Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Chose to be governed by those lesser powers,

  More than inferior to excellence –

  The worms astir in God’s corrupt flesh.

  God died, not excellence his name:

  Excellence lived, but only was not God.

  As for those lesser powers who played at God,

  Bloated with Adam’s deferential sighs

  In mourning for expired divinity,

  They reigned as royal monsters upon earth.

  Adam grew lean, and wore perpetual black;

  He made no reaching after excellence.

  Eve gave him sorry comfort for his grief

  With birth of sons, and mourning still he died.

  Adam was buried in one grave with God

  And the worms ranged and ravaged in between.

  Into their white maws fell abundance

  Of all things rotten. They were greedy-nosed

  To smell the taint out and go scavenging,

  Yet over excellence held no domain.

  Excellence lives; they are already dead –

  The ages of a putrefying corpse.

  A WITHERING HERB

  Ambition in the herb denied his root.

  In dreams of the dark he whispered:

  ‘O to be all flower, and to star the sky –

  True brother to the moon, that stemless flower

  Who long has cherished me!’

  Disdained the happy sun of morning,

  Held it gross rival to the sovereign moon –

  Thus for ambition cast his cloak of leaves

  Yet could not snap the stem, to float upward

  And from his roots be free:

  So withered staunchly.

  THE SHOT

  The curious heart plays with its fears:

  To hurl a shot through the ship’s planks,

  Being assured that the green angry flood

  Is charmed and dares not dance into the hold –

  Nor first to sweep a lingering glance around

  For land or shoal or cask adrift.

  ‘So miracles are done; but madmen drown.’

  O weary luxury of hypothesis –

  For human nature, honest human nature

  (Which the fear-pampered heart denies)

  Knows its own miracle: not to go mad.

  Will pitch the shot in fancy, hint the fact,

  Will bore perhaps a meagre auger hole

  But stanch the spurting with a tarred rag,

  And will not drown, nor even ride the cask.

  DREAM OF A CLIMBER

  Watch how this climber raises his own ladder

  From earth to heaven, and not in a night

  Nor from the secret, stony pillow.

  (World patents pending; tested in the shops.)

  Here’s quality timber, nosings of pure brass,

  The perfect phallo-spiritual tilt,

  A fuzzy puff of cloud on top –

  Excellent lure for angels and archangels!

  Come, climber, with your scientific hat

  And beady gambler’s eye, ascend!

  He pauses, poses for his camera-man:

  ‘Well-known Climber About to Ascend.’

  But in the published print, we may be sure,

  He will appear, not on the lowest rung

  But nearly out of view, almost in the cloud,

  Leaning aside for an angel to pass,

  His muscular broad hands a-glint in the sun,

  And crampons on his feet.

  LOLLOCKS

  By sloth on sorrow fathered,

  These dusty-featured Lollocks

  Have their nativity in all disordered

  Backs of cupboard drawers.

  They play hide and seek

  Among collars and novels

  And empty medicine bottles,

  And letters from abroad

  That never will be answered.

  Every sultry night

  They plague little children,

  Gurgling from the cistern,

  Humming from the air,

  Skewing up the bed-clothes,

  Twitching the blind.

  When the imbecile agèd

  Are over-long in dying

  And the nurse drowses,

  Lollocks come skipping

  Up the tattered stairs

  And are nasty together

  In the bed’s shadow.

  The signs of their presence

  Are boils on the neck,

  Dreams of vexation suddenly recalled

  In the middle of the morning,

  Languor after food.

  Men cannot see them,

  Men cannot hear them,

  Do not believe in them –

  But suffer the more

  Both in neck and belly.

  Women can see them –

  O those naughty wives

  Who sit by the fireside

  Munching bread and honey,

  Watching them in mischief

  From corners of their eyes,

  Slily allowing them to lick

  Honey-sticky fingers.

  Sovereign against Lollocks

  Are hard broom and soft broom,

  To well comb the hair,

  To well brush the shoe,

  And to pay every debt

  As it falls due.

  DESPITE AND STILL

  Have you not read

  The words in my head,

  And I made part

  Of your own heart?

  We have been such as draw

  The losing straw –

  You of your gentleness,

  I of my rashness,

  Both of despair –

  Yet still might share

  This happy will:

  To love despite and still.

  Never let us deny

  The thing’s necessity,

  But, O, refuse

  To choose

  Where chance may seem to give

  Loves in alternative.

  THE SUICIDE IN THE COPSE

  The suicide, far from content,

  Stared down at his own shattered skull:

  Was this what he meant?

  Had not his purpose been

  To liberate himself from duns and dolts

  By a change of scene?

  From somewhere came a roll of laughter:

  He had looked so on his wedding-day,

  And the day after.

  There was nowhere at all to go,

  And no diversion now but to peruse

  What literature the winds might blow

  Into the copse where his body lay:

  A year-old sheet of sporting news,

  A crumpled schoolboy essay.

  FRIGHTENED MEN

  We were not ever of their feline race,

  Never had hidden claws so sharp as theirs

  In any half-remembered incarnation;

  Have only the least knowledge of their minds

  Through a grace on their part in thinking aloud;

  And we remain mouse-quiet when they begin

  Suddenly in their unpredictable way

  To weave an allegory of their lives,

  Making each point by walking round it –

  Then off again, as interest is warmed.

  What have they said? Or unsaid? What?

  We understood the general drift only.

  They are punctilious as implacable,

  Most neighbourly to those who love them least.

  A shout will scare them. When they spring, they seize.

  The worst is when they hide from us and change

  To something altogether other:

  We meet them at the door, as who returns

  After a one-hour-seeming century

  To a house not his own.

  A STRANGER AT THE PARTY

  For annoyance, not shame,

  Under their covert stares

  She would not give her name

  Nor demand theirs.

&nb
sp; Soon everyone at the party,

  Who knew everyone,

  Eyed her with plain envy

  For knowing none –

  Such neighbourly mistrust

  Breathed across the floor,

  Such familiar disgust

  With what they were and wore –

  Until, as she was leaving,

  Her time out-stayed,

  They tried to say they loved her;

  But pride forbade.

  THE OATH

  The doubt and the passion

  Falling away from them,

  In that instant both

  Take timely courage

  From the sky’s clearness

  To confirm an oath.

  Her loves are his loves,

  His trust is her trust;

  Else all were grief

  And they, lost ciphers

  On a yellowing page,

  Death overleaf.

  Rumour of old battle

  Growls across the air;

  Then let it growl

  With no more terror

  Than the creaking stair

  Or the calling owl.

  She knows, as he knows,

  Of a faithful-always

  And an always-dear

  By early emblems

  Prognosticated,

  Fulfilled here.

  LANGUAGE OF THE SEASONS

  Living among orchards, we are ruled

  By the four seasons necessarily:

  This from unseasonable frosts we learn

  Or from usurping suns and haggard flowers –

  Legitimist our disapproval.

  Weather we knew, not seasons, in the city

  Where, seasonless, orange and orchid shone,

  Knew it by heavy overcoat or light,

  Framed love in later terminologies

  Than here, where we report how weight of snow,

  Or weight of fruit, tears branches from the tree.

  MID-WINTER WAKING

  Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,

  I knew myself once more a poet

  Guarded by timeless principalities

  Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;

  And presently dared open both my eyes.

  O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,

  Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;

  And you, sudden warm airs that blow

  Before the expected season of new blossom,

  While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go –

  Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,

  I found her hand in mine laid closely

  Who shall watch out the Spring with me.

  We stared in silence all around us

  But found no winter anywhere to see.

  THE ROCK AT THE CORNER

  The quarrymen left ragged

  A rock at the corner;

  But over it move now

  The comforting fingers

  Of ivy and briar.

  Nor will it need assurance

  Of nature’s compassion

  When presently it weathers

  To a noble landmark

  Of such countenance

  That travellers in winter

  Will see it as a creature

  On guard at the corner

  Where deep snows ingratiate

  The comforts of death.

  From Poems 1938–1945

  (1945)

  THE BEACH

  Louder than gulls the little children scream

  Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam;

  But others fearlessly rush in, breast high,

  Laughing the salty water from their mouths –

  Heroes of the nursery.

  The horny boatman, who has seen whales

  And flying fishes, who has sailed as far

  As Demerara and the Ivory Coast,

  Will warn them, when they crowd to hear his tales,

  That every ocean smells alike of tar.

  THE VILLAGERS AND DEATH

  The Rector’s pallid neighbour at The Firs,

  Death, did not flurry the parishioners.

  Yet from a weight of superstitious fears

  Each tried to lengthen his own term of years.

  He was congratulated who combined

  Toughness of flesh and weakness of the mind

  In consequential rosiness of face.

  This dull and not ill-mannered populace

  Pulled off their caps to Death, as they slouched by,

  But rumoured him both atheist and spy.

  All vowed to outlast him (though none ever did)

  And hear the earth drum on his coffin-lid.

  Their groans and whispers down the village street

  Soon soured his nature, which was never sweet.

  THE DOOR

  When she came suddenly in

  It seemed the door could never close again,

  Nor even did she close it – she, she –

  The room lay open to a visiting sea

  Which no door could restrain.

  Yet when at last she smiled, tilting her head

  To take her leave of me,

  Where she had smiled, instead

  There was a dark door closing endlessly,

  The waves receded.

  UNDER THE POT

  Sulkily the sticks burn, and though they crackle

  With scorn under the bubbling pot, or spout

  Magnanimous jets of flame against the smoke,

  At each heel end a dirty sap breaks out.

  Confess, creatures, how sulkily ourselves

  We hiss with doom, fuel of a sodden age –

  Not rapt up roaring to the chimney stack

  On incandescent clouds of spirit or rage.

  THROUGH NIGHTMARE

  Never be disenchanted of

  That place you sometimes dream yourself into,

  Lying at large remove beyond all dream,

  Or those you find there, though but seldom

  In their company seated –

  The untameable, the live, the gentle.

  Have you not known them? Whom? They carry

  Time looped so river-wise about their house

  There’s no way in by history’s road

  To name or number them.

  In your sleepy eyes I read the journey

  Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs

  My loving admiration, that you should travel

  Through nightmare to a lost and moated land,

  Who are timorous by nature.

  TO LUCIA AT BIRTH

  Though the moon beaming matronly and bland

  Greets you, among the crowd of the new-born,

  With ‘welcome to the world’ yet understand

  That still her pale, lascivious unicorn

  And bloody lion are loose on either hand:

  With din of bones and tantarará of horn

  Their fanciful cortege parades the land –

  Pest on the high road, wild-fire in the corn.

  Outrageous company to be born into,

  Lunatics of a royal age long dead.

  Then reckon time by what you are or do,

  Not by the epochs of the war they spread.

  Hark how they roar; but never turn your head.

  Nothing will change them, let them not change you.

  DEATH BY DRUMS

  If I cried out in anger against music,

  It was not that I cried

  Against the wholesome bitter arsenic

  Necessary for suicide:

  For suicide in the drums’ racking riot

  Where horned moriscoes wailing to their bride

  Scare every Lydian songster from the spot.

  SHE TELLS HER LOVE WHILE HALF ASLEEP

  She tells her love while half asleep,

  In the dark hours,

  With half-words whispered low:

  As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

  And puts out g
rass and flowers

  Despite the snow,

  Despite the falling snow.

  INSTRUCTIONS TO THE ORPHIC ADEPT

  [In part translated from the Timpone Grande and Campagno Orphic tablets.]

  So soon as ever your mazed spirit descends

  From daylight into darkness, Man, remember

  What you have suffered here in Samothrace,

  What you have suffered.

  After your passage through Hell’s seven floods,

  Whose fumes of sulphur will have parched your throat,

  The Halls of Judgement shall loom up before you,

  A miracle of jasper and of onyx.

  To the left hand there bubbles a black spring

  Overshadowed with a great white cypress.

  Avoid this spring, which is Forgetfulness;

  Though all the common rout rush down to drink,

  Avoid this spring!

  To the right hand there lies a secret pool

  Alive with speckled trout and fish of gold;

  A hazel overshadows it. Ophion,

  Primaeval serpent straggling in the branches,

  Darts out his tongue. This holy pool is fed

  By dripping water; guardians stand before it.

  Run to this pool, the pool of Memory,

  Run to this pool!

  Then will the guardians scrutinize you, saying:

  ‘Who are you, who? What have you to remember?

  Do you not fear Ophion’s flickering tongue?

  Go rather to the spring beneath the cypress,

  Flee from this pool!’

  Then you shall answer: ‘I am parched with thirst.

  Give me to drink. I am a child of Earth,

  But of Sky also, come from Samothrace.

  Witness the glint of amber on my brow.

  Out of the Pure I come, as you may see.

  I also am of your thrice-blessèd kin,

  Child of the three-fold Queen of Samothrace;

  Have made full quittance for my deeds of blood,

  Have been by her invested in sea-purple,

  And like a kid have fallen into milk.

  Give me to drink, now I am parched with thirst,

  Give me to drink!’

  But they will ask you yet: ‘What of your feet?’

  You shall reply: ‘My feet have borne me here

  Out of the weary wheel, the circling years,

  To that still, spokeless wheel: – Persephone.

  Give me to drink!’

  Then they will welcome you with fruit and flowers,