____________________________________________________________________
Read the full poem: The City by C.P. Cavafy
____________________________________________________________________
A friend gave me this poem, the way friends give me a lot of things, the same way most of what I absorb culturally seems to happen almost accidentally, and the same way anyone’s accidents add up to their life ultimately. You’ll like this one, my friend said through his phone, lighting up my drifty night brain like a friendly tentacle. And I did. In sixteen lines it probably sums up most of what I’ve ever written and most of what I’ve ever enjoyed reading.
Cavafy’s “The City” is a reckoning with home and travel, between the territory of the possible and that of the actual. Split into two stanzas, it’s a poem of tension and release, of trying and failing, running and accepting. It’s a poem about the illusory magic offered by the city, and how we spend our time in urban capitalism trailed by past imperfect versions of ourselves while being seduced by future perfect ones – if we could only find them.
My first thought on reading was: Where is my life here? Where am I up to in the trajectory of this poem? Which line am I?
The poem opens with:
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
The speaker seems to address me directly, almost sternly, and I’m hooked, because that level of directness is not often mixed with this level of knowing, and what I want in life is to be correctly corrected. The poem was right, I had been to other countries, I had failed at a lot of things in lots of different locations. But my heart wasn’t buried like something dead; I hadn’t given up yet. I was still to and-froing between the unknown and something like a homestead. There was this feeling though, that Manchester was doing something bad to me. That I’d wasted so much time already, on these streets, and in so many of these houses. Trying to come to terms with myself, to work out what my body was for and how my brain functioned best and what I was supposed to do with everything.
I had spoken many times about the hauntings of the streets of Manchester. What I saw of my previous selves in them, intrusively. The people I had been, been with, and all the people who had upped and left here. Disembodied over-the-shoulder heads would chatter at me, reliving their lines in real time as I tried to push past Greggs. There became a desire to run before I was the oldest thing, the loneliest thing. It happens. I’ve seen it happening. People communicating solely via past landmarks: the old BBC, the old Jilly’s Rock World, the old Dutch Pancake House (and that’s only one section of road). I’d take people on tours through the city – fell off my bike there, stuck my foot through the spoke, don’t know why – first date there, Misery Loves Co. T-shirt, swollen infected eye, he didn’t mind – used to be a park there, we’d sleep in wayward piles until the first bus home arrived.
Most of the memories added up to career avoidance, insecurity, alcohol, risky behaviours, and the people I’d come to be friends with. I’d fill my life with people, as if collecting them could teach me something, save me from the uncertainties of navigating a world as one small self alone.
I travelled and came back – revenge trips against a city that wouldn’t home me properly. Where Cavafy says, “Wherever I turn, wherever I look / I see the black ruins of my life”, I was thwarting those ruins, outstepping them. Liaising with past friends, comparing journeys. Who’d gone the furthest, done, seen, been the most? It wasn’t about settling, because for that you needed money. But it was, sometimes, foolishly, about looking for a person who might settle me. Who I could shift around the indifference of the landscape with. I’d latch onto friends like a lank unfinished limpet – who could I be, how could I say it, what would this later mean when we’re around that future campfire looking back, together at last and slow? It’s old age I’ve been aiming for the entire time, ever since I was a child – how do you get to that point and still be happy? I’d seen so many people doing it wrong that I’d grown up as largely negation. In Manchester where, much like the addressee of The City, “I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
I fled completely after a time. It was too much, the lack of linear progress, the accumulations and reversals. The rentals, the rentals. I said to a friend – when I was twenty-four and presumably doing okay – is it just going to jobs that are alright and drinking with friends and watching films and going to gigs sometimes? He said, I think so. At least when you went somewhere, you could say you’d done something. The years away do add up. There’s those scratch maps people buy to colonise their bedroom walls – been here, been here. Many people, even those more than halfway through their lives, are still counting the number of countries they’ve visited and lording that information over the less-travelled, proudly. The same way others do with relationship longevity – diamond, platinum.
The second stanza of The City (after the line break that lets the devastation of time and the impossibility of trying to outrun it sink in) opens with:
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
This mirroring of the opening two lines of the first stanza produce a deadening effect, so blunt its comic. Truth like an anvil.
Manchester has always pursued me. Nothing else was ever it. Life is accumulative, everything comes with.
And Cavafy here, that’s what he’s saying, the linear is a myth, travel, time, all of it. You can’t escape entropy. You can go somewhere else and start again, but you can’t delete anything or cancel out the twenty years you’ve already spent in the city you’re trying to improve on. It is very hard to build true knowing, and by the time you have, you’ll be back at the start of stanza one saying “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore / find another city better than this one” all over again.
As Cavafy says, “You’ll always end up in this city,” wherever you choose to be.
Our cities are inside us.
When I opened up in a new city, nothing existed there for me from before that time – its shore was never mine. The home of my past was trapped where I had lived it, so any movement was bound to lead to a splitting. I was always going to be both Cavafy’s first stanza and his second. The desire to go and the desire to go back. Perhaps I was living in the white space between the two verses, which was actually just a pause, which was itself a form of nothing.
Choosing is always a shutting down of possibility.
But possibility is a cloud and if you stay too long in the vapour, the hands of the solid will pass through you like lost rituals. You’ll watch your neighbours shut down, your colleagues, old school friends. It all looks so minimal. But they’re grouping. While you and the other transients blow through each other, and you can’t, you somehow can’t ever build a community. The world is too big, too demanding of our dreams, too particular in what it conditions us to dream for.
In the lines, “Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road,” I feel an affirmation rising. Not hoping is not the same as being hopeless. There’s relief in knowing my life is wasted wherever I go, that doesn’t really matter to a whole lot of people what I do with it. But when literature speaks to me, it does feel intimate, and I almost wanted to sort my shit out for Cavafy.
I said to my little boy that at some point we’re just not here anymore, so you’ve really got to try to make the best of it. I had buried my heart in Manchester; it wasn’t dead, I could hear it beating in the substrate. I had to come back to dig it up again – I needed it. My memories are my friends, and the buildings and people I have lost are dear to me, even in absence. The outer environment shapes and nourishes the inner. “You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighbourhoods, turn gray in these same houses,” says Cavafy, and I will. I’d rather play in the cracks of a city I know, watch a thing I love leave me, than feel nothing when confronted with the changes of a thing I don’t have any past with.
There is no train for me, no bus, no road. By which I mean, nothing leads away from here. However far I travel, I’m only ever popping out for one elongated moment. I’m the calmness of zooplankton since I returned to the ground that I grew from. I’ll drift and I’ll float, and maybe one day I won’t, but for now I look around and stretch my arms and move my body and fall in love with my friends and all the many connections that come and go.
Cavafy’s narrator closes the argument with:
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
which reads to me like a fiery scream toward death, akin to the “rage rage” of Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle. There’s the same intensity here, as if the going to another country is only serving to postpone the real act of living – and Cavafy’s poem is a call to start living passionately, vitality, within our given spatial disappointments. But the real trick, which I’ve learned in the many years since first encountering this poem, is that nothing is wasted with poetry, however stationary or peripatetic a life may be.
Because if you’ve made poetry here, in this small corner, you’ve made it everywhere in the world.
____________________________________________________________________
LYDIA UNSWORTH is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Stay Awhile (Knives Forks and Spoons), Arthropod (Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Aftershock, Ambit, Anthropocene, Banshee, Berlin Lit, Blackbox Manifold, B O D Y, Oxford Poetry, Perverse, and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. Her latest collection of poetry is This Now Extends to My Daughter (Blue Diode Publishing, 2026)
____________________________________________________________________
C.P. CAVAFY is a major figure of modern Greek literature, he is sometimes considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century.