Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Aldous Huxley juggled up a skull and a loofah.

  [42] ‘Then I wrote of Bridges and the English tongue,

  He reported it furry, prescribing a purge;

  How Lawrence, with dark robes of destiny hung,

  Defied the volcano from its deadly verge;

  How Wells tramped Utopia with ambitious urge;

  How, far in the background, a great scarp up-reared

  For Doughty, the old bard, with owls in his beard.

  [43] ‘Then of Masefield, astride on his notable nag,

  Its name was Right Royalty, out of Grand Slam;

  Of Bennett eating ortolans from a paper bag;

  Of Davies at play with a lodging-house lamb;

  Of Shaw’s manifestos signed with “I am.”

  And “Yonder blandly blinking in the warm sunshine,

  Little David Garnett, a cage-mate of mine.”

  [44] ‘But, O, the Fitzwilliam, and, O, Samuel Butler,

  Subtlest of writers, by death made subtler,

  He’s bequeathing a safe from the Musical Banks,

  And Mr. Sydney Cockerell,

  To whom I dedicate this doggerel,

  Is accepting it with thanks.

  [45] ‘No knob here nor handle, keyhole nor key,

  Butler has vanished with a gleam of glee;

  “Open Sesame, Open Lilies”; they did no such thing.

  The bearded curators

  And literary spectators

  Drone: “Ichabod, Ichabod,” in the voice of Dean Inge.

  [46] ‘Follows discussion and Gossip and trouble,

  Babel and lobby-talk, confused hubble bubble.

  Force the lock, how, why? Why not, or whether?

  But Messrs. Ellis and Yeats

  Observed two curious copper plates,

  Which courtly Gosse slid back with an oiled goose-feather.

  [47] ‘Two keyholes were revealed

  By these covering plates concealed.

  With tantalizing promise for futurity,

  Sir Sidneys Colvin and Lee

  Raised up a mottled calf to see;

  Which, peering in, remarked on a profound obscurity.

  [48] ‘Keyless, but not hopeless, even at this impasse,

  The faithful murmured rapidly, Ça passe, Ça passe, Ça passe!

  (Here I apologize for a somewhat sleepy rhyme)

  While Mr. Lytton Strachey,

  With his skeleton latchkey,

  Picked first one lock, then t’other, in less than no time.

  [49] ‘We rushed, pushed, looked in – but as I saw myself,

  Not even a camphor marble on a bottom shelf,

  Not even a torn sheet of an empty notebook found,

  Until T. S. Eliot, from an upper bracket,

  Pulled down a stud and a dusty ping-pong racquet,

  And Joyce pinged one on the other with a dismal sound.

  [50] ‘I rose at the noise of this priapic pinging,

  Tom-toms beaten distantly for Handelian singing.

  Then the voice of Middleton Murry

  Said “He ought to have looked higher”,

  And the voice of J. C. Squire

  Came blurred and thick and furry.

  [51] The disciples of Freud

  Were quite overjoyed

  At this typical bit

  Of tendency wit;

  The disciples of Jung

  All put out their tongue

  At this symbological misfit.

  Where are the straighteners that Erewhon prophesies?

  Analyze, gentles, analyze!

  Fish for the Society’s annual prize.’

  [52] ‘Melpomené caught up the poem to read.

  Down she threw it, furious. And at once I said:

  “It is nonsense, dear mistress, nonsense indeed,

  Obscure, local, spiteful, not to be read;

  But if you destroy it, I swear by Pope’s head

  I’ll burn your long bookshelves of Augustan verse,

  No duller than mine are, written much worse.”

  [53] ‘She pinched my ear for me, saying all was well,

  But forbade me to trespass on her goodwill.

  Apollo would curse me, candle, book and bell,

  If I could not study to control my quill:

  He would banish me for ever from their high hill.

  I heard her lecture out, I took it in good part,

  But Apollo, I knew well, is divided at heart.

  [54] ‘His people are stiff-necked, steely their hearts,

  Holding pure Helycon in the lowest scorn;

  Square-headed merchants of practical parts.

  And where is the poet? in what city born?

  Shall charm them with lutestring or rouse them with horn,

  To delight in abstractions or in high-flung thought?

  With what hook let down is Leviathan caught?

  [55] ‘We serve a lost cause: does any pride remain

  In prolonging tradition beyond its due time,

  Giving it lip-service, mumbling and vain,

  With a measured metre and expected rhyme?

  Morning and evening our ancient bells chime,

  Yet the whole congregation could sit in one pew,

  The sexton, the verger, and old folk one or two.

  [56] ‘Then while our dead church is not yet disendowed,

  While I still am preacher and the pulpit’s wide,

  I shall roar what I will to the sprinkled crowd,

  Shall drive them hobbling forth aghast and horrified.

  The noise of my hurricane shall be heard outside.

  There are many young lost things passing our way

  Who will turn in to listen, and, puzzled, stay.

  [57] ‘The beginning of wisdom is laughter and song,

  The furtherance of wisdom, scholarship and groans.

  Between first and second, reactions are strong;

  The disputants wrangle in no playful tones,

  Dream against waking, blood against bones:

  Let poetry, then, enter on its third degree,

  In grammar of unreason marching close and free.’

  [58] At this point the monkey paused in his speech,

  Breaking off short half-way through a line.

  Squatting in a corner he began to reach

  For the small of his back, why, I could not divine.

  ‘A flea,’ he informed me, ‘an old friend of mine.

  He knows there’s no comfort in this life to match

  Sunshine, sleep, solitude and a good scratch.’

  [59] This was a gentle hint, I must go on my way;

  He was quietly scratching and settling for sleep.

  I raised my hat to him, he grunted ‘Good day’,

  So curled at his corner, in a hairy heap;

  Soon his quick breathing came steady and deep.

  Then the sounder he slept, the more wakeful grew I:

  Till up rose the red sun in the Eastern sky.

  TAIL PIECE

  A sniff at every flask

  And a lick at every stopper:

  In these quick days, in this odd maze

  It is neither just nor proper,

  Neither just nor proper

  For more than this to ask:

  A lick at every stopper,

  And a sniff at every flask.

  NOTES

  STANZA 2. – ‘…who can/Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite or Leda’s goose a swan.’

  STANZA 4. – See Apuleius’ Golden Ass: The Story of Thelyphron.

  STANZA 6. – This generation is curiously unaware of Joe Miller’s one-time pre-eminence as the father of Jests and god-father of Chestnuts. The recent early-Victorian revival would have done well to exhume him.

  STANZA 8. – To fletcherize is to chew thirty tunes to each mouthful. Horace Fletcher, the inventor, was born in America in 1849. The Old Testament prophecy to which this stanza refers should not need a note. [Joel 1. 4, 2. 25 Ed.]

  S
TANZA 16.–Modo. ‘The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Modo he’s called, and Mahu.’ King Lear.

  STANZA 22. – Lodowick Muggleton, born 1609, died 1697. He enjoyed a numerous following about the times of the Civil War. His works, among them Milk for Babes, were burnt by the common hangman.

  STANZA 24. – See The Book of Mormon and text-books of American military history.

  STANZA 25. – Morgan’s feat at Panama was remarkable. With only twelve hundred men he defeated the Spanish Governor at the head of two squadrons of horse, four regiments of foot, and a great number of wild bulls driven by Indian slaves.

  STANZA 26. – See Caulfield’s Remarkable Persons. Mull’d Sack’s baptismal name was John Cottington; hanged at Smithfield in 1659, after a prosperous career.

  STANZA 27. – Mary Frith, an associate of Mull’d Sack. An old print has this motto:

  ‘See here the Presidress of the pilfering trade,

  Mercury’s second, Venus’s only maid.’

  STANZA 36. – ‘Melpomené, that fair maid, she burnished my beak.

  I pray you let Parrot have liberty to speak.’

  Skelton’s Speke, Parrot.

  STANZA 40 et seq. – The Safe was first published in the Winter Owl. It is an attempt to use the mechanism of the fantastic dream with all its absurd interlacing themes for the purpose of a satiric history of contemporary events. These themes may be particularized as follows. The principal one is given in the introductory stanza, the development in 1925 of Butler’s critical method. The Safe from the Musical Banks occurs in Erewhon, and around it there is continuation of the struggle that Butler’s restless and ingenious mind carried on with the critics of his day, whom he accused of deliberately obscuring the truth. The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge possesses many Butler relics, though not so many as the Library of St. John’s College at the same University, which can show a wide range of very personal Butleriana, from his paint-box to his kettle-holder. The stud and the ping-pong racquet refer partly to this.

  Another theme interwoven is the state of poetry in the years immediately following the war. Mr. Blunden’s fish poems, of which he has written many, are linked up with the London Mercury school of poetry and criticism, the Mercury having been first published at Bream’s Buildings. There are many similar plays on words in the piece. ‘Open Sesame, Open Lilies’ refers to Butler’s quarrel with Ruskin; the ‘arras strained and brittle’ hides a reference to the Arras fighting, in which Mr. Blunden himself took part, and is equivalent to the strained post-war structure of Society and Literature. Mr. Blunden is taken as representative of the best of this London Mercury school; his ruralities are real, a form of war-convalescence distinguished from the mere fatuity of his imitators. He is the one big fish in that stream of Natural History verse; the undergraduate contributors to Mr. Squire’s journal are mere minnows in comparison, but the sunset hues suggest that Mr. Blunden is the last dying glory of the party, and at the time of writing Mr. Blunden is on a foreign strand. Mr. Marsh poised on the edge of a sofa, as the author once saw him in a drawing-room, represents the Georgian movement poised between the soft cushions of tradition and the hard floor of modernism.

  Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’s enquiry, sincere, but largely negative in result, into the meaning of Blake’s Prophetic Books is recollected; engraved plates are associated in Jewish, Mormon and other religions with sacred mystery, but Blake’s copper-plate cover-designs to the Prophetic Books are particularly referred to. Sir Sidneys Colvin and Lee have both recently been assailed, whether justly or not I do not know, as obscurers of literary truth. Sir Sidney Lee for his treatment of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Butler quarrelled with him over this very thing), and Sir Sidney olvin for his treatment of Keats’s and Robert L. Stevenson’s early amours. The mottled calf suggests literary scholarship; the raising up of a calf is a Biblical reminiscence and emblematic of setting up a false god. Mr. Lytton Strachey, whose Queen Victoria and Eminent Victorians are books that Butler would have much enjoyed, won his successes by a bold research in sacrosanct records, such as the Greville Memoirs, which had hitherto been kept locked away from the public. Messrs Strachey, Eliot and James Joyce are, in the author’s opinion, Samuel Butler’s literary and critical heirs; but a lot of things have changed since Butler’s death; these are typified by the Negroid influence in art and music and the sex obsession which to-day characterize the enfant terrible school which Butler founded. Judged from a modern standpoint, Butler was fairly conventional in his aesthetic tastes. In music Handel was his hero: he gave him the same pre-eminence as he gave Shakespeare in dramatic poetry. The end of The Safe refers to Butler’s prophecy of the psycho-analytic movement; his ‘straighteners’ of Erewhon, an absurdity in 1872, are now a common feature of professional life. Perhaps, were Butler alive now, his would be the sort of mind to set in order the extravagance of the Central European School of psychoanalysis, as in his scientific books, Luck, or Cunning? and Life and Habit, he soundly criticized the detail of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The last lines of the poem refer both to the new psychologists and to the Georgians, whom the author invites to fish for the Society’s annual prize, presumably the Hawthornden Prize, which has been awarded to two or three Georgians; Georgians shrink from psychological analysis in any form.

  Note the ‘gentles’, which are piscatorially intended. The reference to the Poet Laureate is to his admirable work with the Society of Pure English. ‘Prescribing’ because Doctor Bridges was once in practice as a physician. Other references to Messrs. Shaw, Doughty, Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Davies, Masefield need little explanation. David Garnett is a ‘cage-mate’ partly, but not entirely, on account of the Man in the Zoo.

  FINAL STANZAS. – A zoologist informs me that monkeys do not have fleas: what they pick off their bodies is only scurf. But the popular proverb about a monkey and his fleas justifies the error.

  THE MOMENT OF WEAKNESS

  Let us at last be dull

  And heavy, battered hull

  Becalmed, like hogs in clover

  Let us roll, our labours over.

  These moments justify

  Terrors of destiny,

  Black waves and broken sky,

  Lost cargo and men’s lives;

  The better part survives –

  You, boy and I, content

  In self-abandonment,

  So broken is our mood,

  To discount fortitude

  And hate adventurous weather.

  Here let us loll together,

  Do nothing and be nothing

  And hold all thought in loathing.

  The too large-hearted gale

  That stript our tops of sail,

  That havocked yards and deck,

  Driving us half in wreck

  Seven hundred miles at least

  On our set course, due East,

  Has dwindled to a breeze

  And failed in sunny seas,

  Leaving us, none too soon,

  To enjoy this temperate noon

  And quiet sleep, past hope,

  To forget rigging and rope

  And set no damage straight,

  To toss the dice and bait

  Fish-hooks, to smoke and joke

  With heads, not hearts, of oak.

  Herrings from the Bay,

  Fresh herrings from the Bay,

  The handbells are ringing,

  The fishwives are gay.

  But last night as my laden boat

  The landing-stage neared,

  A drowned man went by afloat,

  With bubbles in his beard.

  Sow what you would sow

  But another shall reap;

  To-morrow night you go

  Into bellies of the deep.

  Before crabs tear your gaping lips,

  Or fish suck your eyes,

  Get the most play from the shining day,

  Eat, drink, and be not wise.

  From Poems (1914–26)

  (1927)

  THE
COUNTRY DANCE

  More slowly the sun travels West,

  Earth warming beneath,

  Man’s heart swelling tight in his breast

  As a bud in the sheath.

  For the tender and unquiet season,

  The Spring, drawing on

  Kindles flame in the eye, chokes the reason

  And silvers the swan.

  Leap high, jealous Ralph; jet it neat,

  Merry Jill, and remove

  By employment of elbows and feet

  The green sickness of love.

  THE ROSE AND THE LILY

  The Rose and the Lily

  Were loving and silly,

  The Goat and the Ass

  Would let little pass.

  Then the Ass blamed the Goat

  For devouring the Lily

  And the Goat blamed the Ass

  For devouring the Rose.

  So hoof against horn

  They raged through the corn,

  They stamped it to ruin,

  And round the world goes.

  AN OCCASION

  ‘The trenches are filled in, the houseless dead

  Disperse and on the rising thunder-storm

  Cast their weak limbs, are whirled up overhead

  In clouds of fear….’

  Then suddenly as you read,

  As we sat listening there, and cushioned warm,

  War-scarred yet safe, alive beyond all doubt,

  The blundering gale outside faltered, stood still:

  Two bolts clicked at the glass doors, and a shrill

  Impetuous gust of wind blew in with a shout,

  Fluttering your poems. And the lamp went out.

  A DEDICATION OF THREE HATS

  This round hat I devote to Mars,

  Tough steel with leather lined.

  My skin’s my own, redeemed by scars

  From further still more futile wars

  The God may have in mind.

  Minerva takes my square of black

  Well-tasselled with the same;

  Her dullest nurselings never lack

  With hoods of scarlet at their back

  And letters to their name.

  But this third hat, this foolscap sheet,

  (For there’s a strength in three)

  Unblemished, conical and neat

  I hang up here without deceit

  To kind Euphrosyne

  Goddess, accept with smiles or tears

  This gift of a gross fool

  Who having sweated in death fears