Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

To feed the sick saint who once vanquished him

  With spear so stark and grim;

  Would set a pillow of grass beneath his head,

  Would fetch him fever-wort from the pool’s brim –

  And crept into his grave when he was dead.

  TAP ROOM

  Believe me not a dolt: I would invent

  No proverbs; but considering them

  I need to state them:

  Beauty impracticable,

  Strength undemonstrable;

  Lives without end await them.

  Yet know me able and quick

  To force an ending. How?

  Finding a dolt to have begun them.

  Finding him where?

  On Halfpenny Island where they milk the cats.

  Where may that lie?

  Near Farthing Island where they milk mice.

  How shall he have begun them?

  O how indeed, but

  Cracking the nut against the hammer.

  What nut? Why, sir, the nut …

  Believe me not a dolt: I have invented

  No proverbs …

  THE TERRACED VALLEY

  In a deep thought of you and concentration

  I came by hazard to a new region:

  The unnecessary sun was not there,

  The necessary earth lay without care –

  For more than sunshine warmed the skin

  Of the round world that was turned outside-in.

  Calm sea beyond the terraced valley

  Without horizon easily was spread,

  As it were overhead,

  Washing the mountain-spurs behind me:

  The unnecessary sky was not there,

  Therefore no heights, no deeps, no birds of the air.

  Neat outside-inside, neat below-above,

  Hermaphrodizing love.

  Neat this-way-that-way and without mistake:

  On the right hand could slide the left glove.

  Neat over-under: the young snake

  Through an unyielding shell his path could break.

  Singing of kettles, like a singing brook,

  Made out-of-doors a fireside nook.

  But you, my love, where had you then your station?

  Seeing that on this counter-earth together

  We go not distant from each other;

  I knew you near me in that strange region,

  So searched for you, in hope to see you stand

  On some near olive-terrace, in the heat,

  The left-hand glove drawn on your right hand,

  The empty snake’s egg perfect at your feet –

  But found you nowhere in the wide land,

  And cried disconsolately, until you spoke

  Immediate at my elbow, and your voice broke

  This trick of time, changing the world about

  To once more inside-in and outside-out.

  OAK, POPLAR, PINE

  The temple priests though using but one sign

  For TREE, distinguish poplar, oak and pine:

  Oak, short and spreading – poplar, tall and thin –

  Pine, tall, bunched at the top and well inked in.

  Therefore in priestly thought all various trees

  Must be enrolled, in kind, as one of these.

  The fir, the cedar and the deodar

  Are pines, so too the desert palm-trees are;

  Aspens and birches are of poplar folk

  But chestnut, damson, elm and fig are oak.

  All might be simple, did the priests allow

  That apple-blossom dresses the oak bough,

  That dates are pines-cones; but they will not so,

  Well taught how pine and oak and poplar grow:

  In every temple-court, for all to see

  Flourishes one example of each tree

  In tricunx. Your high-priest would laugh to think

  Of oak boughs blossoming in pagan pink,

  Or numerous cones, hung from a single spine,

  Sticky yet sweeter than the fruit of vine,

  (For vine’s no tree; vine is a creeping thing,

  Cousin to snake, that with its juice can sting).

  Confront your priest with evident apple-blossom;

  Will faith and doubt, conflicting, heave his bosom?

  Force dates between his lips, will he forget

  That there’s no date-palm in the alphabet?

  Turn apostate? Even in secret? No,

  He’ll see the blossom as mere mistletoe.

  The dates will be as grapes, good for his needs:

  He’ll swallow down their stones like little seeds.

  And here’s no lie, no hypocritic sham:

  Believe him earnest-minded as I am.

  His script has less, and mine more, characters

  Than stand in use with lexicographers.

  They end with palm, I see and use the sign

  For tree that is to palm as palm to pine,

  As apple-bough to oak-bough in the spring:

  It is no secrecy but a long looking.

  ACT V, SCENE 5

  You call the old nurse and the little page

  To act survivors on your tragic stage –

  You love the intrusive extra character.

  ‘But where’s the tragedy,’ you say, ‘if none

  Remains to moralize on what’s been done?

  There’s no catharsis in complete disaster.

  Tears purge the soul – the nurse’s broken line:

  “O mistress, pretty one, dead!” the page’s whine:

  “Thou too? Alas, fond master!”’

  No purge for my disgusted soul, no tears

  Will wash away my bile of tragic years,

  No sighs vicariously abate my rancour –

  If nurse and page survive, I’d have them own

  Small sorrow to be left up-stage alone,

  And on the bloodiest field of massacre

  Either rant out the anti-climax thus:

  ‘’A’s dead, the bitch!’ ‘So’s Oscar! Joy for us!’

  Then fall to rifling pocket, belt and purse

  With corky jokes and pantomime of sin;

  Or let the feud rage on, page against nurse –

  His jewelled dirk, her thund’rous rolling-pin.

  SONG: LIFT-BOY

  Let me tell you the story of how I began:

  I began as the boot-boy and ended as the boot-man,

  With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,

  With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,

  With nothing in my pockets.

  Let me tell you the story of how I went on:

  I began as the lift-boy and ended as the lift-man,

  With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,

  With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,

  With nothing in my pockets.

  I found it very easy to whistle and play

  With nothing in my head or my pockets all day,

  With nothing in my pockets.

  But along came Old Eagle, like Moses or David;

  He stopped at the fourth floor and preached me Damnation:

  ‘Not a soul shall be savèd, not one shall be savèd.

  The whole First Creation shall forfeit salvation:

  From knife-boy to lift-boy, from ragged to regal,

  Not one shall be saved, not you, not Old Eagle,

  No soul on earth escapeth, even if all repent –’

  So I cut the cords of the lift and down we went,

  With nothing in our pockets.

  From Poems 1926–1930

  (1931)

  BROTHER

  It’s odd enough to be alive with others,

  But odder still to have sisters and brothers:

  To make one of a characteristic litter –

  The sisters puzzled and vexed, the brothers vexed and bitter

  That this one wears, though flattened by abuse,

  The family no
se for individual use.

  BAY OF NAPLES

  The blind man reading Dante upside-down

  And not in Braille frowned an admiring frown;

  He sniffed, he underscored the passage read,

  ‘One nose is better than both eyes,’ he said.

  ‘Here’s a strong trace of orange-peel and sweat

  And palate-scrapings on the rock, still wet,

  And travellers’ names carved on the sappy tree –

  Old Ugolino’s grief! Sublime!’ said he.

  FLYING CROOKED

  The butterfly, a cabbage-white,

  (His honest idiocy of flight)

  Will never now, it is too late,

  Master the art of flying straight,

  Yet has – who knows so well as I? –

  A just sense of how not to fly:

  He lurches here and here by guess

  And God and hope and hopelessness.

  Even the aerobatic swift

  Has not his flying-crooked gift.

  REASSURANCE TO THE SATYR

  The hairs of my beard are red and black mingled,

  With white now frequent in the red and black.

  My finger-nails, see here, are ill-assorted;

  My hands are not a pair, nor are my brows;

  My nose is crooked as my smile.

  ‘How?’ says the Satyr. ‘Dare I trust a monster

  Who cannot match his left hand with his right,

  Who wears three several colours in his beard?’

  Satyr, the question is well asked.

  Nevertheless I am as trustworthy

  As any shepherd in this wide valley.

  I touch the doubtful with the left hand first,

  Then with the right, under right brow and left

  Peer at it doubtfully.

  I am red-bearded wild, white-bearded mild,

  Black-bearded merry.

  And what the other shepherds know but singly

  And easily at the first sight or touch

  (Who follow a straight nose and who smile even)

  I know with labour and most amply:

  I know each possible lie and bias

  That crookedness can cozen out of straightness.

  Satyr, you need not shrink.

  SYNTHETIC SUCH

  ‘The sum of all the parts of Such –

  Of each laboratory scene –

  Is Such.’ While Science means this much

  And means no more, why, let it mean!

  But were the science-men to find

  Some animating principle

  Which gave synthetic Such a mind

  Vital, though metaphysical –

  To Such, such an event, I think

  Would cause unscientific pain:

  Science, appalled by thought, would shrink

  To its component parts again.

  DRAGONS

  These ancient dragons not committed yet

  To any certain manner,

  To any final matter,

  Ranging creation recklessly,

  Empowered to overset

  Natural form and fate,

  Freaking the sober species,

  Smoothing rough accident to be

  Level in a long series

  And, each new century,

  Forging for God a newer signet –

  To these wild monsters boasting

  Over and over

  Their unchecked tyranny,

  The only not a monster

  In a small voice calling

  Answered despitefully:

  ‘Dragons, you count for nothing:

  You are no more than weather,

  The year’s unsteadfastness

  To which, now summer-basking,

  To which, now in distress

  Midwinter-shivering,

  The mind pays no honour.’

  THE NEXT TIME

  And that inevitable accident

  On the familiar journey – roughly reckoned

  By miles and shillings – in a cramped compartment

  Between a first hereafter and a second?

  And when we passengers are given two hours,

  The wheels failing once more at Somewhere-Nowhere,

  To climb out, stretch our legs and pick wild flowers –

  Suppose that this time I elect to stay there?

  To Whom Else?

  (1931)

  LARGESSE TO THE POOR

  I had been God’s own time on travel

  From stage to stage, guest-house to guest-house,

  And at each stage furnished one room

  To my own comfort, hoping God knows what,

  Most happy when most sure that no condition

  Might ever last in God’s own time –

  Unless to be death-numb, as I would not.

  Yet I was always watchful at my choices

  To change the bad at least for a no worse,

  And I was strict nowhere to stay long.

  In turn from each new home passing

  I locked the door and pocketed the key,

  Leaving behind goods plainly mine

  (Should I return to claim them legally)

  Of which I kept particular register –

  In nightly rooms and chattels of the occasion

  I was, to my own grief, a millionaire.

  But now at last, out of God’s firmament,

  To break this endless journey –

  Homeless to come where that awaits me

  Which in my mind’s unwearying discontent

  I begged as pilgrim’s due –

  To fling my keys as largesse to the poor,

  The always travel-hungry God-knows-who,

  With, ‘Let them fatten on my industry

  Who find perfection and eternity

  In might-be-worse, a roof over the head,

  And any half-loaf better than no bread,

  For which to thank God on their knees nightly.’

  THE FELLOE’D YEAR

  The pleasure of summer was its calm success

  Over winter past and winter sequent:

  The pleasure of winter was a warm counting,

  ‘Summer comes again, when, surely.’

  This pleasure and that pleasure touched

  In a perpetual spring-with-autumn ache,

  A creak and groan of season,

  In which all moved,

  In which all move yet – I the same, yet praying

  That the twelve spokes of this round-felloe’d year

  Be a fixed compass, not a turning wheel.

  TIME

  The vague sea thuds against the marble cliffs

  And from their fragments age-long grinds

  Pebbles like flowers.

  Or the vague weather wanders in the fields,

  And up spring flowers with coloured buds

  Like marble pebbles.

  The beauty of the flowers is Time, death-grieved;

  The pebbles’ beauty too is Time,

  Life-wearied.

  It is easy to admire a blowing flower

  Or a smooth pebble flower-like freaked

  By Time and vagueness.

  Time is Time’s lapse, the emulsive element coaxing

  All obstinate locks and rusty hinges

  To loving-kindness.

  And am I proof against that lovesome pair,

  Old age and childhood, twins in Time,

  In sorrowful vagueness?

  And will I not pretend the accustomed thanks:

  Humouring age with filial flowers,

  Childhood with pebbles?

  ON RISING EARLY

  Rising early and walking in the garden

  Before the sun has properly climbed the hill –

  His rays warming the roof, not yet the grass

  That is white with dew still.

  And not enough breeze to eddy a puff of smoke,

  And out in the meadows a thick mist lying yet,

  And nothing anywhere ill or noticeable
–

  Thanks indeed for that.

  But was there ever a day with wit enough

  To be always early, to draw the smoke up straight

  Even at three o’clock of an afternoon,

  To spare dullness or sweat?

  Indeed, many such days I remember

  That were dew-white and gracious to the last,

  That ruled out meal-times, yet had no more hunger

  Than was felt by rising a half-hour before breakfast,

  Nor more fatigue – where was it that I went

  So unencumbered, with my feet trampling

  Like strangers on the past?

  ON DWELLING

  Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening

  From rustic lips fail as the town encroaches:

  Soon nothing passes but the cold quick stare

  Of eyes that see ghosts, yet too many for fear.

  Here I too walk, silent myself, in wonder

  At a town not mine though plainly coextensive

  With mine, even in days coincident:

  In mine I dwell, in theirs like them I haunt.

  And the green country, should I turn again there?

  My bumpkin neighbours loom even ghostlier:

  Like trees they murmur or like blackbirds sing

  Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening.

  ON NECESSITY

  Dung-worms are necessary. And their certain need

  Is dung, more dung, much dung and on such dung to feed.

  And though I chose to sit and ponder for whole days

  On dung-worms, what could I find more to tell or praise

  Than their necessity, their numbers and their greed

  To which necessity in me its daily tribute pays?

  THE FOOLISH SENSES

  Feverishly the eyes roll for what thorough

  Sight may hold them still,

  And most hysterically strains the throat

  At the love song once easy to sing out

  In minstrel serfdom to the armoured ill –

  Let them cease now.

  The view is inward, foolish eye: your rolling

  Flatters the outward scene

  To spread with sunset misery. Foolish throat,

  That ill was colic, love its antidote,

  And beauty, forced regret of who would sing

  Of loves unclean.

  No more, senses, shall you so confound me,

  Playing your pageants through