The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Sappho undertook this responsibility: one should not believe the malevolent lies of the Attic comedians who caricature her as an insatiable Lesbian. The quality of her poems proves her to have been a true Cerridwen. I once asked my so-called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me: ‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’ I gathered that he considered it fortunate that so little of her work had survived. The sixteenth-century Welsh woman-poet, Gwerfyl Mechain, also seems to have played the part of Cerridwen: ‘I am the hostess of the irreproachable Ferry Tavern, a white-gowned moon welcoming any man who comes to me with silver.’

  The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian Classicists would have it. The true poet who goes to the tavern and pays the silver tribute to Blodeuwedd goes over the river to his death. As in the story of Llew Llaw: ‘All their discourse that night was concerning the affection and love that they felt one for the other and which in no longer space than one evening had arisen.’ This paradise lasts only from May Day to St. John’s Eve. Then the plot is hatched and the poisoned dart flies; and the poet knows that it must be so. For him there is no other woman but Cerridwen and he desires one thing above all else in the world: her love. As Blodeuwedd, she will gladly give him her love, but at only one price:

  So may some gentle Muse

  With lucky words favour my destin’d urn

  And, as he passes, turn

  And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.

  However, this is a mere conceit. ‘Muse’ stands for ‘poet possessed by a Muse’: Milton had just traditionally addressed the female Muse with:

  Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well…

  his life. She will exact payment punctually and bloodily. Other women, other goddesses, are kinder-seeming. They sell their love at a reasonable rate – sometimes a man may even have it for the asking. But not Cerridwen: for with her love goes wisdom. And however bitterly and grossly the poet may rail against her in the hour of his humiliation – Catullus is the most familiar instance – he has been party to his own betrayal and has no just cause for complaint.

  Cerridwen abides. Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and ‘Blood! blood! blood!’

  Constant illiterate use of the phrase ‘to woo the Muse’ has obscured its poetic sense: the poet’s inner communion with the White Goddess, regarded as the source of truth. Truth has been represented by poets as a naked woman: a woman divested of all garments or ornaments that will commit her to any particular position in time and space. The Syrian Moon-goddess was also represented so, with a snake head-dress to remind the devotee that she was Death in disguise, and a lion crouched watchfully at her feet. The poet is in love with the White Goddess, with Truth: his heart breaks with longing and love for her. She is the Flower-goddess Olwen or Blodeuwedd; but she is also Blodeuwedd the Owl, lamp-eyed, hooting dismally, with her foul nest in the hollow of a dead tree, or Circe the pitiless falcon, or Lamia with her flickering tongue, or the snarling-chopped Sow-goddess, or the mare-headed Rhiannon who feeds on raw flesh. Odi atqae amo: ‘to be in love with’ is also to hate. Determined to escape from the dilemma, the Apollonian teaches himself to despise woman, and teaches woman to despise herself.

  Solomon’s wit is bitterly succinct: ‘The horse-leech’s two daughters: Give and Give.’ The horse-leech is a small fresh-water animal akin to the medicinal leech, with thirty teeth in its jaws. When a beast goes down to a stream to drink, the leech swims into its mouth and fastens on the soft flesh at the back of its throat. It then sucks blood until completely distended, driving the beast frantic, and as a type of relentless greed gives its name to the Alukah, who is the Canaanite Lamia, or Succuba, or Vampire. The two daughters of Alukah are insatiable, like Alukah herself: and their names are Sheol and the Womb, or Death and Life. Solomon says, in other words: ‘Women are greedy of children; they suck the vigour of their menfolk, like the Vampire; they are sexually insatiable; they resemble the horse-leech of the pond which plagues horses. And to what purpose are men born of women? Only in the end to die. The grave and woman are equally insatiable.’ But Solomon of the Proverbs was a sour philosopher, not a romantic poet like the Galilean ‘Solomon’ of the Canticles who is really Salmaah, the Kenite Dionysus, making love in Hellenistic style to his twin-sister, the May bride of Shulem.

  The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to publish poetry after their early twenties is not necessarily – as I used to think – the decay of patronage and the impossibility of earning a decent living by the profession of poetry. There are several ways of supporting life which are consonant with the writing of poems; and publication of poems is not difficult. The reason is that something dies in the poet. Perhaps he has compromised his poetic integrity by valuing some range of experience or other – literary, religious, philosophical, dramatic, political or social – above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his sense of the White Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse, turns into a domestic woman and would have him turn similarly into a domesticated man. Loyalty prevents him from parting company with her, especially if she is the mother of his children and is proud to be reckoned a good housewife; and as the Muse fades out, so does the poet. The English poets of the early nineteenth century, when the poetry-reading public was very large, were uncomfortably aware of this problem and many of them, such as Southey and Patmore, tried to lyricize domesticity, though none of them with poetic success. The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual ‘other woman’, and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad’s and muse’s heart.

  An unhappy solution to this difficult problem was attempted in Connaught in the seventh century AD by Liadan of Corkaguiney, a noblewoman and also an ollave-poet. She went with her train of twenty-four poet-pupils, as the immemorial custom was, on a poetic cuairt, or circuit of visits where, among others, the poet Curithir made an ale-feast for her and she fell in love with him. He felt an answering love and asked her: ‘Why should we not marry? A son born to us would be famous.’ She answered: ‘Not now, it would spoil my round of poetic visits. Come to me later at Corkaguiney and I will go with you.’ Then she began to brood on his words, and the more she brooded the less she liked them: he had spoken not of their love but only of their fame and of a famous son who might one day be born to them. Why a son? Why not a daughter? Was he rating his gifts above hers? And why irrelevantly contemplate the birth of future poets? Why was Curithir not content to be a poet himself and live in her poetic company? To bear children to such a man would be a sin against herself; yet she loved him with all her heart and had solemnly promised to go with him.

  So when Liadan had finished her circuit of visits to the kings’ and chieftains’ houses of Connaught, exchanging poetic lore with the poets she found there, and receiving gifts from her hosts, she took a religious vow of chastity which it would be death to break; and did this not for any religious motive, but because she was a poet and realized that to marry Curithir would destroy the poetic bond between them. He came to fetch her presently and, true to her promise, she went with him; but, true to her vow, she would not sleep with him. Overwhelmed with grief he took a similar vow. The two then placed themselves under the direction of the severe and suspicious St. Cummine, who gave Curithir the choice of seeing Liadan without speaking to h
er, or speaking to her without seeing her. As a poet he chose speech. Alternately each would wander around the other’s wattled cell in Cummine’s monastic settlement, never being allowed to meet. When Curithir finally persuaded Cummine to relax the severity of this rule, he at once accused them of unchastity and banished Curithir from the settlement. Curithir renounced love, became a pilgrim, and Liadan died of remorse for the barren victory that she had won over him.

  The Irish have been aware of the poet’s love-problem since pre-Christian times. In the Sickbed of Cuchulain, Cuchulain, who is a poet as well as a hero, has deserted his wife Emer and fallen under the spell of Fand, a Queen of the Sidhe. Emer herself was originally his Muse and at their first meeting they had exchanged poetic conversation so abstruse that nobody present understood a word; but marriage had estranged them. Emer comes angrily to Fand’s rath to reclaim Cuchulain, and Fand renounces her possession of him, admitting that he does not really love her and that he had better return to Emer:

  Emer, noble wife, this man is yours.

  He has broken away from me,

  But still I am fated to desire

  What my hand cannot hold and keep.

  Cuchulain goes back, but Emer’s victory is as barren as Liadan of Corkaguiney’s. An ancient Irish Triad is justified: ‘It is death to mock a poet, to love a poet, to be a poet.’

  Let us consider Suibne Geilt, the poet-King of Dal Araidhe, about whom an anonymous ninth-century Irishman composed a prose tale, The Madness of Suibne, incorporating a sequence of dramatic poems based on certain seventh-century originals which were attributed to Suibne himself. In the tale, as it has come down to us, Suibne was driven mad because he had twice insulted St. Ronan: first, by interrupting the Saint as he marked out the site of a new church without royal permission, and tossing his psalter into a stream; and next, by flinging a spear at him as he tried to make peace between the High King of Ireland and Suibne’s overlord, just before the Battle of Magh Rath. The spear hit St. Ronan’s mass-bell, but glanced off harmlessly. St. Ronan thereupon cursed Suibne with the flying madness. Evidence found in three early chronicles, however, suggests that Suibne’s second insult was directed not at St. Ronan but at an ollave, or sacrosanct poet, who was trying to make peace on the eve of Magh Rath between the rival army-commanders, namely King Domnal the Scot, and Domnal High King of Ireland. In the seventh century, such peacemaking was an ollave’s function, not a priest’s. Perhaps Suibne’s spear struck the branch of golden bells which were the ollave’s emblem of office; and the ollave vengefully threw in his face a so-called ‘madman’s wisp’ (a magical handful of straw), which sent him fleeing crazily from the battlefield. At any rate, Suibne’s wife Éorann had tried to restrain him from this act of folly, and was therefore spared the curse. The flying madness is described as making his body so light that he could perch in the tops of trees, and leap desperate leaps of a hundred feet or more without injury. (Mediaeval Latin philosophers described the condition as spiritualizatio, agilitas and subtilitas, and applied it to cases of levitation by ecstatic saints.) Feathers then sprouted on Suibne’s body, and he lived like the wild things: feeding on sloes, hollyberries, watercress, brooklime, acorns; sleeping in yew-trees and rocky clefts of ivy-clad cliffs, and even in hawthorn and bramble bushes. The slightest noise would startle him into flight, and he was cursed with a perpetual distrust of all men.

  Suibne had a friend, Loingseachan, who constantly went in pursuit, trying to catch and cure him. Loingseachan succeeded in this on three occasions, but Suibne always relapsed: a fury known as ‘the Hag of the Mill’, would soon tempt him to renew his frantic leaps. During a lucid interval after seven years of madness, Suibne visited Éorann, who was being forced to marry his successor the new king – and one most moving dramatic poem records their conversation:

  SUIBNE ‘At ease you are, bright Éorann,

  Bound bedward to your lover;

  It is not so with Suibne here –

  Long has he wandered footloose.

  ‘Lightly once, great Éorann,

  You whispered words that pleased me.

  “I could not live,” you said, “were I

  Parted one day from Suibne.”

  ‘Now it is clear and daylight clear,

  How small your care for Suibne;

  You lie warm on a good down bed,

  He starves for cold till sunrise.’

  ÉORANN ‘Welcome, my guileless madman,

  Dearest of humankind!

  Though soft I lie, my body wastes

  Since the day of your downfall.’

  SUIBNE ‘More welcome than I, that prince

  Who escorts you to the banquet.

  He is your chosen gallant;

  Your old love you neglect.’

  ÉORANN Though a prince may now escort me

  To the carefree banquet-hall,

  I had liefer sleep in a tree’s cramped bole

  With you, Suibne, my husband.

  ‘Could I choose from all the warriors

  Of Ireland and of Scotland,

  I had liefer live, blameless, with you

  On watercress and water.’

  SUIBNE ‘No path for his belovéd

  Is Suibne’s track of care;

  Cold he lies at Ard Abhla,

  His lodgings cold are many.

  ‘Far better to feel affection

  For the prince whose bride you are,

  Than for this madman all uncouth,

  Famished and stark-naked.’

  ÉORANN ‘I grieve for you, toiling madman,

  So filthy and downcast;

  I grieve that your skin is weather worn,

  Torn by spines and brambles…’

  ‘O that we were together,

  And my body feathered too;

  In light and darkness would I wander

  With you, for evermore!’

  SUIBNE ‘One night I spent in cheerful Mourne,

  One night in Bann’s sweet estuary.

  I have roved this land from end to end….’

  The tale continues:

  ‘Hardly had Suibne spoken these words when the army came marching into the camp from all directions. He sped away in wild flight, as he had often done before; and presently, when he had perched on a high, ivy-clad branch, the Hag of the Mill settled close beside him. Suibne then made this poem, describing the trees and herbs of Ireland:

  Bushy oak, leafy oak,

  You tower above all trees.

  O hazel, little branching one,

  Coffer for sweet nuts!

  You are not cruel, O alder.

  Delightfully you gleam,

  You neither rend nor prickle

  In the gap you occupy.

  Blackthorn, little thorny one,

  Dark provider of sloes.

  Watercress, little green-topped one,

  From the stream where blackbirds drink.

  O apple-tree, true to your kind,

  You are much shaken by men;

  O rowan, cluster-berried one,

  Beautiful is your blossom!

  O briar, arching over,

  You never play me fair;

  Ever again you tear me,

  Drinking your fill of blood.

  Yew-tree, yew-tree, true to your kind,

  In churchyards you are found;