Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Of a mild cardiac lesion or slipped disk?

  SOMETHING TO SAY

  (Dialogue between Thomas Carlyle and Lewis Carroll)

  T.C. ‘Would you care to explain

  Why they fight for your books

  With already too many

  Tight-packed on their shelves

  (Many hundreds of thousands

  Or hundreds of millions)

  As though you had written

  Those few for themselves?’

  L. C. ‘In reply to your query:

  I wrote for one reason

  And only one reason

  (That being my way):

  Not for fame, not for glory,

  Nor yet for distraction,

  But oddly enough

  I had something to say.’

  T.C. ‘So you wrote for one reason?

  Be damned to that reason!

  It may sound pretty fine

  But relinquish it, pray!

  There are preachers in pulpits

  And urchins in playgrounds

  And fools in asylums

  And beggars in corners

  And drunkards in gutters

  And bandits in prisons

  With all the right reasons

  For something to say.’

  OCCASIONALIA

  RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: CLASSIFIED

  We reckon Cooke our best chemist alive

  And therefore the least certain to survive

  Even by crediting his way-out findings

  To our Department boss, Sir Bonehead Clive.

  Those Goblins, guessing which of us is what

  (And, but for Cooke, we’re far from a bright lot),

  Must either pinch his know-how or else wipe him.

  He boasts himself quite safe. By God, he’s not!

  In fact, we all conclude that Cooke’s one hope

  Is neither loud heroics nor soft soap:

  Cooke must defect, we warn him, to the Goblins,

  Though even they may grudge him enough rope.

  THE IMMINENT SEVENTIES

  Man’s life is threescore years and ten,*

  Which God will surely bless;

  Still, we are warned what follows then –

  Labour and heaviness –

  And understand old David’s grouch

  Though he (or so we’re told)

  Bespoke a virgin for his couch

  To shield him from the cold….§

  Are not all centuries, like men,

  Born hopeful too and gay,

  And good for seventy years, but then

  Hope slowly seeps away?

  True, a new geriatric art

  Prolongs our last adventures

  When eyes grow dim, when teeth depart:

  For glasses come, and dentures –

  Helps which these last three decades need

  If true to Freedom’s cause:

  Glasses (detecting crimes of greed)

  Teeth (implementing laws).

  CAROL OF PATIENCE

  Shepherds armed with staff and sling,

  Ranged along a steep hillside,

  Watch for their anointed King

  By all prophets prophesied –

  Sing patience, patience,

  Only still have patience!

  Hour by hour they scrutinize

  Comet, planet, planet, star,

  Till the oldest shepherd sighs:

  ‘I am frail and he is far.’

  Sing patience etc.

  ‘Born, they say, a happy child;

  Grown, a man of grief to be,

  From all careless joys exiled,

  Rooted in eternity.’

  Sing patience etc.

  Then another shepherd said:

  ‘Yonder lights are Bethlehem;

  There young David raised his head

  Destined for the diadem.’

  Sing patience etc.

  Cried the youngest shepherd: ‘There

  Our Redeemer comes tonight,

  Comes with starlight on his hair,

  With his brow exceeding bright.’

  Sing patience etc.

  ‘Sacrifice no lamb nor kid,

  Let such foolish fashions pass;

  In a manger find him hid,

  Breathed upon by ox and ass.’

  Sing patience etc.

  Dance for him and laugh and sing,

  Watch him mercifully smile,

  Dance although tomorrow bring

  Every plague that plagued the Nile!

  Sing patience, patience,

  Only still have patience!

  H

  H may be N for those who speak

  Russian, although long E in Greek;

  And cockneys, like the French, agree

  That H is neither N nor E

  Nor Hate’s harsh aspirate, but meek

  And mute as in Humanity.

  INVITATION TO BRISTOL

  ‘Come as my doctor,

  Come as my lawyer,

  Or come as my agent

  (First practise your lies)

  For Bristol is a small town

  Full of silly gossip

  And a girl gets abashed by

  Ten thousand staring eyes.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll come as your lawyer

  Or as your god-father,

  Or even as Father Christmas? –

  Not half a bad disguise –

  With a jingle of sleigh bells,

  A sack full of crackers

  And a big bunch of mistletoe

  For you to recognize.’

  THE PRIMROSE BED

  The eunuch and the unicorn

  Walked by the primrose bed;

  The month was May, the time was morn,

  Their hearts were dull as lead.

  ‘Ah, unicorn,’ the eunuch cried,

  ‘How tragic is our Spring,

  With stir of love on every side,

  And loud the sweet birds sing.’

  Then, arm and foreleg intertwined,

  Both mourned their cruel fate –

  The one was single of his kind,

  The other could not mate.

  THE STRANGLING IN MERRION SQUARE

  None ever loved as Molly loved me then,

  With her whole soul, and yet

  How might the patientest of Irishmen

  Forgive, far less forget

  Her long unpaid and now unpayable debt?

  There’s scarce a liveried footman in the Square

  But can detail you how and when and where.

  THE AWAKENING

  Just why should it invariably happen

  That when the Christian wakes at last in Heaven

  He finds two harassed surgeons watching by

  In white angelic smocks and gloves, and why

  Looking so cross and (as three junior nurses

  Trundle the trolley off with stifled curses)

  Why joking that the X-ray photograph

  Must have been someone else’s – what a laugh! –?

  Now they may smoke…. A message from downstairs

  Says: ‘Matron says, God’s due soon after Prayers.’

  From The Green-Sailed Vessel

  (1971)

  THE HOOPOE TELLS US HOW

  Recklessly you offered me your all,

  Recklessly I accepted,

  Laying my large world at your childish feet

  Beyond all bounds of honourable recall:

  Wild, wilful, incomplete.

  Absence reintegrates our pact of pacts –

  The hoopoe tells us how:

  With bold love-magic, Moon in Leo,

  Sun in Pisces, blossom upon bough.

  PART I

  THE WAND

  These tears flooding my eyes, are they of pain

  Or of relief: to have done with other loves,

  To abstain from childish folly?

  It has fallen on us to become exemplars

  Of a love so far removed from galla
ntry

  That we now meet seldom in a room apart

  Or kiss goodnight, or even dine together

  Unless in casual company.

  For while we walk the same green paradise

  And confidently ply the same green wand

  That still restores the wilting hopes of others

  Far more distressed than we,

  How can we dread the broad and bottomless mere

  Of utter infamy sunk below us

  Where the eggs of hatred hatch?

  FIVE

  Five beringed fingers of Creation,

  Five candles blazing at a shrine,

  Five points of her continuous pentagram,

  Five letters in her name – as five in mine.

  I love, therefore I am.

  QUINQUE

  Quinque tibi luces vibrant in nomine: quinque

  Isidis in Stella cornua sacra deae.

  Nonne etiam digitos anuli quinque Isidis ornant?

  Ornant te totidem, Julia .… Sum, quod amo.

  ARROW ON THE VANE

  Suddenly, at last, the bitter wind veers round

  From North-East to South-West. It is at your orders;

  And the arrow on our vane swings and stays true

  To your direction. Nothing parts us now.

  What can I say? Nothing I have not said,

  However the wind blew. I more than love,

  As when you drew me bodily from the dead.

  GORGON MASK

  When the great ship ran madly towards the rocks

  An unseen current slewed her into safety,

  A dying man ashore took heart and lived,

  And the moon soared overhead, ringed with three rainbows,

  To announce the birth of a miraculous child.

  Yet you preserved your silence, secretly

  Nodding at me across the crowded hall.

  The ship carried no cargo destined for us,

  Nor were her crew or master known to us,

  Nor was that sick man under our surveillance,

  Nor would the child ever be born to you,

  Or by me fathered on another woman –

  Nevertheless our magic power ordained

  These three concurrent prodigies.

  Stranger things bear upon us. We are poets

  Age-old in love: a full reach of desire

  Would burn us both to an invisible ash….

  Then hide from me, if hide from me you must,

  In bleak refuge among nonentities,

  But wear your Gorgon mask of divine warning

  That, as we first began, so must we stay.

  TO BE POETS

  We are two lovers of no careless breed,

  Nor is our love a curiosity

  (Like honey-suckle shoots from an oak tree

  Or a child with two left hands) but a proud need

  For royal thought and irreproachable deed;

  What others write about us makes poor sense,

  Theirs being a no-man’s land of negligence.

  To be poets confers Death on us:

  Death, paradisal fiery conspectus

  For those who bear themselves always as poets,

  Who cannot fall beneath the ignoble curse

  (Whether by love of self, whether by scorn

  Of truth) never to die, never to have been born.

  WITH A GIFT OF RINGS

  It was no costume jewellery I sent:

  True stones cool to the tongue, their settings ancient,

  Their magic evident.

  Conceal your pride, accept them negligently

  But, naked on your couch, wear them for me.

  CASSE-NOISETTE

  As a scurrying snow-flake

  Or a wild-rose petal

  Carried by the breeze,

  Dance your nightly ballet

  On the set stage.

  And although each scurrying

  Snow-flake or rose-petal

  Resembles any other –

  Her established smile,

  Her well-schooled carriage –

  Dance to Rule, ballet-child;

  Yet never laugh to Rule,

  Never love to Rule!

  Keep your genius hidden

  By a slow rage.

  So let it be your triumph

  In this nightly ballet

  Of snow-flakes and petals,

  To present love-magic

  In your single image –

  With a low, final curtsey

  From the set stage.

  THE GARDEN

  Enhanced in a tower, asleep, dreaming about him,

  The twin buds of her breasts opening like flowers,

  Her fingers leafed and wandering…

  Past the well

  Blossoms an apple-tree, and a horde of birds

  Nested in the close thickets of her hair

  Grumble in dreamy dissonance,

  Calling him to the garden, if he dare.

  THE GREEN-SAILED VESSEL

  We are like doves, well-paired,

  Veering across a meadow –

  Children’s voices below,

  Their song and echo;

  Like raven, wren or crow

  That cry and prophesy,

  What do we not foreknow,

  Whether deep or shallow?

  Like the tiller and prow

  Of a green-sailed vessel

  Voyaging, none knows how,

  Between moon and shadow;

  Like the restless, endless

  Blossoming of a bough,

  Like tansy, violet, mallow,

  Like the sun’s afterglow.

  Of sharp resemblances

  What further must I show

  Until your black eyes narrow,

  Furrowing your clear brow?

  DREAMING CHILDREN

  They have space enough, however cramped their quarters,

  And time enough, however short their day,

  In sleep to chase each other through dream orchards

  Or bounce from rafters into buoyant hay.

  But midnight thunder rolls, with frequent flashes,

  Wild hail peppers the farm-house roof and walls,

  Wild wind sweeps from the North, flattening the bushes

  As with a crash of doom chain-lightning falls.

  Split to its tap-roots, their own favourite oak-tree

  Glows like a torch across the narrow heath.

  She shudders: ‘Take me home again! It scares me!

  Put your arms round me, we have seen death!’

  THE PROHIBITION

  You were by my side, though I could not see you,

  Your beauty being sucked up by the moon

  In whose broad light, streaming across the valley,

  We could match colours or read the finest print,

  While swart tree shadows rose from living roots

  Like a stockade planted against intrusion.

  But since dawn spread, birds everywhere wakeful

  And the sun risen masterly from the East,

  Where are you now? Not standing at my side

  But gone with the moon, sucked away into daylight,

  All magic vanished, save for the rare instant

  When a sudden arrow-shot transfixes me.

  Marry into your tribe, bear noble sons

  Never to call me father – which is forbidden

  To poets by the laws of moon magic,

  The Goddess being forever a fierce virgin

  And chastening all love with prohibition

  Of what her untranslatable truth transcends.

  SERPENT’S TAIL

  When you are old as I now am

  I shall be young as you, my lamb;

  For lest love’s timely force should fail

  The Serpent swallows his own tail.

  UNTIL WE BOTH …

  Until we both…

  Strolling across Great Park

  With a child and a dog, greeting the guardian lions

&n
bsp; At the royal entrance, slowly rounding the mere

  Where boats are sailed all day, this perfect Sunday,

  Counting our blessings peacefully enough…

  Until we both, at the same horrid signal,

  The twelfth stroke of a clock booming behind us,

  Sink through these nonchalant, broad, close-cut lawns

  To a swirling no-man’s land shrouded in smoke

  That feeds our kisses with bright furnace embers,

  And we beg anguished mercy of each other,

  Exchanging vow for vow, our lips blistered…

  Until we both…

  Until we both at once…

  Have you more courage, love, even than I

  Under this final torment?

  Shall we ever again greet our guardian lions

  And the boats on the Great Mere?

  THE MIRACLE

  No one can understand our habit of love

  Unless, trudging perhaps across the moor

  Or resting on a tree-stump, deep in thought,

  He has been scorched, like me, by summer lightning

  And every blade of grass etherialized.

  Which must have happened at some sudden turn

  Of love, neither invited nor foreseen,

  Nor are such miracles ever repetitious

  Unless in their long deep-drawn gasp of wonder

  And fierce awareness of its origin.

  Do they astonish always as renewal

  Of truth after impossible variance,

  With tongues of flame spurting from bush and tree?

  THE ROSE

  When was it that we swore to love for ever?

  When did this Universe come at last to be?

  The two questions are one.

  Fetch me a rose from your rose-arbour

  To bless this night and grant me honest sleep:

  Sleep, not oblivion.

  TESTAMENT

  Pure melody, love without alteration,

  Flame without smoke, cresses from a clean brook,

  The sun and moon as it were casting dice

  With ample falls of rain,

  Then comes the peaceful moment of appraisal,

  The first and last lines of our testament,

  With you ensconced high in the castle turret,

  Combing your dark hair at a silver mirror,