With Seferis, it is lines rather than whole poems that most often grab my imagination.

What are they after, our souls, traveling
on the decks of decayed ships
(Mythistorema 8)

Bend if you can to the dark sea forgetting
the sound of a flute on naked feet
that trod your sleep in the other, the sunken life.
(Gymnopaidia, Santorini)

I have seen in the night
the sharp peak of the mountain,
seen the plain beyond flooded
with the light of an invisible moon,
seen turning my head,
black stones huddled
and my life taut as a chord
beginning and end
the final moment:
my hands.
(Gymnopaidia, Mycenae)

I stared at you with all the light and darkness I possess.
(Summer Solstice, XI)

And yet I used to love Syngrou Avenue
the double rise and fall of trhe great road
bringing us out miraculously to the sea
the eternal sea, to cleanse us of our sins.
(A Word for Summer)

In "Six Nights" he has a wonderful image about isolation and community. There is a man who collects bottles of water from rivers like some collect postage stamps.  If you looked on this bizarre individual's shelves, "you'd see the Ganges, the Volga, the Thames, the Nile and so on. ... Indeed, my dear friends, each one of us is as a river, a self-sufficient river, from its source in the mountains to its discharge into the sea.  An uncommunicative river inside a sealed-up little bottle. ... The question is this.  Who will break the seals on these bottled-up rivers?  Who will co-mingle a few droplets from the waters of the Jordan ... with a few droplets from the [Nile], or a few droplets from the [Thames] with a few droplets from the [Ganges]?”

Links

Poetry Foundation (Up 7/20/2024, posted 11/16/22)

Nobel Foundation (Up 7/20/2024, posted 1/14/00)

Works

George Seferis
Collected Poems: Revised Edition
Translated, by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

(1995, Princeton)

George Seferis

Novel and Other Poems
Translated by Roderick Beaton
(2016, Aiora)

George Seferis