Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that a poem, to be truly good, should touch us “like the presence of the sea.” And late in life, in a despondent letter to a friend, our own Marianne Moore confessed that the two things she believed a lasting poem should possess were “a fighting spirit and a sense of the sea.” Certainly Moore possessed a fighting spirit, even if demurely tucked under her kooky three-cornered hat; as an ardent fan of the once-glorious Brooklyn Dodgers, she needed it. But the sea eluded her, though occasionally she succeeded in suggesting its force, as in the lines from her weird poem “Those Various Scalpels”: “flowers of ice and snow / sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships.”T.S. Eliot signaled this out for praise, noting that the unexpected collision of sounds reminded him of Latin poetry; and yet, we recognize what Moore regretted: This after all is a high literary wind, without the quickening sting of salt or spray.

For a vivid sense of the sea we have to turn our gaze towards the Mediterranean and especially towards the Greeks. From Homer and his “wine-dark sea” onwards, Greek poets have evoked the sea with mingled dread and exhilaration. Their sea is rough and pummeling; it is a laboring ocean against which human ambition must be measured. For all his love of Greece, Byron’s “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!” is quite un-Greek. His is the sea of a spectator, not of a toiler on the waves.

Modern Greek poets have somehow succeeded in recapturing the old Homeric ocean.When we read the poems of Cavafy or George Seferis or Odysseus Elytis or Nikos Gatsos, we are brought, sometimes brutally, into that “presence of the sea” that is one guarantor of all great verse.Their ocean too is literary – how could it be otherwise under the ancient shadow of Homer? – but their lines manage to move like incoming waves, with all the bitter savor and commotion of their origins.

In his great sequence “Mythical Story,” Seferis conjures up the Mediterranean through its exactions on the crew, those Argonauts of classical legend; in his poems we do not see the ocean, we feel it:

We moored on shores full of nightscents
With the singing of birds, waters which left on the hands
The memory of a great happiness.
But the voyages did not end.
Their souls became one with the oars and the rowlocks
With the solemn face of the prow
With the channel made by the rudder
With the water that shattered their image.

The Greek title of this sequence is “Mythistorema,” a compound Seferis coined. History and myth are inextricably fused in his verses, as though history could be recovered, if at all, only in the shape of those half-remembered myths which the harsh memory of exile pieces together again. And the sea is the matrix of memory in these poems.

Seferis was lucky in his English translators; all his poems may be found in the superb “Collected Poems,” edited and beautifully translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton University Press, 299 pages, $20).

George Seferis was born in 1900 in Smyrna. That city on the Aegean fell to Turkey after 1922 – it is now Izmir – and its Greek populace was scattered to the winds of exile. Though Seferis enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career, eventually becoming the Greek ambassador to Britain towards the end of his life, and though his poetry grew ever more celebrated, culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963, he remained beneath the glittering accolades the inconsolable voice of his homeland, not only in its diaspora but in its own savage, and self-inflicted, agonies. When he wrote “Wherever I go, Greece wounds me,” this was no narrow nationalistic utterance but an expression of loathing as well as sorrow. Anyone who has experienced exile understands these lancing words at once.

Perhaps it is this underlying ache of loss that gives Seferis’s poetry a sense of the sea; not “the element itself, lascivious and liquid,” which Paul Claudel, another great invoker of oceans, salutes, but the sea as that expanse through which we toil even as it takes us from home forever:

We saw them perhaps twice and then they took to the ships;
Cargoes of coal, cargoes of grain, and our friends
Lost beyond the ocean forever.
Dawn finds us beside the weary lamp
Drawing on the paper, with great effort and awkwardly,
Ships, mermaids or sea-shells;
At dusk we go down to the river
Because it shows us the way to the sea;
And we spend the nights in cellars that smell of tar.

If Seferis’s sense of the sea is un-Byronic, it also has little in common with the “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening sea” Buck Mulligan caricatures in Joyce’s “Ulysses.” That too seems but the ironic obverse of the Romantic ocean. For Seferis, and for other Greek poets, the sea is almost a human thing, it is the place of our lives, overwhelming and alien yet excruciatingly familiar, and contains all the brackish strangeness of human existence:

What do our souls seek journeying
On the decks of decayed ships
Crowded with sallow women and crying infants
Unable to forget themselves, either with the flying fish
Or with the stars which the tips of the masts indicate,
Grated by gramophone records
Bound unwillingly by nonexistent pilgrimages
Murmuring broken thoughts from foreign tongues?

Seferis translated Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into modern Greek, and it would be tempting to conclude from those echoes of Eliot that lap at the edges of his poems that for him the sea represented a kind of wasteland, though a boundless one. But what makes him at once more disillusioned and yet more hopeful than Eliot is that the sea holds out the continual possibility of mythic memory, however its horizons recede.

eormsby@nysun.com