ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a diary entry from the published notebooks of George Seferis, dated Tuesday, 4 June 1946, evokes an emotional moment of cultural return, a "second coming" of Hellenic civilization. Seferis describes the "excavation site" of the Archaeological Museum in Athens, where statues placed in storage at the beginning of World War II for protection from the invading and later occupying German forces are resurrected from their vaults beneath the floors. Seferis does not name the historical moment with any precision. Instead, his emphasis on bodies and intense emotions serves to neutralize, or even to repress, the fact that Greece is in the midst of Civil War. Seferis takes a very different approach from that of Pound in his appropriation of Homer. Both culture and nature emanate from this "Light" of Hellenism, as Seferis explains in the essay on Thrush.
