Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Blankly outside, or more unfairly still,

  Cracking the crust and doing what you will

  With spoon and fingers, claim at last to find

  The proof of dumplingdom – study defined

  Without regard for the unstudied whole –

  In your digestion and your finger-bowl.

  Either be dumplings and be wise of us

  Or be content, as men, not to discuss

  What is not us so soon as you begin

  To let our steam out and your noses in.

  SORROW

  There is a you, a you yourself, denies

  All predicates that admit contraries.

  Therefore I spare you love because of hate,

  Or life because of death. Joy cannot state

  Such joy I have in you, because of grief.

  No, let me name you sorrow: sorrow, in brief,

  Is a full thought with no contrasting sense

  But sorrow. Grief will cloud an innocence

  Or wholeness, which in turn love’s rebel hates

  Blacken, which death-of-life annihilates,

  But sorrow quickens to transparency.

  Be not even beauty to me through your beauty,

  But singly through your sorrow: that will ease me.

  THE NAPE OF THE NECK

  To speak of the hollow nape where the close chaplet

  Of thought is bound, the loose-ends lying neat

  In two strands downward, where the shoulders open

  Casual and strong below, waiting their burden,

  And the long spine begins its downward journey:

  The hair curtains this postern silkily,

  This secret stairway by which thought will come

  More personally, with a closer welcome,

  Than through the latticed eyes or portalled ears;

  Where kisses and all unconsidered whispers

  Go smoother in than by the very lip,

  And more endeared because the head’s asleep

  Or grieving, the face covered with the hands.

  ‘But equally,’ you say, ‘to these neck-ribbands –’

  To be near napeless, headsunk, simian

  Forgoes the privilege of man and woman.

  The tighter bound the chaplet, the more easy

  The door moves on its hinges; the more free

  The stair, then the more sure the tenancy –’

  ‘But equally,’ you say, ‘to these neck-ribbands

  May come one night the hypocrite assassin

  With show of love or wisdom thrusting in

  And, prompted in the watchword of the day,

  Run up and stab and walk unseen away.’

  But there’s no need to use such melodrama,

  For each betrayer only can betray

  Once and the last effect of violation

  Need be no ruin, no grief or contrition

  (Despite tradition)

  But a clear view: ‘I was betrayed indeed,

  Yet to a strictness and a present need.’

  And it should come to this, to wear with pride

  The knife scars that it would be shame to hide,

  And once more without shuddering or hardness

  Loll down the head to any chosen kiss.

  A VISIT TO STRATFORD

  And was he innocent as you protest

  Of these hot wheels, this tide, this trade, this sawdust?

  No, there was weakness in him that foreknew,

  Even claimed it with a brazen non sans droict,

  And here’s his pedigree which pardon me

  I do not mean to read, found in his closet.

  His rival playwrights nudged and laughed at this,

  For patronage busy among the heralds

  In gratitude for secret service rendered

  Had cut all tangled genealogic knots

  And sealed the lie – linking the generations

  We also laugh at him, in spite of love.

  To go no further than the tanner’s son.

  The tannery failed, beginning the long turmoil:

  Turmoil brought settled grief, grief, fear of death:

  This fear postponed itself in architecture:

  Architecture spelt itself sweet death;

  After death the abstraction of the body

  (Protected by the merest formal curse)

  Freeing the massy tomb for commendation,

  For commentaries, for mere scholiasm:

  And scholiasm bred strange heresies

  Which thinned and spread in chatter through the schools:

  Chatter brought pilgrims flocking, therefore trade:

  Trade, this false history, this word-worn patter:

  So, timber from the mulberry that he planted

  Miraculously multiplied, enough

  To plank and roof a great memorial hall

  For summer festivals: his eight least plays,

  The Shrew and Merry Wives starring the bill:

  Matinees, Saturdays and Wednesdays: stalls

  And sideshows valeted by the Concordance.

  Oh, he foreknew the frequence of the sequence –

  Sixpence a ticket, sixpence, sixpence,

  School-children with their teachers, twopence.

  The hackney rides, quotation to quotation,

  To be or not to be. The bubble reputation.

  A grievous fault (for one so rich of wit)

  And grievously has Caesar answered it.

  PURE DEATH

  We looked, we loved, and therewith instantly

  Death became terrible to you and me.

  By love we disenthralled our natural terror

  From every comfortable philosopher

  Or tall, grey doctor of divinity:

  Death stood at last in his true rank and order.

  It happened soon, so wild of heart were we,

  Exchange of gifts grew to a malady:

  Their worth rose always higher on each side

  Till there seemed nothing but ungivable pride

  That yet remained ungiven, and this degree

  Called a conclusion not to be denied.

  Then we at last bethought ourselves, made shift

  And simultaneously this final gift

  Gave: each with shaking hands unlocks

  The sinister, long, brass-bound coffin-box,

  Unwraps pure death, with such bewilderment

  As greeted our love’s first acknowledgement.

  THE COOL WEB

  Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

  How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

  How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

  How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

  But we have speech, to chill the angry day,

  And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.

  We spell away the overhanging night,

  We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

  There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

  Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:

  We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

  In brininess and volubility.

  But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

  Throwing off language and its watery clasp

  Before our death, instead of when death comes,

  Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,

  Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

  We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

  II

  * * *

  From Poems (1914–27)

  (1927)

  NINE ADDITIONAL POEMS: 1927

  THE PROGRESS

  There is a travelling fury in his feet

  (Scorn for the waters of his native spring)

  Which proves at last the downfall of this king:

  Shame will not let him sound the long retreat.

  Tormented by his progress he displays

  An open flank to the swarmed enemy

&n
bsp; Who, charging through and through, set his pride free

  For death’s impossible and footless ways.

  HELL

  Husks, rags and bones, waste-paper, excrement,

  Denied a soul whether for good or evil

  And casually consigned to unfulfilment,

  Are pronged into his bag by the great-devil.

  Or words repeated, over and over and over,

  Until their sense sickens and all but dies,

  These the same fellow like a ghoulish lover

  Will lay his hands upon and hypnotize.

  From husks and rags and waste and excrement

  He forms the pavement-feet and the lift-faces;

  He steers the sick words into parliament

  To rule a dust-bin world with deep-sleep phrases.

  When healthy words or people chance to dine

  Together in this rarely actual scene,

  There is a love-taste in the bread and wine,

  Nor is it asked: ‘Do you mean what you mean?’

  But to their table-converse boldly comes

  The same great-devil with his brush and tray,

  To conjure plump loaves from the scattered crumbs,

  And feed his false five thousands day by day.

  THE FURIOUS VOYAGE

  So, overmasterful, to sea!

  But hope no distant view of sail,

  No growling ice, nor weed, nor whale,

  Nor breakers perilous on the lee.

  Though you enlarge your angry mind

  Three leagues and more about the ship

  And stamp till every puncheon skip,

  The wake runs evenly behind.

  And it has width enough for you,

  This vessel, dead from truck to keel,

  With its unmanageable wheel,

  A blank chart and a surly crew,

  In ballast only due to fetch

  The turning point of wretchedness

  On an uncoasted, featureless

  And barren ocean of blue stretch.

  O JORROCKS, I HAVE PROMISED

  Sprung of no worthier parentage than sun

  In February, and fireside and the snow

  Streaked on the north side of each wall and hedge,

  And breakfast late, in bed, and a tall puppy

  Restless for sticks to fetch and tussle over,

  And Jorrocks bawling from the library shelf,

  And the accumulation of newspapers

  And the day-after-judgement-day to face –

  This poem (only well bred on one side,

  Father a grum, mother a lady’s maid)

  Asked for a style, a place in literature.

  So, since the morning had been wholly spoilt

  By sun, by snow, breakfast in bed, the puppy,

  By literature, a headache and their headaches;

  Throwing away the rest of my bad day

  I gave it style, let it be literature

  Only too well, and let it talk itself

  And me to boredom, let it draw lunch out

  From one o’clock to three with nuts and smoking

  While it went talking on, with imagery,

  Why it was what it was, and had no breeding

  But waste things and the ambition to be real;

  And flattered me with puppy gratitude.

  I let it miss the one train back to town

  And stay to tea and supper and a bed

  And even bed-in-breakfast the next morning.

  More thanks.

  The penalty of authorship;

  Forced hospitality, an impotence

  Expecting an impossible return

  Not only from the plainly stupid chance

  But from impossible caddishness, no less.

  I answered leading questions about Poe

  And let it photograph me in the snow

  And gave it a signed copy of itself

  And ‘the nursery money-box is on the shelf,

  How kind of you to give them each a penny.’

  O Jorrocks I have promised

  To serve thee to the end,

  To entertain young Indians,

  The pupils of my friend,

  To entertain Etonians

  And for their sake combine

  The wit of T.S. Eliot,

  The grace of Gertrude Stein.

  Be thou forever near me

  To hasten or control,

  Thou Literary Supplement,

  Thou Guardian of my soul.

  I shall not fear the battle

  While thou art by my side,

  Nor wander from the pathway

  If thou shalt be my guide.

  Amen.

  LOST ACRES

  These acres, always again lost

  By every new ordnance-survey

  And searched for at exhausting cost

  Of time and thought, are still away.

  They have their paper-substitute –

  Intercalation of an inch

  At the so-many-thousandth foot –

  And no one parish feels the pinch.

  But lost they are, despite all care,

  And perhaps likely to be bound

  Together in a piece somewhere,

  A plot of undiscovered ground.

  Invisible, they have the spite

  To swerve the tautest measuring-chain

  And the exact theodolite

  Perched every side of them in vain.

  Yet, be assured, we have no need

  To plot these acres of the mind

  With prehistoric fern and reed

  And monsters such as heroes find.

  Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,

  Their trees behind the phantom fence,

  But of a substance without words:

  To walk there would be loss of sense.

  GARDENER

  Loveliest flowers, though crooked in their border,

  And glorious fruit, dangling from ill-pruned boughs –

  Be sure the gardener had not eye enough

  To wheel a barrow between the broadest gates

  Without a clumsy scraping.

  Yet none could think it simple awkwardness;

  And when he stammered of a garden-guardian,

  Said the smooth lawns came by angelic favour,

  The pinks and pears in spite of his own blunders,

  They nudged at this conceit.

  Well, he had something, though he called it nothing –

  An ass’s wit, a hairy-belly shrewdness

  That would appraise the intentions of an angel

  By the very yard-stick of his own confusion,

  And bring the most to pass.

  TO A CHARGE OF DIDACTICISM

  Didactic, I shall be didactic

  When I have hit on something new

  Else dons unborn will be didactic

  On undidacticism too.

  Didactic, they will be didactic

  With ‘excellently’s’ and ‘absurd’s’:

  Let me make sure that they’re didactic

  On my own words on my own words.

  THE PHILATELIST-ROYAL

  The Philatelist-Royal

  Was always too loyal

  To say what he honestly

  Thought of Philately.

  Must it rank as a Science?

  Then he had more reliance,

  (As he told the Press wittily),

  In Royal Philately

  Than in all your geologies,

  All your psychologies,

  Bacteriologies,

  Physics and such.

  It was honester, much,

  Free of mere speculations

  And doubtful equations,

  So therefore more true

  From a pure science view

  Than other school courses:

  For Nature’s blind forces

  Here alone, they must own,

  Played no meddlesome part.

  It was better than Art:

&nb
sp; It enforced education,

  It strengthened the nation

  In the arts of mensuration

  And colour-discrimination,

  In cleanliness, in hope,

  In use of the microscope,

  In mercantile transactions,

  In a love of abstractions,

  In geography and history:

  It was a noble mystery.

  So he told them again

  That Philately’s reign,

  So mild and humane,

  Would surely last longer,

  Would surely prove stronger

  Than the glory of Greece,

  Than the grandeur of Rome.

  It brought goodwill and peace

  Wherever it found a home.

  It was more democratic,

  More full, more ecstatic,

  Than the Bible, the bottle,

  The Complete Works of Aristotle,

  And worthierer and betterer

  And etceterier and etcetera.

  The Philatelist-Royal

  Was always too loyal

  To say what he honestly

  Thought of Philately.

  SONG: TO BE LESS PHILOSOPHICAL

  Listen, you theologians,

  Give ear, you rhetoricians,

  Hearken, you Aristotelians:

  Of the Nature of God, my song shall be.

  Our God is infinite,

  Your God is infinite,

  Their God is infinite,

  Of infinite variety.

  God, he is also finite,

  God, she is also definite,

  He, she; we, they; you, each and it –

  Of finite omnipresence.

  He is a bloody smart sergeant

  And served in the Royal Artillery:

  For gallantly exposing his person

  He won the Victoria Cross.

  She is also divorced,

  From a Russian count in exile,

  And paints a little and sings a little –

  And won a little prize in Paris.

  It has also the character of a soap

  And may be employed quite freely

  For disinfecting cattle trucks

  And the very kine in the byre.

  You are also mad, quite mad,

  To imagine you are not God.

  Goddam it, aren’t you a Spirit,

  And your ministers a flaming fire?

  We are also gradually tending

  To be less philosophical,

  We talk through hats more personally,

  With madness more divine.

  They are a very smart Goddam Cross

  With the character of a soap, a little: