excerpt
“Twentieth Canto” develops this qualification through the reciprocal action of hands and clay: the hands work the material, while the material works upon the hands. Creation here involves being changed by what one touches. The image quietly opposes the juvenile God’s unilateral impositions. It also offers a persuasive account of poetic responsibility. The artist should discover something through the encounter, rather than merely force the world to illustrate a conviction. This modest image of making carries as much ethical weight as the sequence’s more thunderous denunciations.
The language largely proceeds through accumulation. Short lines, limited punctuation, and rapid shifts between bodily, botanical, theological, and political vocabularies create a restless current. A metaphor rarely remains isolated; it attracts another before its implications have settled. The result can be exhilarating, particularly when an unexpected verb animates a familiar object or when a delicate creature abruptly interrupts an abstract claim. The page gives this crowded movement room through generous spacing, while the Cantos’ italic setting visually distinguishes their answering voices from the Hours.
The same abundance occasionally strains clarity. Successive abstractions and densely modified images can compete for attention, leaving the emotional direction clearer than the relationship between phrases. Similarly, the repeated denunciation of clerics and fanatics sometimes offers less dramatic discovery than the ambivalent treatment of Death. These limitations arise from the work’s chosen pressure: it wants to be chorus, accusation, love song, and cosmic argument at once. Its finest passages allow a concrete action to organize that energy, giving the reader somewhere to stand amid the verbal tempest.
The concluding movements deepen the book by bringing loss closer to the speaking voice. In “Twenty-Third Canto,” a photograph taken from a wallet releases tears, and the speaker loses his desire for a favourite wine. The shift matters because grief is registered as an alteration of appetite and habit. The public vocabulary of outrage yields to the difficulty of continuing a private life. A model train then delivers the familiar promise of doing better, placing the refrain in an object whose smallness contrasts sharply with the cosmic machinery surrounding it.
The final Canto makes the personal cost unmistakable. While the speaker persists in household chores, news arrives of his son’s death in a zealot’s war. This is a revelation within the poem, not a warrant for assuming autobiography. Its force comes from the collision between ordinary maintenance and irreversible loss. Watering flowers becomes almost unbearably inadequate, yet it remains an act addressed to living things. The surrounding animals continue to know their paths and habits until bullets and nets interrupt them. Human bereavement and ecological destruction become neighbouring instances of life needlessly cut short.
At this point the refrain changes. The question becomes whether He could have done better, and the sea answers that He could. The shift moves from an undertaking to a judgment. It withdraws the excuse that the existing order must be accepted as the best or only possible one. The concluding passage attributed to Elytis leaves ethical existence poised upon a precarious point, preserving the difficulty of choice after the accusation has been delivered. There is no easy reconciliation between the poem’s anger and its love of the world.
Opera Bufa succeeds most fully as a work of impassioned refusal, sustained by the pleasures that make refusal necessary. Its theatrical God, philosophical Death, wounded creatures, lovers, and grieving speaker occupy a stage where authority is continually tested against vulnerable life. Although its rhetorical abundance sometimes obscures distinctions, the sequence’s formal persistence gives its indignation cumulative force. The final grief also changes the resonance of everything preceding it. What initially sounds like defiant confidence becomes a more demanding promise: to do better means continuing to care when neither cosmic justice nor personal consolation can be guaranteed.
