The City

The City
By C. P. Cavafy

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.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

About the Poem

You said: “I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea.
Another city will turn up, one better than this…”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.

In “The City”, C.P. Cavafy offers a haunting meditation on the inability to escape oneself. The speaker dreams of abandoning the city—representing failure, disappointment, and perhaps forbidden desires—for another, better place. But the poem undermines this fantasy, repeating the refrain that the city, and all it symbolizes, “will always pursue you.” The “city” becomes not just a literal place, but a psychological and emotional state—a metaphor for internalized shame, regret, or the burden of identity.

This theme has particular resonance in queer readings of the poem. For many LGBTQ+ individuals, especially in the early 20th century when Cavafy was writing, fleeing from one’s environment did not mean freedom from judgment or repression. The city follows not because of geography, but because it lives within the self. The speaker’s disillusionment—“You won’t find new places, you won’t find other seas”—echoes the pain of those who have tried to escape their own truths or reinvent themselves in new places, only to discover that what haunts them is internal.

Cavafy’s strength lies in this subtlety. He rarely wrote directly about homosexuality, but his poems are filled with coded longing, remembrance of fleeting encounters, and the quiet ache of unfulfilled desires. “The City” is often paired with poems like “Days of 1903” or “The Afternoon Sun” in queer readings, all of which evoke nostalgia for past loves or unspoken yearnings. The city becomes both the scene of desire and the prison of repression. During Pride Month, “The City” reminds us that visibility, acceptance, and healing must begin within—even as we fight for it in the world outside.

About the Poet

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) was a Greek poet who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. Though he worked as a civil servant by day, his poetry carved a powerful legacy that would influence generations of queer and modernist writers. His work often blends historical references from Hellenistic and Byzantine eras with deeply personal emotional landscapes. Published sparingly during his lifetime, many of his poems circulated privately among friends and admirers, adding to their aura of intimacy and secrecy.

Cavafy was a gay man writing in a conservative society, and he developed a poetic language that allowed him to express homoerotic longing while veiling it in allegory, history, and metaphor. He never married and lived a relatively reclusive life, but his poetry reveals a rich inner world of desire, memory, and loss. After his death, his work gained international recognition, with poets like E.M. Forster championing his genius and his role as a pioneer of queer literature.

In poems like “The City,” Cavafy’s voice is timeless. His ability to fuse the personal with the universal, the erotic with the philosophical, continues to speak to readers who have wrestled with identity, regret, and the yearning for a different life. For LGBTQ+ audiences, his poetry offers not just reflection, but connection—a bridge across time and silence.