The Poetry of Robert Graves Ronald Gaskell

Goodbye to All That, although it was written more than thirty years ago, is in many ways the best introduction to Graves’s poems. It isn’t very much about poetry; it’s about friendship and contempt, about loving and getting married and having children, and (over- whelmingly) about the agony of the first world war. These emotions, and others like them, have formed the substance of his work. He is not one of those poets like Valtry or Rilke who enlarge or deepen our experience, but a writer who helps us to understand our experience by the thoroughness with which he explores his own. And the qualities which emerge from his autobiography-the intransi- gence and realism, the personal integrity-are the qualities that give resilience to his verse. He can be arrogant and scornful, he can be passionate, humorous and gentle. He can write in casual speech rhythms without becoming prosaic and in emphatic metres without ever sounding banal. He has a technical competence which is the admiration of younger writers.

The poems he has decided to keep are available in two books, the Collected Poems of 1959 and his new volume, More Poems 1961. In a preface to the Collected Poems he tells us:

These poems follow a roughly chronological order. The first was written in the summer of 1914, and shows where I stood at the age of 19, before getting caught up in the first world war, which permanently changed my outlook on life.

Graves’s early reputation was made with poems written in the trenches. Most of them are not very good, and he no longer prints them. But Graves saw some of the ugliest fighting of the Western front, and the scar that the experience left on his mind has been decisive for everything he has written: it comes through in his poetry in his respect for courage, his distrust of generalisations, his accep- tance of pain and hardship as normal.

The immediate result of the war was to make writing a necessity for him, as a relief from mental suffering. He had been badly shell- shocked in France and continued to have dreams of the most violent and disagreeable kind for ten or twelve years. These were not recollections of the physical brutality of the trenches, but dreams of inexplicable terror and bewilderment. In a diary of September, 1929 he notes:

One of the best physical sensations I know is waking up dead tired, with a clear mind, in sunlight, after a night of horror. Several of his poems in the nineteen twenties record nightmares,

and record them with a kind of strangled intensity as if the poem had been drafted immediately on waking. They are not good peoms, and no amount of revision could make them good. Most of them

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Graves has suppressed. That he continues to print one or two is a sign, perhaps, not that he is satisfied with them but that he attaches too much importance to these experiences to allow the record of them to disappear.

There is, however, one poem, and a very characteristic one, in which Graves is sufficiently detached from the experience to focus it clearly and to control its violence by a very simple metre and rhyme scheme. (One of the features of his work is that the most sinister poems are apt to have the most harmless surface):

THE HAUNTED HOUSE ‘Come, surly fellow, come: a song!’

What, fools? Sing to you? Choose from the clouded tales of wrong

And terror I bring to you: Of a night so torn with cries,

Honest men sleeping Start awake with rabid eyes,

Bone-chilled, flesh creeping, Of spirits in the web-hung room

Up above the stable, Groans, knocking in the gloom,

The dancing table, Of demons in the dry well

That cheep and mutter, Clanging of an unseen bell,

Blood choking the gutter, Of lust frightful past belief

Lurking unforgotten, Unrestrainable endless grief

In breasts long rotten. A song? What laughter or what song

Can this house remember ? Do flowers and butterflies belong To a blind December?

This nightmare atmosphere is present in several of Graves’s poems, not only in the twenties but as late as 1940 when he pub- lished a book with the significant title No More Ghosts. There are hints in his work of the irrational, the unexplainable, which are all the more disturbing because the argument of the poems is markedly rational, the tone sceptical, the form regular. He has always been fascinated by the irrational element in poetry: in nursery rhymes, in spells, riddles, charms, magical poems generally. The title of his first considerable book of criticism was Poetic Unreason. His own poetry is reasonable; but in many of the poems the reason is hardly

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more than a tightrope, and if the man loses his balance there is nothing to break his fall.

Of all the uncertainties of our life, Dr. Johnson observed, the most terrible is the uncertainty of the continuance of reason. It’s this uncertainty, this precariousness of the mind’s balance, that gives such tension and poignancy to the most remarkable of Graves’s poems-the poem which he used to call 0 Love in Me, and which he now calls Sick Love:

0 Love, be fed with apples while you may, And feel the sun and go in royal array, A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,

Though in what listening horror for the cry That soars in outer blackness dismally, The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:

Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head, Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood, That shivering glory not to be despised.

Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark-a shining space With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.

Few of Graves’s poems between the wars are happy, many of them are disquieting. In the preface to a collection of his poems in 1938 he wrote:

To manifest poetic faith by a close and energetic study of the dis- gusting, the contemptible and the evil, is not very far in the direction of poetic serenity; but it has been the behaviour most natural to a man of my physical and literary inheritance.

The Haunted House stands at the beginning of the 1938 collection, as a warning of what we are to expect: ‘Choose from the clouded tales of wrong/And terror I bring to you’. There is a premonition, too, of one of the themes that Graves was to choose most fre- quently, or by which he was to be ridden most frequently: ‘lust frightful past belief’. Lust is obviously a difficult theme for poetry, and one not often attempted in English. There is Shakespeare’s sonnet, a few poems by Donne, one or two by Yeats, some lines in Eliot. All of these, except occasionally Donne and very occasionally Yeats, isolate lust, and so simplify the experience and simplify the poem. Graves rarely does this. For his concern is not with lust itself but with the interaction of lust and love. ‘Poetry’, he claims, ‘is rooted in love, and love in desire’. Nearly a third of his work consists of love poems; and what gives them their value is precisely this awareness of the savagery of love, the inseparability of love and desire. But even where love is not abused or complicated by lust, they are seldom happy poems. They are poems of anger, jealously,

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reproach, grief, separation. The moments of happiness, the moments of calm, of trust, are only moments: ‘0 love be fed with apples while you may’. This sense of danger, of insecurity even in love, is characteristic of Graves :

Be assured, the Dragon is not dead But once more from the pools of peace Shall rear his fabulous green head.

Or as he put it once in prose: ‘I should say that my health as a poet lies in my mistrust of the comfortable point of rest’.

It’s this mistrust that gives Graves’s poetry its dryness, even harshness. His attitude to experience is thoroughly pragmatic: each new emotion must be dealt with in its own way. The way that he uses most frequently, especially in his mature poetry, is to present a single image or legendary situation in which he can set his emotions at a distance (the poems have titles like Ulysses, Prometheus, Theseus and Ariudne). This strategy is fairly common in modem poetry and derives, probably, from French symbolism. It is the method Eliot identified forty years ago in his essay on Hamlet; he argues that there is something radically wrong with the play because Shakespeare has not succeeded in inventing a plot and characters that entirely objectify the emotions he was struggling to deal with: the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

This sounds rather abstract and theoretical, but it’s easy to see how it works in a very short poem of Graves, which presents the image of a ship leaving harbour:

And glad to find, on again looking at it, It meant even less to me than I had thought- You know the ship is moving when you see The boxes on the quayside sliding away And growing smaller-and feel a calm delight When the port’s cleared and the coast out of sight, And ships are few, each on its proper course, With no occasion for approach or discourse.

The pleasure we take in a poem like this is at first simply in the accuracy of the writing, the quality of observation, for instance, in lines three to five. But if the poem gave us no more than this, we could not take it very seriously. In fact, it gives us a good deal more, as soon as we look at the title: A Former Attachment. And the emotion-the sense of freedom and independence that comes with the breaking of an attachment-is defined not only through the central image, the objective correlative, but through the vigour of the rhythm, the tautness of the phrasing, the half-rhymes that give the verse its strength and balance.

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In a poem of this kind Graves nearly always uses half-rhyme, to suggest, that the experience dealt with, like all experiences, is incomplete. A Furmer Attachment is written in herioc couplets, but the characteristic ring and finality of the couplet have been muted into a tight-lipped casualness. The poem begins in the middle of a sentence and ends on an off-beat rhyme.

This use of language to enforce his theme is typical of Graves. We find it again in Certain Mercies, although there the half-rhymes, coming as close together as they do, have an effect not of casualness but of discord. They jar on the ear, and this accentuates the harsh- ness of the conditions that the spirit must submit to:

Now must all satisfaction Appear mere mitigation Of an accepted curse? Must we henceforth be grateful That the guards, though spiteful, Are slow of foot and wit? That by night we may spread Over the plank bed A thin coverlet ?

That the rusty water In the unclean pitcher Our thirst quenches? That the rotten, detestable Food is yet eatable By us ravenous ?

That the prison censor Permits a weekly letter? (We may write: ‘we are well’.) That, with patience and deference, We do not experience The punishment cell? That each new indignity Defeats only the body, Pampering the spirit With obscure, proud merit?

The theme of the poem is the dualism of spirit and body. But where an earlier poet, a poet of the seventeenth century would have presented this as a dialogue, Graves works it out through his central image-the spirit as prisoner-and drives this home by the sharpness with which he focusses the image: the plank bed, the thin coverlet, and so on. The dualism of spirit and body reaches into the diction of the poem. The spirit, priding itself on its freedom, likes to use high-sounding abstract nouns : satisfaction, mitigation, patience, deference, indignity. But this freedom is an illusion; for in fact it is

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tied inescapably to this wretched animal, this body that has to be fed and watered like any other animal. And this is acknowledged in the physical details: the rusty water, the unclean pitcher, the detestable food. Thematically the poem is a conflict between soul and body; linguistically, a conflict between abstract and concrete nouns.

Many of Graves’s poems work in this way, through a central image realised in vivid detail. And in the best of them, as in Certain Mercies, he not only presents an experience but explores and implicitly judges it. He can define a complex moral situation in a dozen or fourteen lines. One evening a few years ago, while sitting in a bus, he noticed through the window a woman saying goodnight to a young man. On the basis of that glimpse he wrote the poem With Her Lips Only:

This honest wife, challenged at dusk At the garden gate, under 9 moon perhaps, In the scent of honeysuckle, dared to deny Love to an urgent lover: with her lips only, Not with her heart. It was no assignation; Taken aback, what could she say else? For the children’s sake, the lie was venial; ‘For the children’s sake’, she argued with her conscience. Yet a mortal lie must follow before dawn: Challenged as usual in her own bed, She protests love to an urgent husband, Not with her heart but with her lips only; ‘For the children’s sake’, she argues with her conscience, ‘For the children’-turning suddenly cold towards them.

This interest in the treachery of the heart distinguishes Graves from a poet like Yeats, who might seem at first to have a good deal in common with him. There are poems in Yeats more moving and more splendid than anything in Graves. But there is very little in Yeats of the awkwardness of human relationships: the failures and betrayals of the will, the self-deceptions and misunderstandings in which we involve ourselves; the difficulty, in fact, of living with other people.

One can recognise this moral concern of Graves in the value he places on integrity; the modern poet’s habit of camouflaging himself as a publisher or banker or solicitor has never appealed to him. Except for one year teaching literature in the University of Cairo, he has made his living by writing: poetry and criticism, novels, essays, short stories, sketches, book reviews, translations. And to innovations in poetry he has been largely indifferent : he said good- bye to all that, as to so much else, when he left England in 1929. This indifference in a poet as good as Graves is a sign not of a parochial but of a strongly independent mind. In a poem written for his daughter Jenny on her wedding day, he murmurs:

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Here is my private blessing: so to remain AS today you are, with features Resolute and unchangeably your own.

Graves has managed to remain resolute and unchangeably the man he made himself thirty years ago. The Collected Poems are a record of endurance: a record of defeats and humiliations, as well as of the occasional recovery of ground that has been lost, and will be lost again, and fought for again. They represent an effort to see things as they are, and not as Graves would like them to be. He is plainly a man of profoundly romantic temperament and the romantic, almost by definition, is a man who does not see things as they are. The struggle to see truly, and the struggle to live well, give his poetry its vigour. He uses poetry as a kind of moral weapon, not just to curb the passions but to discriminate and clarify: to explore his experiences and to judge them.

In order to do this, he developed more than twenty years ago a style at once laconic, colloquial and formal. It is a style almost completely bare of metaphor; and at first this seems surprising in a poet who relies on personal emotion for h s themes. But Graves, although a man of strong passions, has not a quick sensibility, He is not in fact very interested in the senses, except as they provide him with images of moral experience. (One could check this by reference to his characteristic landscapes.) For the greater part of the last thirty years he has lived in Majorca; but one would never guess this from his poetry. There are no blue Mediterranean bays, no lemon groves or eucalyptus trees; only open moor, furze, peat, rock. This sparseness of imagery is in keeping with his characteristic rhythms. Of musical interest such as we find in a poet like Eliot, Graves’s work has nothing. The virtue of his verse is its immediacy, its closeness to experience. All but a handful of his poems are written in regular metres, but he has a gift for avoiding the obvious, a gift for the natural unexpected rhythm of speech, that gives a quite distinct pleasure.

This playing off of speech rhythm against regular metre is not virtuosity for its own sake. Graves avoids the obvious rhythm not because he finds it uninteresting but because he finds it inexact. The danger of writing in regular metre, and especially of writing in stanzas, is that the particular shape of the experience will be lost, will be moulded by the stanza into something more familiar. With Her Lips OnZy is a poem Thomas Hardy might have written; but if he had, he would scarcely have brought us so close to the scene as Graves has done, for again and again in Hardy the experience is blurred, the outline softened, by the smoothness of the metre.

Graves can be smooth when he wants to be: there is nothing careless about his rhythms. But there is often a roughness that provides, especially in his recent poetry, a valuable check on the

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violence of the emotion. One of the best of his poems of the last few years, The Straw, succeeds in this way:

Peace, the wild valley streaked with torrents, A hoopoe perched on his warm rock. Then why This tremor of the straw between my fingers?

What should I fear? Have 1 not testimony In her own hand, signed with her own name That my love fell as lightning on her heart?

These questions, bird, are not rhetorical. Watch how the straw twitches and leaps As though the earth quaked at a distance.

Requited love; but better unrequited If this chance instrument gives warning Of cataclysmic anguish far away.

Were she at ease, warmed by the thought of me, Would not my hand stay steady as this rock ? Have I undone her by my vehemence?

In writing like this, in the moderation and economy of phrase, in the energy of the rhythms, lies the strength of his poetry. It’s true that Graves is also admired for qualities which are not strictly literary-for his courage, his obstinacy, his empiricism. But these are inseparable from the force and flexibility of the writing.

It may seem at first that his work shows little development, but we have to remember the ruthlessness with which he revises and discards. If the Collected Poems seem surprisingly even, this is partly because three or four hundred have been omitted and many of the earlier poems drastically revised. To go through the separate volumes, from 1916 onward, is to find a steadily increasing con- fidence and strength. The watershed in his poetry is the year 1926. Before that, may of the poems are too consciously ‘poetic’ in their subject and treatment. Between 1926 and 1930, in the early years of his association with Laura Riding, he worked out the characteristic style of his mature poetry. The subjects are taken from personal experience, often from experience recalcitrant to ‘poetic’ treatment: lust, anger, fear, jealousy. The phrasing becomes colloquial and distinctive, the syntax is tightened, the rhythms are more nervous and more vigorous. In the next ten years he struggled to extend his range by taking more awkward feelings and more complex situations into his poetry. Since 1940 (No More Ghosts) there has been a gathering confidence in the handling of emotion, and so the rhythms have grown more impetuous and more emphatic, the syntax simpler, the diction more romantic.

This romantic feeling which runs deep in Graves’s work has been channelled partly into his myth of the White Goddess, A poem for his son, To Juan at the Winter Solstice, begins :

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There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling, Whether as learned bard or gifted child.

This one story, the one true theme of poetry, is the story of woman as the lover and destroyer of man; the story of man drawn inesca- pably to woman by her beauty, immolated in the act of love, and finally supplanted by his son. For this archetypal pattern of human experience Graves has sought a religious basis in primitive cults of the moon goddess, in whose service (he argues) all true poetry is written. How far Graves really believes this, it’s difficult to say, but the value of the myth for his poetry is clear enough. It allows him to claim, as the romantic in him wants to claim, that the central drama of human life is the emotional and physical meeting of man and woman, and that this drama is essentially ritualistic. For in the act of love, and only there, man is living a fully religious life: is living, so to speak, at the centre of life.

It is this conviction of the radical importance of love that has enabled Graves, for all his scepticism, to commit himself so fully to experience. Nothing is more remarkable in the poems he has pub- lished recently than the directness of their emotional commitment: a directness that in a less axomplished poet would be embarrassing. A poet like Yeats can be direct because when the emotion is powerful he either concentrates it in symbolic images- tower, hawk, swan, dancer--or he impersonalises it by assigning it to one of his masks (Owen Aherne, Crazy Jane, Michael Robartes). Graves, in his determination to hold to the experience, refuses to adopt a mask: and his colloquial style makes the use of symbolic images almost impossible. The result is that the emotion has to be crowded into the words, into the vocabulary of the poem, and only the tension of the rhythm prevents it from overflowing. In his new book More Poem 1961, he takes risks that he would not have taken twenty years ago. A single poem may include words like slender, moonlight, shadow, blossom, whisper. These are words of which we have learned to be suspicious in poetry, and the fact that Graves can use them with conviction, without self-consciousness, is a measure of the achievement represented by the poems that he wrote throughout the twenties and thirties.

In one of his letters to a young poet, Rilke speaks of the need for patience:

Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.

The honour in which Graves is held in England has been earned by the stubbornness with which he has lived the questions of his life; and the verve of his poetry since the war suggests that he feels he is at

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last living into the answer. Certainly the peculiar blend of truculence and chivalry, the readiness to trust in impulse, are more marked than ever. If he remains an extremely limited writer, he is also a man for whom writing is a complete commitment. Graves, in short, is a professional poet: not a philosopher, not a saint, not an orator, not a prophet, but in Wordsworth’s phrase, a man speaking to men: a man determined to live truthfully and to write well.

just published

Geoffrey Wagner

THE PERIOD OF MAMMON

Poems Sacred and Profane

12/6

Scorpion Press

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