"Decay" and "speech" are the two poles between which Seferis moves with his first work, "Turning," in 1931. With the poetic "speech," he attempted to resist the "decay" to which the man of the twentieth century is exposed, forced to live in a "dissolved and drugged world, where the senses evaporate and lose their reality, within the chaos of impressions," as the poet himself aptly described it.

Within these conditions, "decay" entered Seferis's poetry in two different ways.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]