SOURCE: "Eros: His Power, Forms and Transformations in the Poetry of Odysseus Elytis," in Odysseus Elytis: Analogies of Light, edited by Ivar Ivask, University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, pp. 45-58.

Below, Decavalles explores one of Elytis's principle themes, the "progressive story of Eros's nature … his external and internal discoveries in the process of building a world at once natural, human esthetic, earthly and universal, timely and timeless, finite and infinite, mortal yet immortal. "

I have conceived my figure between a sea that comes to view right behind the whitewashed little wall of a chapel and a barefoot girl with the wind lifting her dress, a chance moment I struggle to capture, and I waylay it with Greek words.

If I spoke at the beginning about a girl and a chapel, at the risk of sounding less than serious, I had my reasons. I would have liked to draw that...