Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

by Robert Graves

  Where pure souls matrilineally foregather.

  We were then shot through by merciful lunar shafts

  Until hearts tingled, heads sang, and praises flowed;

  And learned to scorn your factitious universe

  Ruled by the death which we had flouted;

  Acknowledging only that from the Dove’s egg hatched

  Before aught was, but wind – unpredictable

  As our second birth would be, or our second love:

  A moon-warmed world of discontinuance.

  A SLICE OF WEDDING CAKE

  Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls

  Married impossible men?

  Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,

  And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

  Repeat ‘impossible men’: not merely rustic,

  Foul-tempered or depraved

  (Dramatic foils chosen to show the world

  How well women behave, and always have behaved).

  Impossible men: idle, illiterate,

  Self-pitying, dirty, sly,

  For whose appearance even in City parks

  Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

  Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands

  Fallen, in fact, so low?

  Or do I always over-value woman

  At the expense of man?

  Do I?

  It might be so.

  A PLEA TO BOYS AND GIRLS

  You learned Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;

  You learned Pope’s Iliad by rote, not heart;

  These terms should be distinguished if you quote

  My verses, children – keep them poles apart –

  And call the man a liar who says I wrote

  All that I wrote in love, for love of art.

  A BOUQUET FROM A FELLOW ROSEMAN

  Oh, what does the roseman answer

  On receiving a gift bouquet

  Of raddled and blowsy roses

  From the garden across the way,

  From a fellow roseman?

  If the roseman is a roseman is a roseman,

  And nothing other at all,

  He flings that bouquet of roses

  Clear over his garden wall

  Like a proper roseman.

  But, if only a week-end roseman,

  He does what he has to do:

  ‘What beautiful blooms,’ he answers,

  ‘How exceedingly kind of you!’

  To the flattered roseman;

  And never escapes the insistent

  Arrival of new bouquets,

  All equally damned and dismal,

  All hankering for his praise

  As a fellow roseman.

  YES

  The Romans had no word for YES,

  So mean they were, and stiff;

  With SI the Spaniards make you guess

  (Their YES conceals an IF);

  OUI means no more than ‘so I hear’;

  JA sounds a little coarse;

  Then, child, say YES, polite and clear –

  Not UH-HUH, like a horse.

  THE OUTSIDER

  Glandular change provokes a vague content,

  St Martin’s summer blossoms warm and sweet.

  Frail, balding, toothless, yet benevolent

  The outsider has attained the inside seat

  Which once he scorned; all angry passion spent,

  And twelve disciples prostrate at his feet.

  Now that his once outrageous heresies

  Stand firmly in the schools’ curriculum,

  Should he be vexed if young fools think him wise

  Whom their grandfathers prayed to be struck dumb?

  And should he disavow old truth as lies,

  Which on obsequious lips it has become?

  From Steps

  (1958)

  THE ENLISTED MAN

  Yelled Corporal Punishment at Private Reasons:

  ‘Rebels like you have no right to enlist –

  Or to exist!’

  Major Considerations leered approval,

  Clenching his fist,

  And gave his fierce moustache a fiercer twist.

  So no appeal, even to General Conscience,

  Kept Private Reasons’ name off the defaulter-list.

  MIKE AND MANDY

  Mandy: O, I’d like to be a Rug

  Basking by the fireside

  In a farm-house parlour.

  Mike: If you were the Rug,

  I’d like to be a Hard Broom

  And scratch you all over.

  Mandy: If you were the Hard Broom,

  I’d like to be a Kitchen Maid

  And toss you in a corner.

  Mike: If you were a Kitchen Maid,

  I’d like to be the Farmer

  And show you who was master.

  Mandy: If you were the Farmer,

  I’d like to be his Wife

  And strike you with a poker.

  Mike: If you were his Wife,

  I’d like to be the Constable

  And grab you by the shoulder.

  Mandy: If you were the Constable,

  I’d like to be a Rug,

  Lying by the fireside

  In that farm-house parlour –

  To slide and trip you up

  And make you bang your head

  On the corner of the firegrate

  And kill you stone dead.

  NOTHING

  NOTHING is circular,

  Like the empty centre

  Of a smoke-ring’s shadow:

  That colourless zero

  Marked on a bare wall –

  Nothing at all

  And reflected in a mirror.

  Then need you wonder

  If the trained philosopher

  Who seeks to define NOTHING

  As absence of anything,

  A world more logistically

  Than, above, I

  (Though my terms are cosier),

  And claims he has found

  That NOTHING is not round

  Or hardly ever,

  Will run a brain-fever

  To the precise degree

  Of one hundred and three

  On Fahrenheit’s thermometer?

  CALL IT A GOOD MARRIAGE

  Call it a good marriage –

  For no one ever questioned

  Her warmth, his masculinity,

  Their interlocking views;

  Except one stray graphologist

  Who frowned in speculation

  At her h’s and her s’s,

  His p’s and w’s.

  Though few would still subscribe

  To the monogamic axiom

  That strife below the hip-bones

  Need not estrange the heart,

  Call it a good marriage:

  More drew those two together,

  Despite a lack of children,

  Than pulled them apart.

  Call it a good marriage:

  They never fought in public,

  They acted circumspectly

  And faced the world with pride;

  Thus the hazards of their love-bed

  Were none of our damned business –

  Till as jurymen we sat upon

  Two deaths by suicide.

  READ ME, PLEASE!

  If, as well may happen,

  On an autumn day

  When white clouds go scudding

  And winds are gay,

  Some earth-bound spirit,

  A man lately dead,

  (Your fellow-clerk) should take it

  Into his crazed head

  To adopt a more venturesome

  Shape than a dead leaf

  And wish you a ‘good morning’

  Abrupt and brief,

  He will come disguised

  As a sheet of newspaper

  Charging across the square

  With a clumsy caper,

  To flatten himself out

  Across
your shins and knees

  In a suppliant posture:

  ‘Read me, please!’

  Then scanning every column

  On both sides, with care,

  You will find that clerk’s name

  Printed somewhere –

  Unless, perhaps, in warning

  The sheet comes blown

  And the name which you stumble on

  Is, alas, your own.

  THE TWIN OF SLEEP

  Death is the twin of Sleep, they say:

  For I shall rise renewed,

  Free from the cramps of yesterday,

  Clear-eyed and supple-thewed.

  But though this bland analogy

  Helps other folk to face

  Decrepitude, senility,

  Madness, disease, disgrace,

  I do not like Death’s greedy looks:

  Give me his twin instead –

  Sleep never auctions off my books,

  My boots, my shirts, my bed.

  AROUND THE MOUNTAIN

  Some of you may know, others perhaps can guess

  How it is to walk all night through summer rain

  (Thin rain that shrouds a beneficent full moon),

  To circle a mountain, and then limp home again.

  The experience varies with a traveller’s age

  And bodily strength, and strength of the love affair

  That harries him out of doors in steady drizzle,

  With neither jacket nor hat, and holds him there.

  Still, let us concede some common elements:

  Wild-fire that, until midnight, burns his feet;

  And surging rankly up, strong on the palate,

  Scents of July, imprisoned by long heat.

  Add: the sub-human, black tree-silhouettes

  Against a featureless pale pall of sky;

  Unseen, gurgling water; the bulk and menace

  Of entranced houses; a wraith wandering by.

  Milestones, each one witness of a new mood –

  Anger, desperation, grief, regret;

  Her too-familiar face that whirls and totters

  In memory, never willing to stay set.

  Whoever makes the desired turning-point,

  Which means another fifteen miles to go,

  Learns more from dawn than love, so far, has taught him:

  Especially the false dawn, when cocks first crow.

  Those last few miles are easy: being assured

  Of the truth, why should he fabricate fresh lies?

  His house looms up; the eaves drip drowsily;

  The windows blaze to a resolute sunrise.

  III

  * * *

  From Food for Centaurs

  (1960)

  TWICE OF THE SAME FEVER

  No one can die twice of the same fever?

  Tell them it is untrue:

  Have we not died three deaths, and three again,

  You of me, I of you?

  The chill, the frantic pulse, brows burning,

  Lips broken by thirst –

  Until, in darkness, a ghost grieves:

  ‘It was I died the first.’

  Worse than such death, even, is resurrection.

  Do we dare laugh away

  Disaster, and with a callous madrigal

  Salute the new day?

  ESTABLISHED LOVERS

  The established lovers of an elder generation

  Dead from the waist down, every man of them,

  Have now expired for sure

  And, after nine days’ public threnody,

  Lapse to oblivion, or literature…

  Clerks of Establishment must therefore search

  For faces fit to people the blank spaces.

  Faces enough are found, to pretend modesty

  And mask their yearning for the public call:

  Pluperfect candidates

  Having long ceased to live as lovers do…

  Clerks of Establishment, checking the dates,

  Can feel no qualm in recommending Orders,

  Titles and honorary love-doctorates.

  Observe him well, the scarlet-robed academician

  Stalled with his peers, an Order on his breast,

  And (who could doubt it?) free

  Of such despairs and voices as attended

  His visits to the grotto below sea

  Where once he served a glare-eyed Demoness

  And swore her his unswerving verity.

  THE QUIET GLADES OF EDEN

  All such proclivities are tabulated –

  By trained pathologists, in detail too –

  The obscener parts of speech compulsively

  Shrouded in Classic Latin.

  But though my pleasure in your feet and hair

  Is ungainsayable, let me protest

  (Dear love) I am no trichomaniac

  And no foot-fetichist.

  If it should please you, for your own best reasons,

  To take and flog me with a rawhide whip,

  I might (who knows?) surprisedly accept

  This earnest of affection.

  Nothing, agreed, is alien to love

  When pure desire has overflowed its baulks;

  But why must private sportiveness be viewed

  Through public spectacles?

  Enough, I will not claim a heart unfluttered

  By these case-histories of aberrancy;

  Nevertheless a long cool draught of water,

  Or a long swim in the bay,

  Serves to restore my wholesome appetite

  For you and what we do at night together:

  Which is no more than Adam did with Eve

  In the quiet glades of Eden.

  HEROES IN THEIR PRIME

  Theseus: was he an old, bald King of Athens

  By folly forced into self-banishment,

  Who cursed his own twelve tribes from Mount Gargettus

  And sailed for Scyros, glowering discontent?

  No, but that tall youth who laid low Procrustes,

  Sinis and Scyron, bandits of repute,

  And in a labyrinthine lair at Cnossus

  The Minotaur by night did execute.

  Bellerophon: was he a tattered outcast

  Seldom descried on the rough Xanthian plain,

  Whom Pegasus had pitched into a thorn-bush,

  Thus rudely closing his presumptuous reign?

  No, but that hero, smiled on by Athene,

  Scourge both of Amazons and Solymi,

  Who quenched Chimaera’s fiery exhalations

  With arrows shot at her from a clear sky.

  Jason: was Jason a chap-fallen beggar

  Whom the prophetic prow of Argo slew

  When back he crawled to die in shame at Corinth

  Loathed by the gods, and by his shipmates too?

  No, but that single-sandalled young Magnesian,

  Fearless and fond, the cynosure of Greece,

  Who by your kindly aid, Queen Aphrodite,

  Seduced Medea and fetched home the Fleece.

  And Nestor: was he Agamemnon’s Nestor,

  Whose grey beard wagged beside the walls of Troy

  And wagged still more, long after Troy had fallen,

  Anent his exploits as a beardless boy?

  Yes, that was he: revered by Prince Achilles,

  Odysseus, Diomede and many more –

  Not the young braggart quaking at the tree-top

  In terror of a Calydonian boar.

  CATKIND

  Through the window,

  Listening carefully,

  I overheard a low

  Moonlight murmur from an olive-tree –

  Three cats rehearsed the virtues of catkind:

  Catkind’s silky tread and devious mind,

  Catkind’s quiet economy

  (Cleansing itself with wash of its own body),

  Catkind’s nonchalance,

  Catkind’s persistence,

  Catkind’s circumambulance,
r />   Its fealty to the Queen of Cats above –

  ‘But when we love,’ they wailed, ‘alas, we LOVE!’

  TWO CHILDREN

  You were as venturesome as I was shy:

  Eager and inquisitive your eye.

  You set a nap on the plum, a haze on the rose,

  And shooting stars across the wintry sky

  Flashed by in volleys for me when you chose.

  None spoke with you, I alone worshipped you,

  Child of the wave, child of the morning dew,

  And in my dreams went chasing here and there

  A fugitive beacon – your moon-yellow hair.

  HERE LIVE YOUR LIFE OUT!

  Window-gazing, at one time or another

  In the course of travel, you must have startled at

  Some coign of true felicity. ‘Stay!’ it beckoned,

  ‘Here live your life out!’ If you were simple-hearted

  The village rose, perhaps, from a broad stream

  Lined with alders and gold-flowering flags –

  Hills, hay-fields, orchards, mills – and, plain to see,

  The very house behind its mulberry-tree

  Stood, by a miracle, untenanted!

  Alas, you could not alight, found yourself jolted

  Viciously on; public conveyances

  Are not amenable to casual halts,

  Except in sternly drawn emergencies –

  Bandits, floods, landslides, earthquakes or the like –

  Nor could you muster resolution enough

  To shout: ‘This is emergency, let me out!’

  Rushing to grasp their brakes; so the whole scene

  Withdrew forever. Once at the terminus

  (As your internal mentor will have told you),

  It would have been pure folly to engage

  A private car, drive back, sue for possession.

  Too far, too late:

  Already bolder tenants were at the gate.

  JOAN AND DARBY

  My friends are those who find agreement with me

  In large measure, but not absolutely.

  Little children, parasites and God

  May flatter me with absolute agreement –

  For no one lives more cynical than God.

  As for my love, I gifted my heart to her

  Twenty years ago, without proviso,

  And in return she gifted hers to me;

  Yet still they beat as two, unyielding in