Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;

  Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)

  Motive and end and moral in the air;

  Nice contradiction between fact and fact

  Will make the whole read human and exact.

  LUNCH-HOUR BLUES

  His ears discount the ragged noise,

  His nose, the tangled smell;

  His eyes when prodigies go past

  Look up, but never dwell.

  His tongue not even registers

  The juices of his plate,

  His hands (some other eater’s hands?)

  Will not communicate.

  He’s thrown the senses from their seat,

  As Indian heroes do –

  An act more notable were not

  The mind unseated too.

  O yogey-bogey lunching man,

  Lunch on, against the bill –

  Your service to the ascetic rule

  And to the chiming till.

  HOTEL BED AT LUGANO

  Even in hotel beds the hair tousles.

  But this is observation, not complaint –

  ‘Complaints should please be dropped in the complaint-box’ –

  ‘Which courteously we beg you to vacate

  In that clean state as you should wish to find it.’

  And the day after Carnival, today,

  I found, in the square, a crimson cardboard heart:

  ‘Anna Maria’, it read. Otherwise, friends,

  No foreign news – unless that here they drink

  Red wine from china bowls; here anis-roots

  Are stewed like turnips; here funiculars

  Light up at dusk, two crooked constellations;

  And if bells peal a victory or great birth,

  That will be cows careering towards the pail.

  ‘It is not yet the season,’ pleads the Porter,

  ‘That comes in April, when the rain most rains.’

  Trilingual Switzer fish in Switzer lakes

  Pining for rain and bread-crumbs of the season,

  In thin reed-beds you pine!

  A-bed drowsing,

  (While the hair slowly tousles) uncomplaining…

  Anna Maria’s heart under my pillow

  Provokes no furious dream. Who is this Anna?

  A Switzer maiden among Switzer maidens,

  Child of the children of that fox who never

  Ate the sour grapes: her teeth not set on edge.

  PROGRESSIVE HOUSING

  At history’s compulsion

  A welcome greeted once

  All gross or trivial objects

  That reached, by grand endurance,

  Their bicentenary year.

  But not two thousand years

  Gould sanctify this building

  With bat-and-ivy ruin,

  Or justify these furnishings

  As woe-begone antiques.

  No doubt it is good news

  That the spell of age is lifted,

  The museums’ greed rebuked:

  Yet might this not have come about

  Less nastily perhaps?

  LEDA

  Heart, with what lonely fears you ached,

  How lecherously mused upon

  That horror with which Leda quaked

  Under the spread wings of the swan.

  Then soon your mad religious smile

  Made taut the belly, arched the breast,

  And there beneath your god awhile

  You strained and gulped your beastliest.

  Pregnant you are, as Leda was,

  Of bawdry, murder and deceit;

  Perpetuating night because

  The after-languors hang so sweet.

  THE FLORIST ROSE

  This wax-mannequin nude, the florist rose,

  She of the long stem and too glossy leaf,

  Is dead to honest greenfly and leaf-cutter:

  Behind plate-glass watches the yellow fogs.

  Claims kin with the robust male aeroplane

  Whom eagles hate and phantoms of the air,

  Who has no legend, as she breaks from legend –

  From fellowship with sword and sail and crown.

  Experiment’s flower, scentless (he its bird);

  Is dewed by the spray-gun; is tender-thorned;

  Pouts, false-virginal, between bud and bloom;

  Bought as a love-gift, droops within the day.

  BEING TALL

  Long poems written by tall men

  Wear a monstrous look; but then

  Would these do better to write short

  Like poets of the midget sort?

  Here is no plea for medium height

  In poets or what poets write:

  Only a trifle to recall

  The days when I had grown too tall,

  When jealous dwarfs leered up at me

  From somewhere between shoe and knee.

  I grinned them my contempt and fear,

  Stooping till our heads came near.

  Then all I wrote, until in rage

  I whipped them off the path and page,

  Bent like a hook this way and that –

  And who could guess what I was at?

  But rage was not enough to teach

  My natural height and breadth and reach:

  It wanted love with kindly phlegm

  To shrink my bones and straighten them.

  AT FIRST SIGHT

  ‘Love at first sight,’ some say, misnaming

  Discovery of twinned helplessness

  Against the huge tug of procreation.

  But friendship at first sight? This also

  Catches fiercely at the surprised heart

  So that the cheek blanches and then blushes.

  RECALLING WAR

  Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,

  The track aches only when the rain reminds.

  The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,

  The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.

  The blinded man sees with his ears and hands

  As much or more than once with both his eyes.

  Their war was fought these twenty years ago

  And now assumes the nature-look of time,

  As when the morning traveller turns and views

  His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.

  What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags

  But an infection of the common sky

  That sagged ominously upon the earth

  Even when the season was the airiest May.

  Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out

  Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.

  Natural infirmities were out of mode,

  For Death was young again: patron alone

  Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.

  Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight

  At life’s discovered transitoriness,

  Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.

  Never was such antiqueness of romance,

  Such tasty honey oozing from the heart.

  And old importances came swimming back –

  Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head,

  A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call.

  Even there was a use again for God –

  A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire,

  In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.

  War was return of earth to ugly earth,

  War was foundering of sublimities,

  Extinction of each happy art and faith

  By which the world had still kept head in air,

  Protesting logic or protesting love,

  Until the unendurable moment struck –

  The inward scream, the duty to run mad.

  And we recall the merry ways of guns –

  Nibbling the walls of factory and church

  Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees


  Like a child, dandelions with a switch.

  Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill,

  Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall:

  A sight to be recalled in elder days

  When learnedly the future we devote

  To yet more boastful visions of despair.

  X

  Detective, criminal or corpse –

  Who is the I of the story?

  Agreed, the first stage of a narrative

  Permits mystification – the I

  Rainbowing clues and fancies.

  That is the time of drawing-room charades:

  Each mask resembles every other mask,

  And every beard is false.

  But now the story hardens and grows adult:

  By the beginning of the final chapter

  Holmes and Moriarty are distinct,

  The corpse at least not either’s –

  I joins merrily in the man-hunt

  With a key to the code.

  The great K.C. is briefed at last,

  The Judge is trying on his sternest wig,

  The public queueing up with camp-stools.

  Do you dare to tell us, I, at this late hour,

  That who you are still waits decision?

  Malice Aforethought or Unfit to Plead?

  PARENT TO CHILDREN

  When you grow up, are no more children,

  Nor am I then your parent:

  The day of settlement falls.

  ‘Parent’, mortality’s reminder,

  In each son’s mouth or daughter’s

  A word of shame and rage!

  I, who begot you, ask no pardon of you;

  Nor may the soldier ask

  Pardon of the strewn dead.

  The procreative act was blind:

  It was not you I sired then –

  For who sires friends, as you are mine now?

  In fear begotten, I begot in fear.

  Would you have had me cast fear out

  So that you should not be?

  TO CHALLENGE DELIGHT

  Living is delight –

  Lovers, even, confess it;

  And what could compare

  With the pain these suffer?

  Delight is all repeating –

  Doves coo, cats purr, men sing.

  ‘Challenge delight, of purpose,

  And you pull Nature’s nose

  In self-spite, you slap her face

  In the portico of her palace,

  Exchange her sportive sun

  For a black perfection.’

  Thus hardly anybody

  Will make delight his study.

  Its meaning to know

  Would be emptier than sorrow,

  That Sunday morning respite

  From a hard week of delight.

  TO WALK ON HILLS

  To walk on hills is to employ legs

  As porters of the head and heart

  Jointly adventuring towards

  Perhaps true equanimity.

  To walk on hills is to see sights

  And hear sounds unfamiliar.

  When in wind the pine-tree roars,

  When crags with bleatings echo,

  When water foams below the fall,

  Heart records that journey

  As memorable indeed;

  Head reserves opinion,

  Confused by the wind.

  A view of three shires and the sea!

  Seldom so much at once appears

  Of the coloured world, says heart.

  Head is glum, says nothing.

  Legs become weary, halting

  To sprawl in a rock’s shelter,

  While the sun drowsily blinks

  On head at last brought low –

  This giddied passenger of legs

  That has no word to utter.

  Heart does double duty,

  As heart, and as head,

  With portentous trifling.

  A castle, on its crag perched,

  Across the miles between is viewed

  With awe as across years.

  Now a daisy pleases,

  Pleases and astounds, even,

  That on a garden lawn could blow

  All summer long with no esteem.

  And the buzzard’s cruel poise,

  And the plover’s misery,

  And the important beetle’s

  Blue-green-shiny back….

  To walk on hills is to employ legs

  To march away and lose the day.

  Tell us, have you known shepherds?

  And are they not a witless race,

  Prone to quaint visions?

  Not thus from solitude

  (Solitude sobers only)

  But from long hilltop striding.

  TO BRING THE DEAD TO LIFE

  To bring the dead to life

  Is no great magic.

  Few are wholly dead:

  Blow on a dead man’s embers

  And a live flame will start.

  Let his forgotten griefs be now,

  And now his withered hopes;

  Subdue your pen to his handwriting

  Until it prove as natural

  To sign his name as yours.

  Limp as he limped,

  Swear by the oaths he swore;

  If he wore black, affect the same;

  If he had gouty fingers,

  Be yours gouty too.

  Assemble tokens intimate of him –

  A seal, a cloak, a pen:

  Around these elements then build

  A home familiar to

  The greedy revenant.

  So grant him life, but reckon

  That the grave which housed him

  May not be empty now:

  You in his spotted garments

  Shall yourself lie wrapped.

  TO EVOKE POSTERITY

  To evoke posterity

  Is to weep on your own grave,

  Ventriloquizing for the unborn:

  ‘Would you were present in flesh, hero!

  What wreaths and junketings!’

  And the punishment is fixed:

  To be found fully ancestral,

  To be cast in bronze for a city square,

  To dribble green in times of rain

  And stain the pedestal.

  Spiders in the spread beard;

  A life proverbial

  On clergy lips a-cackle;

  Eponymous institutes,

  Their luckless architecture.

  Two more dates of life and birth

  For the hour of special study

  From which all boys and girls of mettle

  Twice a week play truant

  And worn excuses try.

  Alive, you have abhorred

  The crowds on holiday

  Jostling and whistling – yet would you air

  Your death-mask, smoothly lidded,

  Along the promenade?

  ANY HONEST HOUSEWIFE

  Any honest housewife could sort them out,

  Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.

  Is it any mystery who are the sound,

  And who the rotten? Never, by her lights.

  Any honest housewife who, by ill-fortune,

  Ever engaged a slut to scrub for her

  Could instantly distinguish from the workers

  The lazy, the liars, and the petty thieves.

  Does this denote a sixth peculiar sense

  Gifted to housewives for their vestal needs?

  Or is it failure of the usual five

  In all unthrifty writers on this head?

  DEFEAT OF THE REBELS

  The enemy forces are in wild flight.

  Poor souls (you say), they were intoxicated

  With rhetoric and banners, thought it enough

  To believe and to blow trumpets, to wear

  That menacing lie in their shakos.

  Enough: it falls on us to shoot them down,

  The incorrigibles an
d cowards,

  Where they shiver behind rocks, or in ditches

  Seek graves that have no headstones to them –

  Such prisoners were unprofitable.

  Now as our vanguard, pressing on,

  Dislodges them from village and town,

  Who yelling abandon packs and cloaks,

  Their arms and even the day’s rations,

  We are not abashed by victory,

  We raise no pitying monument

  To check the counter-stroke of fortune.

  These are not spoils: we recognize

  Our own strewn gear, that never had been robbed

  But for our sloth and hesitancy.

  THE GRUDGE

  Judging the gift, his eye of greed

  Weighed resentment against need.

  Resentment won, for to receive

  Is not so blessèd as to give:

  To give is to undo a lack.

  Nor could the gift be deeded back

  But with vile ingratitude –

  And gifts, like embassies, he viewed

  As if enclaves of foreign ground.

  Nor could a compromise be found

  Between the giver’s thoughtfulness

  And his own more-than-thanklessness.

  The gift held neither bribe nor blame

  But with cruel aptness came,

  Disproving self-sufficiency –

  That cloaked-in-silence misery

  Which had, itself, no gifts to make,

  Grudged to bend, and would not break.

  NEVER SUCH LOVE

  Twined together and, as is customary,

  For words of rapture groping, they

  ‘Never such love,’ swore, ‘ever before was!’

  Contrast with all loves that had failed or staled

  Registered their own as love indeed.

  And was this not to blab idly

  The heart’s fated inconstancy?

  Better in love to seal the love-sure lips,

  For truly love was before words were,

  And no word given, no word broken.

  When the name ‘love’ is uttered

  (Love, the near-honourable malady

  With which in greed and haste they

  Each other do infect and curse)

  Or, worse, is written down….

  Wise after the event, by love withered,

  A ‘never more!’ most frantically

  Sorrow and shame would proclaim

  Such as, they’d swear, never before were:

  True lovers even in this.

  THE HALFPENNY

  His lucky halfpenny after years of solace