Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

by Robert Graves

  Unawed by the thick gloom.

  Such love illuminates the far house

  Where difficult questions meet their answers

  And lies get scoured away.

  Your powers to love were forged by Mother Night –

  Her perfect discipline of thought and breath –

  Sleep is their sustenance.

  You prophesy without accessories:

  Her words run splashed in light across your walls

  For reading as you wake.

  But Night, no doubt, has deathless other secrets

  Guarded by her unblinking owls against

  All clumsy stumbling on them.

  CHILD WITH VETERAN

  You were a child and I your veteran;

  An age of violence lay between us,

  Yet both claimed citizenship of the same land

  Conversing in our own soft, hidden language,

  Often by signs alone.

  Our eyelids closed, little by little,

  And we fell chained in an enchantment

  Heavier than any known or dreamed before,

  Groping in darkness for each other’s fingers

  Lifting them to our lips.

  Here brooded power beyond comparison,

  Tremendous as a thousand bee-stings

  Or a great volley of steel-tipped arrows

  With which to take possession of a province

  That no one could deny us,

  For the swift regeneration of dead souls

  And the pride of those undead.

  PURIFICATION

  ‘He numbed my heart, he stole away my truth,

  He laid hands on my body.

  Never had I known ecstasy like that:

  I could have flown with him to the world’s end

  And thought of you no more.’

  ‘Wake, dearest love, here in my own warm arms,

  That was a nightmare only.

  You kept the wall-side, leaving me the outer,

  No demon slid between us to molest you.

  This is a narrow bed.’

  I would have brought her breakfast on a tray

  But she seemed haunted still

  By terror that in nine short months, maybe,

  A demon’s litter, twitching scaly tails

  Would hang from either breast.

  And still she shuddered inconsolably

  All day; our true love-magic

  Dwindled and failed. ‘He swore to take me

  The round of Paris, on his midnight tours,

  Fiddling for me to dance.’

  Thus to have murdered love even in dream

  Called for purification;

  And (as the Great Queen yearly did at Paphos)

  Down to the sea she trod and in salt water

  Renewed virginity.

  POWERS UNCONFESSED

  Diffidently, when asked who might I be,

  I agreed that, yes, I ruled a small kingdom

  Though, like yourself, free to wander abroad

  Hatless, barefooted and incognito.

  Abruptly we embraced – a strange event,

  The casual passers-by taking less notice

  Than had this been a chance meeting of cousins –

  Nor did we argue over protocol.

  You, from your queendom, answerable only

  To royal virtue, not to a male code,

  Knew me for supernatural, like yourself,

  And fell at once head over heels in love;

  As I also with you – but lamentably

  Never confessed what wrathful powers attest

  The Roman jealousy of my male genius.

  PANDORA

  But our escape: to what god did we owe it,

  Pandora, my one love?

  White-faced we lay, apart and all but dead.

  In place of magic had you offered fancy

  (Being still a girl and over-credulous)

  To honour my poor genius? –

  And with your careless innocence of death

  Concealed the mischief and those unseen Spites

  For long months haunting you and me, your Titan,

  Chasing away the honey-bees of love?

  Though my acute dream-senses, apprehending,

  Warned me with fevers, chills and violences

  That the postern gate was forced

  And the keep in instant peril,

  Why did my eyes stay blind and my ears deaf?

  And this escape: to what god did we owe it,

  Or to what unborn child?

  SOLOMON’S SEAL

  Peace is at last confirmed for us:

  A double blessing, heavily priced,

  Won back as we renew our maiden hearts

  In a magic known to ourselves only,

  Proof against furious tides of error

  And bitter ironies of the self-damned:

  Perfect in love now, though not sharing

  The customary pillow – and our reasons

  Appear shrouded in dark Egyptian dreams

  That recreate us as a single being

  Wholly in love with love.

  Under each pyramid lies inverted

  Its twin, the sister-bride to Pharaoh,

  And so Solomon’s seal bears witness.

  Therefore we neither plead nor threaten

  As lovers do who have lost faith –

  Lovers not riven together by an oath

  Sworn on the very brink of birth,

  Nor by the penetrative ray of need

  Piercing our doubled pyramid to its bed.

  All time lies knotted here in Time’s caress,

  And so Solomon’s seal bears witness.

  TO PUT IT SIMPLY

  Perfect reliance on the impossible

  By strict avoidance of all such conjecture

  As underlies the so-called possible:

  That is true love’s adventure.

  Put it more simply: all the truth we need

  Is ours by curious preknowledge of it –

  On love’s impossibility agreed,

  Constrained neither by horoscope nor prophet.

  Or put it still more simply: all we know

  Is that love is and always must be so.

  TO TELL AND BE TOLD

  What is it I most want in all the world?

  To be with you at last, alone in the world,

  And as I kiss with you to tell and be told.

  A child you no more are, yet as a child

  You foresaw miracles when no more a child –

  So spread a bed for us, to tell and be told.

  You wear my promises on rings of gold,

  I wear your promise on a chain of gold:

  For ever and once more to tell and be told.

  THE THEME OF DEATH

  Since love is an astonished always

  Challenging the long lies of history,

  Yesterday when I chose the theme of death

  You shook a passionate finger at me:

  ‘Wake from your nightmare! Would you murder love?

  Wake from your nightmare!’

  No, sweetheart! Death is nightmare when conceived

  As God’s Last Judgement, or the curse of Time –

  Its intransgressible bounds of destiny;

  But love is an astonished always

  With death as affidavit for its birth

  And timeless progress.

  What if these tombs and catafalques conspire,

  Menacing us with gross ancestral fears,

  To dissipate my living truth, and yours,

  To induct us into ritual weeping?

  Our love remains a still astonished always,

  Pure death its witness.

  AT THE WELL

  To work it out even a thought better

  Than ever before – yet a thought rare enough

  To raise a sigh of wonder –

  That is your art (he said) but mine also

  Since first I fell upon the secret

/>   And sighed for wonder that our dry mouths

  After a world of travel

  Were drawn together by the same spell

  To drink at the same well.

  Coincidence (she said) continues with us,

  Secret by secret,

  Love’s magic being no more than obstinacy

  In love’s perfection –

  Like the red apple, highest on the tree

  Reserved for you by me.

  LOGIC

  Clear knowledge having come

  Of an algebraic queendom,

  Compulsive touch and tread

  By a public voice dictated

  Proclaims renewed loyalty

  To a defunct geometry:

  Blue-prints of logic –

  Logic, tricking the tongue

  With its fool’s learning,

  Prescribed excess,

  Devoted emptiness,

  With dull heart-burning

  For a forgotten peace,

  For work beyond employment,

  For trust beyond allegiance,

  For love beyond enjoyment,

  For life beyond existence,

  For death beyond decease.

  ROBBERS’ DEN

  They have taken Sun from Woman

  And consoled her with Moon;

  They have taken Moon from Woman

  And consoled her with Seas;

  They have taken Seas from Woman

  And consoled her with Stars;

  They have taken Stars from Woman

  And consoled her with Trees;

  They have taken Trees from Woman

  And consoled her with Tilth;

  They have taken Tilth from Woman

  And consoled her with Hearth;

  They have taken Hearth from Woman

  And consoled her with Praise –

  Goddess, the robbers’ den that men inherit

  They soon must quit, going their ways,

  Restoring you your Sun, your Moon, your Seas,

  Your Stars, your Trees, your Tilth, your Hearth –

  But sparing you the indignity of Praise.

  THE ACCOMPLICE

  Mercury, god of larceny

  And banking and diplomacy,

  Marks you as his accomplice.

  No coins hang from his watch-chain

  Where once he used to wear them:

  He has done with toys like these.

  Would you prove your independence

  By entering some Order

  Or taking your own life?

  He will, be sure, divinely

  Revenge the moral fervour

  Of your disloyalties.

  For his fistful of signed contracts

  And million-dollar bank-notes

  Bear witness to his credit

  With your colleagues, friends, assistants

  And your own faithful wife.

  FIRST LOVE

  Darling, if ever on some night of fever

  But with your own full knowledge …

  Darling, confess how it will be if ever

  You violate your true-love pledge

  Once offered me unprompted,

  Which I reciprocated

  Freely, fully and without restraint

  Nor ever have abjured since first we kissed?

  Will that prove you a liar and me a saint,

  Or me a fool and you a realist?

  THROUGH A DARK WOOD

  Together, trustfully, through a dark wood –

  But headed where, unless to the ancient, cruel,

  Inescapable, marital pitfall

  With its thorny couch for the procreation

  Of love’s usurpers or interlopers?

  Or worse by far, should each be trapped singly

  But for true-love’s sake gulp down a jealousy

  And grief at not having suffered jointly….

  Together, through a dark wood, trustfully.

  IN THE VESTRY

  It is over now, with no more need

  For whispers, for brief messages posted

  In the chestnut-tree, for blank avoidance

  Of each other’s eyes at festivals,

  For hoarded letters, for blossom-tokens,

  For go-betweens or confidants.

  Well, are you glad that all is over now?

  Be as truthful as you dare.

  Posted at last as would-be man and wife

  Behaving as the Lord Himself enjoined,

  Repudiating your lascivious past,

  Each alike swearing never to retrieve it,

  Particularly (God knows) with someone else –

  Marriage being for procreation only –

  Are you both glad and sure that all is over?

  WHEN LOVE IS NOT

  ‘Where is love when love is not?’

  Asked the logician.

  ‘We term it Omega Minus,’

  Said the mathematician.

  ‘Does that mean marriage or plain Hell?’

  Asked the logician.

  ‘I was never at the altar,’

  Said the mathematician.

  ‘Is it love makes the world go round?’

  Asked the logician.

  ‘Or you might reverse the question,’

  Said the mathematician.

  THE REITERATION

  The death of love comes from reiteration:

  A single line sung over and over again –

  No prelude and no end.

  The word is not, perhaps, ‘reiteration’ –

  Nature herself repunctuates her seasons

  With the same stars, flowers, fruits –

  Though love’s foolish reluctance to survive

  Springs always from the same mechanical fault:

  The needle jumps its groove.

  MAN OF EVIL

  But should I not pity that poor devil,

  Such a load of guilt he carries?

  He debauched the daughter of his benefactor –

  A girl of seventeen – her brother too,

  At the same drunken picnic.

  Pushes hard drugs, abstains from them himself;

  His first wife ended in a mad-house,

  The second was found drowned in a forest pool –

  The Coroner, observing his distress,

  Called for an open verdict.

  And so on, oh and so on – why continue?

  He complains always of his luckless childhood

  And fills commiserating eyes with tears.

  The truth is: he was evil from the womb

  And both his parents knew it.

  He cowers and sponges when his guilt is plain

  And his bank-account runs dry.

  O, that unalterable black self-pity,

  Void of repentance or amendment,

  Clouding his Universe!

  But who can cast out evil? We can only

  Learn to diagnose that natal sickness,

  The one known cure for which, so far, is death.

  Evil is here to stay unendingly;

  But so also is Love.

  THE RAFT

  Asleep on the raft and forced far out to sea

  By an irresistible current:

  No good, no good!

  O for a sister island! Ships were scarce

  In that unhomely latitude,

  And he lacked food.

  No canoes would row out to his rescue;

  No native ever called him brother –

  What was brotherhood?

  He asked another question: which to choose?

  A drowning vision of damnation

  Or slow starvation?

  Even savages, hungry for his flesh,

  Would offer him a happier exit;

  And he need not fight.

  Yet, having always drifted on the raft

  Each night, always without provision,

  Loathing each night,

  So now again he quaked with sudden terror

  Lest the same current, irresistibly


  Reversed, should toss him back

  Once more on the same shore –

  As it did every night.

  THE UNCUT DIAMOND

  This is ours by natural, not by civil, right:

  An uncut diamond, found while picnicking

  Beside blue clay here on the open veldt!

  It should carve up to a walnut-sized brilliant

  And a score of lesser gems.

  What shall we do? To be caught smuggling stones

  Assures us each a dozen years in gaol;

  And who can trust a cutting-agency?

  So, do you love me?

  Or must I toss it back?

  MY GHOST

  I held a poor opinion of myself

  When young, but never bettered my opinion

  (Even by comparison)

  Of all my fellow-fools at school or college.

  Passage of years induced a tolerance,

  Even a near-affection, for myself –

  Which, when you fell in love with me, amounted

  (Though with my tongue kept resolutely tied)

  To little short of pride.

  Pride brought its punishment: thus to be haunted

  By my own ghost whom, much to my disquiet,

  All would-be friends and open enemies

  Boldly identified and certified

  As me, including him in anecdotal

  Autobiographies.

  Love, should you meet him in the newspapers,

  In planes, on trains, or at large get-togethers,

  I charge you, disregard his foolish capers;

  Silence him with a cold unwinking stare

  Where he sits opposite you at table

  And let all present watch amazed, remarking

  On how little you care.

  THE RISK

  Though there are always doctors who advise

  Fools on the care of their own foolish bodies,

  And surgeons ready to rush up and set

  Well-fractured arms or thighs, never forget

  That you are your own body and alone

  Can give it a true medical opinion

  Drawn not from catalogued analogies

  But from a sense of where your danger lies,

  And how it obstinately defies the danger.

  Your body, though yourself, can play the stranger

  As when it falls in love, presuming on

  Another’s truth and perfect comprehension,

  And fails to ask you: dare it run the risk