Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Harp falls silent –

  For lack of strings,

  Not for lack of love.

  PITY

  Sickness may seem a falling out of love,

  With pleas for pity– love’s lean deputy.

  If so, refuse me pity, wait, love on:

  Never outlaw me while I yet live.

  The day may come when you too, falling sick,

  Implore my pity. Let me, too, refuse it

  Offering you, instead, my pitiless love.

  SILENT VISIT

  I was walking my garden

  Judiciously, calmly,

  Curved mattock in hand

  Heavy basket on shoulder,

  When all of a sudden

  You kissed me most kindly

  From forehead to chin,

  Though arriving unseen

  As a pledge of love-magic

  And wordlessly even.

  Had you come, long-announced,

  Wearing velvets and silk

  After travels of grandeur

  From Greece to the Yemen,

  Socotra and Aden

  With no rapture of silence

  Nor rapture of absence –

  No poem to greet you,

  No burst of green glory

  From trees in my garden….

  But you came, a grown woman,

  No longer the child

  Whom I loved well enough

  When your age was just seven –

  Who would enter alone

  The close thickets of Eden

  And there would run wild.

  CORONET OF MOONLIGHT

  Such was the circumstance of our first love:

  Sea, silence, a full moon.

  Nevertheless, even the same silence

  Amended by a distant nightingale

  From the same past, and gently heaving surf,

  Brings me no sure revival of our dream –

  For to be surely with you is to sleep,

  Having well earned my coronet of moonlight

  By no mere counting of processional sheep.

  SONG: TO BECOME EACH OTHER

  To love you truly

  I must become you,

  And so to love you

  I must leave behind

  All that was not you:

  All jewelled phantoms,

  All fabrications

  Of a jealous mind.

  For man and woman

  To become each other

  Is far less hard

  Than would seem to be:

  An eternal serpent

  With eyes of emerald

  Stands curled around

  This blossoming tree.

  Though I seem old

  As a castle turret

  And you as young

  As the grass beneath

  It is no great task

  To become each other

  Where nothing honest

  Goes in fear of death.

  HEAVEN

  Laugh still, write always lovingly, for still

  You neither will nor can deny your heart,

  Which always was a poet’s,

  Even while our ways are cruelly swept apart.

  But though the rose I gave you in your childhood

  Has never crumbled yellowing into dust

  Neither as yet have needles pricked your conscience,

  Which also is a poet’s,

  To attempt the miracles which one day you must.

  Meanwhile reject their Heaven, but guard our own

  Here on this needle-point, immediately

  Accessible, not sprawled like theirs across

  Limitless outer space. If to those angels

  We seem a million light-years yet unborn,

  And cannot more concern them than they us,

  Let our own Heaven, with neither choir nor throne

  Nor janitor, rest inexpugnable

  And private for our gentler love alone.

  GROWING PAINS

  My earliest love, that stabbed and lacerated,

  Must I accept it as it seemed then –

  Although still closely documented, dated

  And even irreversibly annotated

  By your own honest pen?

  Love never lies, even when it most enlarges

  Dimensions, griefs, or charges,

  But, come what must, remains

  Irrevocably true to its worst growing pains.

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  On the brink of sleep, stretched in a wide bed,

  Rain pattering at the windows

  And proud waves booming against granite rocks:

  Such was our night of glory.

  Thursday had brought us dreams only of evil,

  As the muezzin warned us:

  ‘Forget all nightmare once the dawn breaks,

  Prepare for holy Friday!’

  Friday brings dreams only of inward love

  So overpassing passion

  That no lips reach to kiss, nor hands to clasp,

  Nor does foot press on foot

  We wait until the lamp has flickered out

  Leaving us in full darkness,

  Each still observant of the other’s lively

  Sighs of pure content.

  Truth is prolonged until the grey dawn:

  Her face floating above me,

  Her black hair falling cloudlike to her breasts,

  Her lovely eyes half-open.

  THE PACT

  The identity of opposites had linked us

  In our impossible pact of only love

  Which, being a man, I honoured to excess

  But you, being woman, quietly disregarded –

  Though loving me no less –

  And, when I would have left you, envied me

  My unassuageable positivity.

  POOR OTHERS

  Hope, not Love, (wangles her single string

  Monotonously and in broken rhythms.

  Can Hope deserve praise?

  I fell in love with you, as you with me.

  Hope envies us for being otherwise

  Than honest Hope should be.

  No charm avails against the evil eye

  Of envy but to spit into our bosoms

  And so dissemble

  That we are we and not such luckless others

  As hope and tremble,

  Shifting the blame to fathers or to mothers

  For being themselves, not others:

  Alas, poor others!

  A TOAST TO DEATH

  This is, indeed, neither the time nor the place

  For victory celebrations. Victory over what?

  Over Death, his grinning image and manifesto

  Of which, as children, we have been forewarned

  And offered a corpse’s frigid hand to kiss.

  Contrariwise, let me raise this unsteady glass

  In a toast to Death, the sole deviser of life,

  Our antenatal witness when each determined

  Sex, colour, humour, religion, limit of years,

  Parents, place, date of birth –

  A full conspectus, with ourselves recognized

  As viable capsules lodged in the fifth dimension,

  Never to perish, time being irrelevant,

  And the reason for which, and sole excuse, is love –

  Tripled togetherness of you with me.

  THE YOUNG SIBYL

  The swing has its bold rhythm,

  Yet a breeze in the trees

  Varies the music for her

  As down the apples drop

  In a row on her lap.

  Though still only a child

  She must become our Sibyl,

  A holder of the apple

  Prophesying wild

  Histories for her people.

  Five apples in a row,

  Each with ruddy cheeks,

  So too her own cheeks glow

  As the long swing creaks,

  Pulsing to and fro

  RE
CORDS

  Accept these records of pure love

  With no end or beginning, written for

  Yourself alone, not the abashed world,

  Timeless therefore –

  Whose exaltations clearly tell

  Of a past pilgrimage through hell,

  Which in the name of love I spare you.

  Hell is my loneliness, not ours,

  Else we should harrow it together.

  Love, have you walked worse hells even than I,

  Through echoing silence where no midge or fly

  Buzzes – hells boundless, without change of weather?

  THE FLOWERING ALOE

  The century-plant has flowered, its golden blossom

  Showering honey from seven times our height:

  Now the stock withers fast and wonder ends.

  Yet from its roots eventually will soar

  Another stock to enchant your great-grandchildren

  But vex my jealous, uninvited ghost,

  These being no blood of mine.

  CIRCUS RING

  How may a lover draw two bows at once

  Or ride two steeds at once,

  Firm in the saddle?

  Yet these are master-feats you ask of me

  Who loves you crazily

  When in the circus ring you rock astraddle

  Your well-matched bay and grey –

  Firing sharp kisses at me.

  AGELESS REASON

  We laugh, we frown, our fingers twitch

  Nor can we yet prognosticate

  How we shall learn our fate –

  The occasion when, the country which –

  Determined only that this season

  Of royal tremulous possession

  Shall find its deathless reason.

  AS WHEN THE MYSTIC

  To be lost for good to the gay self-esteem

  That carried him through difficult years of childhood,

  To be well stripped of all tattered ambitions

  By his own judgement, now scorning himself

  As past redemption –

  this is anticipation

  Of true felicity, as when the mystic

  Starved, frightened, purged, assaulted and ignobled

  Drinks Eleusinian ambrosia

  From a gold cup and walks in Paradise.

  UNPOSTED LETTER

  (1963)

  Do you still love, once having shared love’s secret

  With a man born to it?

  Then sleep no more in graceless beds, untrue

  To love, where jealousy of the secret

  May scorch away your childlike sheen of virtue –

  Did he not confer crown, orb and sceptre

  On a single-hearted, single-fated you?

  BIRTH OF A GODDESS

  It was John the Baptist, son to Zechariah,

  Who assumed the cloak of God’s honest Archangel

  And mouthpiece born on Monday, Gabriel,

  And coming where his cousin Mary span

  Her purple thread or stitched a golden tassel

  For the curtain of the Temple Sanctuary,

  Hailed her as imminent mother, not as bride –

  Leaving the honest virgin mystified.

  Nor would it be a man-child she must bear:

  Foreseen by John as a Messiah sentenced

  To ransom all mankind from endless shame –

  But a Virgin Goddess cast in her own image

  And bearing the same name.

  BEATRICE AND DANTE

  He, a grave poet, fell in love with her.

  She, a mere child, fell deep in love with love

  And, being a child, illumined his whole heart.

  From her clear conspect rose a whispering

  With no hard words in innocency held back –

  Until the day that she became woman,

  Frowning to find her love imposed upon:

  A new world beaten out in her own image –

  For his own deathless glory.

  THE DILEMMA

  Tom Noddy’s body speaks, not so his mind;

  Or his mind speaks, not so Tom Noddy’s body.

  Undualistic truth is hard to find

  For the distressed Tom Noddy.

  Mind wanders blindly, body misbehaves;

  Body sickens, mind at last repents,

  Each calling on the heart, the heart that saves,

  Disposes, glows, relents.

  Which of these two must poor Tom’s heart obey:

  The mind seduced by logical excess

  To misbehaviour, or its lonely prey –

  The unthinking body sunk in lovelessness?

  THE WALL

  A towering wall divides your house from mine.

  You alone hold the key to the hidden door

  That gives you secret passage, north to south,

  Changing unrecognizably as you go.

  The south side borders on my cherry orchard

  Which, when you see, you smile upon and bless.

  The north side I am never allowed to visit;

  Your northern self I must not even greet,

  Nor would you welcome me if I stole through.

  I have a single self, which never alters

  And which you love more than the whole world

  Though you fetch nothing for me from the north

  And can bring nothing back. To be a poet

  Is to have no wall parting his domain,

  Never to change. Whenever you stand by me

  You are the Queen of poets, and my judge.

  Yet you return to play the Mameluke

  Speaking a language alien to our own.

  WOMEN AND MASKS

  Translated from Gábor Devecseri’s Hungarian

  Women and masks: an old familiar story.

  Life slowly drains away and we are left

  As masks of what we were. The living past

  Rightly respects all countenances offered

  As visible sacrifices to the gods

  And clamps them fast even upon live faces.

  Let face be mask then, or let mask be face –

  Mankind can take its ease, may assume godhead.

  Thus God from time to time descends in power

  Graciously, not to a theologian’s hell

  But to our human hell enlaced with heaven.

  Let us wear masks once worn in the swift circlings

  And constant clamour of a holy dance

  Performed always in prayer, in the ecstasy

  Of love-hate murder – today’s children always

  Feeling, recording, never understanding.

  Yet this old woman understands, it seems,

  At least the unimportance of half-knowledge,

  Her face already become mask, her teeth

  Wide-gapped as though to scare us, her calm face

  Patterned with wrinkles in unchanging grooves

  That outlive years, decades and centuries.

  Hers is a mask remains exemplary

  For countless generations. Who may wear it?

  She only, having fashioned it herself.

  So long as memory lasts us, it was hers.

  Behind it she assembles her rapt goodness,

  Her gentle worth already overflooding

  The mask, her prison, shaming its fierce, holy

  Terror: for through its gaping sockets always

  Peer out a pair of young and lovely eyes.

  TILTH

  (‘Robert Graves, the British veteran, is no longer in the poetic swim. He still resorts to traditional metres and rhyme, and to such out-dated words as tilth; withholding his 100% approbation also from contemporary poems that favour sexual freedom.’

  From a New York critical weekly)

  Gone are the drab monosyllabic days

  When ‘agricultural labour’ still was tilth;

  And ‘100% approbation’, praise;

  And ‘pornographic modernism’, filth –

  Yet still
I stand by tilth and filth and praise.

  THE LAST FISTFUL

  He won her Classic races, at the start,

  With a sound wind, strong legs and gallant heart;

  Yet she reduced his fodder day by day

  Till she had sneaked the last fistful away –

  When, not unnaturally, the old nag died

  Leaving her four worn horseshoes and his hide.

  THE TRADITIONALIST

  Respect his obstinacy of undefeat,

  His hoarding of tradition,

  Those hands hung loosely at his side

  Always prepared for hardening into fists

  Should any fool waylay him,

  His feet prepared for the conquest of crags

  Or a week’s march to the sea.

  If miracles are recorded in his presence

  As in your own, remember

  These are no more than time’s obliquities

  Gifted to men who still fall deep in love

  With real women like you.

  THE PREPARED STATEMENT

  The Prepared Statement is a sure stand-by

  For business men and Ministers. A lie

  Blurted by thieves caught in the very act

  Shows less regard, no doubt, for the act’s fact

  But more for truth; and all good thieves know why.

  ST ANTONY OF PADUA

  Love, when you lost your keepsake,

  The green-eyed silver serpent,

  And called upon St Antony

  To fetch it back again,

  The fact was that such keepsakes

  Must never become idols

  And meddle with the magic

  That chains us with its chain:

  Indeed the tears it cost you

  By sliding from your finger

  Was Antony’s admonishment

  That magic must remain

  Dependent on no silver ring

  Nor serpent’s emerald eyes

  But equally unalterable,

  Acceptable and plain…

  Yet none the less St Antony

  (A blessing on his honesty!)

  Proved merciful to you and me

  And found that ring again.

  BROKEN COMPACT

  It was not he who broke their compact;

  But neither had he dared to warn her