JOURNEYS ‘IN THE REALMS OF GOLD’

For over twenty years I had a job which obliged me to travel widely, particularly in
Asia. This required excessive time in hotel rooms and airports so I took up learning
and reciting poetry. I would practice with my face in the water when doing laps in the
pool or alone in my room so as not to be a menace to the public, and would
occasionally recite in the right company. Some of my poems were about travel, not
the sort that I was undertaking as an atypical ‘road warrior’, but about voyages in the
slipstream of imagination.

CP Cavafy’s Ithaka (translation, John Mavrogordato) is at once a story of a legendary

journey and an invocation to travel in an almost modern sense:

‘Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka / You must pray that the way be long,
Full of adventures and experiences. / The Laistrygonians, and the Kyklopes,
Angry Poseidon, - don’t be afraid of them; / You will never find such things on your
way, / If only your thoughts be high, and a select / Emotion touch your spirit and your
body…’

Cavafy, a Greek from Alexandria, wrote this in 1911. Many young travellers in the
sixties discovered it, seeing it as a song to the journey rather than the arrival. It also
had the advantage of taking many of us back to Homer and Odysseus’ epic journey.

In Ithaka, we are advised to ignore any fears and phantoms, and to ‘…pray that the
way be long; / Many be the summer mornings / When with what pleasure, with what
delight / You enter harbours never seen before’.

What an inducement to the ways of the vagabond!

We are urged to stop at Phoenician trading stations to acquire ‘mother of pearl and
coral, amber and ebony, / And sensuous perfumes of every kind…’ And, as well, to
‘go to the many cities of Egypt, / To learn and still to learn from those who know.’

The traveller should never hurry, but ‘Be quite old when you anchor at the island
Rich with all you have gained on the way, / Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches’.

Ithaka has inspired the journey but true wealth comes from what the traveller learns:
‘Wise as you have become, with all your experience, / You will have understood the
meaning of an Ithaka’.

There is no clearer message about the value of absorbing the moment, not focusing
obsessively on the destination, gaining what you can from each experience – and
when you arrive and find just some poor place, expect nothing more, because ‘Ithaka
has given you your lovely journey’.

While we are in a Homeric place, Keats’ ethereal sonnet On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer appears. This is a poem on a journey which is entirely in the mind
yet refers unerringly to true lands and true discovery.

Keats had read the classics and knew the lands and seas of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

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In writing ‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold / And many goodly states and
kingdoms seen / Round many Western islands have I been / Which bards in fealty to
Apollo hold’, Keats might be describing a visit to these immemorial lands, so flawless
is the language. However he goes on to express exhilaration at the awakening which
came upon reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer: ‘Then felt I like some
watcher of the skies / when a new planet swims into his ken’.

What a thrilling image, and what days they were when a new translation of an ancient
poet could be as revelatory as the distant gleam of an unknown planet; or, even more
powerfully, as the discovery of an ocean: ‘… like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific…Silent upon a peak in Darien’.

Writing this in the early 19th century, Keats might be forgiven for confusing Hernando
Cortez with Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to cross Darien (in Panama,
today) and gaze at the Pacific from its eastern shore. What is striking is the sweeping
sense of exploration and enlightenment that can be found in reading, and from the
perspective of the poetry, the vibrant inspiration in another poet’s writings, the
‘realms of gold’.

Shakespeare, naturally, provides us with wisdom and wit on everything. One verse I
particularly like for its wise angle on going abroad is from King Richard II. John of
Gaunt is speaking to his son, who has been banished from England: ‘All places that
the eye of heaven visits / Are to a wise man ports and happy havens’. Isn’t it so that
the alert traveller sees attraction everywhere, while clots see only people and things
that are not as they are at home?

Gaunt advises Bolingbroke to make the most of his situation – to see the opportunities
and pleasures to be had in the places he is going rather than to dwell on what he has
lost: ‘Look at what thy soul holds dear, imagine it / To lie that way thou goest, not
whence thou com’st’. And to use his imagination: ‘Suppose the singing birds
musicians, / The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strew’d, / The flowers fair
ladies’- a quirky reminder of the delights concealed in the familiar, especially in a
foreign place, and one that inverts conventional travel advice.

Charles Baudelaire’s Invitation to the Journey was published in The Flowers of Evil
in 1857. It begins:

‘My child and my star, / Let us wander afar,

None can resist her, / In the desire of living together;
- To live there at leisure, / To die there for pleasure
Under this wonderful weather… (translation, Arthur Symons).

Baudelaire’s was a dream of exile with a lover to a place she resembled – one of
‘Oriental splendour’, which was ‘vaguely voluptuous of amber’, where ‘all is beauty,
ardency, Passion, rest and luxury’. There is a fleeting shadow of menace: ‘See how
on these Lagoons / Sleep sinister moons…’ (although Roy Campbell translates this as
‘On the channels and streams /See each vessel that dreams / In its whimsical
vagabond way…’) but moonlight or ship, it has come from afar to meet the
evanescent desires of his lover.

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This is luxury travel infused with Orientalist nostalgia - sumptuous beauty, rare
flowers, revealing mirrors, luminous, drunken skies, radiant sunsets and a mysterious
woman with ‘treacherous eyes’. The sinister suggestion in Symons is consistent with
images in French Orientalist paintings such as those of Eugène Delacroix with which
Baudelaire was familiar; his ‘Women of Algiers in their Room’ could almost be an
illustration of L’Invitation au Voyage.

Another French poet takes us along as he is swept away on a journey of geographical

abandon, experiencing whatever the tumultuous world throws up. Arthur Rimbaud’s
life and writing constituted an all-out assault on frontiers and convention; he enjoyed
a colourful childhood and adolescence and, giving up poetry at the age of 19,
embarked on years of adventure until his inevitable early death in Marseilles at the
age of 37 (‘Quick! Are there any other lives?’ he had demanded in A Season in Hell.)
Incredibly, none of his verse was written once his wandering began.

In 1876 Rimbaud enlisted in the Dutch Army and was sent to the East Indies,
whereupon he deserted, found his way to Africa and ‘settled’ in Abyssinia. There he
was variously a trader, smuggler, explorer, representative of the King of Abyssinia,
and writer of reports for the French Geographical Society.

Lovers of Rimbaud regret that he abandoned poetry when so young, but are astounded
that he produced such wealth. We remain hopeful that a manuscript will emerge in
North Africa, or somewhere, as vibrant and visionary as the brilliant oeuvre that is
known. The celebrated 100-line poem Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) was written
in 1871 when Rimbaud was 17. The story is that of a boat which recounts its own
outlandish voyages after its crew is massacred (translation, Martin Sorrell): ‘I didn’t
give a damn about the crews / Or the Flemish wheat and English cotton. / Once the
shindig with my haulers finished / I had the current take me where I wished’. And
from that moment, ‘I bathed in the Poem of the sea, / latescent and steeped in stars,
devouring green azures; where a drowned man / Like beached flotsam sometimes
sinks in a trance…’

‘Glaciers, silver suns, pearl seas, firecoal skies! / Hideous wreckages down in brown
depths / Where enormous insect-tormented snakes / Crash from twisted trees reeking
with blackness…’

The hailstorm of images seems to be a premonition of his reckless vagabondage to

come: furious riptides, atrocious moons, unanchored peninsulas, skies splintered by
lightning, rutting behemoths, star-sown islands, delirious skies which summon sailors,
‘amazing Floridas where flowers twine with panther eyes inside men’s skins’,
underwater rainbows, hurricanes hurling the boat through ‘birdless space’, before
returning to a melancholy Europe, ‘a dark cold pond’ on a ‘fragrant evening at dusk’,
and the journey’s end:

‘Steeped in your slow wine, waves, no more can I / Cadge rides in the cotton-
freighters’ slipstream, / Nor brave proud lines of ensigns and streamers,
Nor face the prison-ships’ terrible eyes.’

Note: Baudelaire and Rimbaud, like other poets of intense imagery, present almost unsurmountable difficulties for
the translator. There are several English versions of these poems which differ markedly.