The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  O ivy, growing ivy-like,

  You are found in the dark wood.

  O holly, tree of shelter,

  Bulwark against the winds;

  O ash-tree, very baleful one,

  Haft for the warrior’s spear.

  O birch-tree, smooth and blessed,

  Melodious and proud,

  Delightful every tangled branch

  At the top of your crown….

  Yet misery piled upon misery, until one day, when Suibne was about to pluck watercress from a stream at Ros Cornain, the wife of the monastery bailiff chased him away and plucked it all for herself, which sent him into utter despair:

  Gloomy is this life,

  In lack of a soft bed,

  To know the numbing frost,

  And rough wind-driven snow.

  Cold wind, icy wind,

  Faint shadow of a feeble sun,

  Shelter of a single tree

  On the top of a flat hill.

  Enduring the rain-storm,

  Stepping along deer-paths,

  Slouching through greensward

  On a day of grey frost.

  A belling of stags

  That echoes through the wood,

  A climb to the deer-pass,

  The roar of spumy seas….

  Stretched on a watery bed

  By the banks of Loch Erne,

  I consider early rising

  When the day shall dawn.

  Then Suibne thought again of Éorann. The story goes:

  ‘Thereafter Suibne went to the place where Éorann was, and stood at the outer door of the house wherein were the queen and her womenfolk, and said again: “At ease you are, Éorann, though ease is not for me.”

  ‘“True,” said Éorann, “yet come in,” said she.

  ‘“Indeed I will not,” said Suibne, “lest the army pen me into the house.”

  ‘“Methinks,” said she, “your reason does not improve with time, and since you will not stay with us,” said she, “go away and do not visit us at all, for we are ashamed that you should be seen in this guise by those who have seen you in your true guise.”

  ‘“Wretched indeed is that,” said Suibne. “Woe to him who trusts a woman….”

  Suibne resumed his fruitless wanderings, until befriended by a cowman’s wife, who would secretly pour a little milk for him into a hole she had stamped with her heel in the stable cowdung. He lapped the milk gratefully, but one day the cowman mistook him for her lover, flung a spear, and mortally wounded him. Then Suibne regained his reason and died in peace. He lies buried beneath a fine headstone which the generous-hearted St. Moling raised to him….

  This impossible tale conceals a true one: that of the poet obsessed by the Hag of the Mill, another name for the White Goddess. He calls her ‘the woman white with flour’ just as the Greeks called her Alphito, ‘Goddess of the Barley Flour’. This poet quarrels with both the Church and the bards of the Academic Establishment, and is outlawed by them. He loses touch with his more practical wife, once his Muse; and though, pitying such misery, she admits to a still unextinguished love for him, he can no longer reach her. He trusts nobody, not even his best friend, and enjoys no companionship but that of the blackbirds, the stags, the larks, the badgers, the little foxes, and the wild trees. Towards the end of his tale Suibne has lost even the Hag of the Mill, who snaps her neck-bone in leaping along with him; which means, I suppose, that he breaks down as a poet under the strain of loneliness. In his extremity Suibne returns to Éorann; but her heart has gone dead by now, and she sends him coldly away.

  The tale seems to be devised as an illustration of the Triad that it is ‘death to mock a poet, death to love a poet, death to be a poet’. Suibne found it death to mock a poet; and death to be a poet; Éorann found it death to love a poet. Only after he had died in misery did Suibne’s fame flourish again.

  This must be the most ruthless and bitter description in all European literature of an obsessed poet’s predicament. The woman-poet’s predicament is described in an almost equally poignant tale: The Loves of Liadan and Curithir, discussed above, is as sorrowful as Suibne’s.

  But let us not wallow in these griefs and flying-madnesses. A poet writes, as a rule, while he is young, and has the spell of the White Goddess on him.

  My love is of a birth as rare

  As ’tis by nature strange and high:

  It was begotten by despair

  Upon impossibility.

  In the result, he either loses the girl altogether, as he rightly feared; or else he marries her and loses her in part. Well, why not? If she makes him a good wife, why should he cherish the poetic obsession to his own ruin? Again, if a woman-poet can get a healthy child in exchange for the gift of poetry, why not? The sovereign White Goddess dismisses both deserters with a faintly scornful smile, and inflicts no punishment, so far as I know; but then neither did she praise and cosset and confer Orders on them while they served her. There is no disgrace in being an ex-poet; if only one makes a clean break with poetry, like Rimbaud, or (more recently) Laura Riding.

  Yet, is the alternative between service to the White Goddess, on the one hand, and respectable citizenship, on the other, quite so sharp as the Irish poets presented it? Suibne in his tale has an over-riding obsession about poetry; so has Liadan in hers. But was either of them gifted with a sense of humour? Doubtless not, or they would never have punished themselves so cruelly. Humour is the one gift that helps men and women to survive the stress of city life. If he keeps his sense of humour, too, a poet can go mad gracefully, swallow his disappointments in love gracefully, reject the Establishment gracefully, die gracefully, and cause no upheaval in society. Nor need he indulge in self-pity, or cause distress to those who love him; and that goes for a woman-poet also.

  Humour is surely reconcilable with devotion to the White Goddess; as it is, for example, with perfect sanctity in a Catholic priest, whose goings and comings are far more strictly circumscribed than a poet’s, and whose Bible contains not one smile from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Andro Man said of the Queen of Elphame in 1597: ‘She can be young or old, as it pleases her’; and indeed, the Goddess reserves a delightfully girlish giggle for those who are not daunted by her customary adult marble glare. She may even allow her poet an eventual happy marriage, if he has taken his early tumbles in good part. For though she is, by definition, non-human, neither is she altogether inhuman. Suibne complains about a snowstorm that caught him without clothes in the fork of a tree:

  I am in great distress tonight,

  Pure wind my body pierces;

  My feet are wounded, my cheek pale,

  Great God, I have cause for grief!

  Yet his sufferings were by no means the whole story. He enjoyed life to the full in better weather: his meals of wild strawberries or blueberries, the swift flight that enabled him to overtake the wood-pigeon, his rides on the antlers of a stag or on the back of a slender-shinned fawn. He could even say: ‘I take no pleasure in the amorous talk of man with woman; far more lovely, to my ear, is the song of the blackbird.’ Nobody can blame Éorann for asking Suibne politely to begone, when he had reached that stage. What preserved her, and what he lacked, was surely a sense of humour? Éorann’s earlier wish for a feathered body which would let her fly around with him, suggests that she too began as a poet, but sensibly resigned when the time for poetry had gone by.

  Can the matter be left at this point? And should it be left there? In our chase of the Roebuck:

  We’m powler’t up and down a bit and had a rattling day

  like the Three Jovial Huntsmen. But is it enough to have described something of the peculiar way in which poets have always thought, and to have recorded at the same time the survival of various antique themes and concepts, or even to have suggested a new intellectual approach to myths and sacred literature? What comes next? Should a practical poetic creed be drafted, which poets might debate, point by point, until it satisfied them as relevant to their immediate writing
needs and in proper form for unanimous subscription? But who would presume to summon these poets to a synod or preside over their sessions? Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office which the ancient Irish called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated metres. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising; yet families of ollaves tended to intermarry; and among the Maoris of New Zealand where a curiously similar system prevailed, the capacity of the ollave to memorize, comprehend, elucidate and extemporize staggered Governor Grey and other early British observers.

  Again, if this hypothetic synod were reserved for poets whose mother tongue is English, how many poets with the necessary patience and integrity to produce any authoritative document would respond to a summons? And even if the synod could be summoned, would not a cleavage be immediately apparent between the devotees of Apollo and those of the White Goddess? This is an Apollonian civilization. It is true that in English-speaking countries the social position of women has improved enormously in the last fifty years and is likely to improve still more now that so large a part of the national wealth is in the control of women – in the United States more than a half; but the age of religious revelation seems to be over, and social security is so intricately bound up with marriage and the family – even where registry marriages predominate – that the White Goddess in her orgiastic character seems to have no chance of staging a come-back, until women themselves grow weary of decadent patriarchalism, and turn Bassarids again. This is unlikely as yet, though the archives of morbid pathology are full of Bassarid case-histories. An English or American woman in a nervous breakdown of sexual origin will often instinctively reproduce in faithful and disgusting detail much of the ancient Dionysiac ritual. I have witnessed it myself in helpless terror.

  The ascetic Thunder-god who inspired the Protestant Revolution has again yielded pride of place to Celestial Hercules, the original patron of the English monarchy. All the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the Son or the Mother, not with the Father, though prayers for rain, victory and the King’s or President’s health are still half-heartedly addressed to him. It is only the pure allegiance of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, that has kept the Father from going ‘the way of all flesh’ – the way of his predecessors Saturn, The Dagda and Kai1 – to end as chief cook and buffoon in the mid-winter masquerade. That may yet be the Father’s end in Britain, if popular religious forces continue to work in their traditional fashion. An ominous sign is the conversion of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children whose feast properly falls on the sixth of December, into white-bearded Father Christmas, the buffoonish patron of the holiday. For in the early morning of Christmas Day, clad in an old red cotton dressing-gown, Father Christmas fills the children’s stockings with nuts, raisins, sugar biscuits and oranges; and while the family are at church singing hymns in honour of the new-born king, presides in the kitchen over the turkey, roast beef, plum pudding, brandy butter and mince pies; and finally when the lighted candles of the Christmas tree have guttered down, goes out into the snow – or rain – with an empty sack and senile groans of farewell.

  This is a cockney civilization and the commonest references to natural phenomena in traditional poetry, which was written by countrymen for countrymen, are becoming unintelligible. Not one English poet in fifty could identify the common trees of the Beth-Luis-Nion, and distinguish roebuck from fallow deer, aconite from corn-cockle, or wryneck from woodpecker. Bow and spear are antiquated weapons; ships have ceased to be the playthings of wind and wave; fear of ghosts and bogeys is confined to children and a few old peasants; and the cranes no longer ‘make letters as they fly’ – the last crane to breed in this country was shot in Anglesey in the year 1908.

  The myths too are wearing thin. When the English language was first formed, all educated people were thinking within the framework of the Christian myth cycle, which was Judaeo-Greek with numerous paganistic accretions disguised as lives of the Saints. The Protestant revolution expelled all but a few saints, and the growth of rationalism since the Darwinian controversy has so weakened the Churches that Biblical myths no longer serve as a secure base of poetic reference; how many people today could identify the quotations of a mid-Victorian sermon? Moreover, the Greek and Latin myths which have always been as important to the poets (professionally at least) as the Christian, are also losing their validity. Only a severe Classical education can impress them on a child’s mind strongly enough to give them emotional relevance, and the Classics no longer dominate the school curriculum either in Britain or the United States. There is not even an official canon of two or three hundred books which every educated person may be assumed to have read with care, and the unofficial canon contains many famous books which very few people indeed have really read – for example, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Lyly’s Euphues. The only two English poets who had the necessary learning, poetic talent, humanity, dignity and independence of mind to be Chief Poets were John Skelton and Ben Jonson; both worthy of the laurel that they wore. Skelton, on terms of easy familiarity with Henry VIII, his former pupil, reckoned himself the spiritual superior, both as scholar and poet, of his ecclesiastical superior Cardinal Wolsey, a half-educated upstart, against whom at the risk of death he published the sharpest satires; and consequently spent the last years of his life in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, refusing to recant. Jonson went on poetic circuits like an Irish ollave, sometimes with pupils ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’, and spoke with acknowledged authority on all professional questions. As one of his hosts, the second Lord Falkland, wrote of him:

  He had an infant’s innocence and truth,

  The judgement of gray hairs, the wit of youth,

  Not a young rashness, not an ag’d despair,

  The courage of the one, the other’s care;

  And both of them might wonder to discern

  His ableness to teach, his skill to learn.

  These lines are memorable as a summary of the ideal poetic temperament. Since Jonson there have been no Chief Poets worthy of the name, either official or unofficial ones.

  The only poet, as far as I know, who ever seriously tried to institute bardism in England was William Blake: he intended his Prophetic Books as a complete corpus of poetic reference, but for want of intelligent colleagues was obliged to become a whole Bardic college in himself, without even an initiate to carry on the tradition after his death. Not wishing to cramp himself by using blank verse or the heroic couplet, he modelled his style on James Macpherson’s free-verse renderings of the Gaelic legends of Oisin, and on the Hebrew prophets as sonorously translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible. Some of his mythological characters, such as the Giant Albion, Job, Erin and the Angel Uriel, are stock figures of mediaeval bardism; others are anagrams of key words found in a polyglot Bible – for example, Los for Sol, the Sun-god. He kept strictly to his system and it is only occasionally that figures occur in his prophecies that seem to belong to his private story rather than to the world of literature. Yet as a leading English literary columnist says of Blake’s readers who admire the gleemanship of Songs of Innocence: ‘Few will ever do more than
dive into the prophetic poems and swim a stroke or two through the seas of shifting symbols and fables.’ He quotes these lines from Jerusalem:

  Albion cold lays on his Rock: storms and snows beat round him Beneath the Furnaces and the starry Wheels and the Immortal Tomb:

  * * *

  The weeds of Death in wrap his hands and feet, blown incessant And wash’d incessant by the for-ever restless sea-waves foaming abroad

  Upon the White Rock. England, a Female Shadow, as deadly damps Of the Mines of Cornwall and Derbyshire, lays upon his bosom heavy, Moved by the wind in volumes of thick cloud, returning, folding round

  His loins and bosom, unremovable by swelling storms and rending Of enraged thunders. Around them the Starry Wheels of their Giant Sons

  Revolve, and over them the Furnaces of Los, and the Immortal Tomb around,

  Erin sitting in the Tomb to watch them unceasing night and day:

  And the body of Albion was closed apart from all Nations.