Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Magical grief that no honour could vex.

  Was it ever granted earlier true lovers –

  Whether equally bruised need not concern us –

  To anticipate such hand-in-hand conformity?

  If so, how were they named? And was their glory

  Fixed by an oath you never dared deny me?

  FAST BOUND TOGETHER

  Fast bound together by the impossible,

  The everlasting, the contempt for change,

  We meet seldom, we kiss seldom, seldom converse,

  Sharing no pillow in no dark bed,

  Knowing ourselves twin poets, man with woman,

  A millennial coincidence past all argument,

  All laughter and all wonder.

  £ s. d.

  When Libra, Solidus, Denarius

  Ruled our metallic currency,

  They satisfied and steadied us: –

  Pounds, shillings, pence, all honest British money.

  True, the gold libra weighed twelve ounces once.

  The solidus, gold equally,

  Worth twenty-five denarii –

  Money that did not burn,

  Money which in its turn…

  ‘What happened to the solidus?’ you ask me.

  Reduced at last to an unsilvered shilling

  Of twelve denarii – ‘pence’, or bronze money –

  It faded pitifully into the blue…

  As for the libra, having done with gold,

  It languished among paper promises

  Based on hopes, lies and shrewd financial guesses.

  But mourn for the French sou, as is most proper:

  Three hundred ounces, once, all of pure copper.

  THREE WORDS ONLY

  Tears from our eyes

  Start out suddenly

  Until wiped away

  By the gentle whisper

  Of three words only.

  And how should we stifle

  Grief and jealousy

  That would jerk us apart

  Were it not for an oracle

  Of three words only?

  Three words only,

  Full seven years waiting

  With prolonged cruelty

  Night by night endured

  For three words only.

  Sweetheart, I love you

  Here in the world’s eye

  And always shall do

  With a perfect faith

  In three words only.

  Let us boast ourselves

  Still to be poets

  Whose power and whose faith

  Hang at this tall altar

  Of three words only

  TRUE MAGIC

  Love, there have necessarily been others

  When we are forced apart

  Into far-off continents and islands

  Either to sleep alone with an aching heart

  Or admit casual lovers…

  Is the choice murderous? Seven years have passed

  Yet each remains the other’s perfect love

  And must continue suffering to the last…

  Can continence claim virtue in preserving

  An oath hurtful and gruelling?

  Patience! No firm alternative can be found

  To absolute love; we therefore plead for none

  And are poets, thriving all hours upon true magic

  Distilled from poetry – such love being sacred

  And its breach wholly beyond absolution.

  THE TOWER OF LOVE

  What demon lurked among those olive-trees,

  Blackening your name, questioning my faith,

  Raising sudden great flaws of desperate wind,

  Making a liar of me?

  Confess: was it the demon Jealousy?

  Has there been any gift in these eight years

  That ever you refused when gently asked?

  Or that I ever chose to refuse you –

  For fear of loving you too dearly –

  However much I had failed to demand?

  Forgive, and teach me to forgive myself.

  This much we know: lifting our faith above

  All argument and idle contradiction,

  We have won eternity of togetherness

  Here in this tall tower blessed for us alone.

  THE LOVE LETTER

  It came at last, a letter of true love,

  Not asking for an answer,

  Being itself the answer

  To such perversities of absence

  As day by day distress us –

  Spring, summer, autumn, winter –

  With due unhappiness and unease.

  What may I say? What must I not say?

  Ours is an evil age, afflicting us

  With acts of unexampled cruelty

  Even in this fast circle of friends,

  Offering no choice between disease and death –

  With love balanced above profound deeps…

  Yet here is your love letter.

  Why must we never sleep in the same bed

  Nor view each other naked

  Though our hearts and minds require it

  In proof of honest love?

  Can it be because poetic magic

  Must mount beyond all sensual choosing

  To a hidden future and forgotten past?

  SONG: SEVEN FRESH YEARS

  Two full generations

  Had parted our births

  Yet still I could love you

  Beyond all concealment,

  All fear, all reproach,

  Until seven fresh years

  Ruling distance and time

  Had established our truth.

  Love brooded undimmed

  For a threatening new age,

  So we travelled together

  Through torment and error

  Beyond jealousy’s eras

  Of midnight and dawn,

  Until seven fresh years

  Ruling distance and time

  Had established our truth.

  AS A LESS THAN ROBBER

  You can scarcely grant me now

  What was already granted

  In bland self-deprivation

  Only to other debtors

  To whom you owed nothing.

  And had I cause for complaint

  After my honest absence

  That for seven long years

  I never dared insist

  That you should keep faith?

  Now in reward for waiting,

  Being still a mere nobody,

  Let me plead without reproach

  As a less than robber

  That I am owed nothing.

  SINGLENESS IN LOVE

  And the magic law long governing our lives

  As poets, how should it be rightly phrased?

  Not as injunction, not as interdiction,

  But as true power of singleness in love

  (The self-same power guarding the fifth dimension

  In which we live and move

  Perfect in time gone by and time foreknown)

  Our endless glory to be bound in love,

  Nor ever lost by cheating circumstance.

  LOVE CHARMS

  How closely these long years have bound us

  Stands proved by constant imminence of death –

  On land, on water, and in the sky –

  As by our love-charms worn on the same finger

  Against a broken neck or sudden drowning –

  Should we debate them?

  To have done with quarrels and misunderstandings

  Seems of small import even though emphasizing

  The impossibility of a fatal breach.

  And yet how strange such charms may seem, how wanton,

  And forced on us by what? Not by the present

  Nor the past either, nor the random future:

  Here we lie caught in love’s close net of truth.

  AT THE GATE

  Where are poems? Why do I now write none?

&nb
sp; This can mean no lack of pens, nor lack of love,

  But need perhaps of an increased magic –

  Where have my ancient powers suddenly gone?

  Tonight I caught a glimpse of her at the gate

  Grappling a monster never found before,

  And jerking back its head. Had I come too late?

  Her eyes blazed fire and I could look no more.

  What could she hold against me? Never yet

  Had I lied to her or thwarted her desire,

  Rejecting prayers that I could never forget,

  Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire.

  THE MOON’S TEAR

  Each time it happened recklessly:

  No poet’s magic could release her

  From those feckless unfathomable demands

  Of anger and imprudence,

  Those pleas of cruelly injured innocence.

  Why should he keep so strange a woman

  Close at his elbow fitfully observing

  The end of a world that was?

  Must he fetch a moon’s black tear to tame her

  For ever and a day?

  SONG: FROM OTHERWHERE OR NOWHERE

  Should unknown messengers appear

  From otherwhere or nowhere,

  Treat them with courtesy,

  Listen most carefully,

  Never presume to argue.

  Though the sense be unintelligible,

  Accept it as true.

  Otherwhere is a lonely past,

  Nowhere a far future

  To which love must have access

  In time of loneliness.

  Listen most carefully:

  Though the sense be unintelligible,

  Accept it as true.

  A distant flower-garden,

  A forgotten forest,

  Islands on a lake

  Teeming with salmon,

  Its waters dark blue –

  Though the sense be unintelligible,

  Accept it as true.

  NAME

  Caught by the lure of marriage,

  Casting yourself in prospect

  As perfect wife and mother

  Through endless years of joy,

  Be warned by one who loves you

  Never to name your first-born

  Until you know the father

  And: is it girl or boy?

  Nine months in mortal darkness

  Let it debate the future,

  Reviewing its inheritance

  Through three-score generations,

  From both sides of the family,

  A most exacting game;

  Then, just before delivery,

  Prepare for a soft whisper

  As it reveals its name.

  TWO DISCIPLINES

  Fierce bodily control, constant routine,

  Precision and a closely smothered rage

  Alike at ballet-school and the manège:

  These harden muscles, these bolster the heart

  For glorious records of achievement

  To glow in public memory apart.

  Which disciplines (ballet and horsemanship)

  Have proved no less reciprocally exclusive –

  Note their strange differences in gait and carriage –

  Than permissivity and Christian marriage

  THE UGLY SECRET

  Grow angry, sweetheart, if you must, with me

  Rather than with yourself. This honest shoulder

  Will surely shrug your heaviest blow away,

  So you can sleep the sounder.

  As for the ugly secret gnawing at you

  Which you still hide for fear of hurting me,

  Here is my blank pledge of forgiveness –

  Nor need you ever name the enemy,

  Nor need I ever guess.

  THREE YEARS WAITING

  Have we now not spent three years waiting

  For these preposterous longings to make sense –

  Mine and what I divine to be your secret

  Since gently you tighten your lips on its conclusion

  Though never registering a copyright?

  Since these are poems in their first making,

  Let us refrain from secret consideration

  Of their bewildered presence.

  What is a poem

  Unless a shot in the night with a blind arrow

  From a well-magicked bowstring?

  From Collected Poems 1975

  (1975)

  THE CRYSTAL

  Incalculably old,

  True gift from true king –

  Crystal with streaks of gold

  For mounting in a ring –

  Be sure this gem bespeaks

  A sunrise love-making:

  To kiss, to have, to hold.

  A CHARM FOR SOUND SLEEPING

  A charm for sound sleeping,

  A charm against nightmares,

  A charm against death –

  Without rhyme, without music,

  Yet short of deceit?

  How to master such magic,

  How acquire such deep knowledge,

  How secure such full power?

  Would you shrink from her answer?

  Would you dare face defeat?

  For to work out of time,

  To endure out of space,

  To live within her truth –

  That alone is full triumph

  And honour complete.

  THE NEW ETERNITY

  We still remain we;

  The how and where now being stationary

  Need not henceforth concern us;

  Nor this new eternity

  Of love prove dangerous

  Even though it still may seem

  Posted and hidden past all dream.

  HISTORY OF THE FALL

  But did not Adam, Eve’s appointed playmate,

  Honour her as his goddess and his guide,

  Finding her ten times hardier than himself:

  Resistant to more sickness and worse weather?

  Did he not try his muscles in Eve’s service –

  Fell trees, shoulder vast boulders, run long errands?

  Hers was a pure age, until humankind

  Ate flesh like the wild beasts. Fruits, roots, and herbs

  Had been their diet before world-wide drought

  Forced famine on them: before witless Adam

  Disobeyed orders, tossing sacred apples

  From Eve’s green tree, driving and butchering deer,

  Teaching his sons to eat as now he ate.

  Eve forced the family from their chosen Eden…

  And Cain killed Abel, battening on the corpse.

  ELSEWHERE

  Either we lodge diurnally here together

  Both in heart and in mind,

  Or awhile you lodge elsewhere –

  And where, dear heart, is Elsewhere?

  Elsewhere may be your casual breach of promise –

  Unpunishable since unbound by oath –

  Yet still awhile Elsewhere.

  As a veteran I must never break my step,

  As a poet I must never break my word,

  Lest one day I should suddenly cease to love you

  And remain unloved elsewhere.

  Gome, call on me tonight –

  Not marching, love, but walking.

  WHAT CAN WE NOT ASK?

  What can we not ask you?

  Being a woman

  You still alert the world and, still being men,

  We never dare gainsay you, nor yet venture

  To descend the mountain when your bells chime

  The midday feast and nature gives assent.

  Whatever hours they strike, you are found true

  To your lovely self and to yourself only:

  Silent yet still uncontradictable.

  Did we ever see you stumble, taking thought?

  What rights have men in such divinity,

  Widely though they may move within its shade,


  Abstaining still from prayers?

  TWO CRUCIAL GENERATIONS

  Two crucial generations parted them,

  Though neither chargeable as an offence –

  Nor could she dare dismiss an honest lover

  For no worse crime than mere senility,

  Nor could he dare to blame her, being himself

  Capable of a passionate end to love

  Should she show signs of mocking at old age?

  Then why debate the near impossible

  Even in fitful bouts of honest rage?

  TO COME OF AGE

  At last we could keep quiet, each on his own,

  Signalling silently though memorably

  His news or latest unnews.

  When younger we had spent those wintry evenings

  In shoutings and wild laughter –

  We dared not come of age.

  Unless obsessed by love none of us changed.

  How could we change? Has true love ever changed?

  Not in our day, but only in another’s.

  Tell me, my heart of hearts, I still beseech you:

  When dare we reasonably come of age?

  SEPTEMBER LANDSCAPE

  Olive-green, sky-blue, gravel-brown,

  With a floor of tumbled locusts,

  And along the country lane

  Isabel dances dressed in red

  Erect, thinking aloud,

  Framed against sudden cloud

  And its bold promise of much-needed rain.

  CRUCIBLES OF LOVE

  From where do poems come?

  From workshops of the mind,

  As do destructive armaments,

  Philosophic calculations,

  Schemes for man’s betterment?

  Or are poems born simply

  From crucibles of love?

  May not you and I together

  Engrossed with each other

  Assess their longevity?

  For who else can judge merits

  Or define demerits –

  This remains a task for lovers

  Held fast in love together

  And for no others.

  WOMAN POET AND MAN POET

  Woman poet and man poet

  Fell in love each with the other.

  It was unsafe for either

  To count on sunny weather,