Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

‘A thread is spun

  For every son,’

  Said he, ‘of Pyrrha’s brood.’

  But great Zeus cursed him, none the less,

  With foresight to deplore

  The end of that day’s childishness,

  And he could eat no more:

  His fame would float

  Through anecdote

  Into dead metaphor.

  Then orators from every land,

  Caught by the same disease,

  With thump of fist or saw of hand

  Or sinking to their knees,

  Would madly boom

  Of the world’s doom

  And swords of Damocles.

  HOMAGE TO TEXAS

  It’s hardly wise to generalize

  About a state or city;

  But Texan girls are decent girls

  And bold as they are pretty.

  Who dared the outrageous unicorn

  Through lonely woods a-leaping?

  Who made him halt and lower his horn

  And couch beside her, weeping?

  Not Helen (wonder of her sex)

  Nor Artemis, nor Pallas;

  No, sir: a girl from Houston, Tex.,

  Though some claim it was Dallas.

  He told her: ‘Ma’am, your Lone Star State,

  Though maybe short on schooling,

  Outshines the whole bright forty-eight’ –

  And so it did, no fooling.

  THE DILEMMA

  When Time, though granting scope enough

  For any conversationalist,

  Gives the sworn poet a rebuff,

  Should he indeed desist?

  Should he to timeless bogs retreat,

  His pace slowed to an old man’s pace,

  Where antique histories interlace

  Around a hearth of peat?

  Or, rather, take revenge on Time,

  Stalking into those flood-lit stews:

  Drown conversation with a crime,

  Pause, yell and blow the fuse?

  Sadist and masochist in me,

  Each boasting himself more than half,

  Press the dilemma feverishly

  And raise hell if I laugh.

  GENERAL BLOODSTOCK’S LAMENT FOR ENGLAND

  “This image (seemingly animated) walks with them in the fields in broad Day-light; and if they are employed in delving, harrowing, Seed-sowing or any other Occupation, they are at the same time mimicked by the ghostly Visitant. Men of the Second Sight … call this reflex-man a Co-walker, every way like the Man, as his Twin-brother and Companion, haunting as his Shadow.”

  Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth, 1691.

  Alas, England, my own generous mother,

  One gift I have from you I hate,

  The second sight: I see your weird co-walker,

  Silver-zoned Albion, stepping in your track,

  Mimicking your sad and doubtful gait,

  Your clasped hands, your head-shakings, your bent back.

  The white hem of a winding sheet

  Draws slowly upward from her feet;

  Soon it will mount knee-high, then to the thigh.

  It crackles like the parchment of the treaties,

  Bonds, contracts and conveyances,

  With which, beggared and faint and like to die,

  You signed away your island sovereignty

  To rogues who learned their primer at your knees.

  ‘¡WELLCOME, TO THE CAVES OF ARTÁ!’

  ‘They are hollowed out in the see coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Artá in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called “The Spider”. There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown forcing visitors have explored them and wrote thier eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.’

  From a Tourist leaflet.

  Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion

  Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.

  While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)

  To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,

  Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language

  Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

  ¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom

  Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?

  Alraedy in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Artá

  The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefyed;

  So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums

  And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

  From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending

  You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;

  ‘The Saloon of Thousand Banners’, or ‘The Tumba of Napoleon’,

  ‘The Grotto of the Rosary’, ‘The Club’, ‘The Camping Tent’.

  And at ‘Cavern of the Organ’ there are knocking streange formacions

  Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

  ¡Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,

  The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.

  Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills apprehending

  An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.

  It is some poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,

  Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.

  TO A POET IN TROUBLE

  Cold wife and angry mistress

  And debts: all three?

  Though they combine to kill you

  Be grateful to the Goddess,

  (Our cruel patroness),

  For this felicity:

  Your poems now ring true.

  From Poems 1953

  (1953)

  TO CALLIOPE

  Permit me here a simple brief aside,

  Calliope,

  You who have shown such patience with my pride

  And obstinacy:

  Am I not loyal to you? I say no less

  Than is to say;

  If more, only from angry-heartedness,

  Not for display.

  But you know, I know, and you know I know

  My principal curse:

  Shame at the mounting dues I have come to owe

  A devil of verse,

  Who caught me young, ingenuous and uncouth,

  Prompting me how

  To evade the patent clumsiness of truth –

  Which I do now.

  No: nothing reads so fresh as I first thought,

  Or as you could wish –

  Yet must I, when far worse is eagerly bought,

  Cry stinking fish?

  THE STRAW

  Peace, the wild valley streaked with torrents,

  A hoopoe perched on his warm rock. Then why

  This tremor of the straw between my fingers?

  What should I fear? Have I not testimony

  In her own hand, signed with her own name

  That my love fell as lightning on her heart?

  These questions, bird, are not rhetorical.

  Watch how the straw twitches and leaps

  As though the earth quaked at a distance.

  Requited love; but better unrequited

  If this chance instrument gives warning

  Of cataclysmic anguish far away.

  Were she at ease, warmed by the thought of me,

  Would not my hand stay steady as this rock?

  Have I undone her by my vehemence?

  THE FOREBODING

  Looking by chance in at the open window

  I saw my own self seated
in his chair

  With gaze abstracted, furrowed forehead,

  Unkempt hair.

  I thought that I had suddenly come to die,

  That to a cold corpse this was my farewell,

  Until the pen moved slowly upon paper

  And tears fell.

  He had written a name, yours, in printed letters:

  One word on which bemusedly to pore –

  No protest, no desire, your naked name,

  Nothing more.

  Would it be tomorrow, would it be next year?

  But the vision was not false, this much I knew;

  And I turned angrily from the open window

  Aghast at you.

  Why never a warning, either by speech or look,

  That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?

  Already it was too late: the bait swallowed,

  The hook fast.

  CRY FAUGH!

  Caria and Philistia considered

  Only pre-marital adventures wise;

  The bourgeois French argue contrariwise.

  Socrates and Plato burked the issue

  (Namely, how man-and-woman love should be)

  With homosexual ideology.

  Apocalyptic Israelites, foretelling

  The Imminent End, called only for a chaste

  Sodality: all dead below the waist.

  Curious, various, amoral, moral –

  Tell me, what elegant square or lumpish hamlet

  Lives free from nymphological disquiet?

  ‘Yet males and females of the lower species

  Contrive to eliminate the sexual problem,’

  Scientists ponder: ‘Why not learn from them?’

  Cry faugh! on science, ethics, metaphysics,

  On antonyms of sacred and profane –

  Come walk with me, love, in a golden rain

  Past toppling colonnades of glory,

  The moon alive on each uptilted face:

  Proud remnants of a visionary race.

  HERCULES AT NEMEA

  Muse, you have bitten through my fool’s-finger.

  Fierce as a lioness you seized it

  In your white teeth most amorously;

  And I stared back, dauntless and fiery-eyed,

  Challenging you to maim me for my pride.

  See me a fulvous hero of nine fingers –

  Sufficient grasp for bow and arrow.

  My beard bristles in exultation:

  Let all Nemea look and understand

  Why you have set your mark on this right hand.

  DIALOGUE ON THE HEADLAND

  She: You’ll not forget these rocks and what I told you?

  He: How could I? Never: whatever happens.

  She: What do you think might happen?

  Might you fall out of love? – did you mean that?

  He: Never, never! ‘Whatever’ was a sop

  For jealous listeners in the shadows.

  She: You haven’t answered me. I asked:

  ‘What do you think might happen?’

  He: Whatever happens: though the skies should fall

  Raining their larks and vultures in our laps –

  She: ‘Though the seas turn to slime’ – say that –

  ‘Though water-snakes be hatched with six heads.’

  He: Though the seas turn to slime, or tower

  In an arching wave above us, three miles high –

  She: ‘Though she should break with you’ – dare you say that?

  ‘Though she deny her words on oath.’

  He: I had that in my mind to say, or nearly;

  It hurt so much I choked it back.

  She: How many other days can’t you forget?

  How many other loves and landscapes?

  He: You are jealous?

  She: Damnably.

  He: The past is past.

  She: And this?

  He: Whatever happens, this goes on.

  She: Without a future? Sweetheart, tell me now:

  What do you want of me? I must know that.

  He: Nothing that isn’t freely mine already.

  She: Say what is freely yours and you shall have it.

  He: Nothing that, loving you, I could dare take.

  She: O, for an answer with no ‘nothing’ in it!

  He: Then give me everything that’s left.

  She: Left after what?

  He: After whatever happens:

  Skies have already fallen, seas are slime,

  Watersnakes poke and peer six-headedly –

  She: And I lie snugly in the Devil’s arms.

  He: I said: ‘Whatever happens.’ Are you crying?

  She: You’ll not forget me – ever, ever, ever?

  LOVERS IN WESTER

  The posture of the tree

  Shows the prevailing wind;

  And ours, long misery

  When you are long unkind.

  But forward, look, we lean –

  Not backward as in doubt –

  And still with branches green

  Ride our ill weather out.

  ESAU AND JUDITH

  Robbed of his birthright and his blessing

  Esau sought refuge in the wilderness,

  An outlaw girding at the world’s deceit.

  He took to wife Judith, daughter of Heth,

  Tall and grey-eyed, a priestess of her grove.

  The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.

  She was that sea which God had held corrupt;

  Her tides he praised and her curvetting fish,

  Though with no comprehension of their ways;

  As a man blind from birth fondly adores

  Fantasies of imagined gold and blue –

  The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.

  For how might Esau strive against his blood?

  Had Isaac and Rebekah not commanded:

  ‘Take thee a daughter from thy father’s house!’ –

  Isaac who played the pander with Rebekah,

  Even as Abraham had done with Sarah?

  The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.

  THE MARK

  If, doubtful of your fate,

  You seek to obliterate

  And to forget

  The counter-mark I set

  In the warm blue-veined nook

  Of your elbow crook,

  How can you not repent

  The experiment?

  No knife nor fang went in

  To lacerate the skin;

  Nor may the eye

  Tetter or wen descry:

  The place which my lips pressed

  Is coloured like the rest

  And fed by the same blood

  Of womanhood.

  Acid, pumice-stone,

  Lancings to the bone,

  Would be in vain.

  Here must the mark remain

  As witness to such love

  As nothing can remove

  Or blur, or hide,

  Save suicide.

  WITH THE GIFT OF A RING

  If one of thy two loves be wroth

  And cry: ‘Thou shalt not love us both,

  Take one or ’tother!’, O then choose

  Him that can nothing thee refuse!

  Only a rogue would tear a part,

  How small soever, from thy heart;

  As Adam sought to plunder Eve’s

  (What time they clad themselves in leaves),

  Conjuring her to make an end

  Of dalliance with her cursèd friend –

  Too late, now she had learned to tell

  False love from true, and ill from well.

  LIADAN AND CURITHIR

  Even in childhood

  Liadan never would

  Accept love simply,

  But stifled longing

  And went away to sing

  In strange company.

  Alas, for Liadan!

  To fear perfection

  Was her ill custom:

  Cho
osing a scruple

  That might seem honourable,

  For retreat therefrom.

  Herself she enticed

  To be nunned for Christ,

  Though in marriage sought

  By a master-poet

  On whom her heart was set –

  Curithir of Connaught;

  And raised a wall

  As it were of crystal

  Her grief around.

  He might not guess

  The cause of her fickleness

  Nor catch one sound.

  She was walled soon after

  Behind stones and mortar,

  From whence too late

  He heard her keening,

  Sighing and complaining

  Of her dire self-hate.

  THE SEA HORSE

  Since now in every public place

  Lurk phantoms who assume your walk and face,

  You cannot yet have utterly abjured me

  Nor stifled the insistent roar of sea.

  Do as I do: confide your unquiet love

  (For one who never owed you less than love)

  To this indomitable hippocamp,

  Child of your element, coiled a-ramp,

  Having ridden out worse tempests than you know of;

  Under his horny ribs a blood-red stain

  Portends renewal of our pain.

  Sweetheart, make much of him and shed

  Tears on his taciturn dry head.

  THE DEVIL AT BERRY POMEROY

  Snow and fog unseasonable,

  The cold remarkable,

  Children sickly;

  Green fruit lay thickly

  Under the crab-tree

  And the wild cherry.

  I heard witches call

  Their imps to the Hall:

  ‘Hey, Ilemauzar,

  Sack-and-Sugar,

  Peck-in-the-Crown,

  Come down, come down!’

  I heard bells toll

  For a monster’s soul

  That was born, half dead,

  With a double head;

  I saw ghosts leap

  From the ruined keep;

  I saw blows thwack

  On the raw back

  Of a dying ass.

  Blight was on the grass,

  Poison in the cup

  (Lover, drink up!),

  With envy, slander,

  Weasels a-wander,

  Incest done

  Between mother and son,

  Murder of hags

  For their money-bags,

  Wrath, rape,