Observations placeholder
Ritsos, Yiannis - 1953 Peace
Identifier
029401
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
When Ritsos was released in 1952 he returned to Athens to begin a crucial period of happiness in his personal life and development in his artistry. The return was celebrated exultingly in a long bitter-sweet-poem entitled Unsubjugated City and in a short lyric called 'Peace', written in January 1953. Dedicated to Kostas Varnalis, this latter work defines its subject by invoking Iife's simplest and most genuine pleasures
The poem is included at the end of the collection Vigil as though to vindicate Ritsos's - and Greece's - faithful waiting throughout the proceeding years; it also looks forward to Ritsos's own happiness, for in 1954 he married and in 1955 welcomed an infant daughter into his household and sang her arrival in a 'small encyclopaedia of diminutives' called Morning Star, the first poem addressed to a member of his immediate family that was not a dirge.
A description of the experience
Peace
Peace is the odour of food in the evening,
when the halting of a car in the street is not fear,
when a knock on the door means a friend
Peace is a glass of warm milk and a book in front of the child who
awakens