ast
becomes a source of happiness in his "Rhapsody," and life is agleam with
joy in his "Idyl." But most reflective of this power of the poet to
conquer darkness with light and to turn ruins into gleaming palaces of
beauty and of song, is the poem entitled "At the Windmill."

The local color which is by no means a rare characteristic of the poetry
of Palamas is particularly rich in this collection. Many of its songs
are vivid and clear pictures of Greek life. Yet with the touch of
symbolism, he makes such local flashes world-flames. In "The Dead," we
have a faithful description of the Greek custom of exposing the open
coffin with the body in a room whence all furniture is removed. Friends
and relatives are gathered about the dead; even children are not
excluded from paying this last honor to the departed. The windows are
closed, and in the gloom tapers and candles are burning before the
images of the saints and over the flower-covered body, while the smoke
of the incense and the fragrance of the wreaths fill the air. Yet
somehow in the verses of the song one catches the moving sounds of
mourning humanity, the image of death against life.

3. FRAGMENTS FROM THE SONG TO THE SUN

"The Fragments from the Song to the Sun" contain some of the noblest
lines of Palamas' poetry. We cannot have a complete understanding of the
symbolism with which this part of _Life Immovable_ is filled. For, after
all, from the great hymn to the light-god, we have here only fragments.
But these fragments remind one of the gold-stained ruins of the
_Akropolis_ against the bright Attic sky. Throughout, we are aware of a
striking duality. The key to these sunlit melodies is probably found in
the "Giants' Shadows." Among the shadows whose voices ascend from
darkness "like moanings of the sea," the poet discovers Telamonian Ajax,
the giant who is utterly absorbed in the world within him, the source of
his light and life, and Goethe, the Teutonic poet, who turns to the
world about himself as a flower to the sun, and whose heart "longs and
thirsts for light." Here then, we detect the doubleness of the sun of
Palamas, a sun within, the source of his inner life and thought, and a
sun without, the source of all external beauty and growth.

Thus without detracting from the charm and power of the day-star, he
ensouls it with a higher meaning and transforms a fiery globe into a
light-clad Olympian divinity, a giver of life and death, a healer and a
slay