thou, performing Member’.

Cavafy’s interest in Byzantium dates from a very early stage in his poetic career. In fact, the Byzantine empire appears to have been the first historical period to attract the self-styled ‘historian-poet’s’ attention. Some of Cavafy’s earliest historical poems and many of the poems of his maturity bear witness to this, and several of his early prose writings are also indicative of his keen interest in the period. In June 1882, shortly before and during his family’s temporary removal to Constantinople, Cavafy began to keep a journal called ‘Constantinopoliad. An Epic’. Ten years later, he wrote a newspaper article on the Byzantine poets, . The reason for Cavafy’s early and enduring interest in the Byzantine period, especially Middle and Late Byzantium, may well be connected with the fact that Cavafy had family roots in Constantinople. A second factor is that, for a Greek of the Diaspora, Late Antiquity, when the centre of Hellenism was no longer Athens, held a particular fascination. Cavafy was able, by means of Byzantium, to lay claim to an elevated genealogy, both for himself (as a descendant of the Phanariots) and for his poetry, as central to (through being descended from) the poetic tradition of Byzantine Egypt, rather than peripheral to the Modern Athenian School.

‘Desire is death’, wrote Shakespeare, exploiting a commonplace of the sixteenth century love-lyric, which lies also at the crux of the anonymous sixteenth century Cypriot sonnets, published with an extensive scholarly introduction, French translation and notes, in 1952, by Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès. The collection comprises one hundred and fifty-six poems, in a variety of metrical forms, some of which translate or adapt Italian originals. Thémis Siapkaras-Pitsillidès addresses the following questions: manuscript condition and origins; dating; authorship; influences, and versification. The poems are placed in categories according to metrical form, and a description of metre and rhyme-schemes is provided. More recently, Lucia Marcheselli-Loukas has made a detailed formal study arguing that the Cypriot sonnets show considerable originality of versification and made a significant contribution to the formation of the Modern Greek literary Koine. In this paper, we shall examine the themes and structures of one of the best-represented metrical forms in the collection: the sonnet.