Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

Shine like an early drop of dew

  Poised on a red rose-petal.

  The dew-drop carries in its eye

  Mountain and forest, sea and sky,

  With every change of weather;

  Contrariwise, a diamond splits

  The prospect into idle bits

  That none can piece together.

  SONG: JUST FRIENDS

  Just friend, you are my only friend –

  You think the same of me

  And swear our love must never end

  Though lapped in secrecy,

  As all true love should be.

  They ask us: ‘What about you two?’

  I answer ‘Only friends’ and you:

  ‘Just friends’ gently agree.

  SONG: OF COURSE

  No, of course we were never

  Off course in our love,

  Being nourished by manna

  That dripped from above,

  And our secret of loving

  Was taught us, it seems,

  By ravens and owlets

  And fast-flowing streams.

  We had sealed it with kisses,

  It blazed from our eyes,

  Yet all was unspoken

  And proof against lies.

  For to publish a secret

  Once learned in the rain

  Would have meant to lose course

  And not find it again.

  So this parting, of course,

  Is illusion, not fate,

  And the love in your letters

  Comes charged overweight.

  SONG: THREE RINGS FOR HER

  Flowers remind of jewels;

  Jewels, of flowers;

  Flowers, of innocent morning;

  Jewels, of honest evening –

  Emerald, moonstone, opal –

  For so I mean, and meant.

  Jewels are longer lasting –

  Emerald, moonstone, opal;

  Opal, emerald, moonstone:

  Moonstone, opal, emerald –

  And wear a livelier scent

  SINCÈREMENT

  J’étais confus à cet instant.

  Quelle honte d’avoir écrit

  L’adverbe aveugle ‘sincèrement’ –

  ‘Je t’aime’ m’aurait suffi

  Sans point et sans souci.

  DAMS UN SEUL LIT

  Entre deux belles femmes dans un seul lit

  Cet homme, se sentant interdit,

  Des convenances n’ose pas faire foin

  Mais opte pour elle qu’il aime le moins.

  Entre deux beaux hommes en pareil cas,

  Une dame sans mœurs si délicats

  Mais sans s’exprimer en termes crus,

  Se penche vers lui qu’elle aime le plus.

  IS NOW THE TIME?

  If he asks, ‘Is now the time?’, it is not the time.

  She turns her head from his concern with time

  As a signal not to haste it;

  And every time he asks: ‘Is now the time?’

  A hundred nights are wasted.

  TWINS

  Siamese twins: one, maddened by

  The other’s moral bigotry,

  Resolved at length to misbehave

  And drink them both into the grave.

  SAIL AND OAR

  Woman sails, man must row:

  Each, disdainful of a tow,

  Cuts across the other’s bows

  Shame or fury to arouse –

  And evermore it shall be so,

  Lest man sail, or woman row.

  GOOSEFLESH ABBEY

  Nuns are allowed full liberty of conscience.

  Yet might this young witch, when she took the veil,

  Count on an aged Abbess’s connivance

  At keeping toad-familiars in her cell?

  Some called it liberty; but others, licence –

  And how was she to tell?

  THE HOME-COMING

  At the tangled heart of a wood I fell asleep,

  Bewildered by her silence and her absence –

  As though such potent lulls in love were not

  Ordained by the demands of pure music.

  A bird sang: ‘Close your eyes, it is not for long –

  Dream of what gold and crimson she will wear

  In honour of your oak-brown.’

  It was her hoopoe. Yet, when the spread heavens

  Of my feast night glistened with shooting stars

  And she walked unheralded up through the dim light

  Of the home lane, I did not recognize her –

  So lost a man can be

  Who feeds on hopes and fears and memory.

  WITH THE GIFT OF A LION’S CLAW

  Queen of the Crabs, accept this claw

  Plucked from a Lion’s patient paw;

  It shall propel her forward who

  Ran sideways always hitherto.

  WIGS AND BEARDS

  In the bad old days a bewigged country Squire

  Would never pay his debts, unless at cards,

  Shot, angled, urged his pack through standing grain,

  Horsewhipped his tenantry, snorted at the arts,

  Toped himself under the table every night,

  Blasphemed God with a cropful of God-damns,

  Aired whorehouse French or lame Italian,

  Set fashions of pluperfect slovenliness

  And claimed seigneurial rights over all women

  Who slept, imprudently, under the same roof.

  Taxes and wars long ago ploughed them under –

  ‘And serve the bastards right’ the Beards agree,

  Hurling their empties through the café window

  And belching loud as they proceed downstairs.

  Latter-day bastards of that famous stock,

  They never rode a nag, nor gaffed a trout,

  Nor winged a pheasant, nor went soldiering,

  But remain true to the same hell-fire code

  In all available particulars

  And scorn to pay their debts even at cards.

  Moreunder (which is to subtract, not add),

  Their ancestors called themselves gentlemen

  As they, in the same sense, call themselves artists.

  PERSONAL PACKAGING, INC.

  Folks, we have zero’d in to a big break-thru:

  Our boys are learning how to package people

  By a new impermeable-grading process

  In cartons of mixed twenties – all three sexes!

  Process involves molecular adjustment

  To micro-regulated temperatures,

  Making them unexpendable time-wise

  Thru a whole century… Some clients opt for

  Five thousand years, or six, in real deep freeze –

  A chance what sensible guy would kick against

  To pile up dollars at compound interest?

  Nor do we even propose that they quit smoking

  Or, necessarily, be parted from their wives.

  WORK ROOM

  Camp-stool for chair once more and packing case for table;

  All histories of doubt extruded from this room

  With its menacing, promising, delusive, toppling bookshelves;

  Nothing now astir but you in my fresh imagination,

  And no letters but yours ever demanding answers.

  To start all over again; indeed, why should I not? –

  With a new pen, clean paper, full inkpot.

  THE ARK

  Beasts of the field, fowls likewise of the air,

  Came trooping, seven by seven or pair by pair;

  And though from Hell the arch-fiend Samael

  Bawled out ‘Escapist!’ Noah did not care.

  ALL EXCEPT HANNIBAL

  Trapped in a dismal marsh, he told his troops:

  ‘No lying down, lads! Form your own mess-groups

  And sit in circles, each man on the knees

  Of the man behind; then nobody will freeze.’

  They obeyed his orde
rs, as the cold sun set,

  Drowsing all night in one another’s debt,

  All except Hannibal himself, who chose

  His private tree-stump – he was one of those!

  THE BEGGAR MAID AND KING COPHETUA

  To be adored by a proud Paladin

  Whom the wide world adored,

  To queen it over countless noblewomen:

  What fame was hers at last,

  What lure and envy!

  Yet, being still a daughter of the mandrake

  She sighed for more than fame;

  Not all the gold with which Cophetua crowned her

  Could check this beggar-maid’s

  Concupiscence.

  Sworn to become proverbially known

  As martyred by true love,

  She took revenge on his victorious name

  That blotted her own fame

  For woman’s magic.

  True to her kind, she slipped away one dawn

  With a poor stable lad,

  Gaunt, spotted, drunken, scrawny, desperate,

  Mean of intelligence

  As bare of honour.

  So pitiable indeed that when the guards

  Who caught them saw the green

  Stain on her finger from his plain brass ring

  They gaped at it, too moved

  Not to applaud her.

  FOR EVER

  Sweetheart, I beg you to renew and seal

  With a not supererogatory kiss

  Our contract of ‘For Ever’.

  Learned judges

  Deplore the household sense ‘interminable’:

  True love, they rule, never acknowledges

  Future or past, only a perfect now….

  But let it read ‘For Ever’, anyhow!

  JUGUM IMPROBUM

  Pyrrha, jugo tandem vitulum junges-ne leoni?

  Sit tibi dilectus, num stricto verbere debet

  Compelli pavitans medium moriturus in ignem?

  DE ARTE POETICA

  De minimis curat non Lex, utcumque poeta.

  SIT MIHI TERRA LEVIS

  Ante mortem qui defletus

  Solis lucem repperit

  Ante Mortem perquietus,

  Erato, domum redit

  ASTYMELUSA*

  ‘Astymelusa!’

  Knees at your approach

  Suddenly give, more than in sleep or death –

  As well they may; such love compels them.

  ‘Astymelusa!’

  But no answer comes.

  Crowned with a leafy crown, the girl passes

  Like a star afloat through glittering sky,

  Or a golden flower, or drifted thistledown.

  TOUSLED PILLOW

  She appeared in Triad – Youth, Truth, Beauty –

  Full face and profiles whispering together

  All night at my bed-foot.

  And when dawn came

  At last, from a tousled pillow resolutely

  I made my full surrender:

  ‘So be it, Goddess, claim me without shame

  And tent me in your hair.’

  Since when she holds me

  As close as candlewick to candleflame

  And from all hazards free,

  My soul drawn back to its virginity.

  TO BE IN LOVE

  To spring impetuously in air and remain

  Treading on air for three heart-beats or four,

  Then to descend at leisure; or else to scale

  The forward-tilted crag with no hand-holds;

  Or, disembodied, to carry roses home

  From a Queen’s garden – this is being in love,

  Graced with agilitas and subtilitas

  At which few famous lovers ever guessed

  Though children may foreknow it, deep in dream,

  And ghosts may mourn it, haunting their own tombs,

  And peacocks cry it, in default of speech.

  FACT OF THE ACT

  On the other side of the world’s narrow lane

  You lie in bed, your young breasts tingling

  With imagined kisses, your lips puckered,

  Your fists tight.

  Dreaming yourself naked in my arms,

  Free from discovery, under some holm oak;

  The high sun peering through thick branches,

  All winds mute.

  Endlessly you prolong the moment

  Of your delirium: a first engagement,

  Silent, inevitable, fearful,

  Honey-sweet.

  Will it be so in fact? Will fact mirror

  Your virginal ecstasies:

  True love, uncircumstantial,

  No blame, no shame?

  It is for you, now, to say ‘come’;

  It is for you, now, to prepare the bed;

  It is for you as the sole hostess

  Of your white dreams –

  It is for you to open the locked gate,

  It is for you to shake red apples down,

  It is for you to halve them with your hands

  That both may eat.

  Yet expectation lies as far from fact

  As fact’s own after-glow in memory;

  Fact is a dark return to man’s beginnings,

  Test of our hardihood, test of a wilful

  And blind acceptance of each other

  As also flesh.

  TO OGMIAN HERCULES

  Your Labours are performed, your Bye-works too,

  Your ashes gently drift from Oeta’s peak.

  Here is escape then, Hercules, from empire.

  Lithe Hebë, youngest of all Goddesses,

  Who circles on the Moon’s broad threshing-floor

  Harboured no jealousy for Megara,

  Augë, Hippolytë, Deianeira,

  But grieved for each in turn. You broke all hearts,

  Burning too Sun-like for a Grecian bride.

  Rest your immortal head on Hebë’s lap;

  What wars you started let your sons conclude.

  Meditate a new Alphabet, heal wounds,

  Draw poets to you with long golden chains

  But still go armed with club and lion’s pelt.

  ARROW SHOTS

  Only a madman could mistake,

  When shot at from behind a tree,

  The whizz and thud that arrows make –

  Yours, for example, fired at me.

  Some bows are drawn to blind or maim,

  I have known others drawn to kill,

  But truth in love is your sole aim

  And proves your vulnerary skill.

  Though often, drowsing at mid-day,

  I wince to find myself your mark,

  Let me concede the hit, but say:

  ‘Your hand is steadiest after dark.’

  SHE TO HIM

  To have it, sweetheart, is to know you have it

  Rather than think you have it;

  To think you have it is a wish to take it,

  Though afterwards you would not have it –

  And thus a fear to take it.

  Yet if you know you have it, you may take it

  And know that still you have it.

  WITHIN REASON

  You have wandered widely through your own mind

  And your own perfect body;

  Thus learning, within reason, gentle one,

  Everything that can prove worth the knowing.

  A concise wisdom never attained by those

  Bodiless nobodies

  Who travel pen in hand through others’ minds,

  But without reason,

  Feeding on manifold contradiction.

  To stand perplexed by love’s inconsequences

  Like fire-flies in your hair

  Or distant flashes of a summer storm:

  Such are the stabs of joy you deal me

  Who also wander widely through my mind

  And still imperfect body

  THE YET UNSAYABLE

  It was always fiercer, brighter, gentler than
could be told

  Even in words quickened by Truth’s dark eye:

  Its absence, whirlpool; its presence, deluge;

  Its time, astonishment; its magnitude,

  A murderous dagger-point.

  So we surrender

  Our voices to the dried and scurrying leaves

  And choose our own long-predetermined path

  From the unsaid to the yet unsayable

  In silence of love and love’s temerity.

  NONE THE WISER

  They would be none the wiser, even could they overhear

  My slurred ecstatic mumbling or grow somehow aware

  Of eyes ablaze behind shut lids in the attic gloom.

  Even if they adjured me on pain of death to disclose

  All that I see and am when I so absent myself,

  What would they make of steady, somnolent light-rings

  Converging, violet-blue or green hypnotic gold,

  Upon a warded peep-hole, as it were a rift in Space,

  Through which I peer, as it might be into your eyes,

  And pass disembodied, a spiral wisp or whorl

  Tall, slanted, russet-red, crowned with a lunar nimbus? –

  To you the central flow, the glow, the ease, the hush

  Of music drawn through irrecoverable modes.

  And then such after-glory, meteors across the heart

  When I awake, astonished, in the bed where once you dreamed.

  ‘Metaphysical’, they would comment lamely, ‘metaphysical’;

  But you would smile at me for leaving so much out.

  THE NARROW SEA

  With you for mast and sail and flag,

  And anchor never known to drag,

  Death’s narrow but oppressive sea

  Looks not unnavigable to me.

  THE OLIVE-YARD

  Now by a sudden shift of eye

  The hitherto exemplary world

  Takes on immediate wildness

  And birds, trees, winds, the very letters

  Of our childhood’s alphabet, alter

  Into rainbowed mysteries.

  Flesh is no longer flesh, but power;