occasions of love

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Robert Graves _______ ______ OCCASIONS OF LOVE The Ample Garden However artfully you transformed yourself Into bitch, vixen, tigress, I knew the woman behind. Light as a bird now, you descend at dawn From the poplar bough or ivy bunch To peck my strawberries, And have need indeed of an ample garden: All my fruits, fountains, arbours, lawns In fief to your glory. You, most unmetaphorically you: Call me a Catholic, so devout in faith I joke of love, as Catholics do of God, And scorn all exegesis. 8

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Robert Graves _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ______

OCCASIONS OF LOVE

The Ample Garden

However artfully you transformed yourself Into bitch, vixen, tigress, I knew the woman behind.

Light as a bird now, you descend at dawn From the poplar bough or ivy bunch To peck my strawberries,

And have need indeed of an ample garden: All my fruits, fountains, arbours, lawns In fief to your glory.

You, most unmetaphorically you: Call me a Catholic, so devout in faith I joke of love, as Catholics do of God, And scorn all exegesis.

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She is No Liar

She is no liar, yet she will wash away Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand, And, dressed at dawn in clean white robes.wil1 say, Trusting the ignorant world to understand: ‘Such things no longer are; this is today.’

A Measure of Casualness

Too fierce the candlelight; your gentle voice Roars as in dream; my shoulder-nooks flower; A scent of honeysuckle invades the house, And my fingertips are so love-enhanced That sailcloth feels like satin to them. Teach me a measure of casualness Though you stalk into my room like Venus naked.

At Best, Poets

Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters, And watchful fingers : We claim no magic comparable to hers- At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.

0 1964 International Authors N.V.

THE LITERARY CRITICS George Watson

Previously issued as a Pelican, this is the first history of English criticism by a British scholar since Saintsbury’s of fifty years ago. Highly original in approach, Mr. Watson sees his subject, not as the conventional steady evolution, but as a pattern forcefully disrupted by the great critics’ refusal to accept obsolescent assumptions. 25s. net

HENRY JAMES AND HIS CULT

Maxwell Geismar ‘The case is triumphantly, and very eloquently, made for a drastic reduction of James’s current standing.’ PHILIP TOYNBEE in The Observer. 30s. net

HENRY KING and the Seventeenth Century

Ronald Berman The first full length study of the author of The Exequy, a representative figure of an age of paradox. 21s. net

THE DIRECTIONS OF MEMORY

Laurence Lerner The latest addition to the Phoenic Living Poets. 12s. 6d. net

CHATTO & WINDUS

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