Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

  Which is to say we may safely

  At any time go back, to consult

  Our newspapers, lawyers or doctors,

  Without being reported missing

  From ourselves. Such is the credit

  Of the extreme word ‘Domicil’.)

  And Anthony Eden is, we know,

  A clever young man who, without

  Other resources than tact and

  A virile English education

  And a flattering way of

  Being at ease among the great

  (So that the great exert themselves

  To be greater, so that Anthony

  May be still more at ease among them),

  Has established the superior

  Virtue of that which is charming.

  In other times this would have caused

  A complete paralysis of

  Activity, not to mention wars,

  All joining in the exaltation

  Of the personal attractiveness

  Of Anthony Eden…. Perhaps,

  If he had been a woman ….

  But the world has grown suspicious of

  Solutions, everyone is anxious

  For simple ways out of

  Complicated situations

  And simple ways back again:

  Lest the trick of history-making

  Be lost and life become the burden

  Of those alive rather than, always,

  The intact inheritance of

  The unborn generation.

  We know, you see, what is going on.

  It is not as if we were living

  On a desert island. When it is

  A question of distance in time

  Rather than in geography

  It is easy to keep well-informed.

  And there are no distances now

  But in time, and time is a matter

  Of print, we read neither by maps

  Nor by dates; the works of T.S. Eliot

  Are in no greater hurry to be read

  Than the works of Homer–

  It is this waiting-power, this

  Going to sleep of the author

  In the work, to be wakened after

  An indefinite time, which makes

  Literature the darling of

  Leisure. ‘Domicil’ combines

  The facts, intention, and leisure,

  Homer is the God of leisure,

  And T.S. Eliot its Christ.

  One does not hesitate to mention

  Homer heartily, he delights

  In dozing off and hearing his name

  Thunder, like a small boy letting

  Sleep roll up the voice of breakfast.

  But one is inclined to call softly on

  T.S. Eliot, one is inclined, that is,

  Not to wake him, to give him sleep

  Of much soft calling; one feels

  He would make breakfast a further

  Occasion for martyrdom.

  He is, you see, the Christ not risen

  Of literature, leisure or domicil,

  Whose glory is not to get up

  Ever– thus the small boy becomes

  The poet. We realize, you see,

  The necessity of being

  Back in time, at least for a year,

  During which, of course, much may grow

  Permanently unfit for interest;

  Nevertheless, we mean not to lose

  Interest. It is important

  To cease looking, when one does,

  Not merely because one is tired,

  But because memory has succeeded

  Observation by the ultimate

  Yielding of contemporary

  Life to the economic

  Crisis: the expense of maintaining

  A news-producing universe

  For our benefit is gigantic,

  Beyond the imagination

  Of financiers, whose good-will depends

  On the reasonable fantasticness

  Of the investment. We do not,

  Truly, require this lavish

  Apparatus for impressing

  On our minds what in any case

  Our minds flash topically upon

  The ever-paling screen of time:

  It is a nice question whether

  The whole dispatch of journalism

  Is not, as far as we are concerned,

  A work of supererogation.

  Our regards to various people

  Who may happen to read this verse,

  (We dare not make it much better

  For fear it may read much worse),

  To the rich man in his castle

  And the poor man at the Spike,

  And the patriot Lady Houston

  Whom personally we like,

  And the new blue gentleman-bobby

  With his microscopes and such,

  A radio-set in his helmet,

  And fluent in Czech and Dutch,

  And fearless Admiral Philips–

  When the traffic light went red

  He clapped his glass to his sightless eye

  And ‘I can’t see it,’ he said,

  And Number One Trunk-murderer

  And likewise Number Two,

  And the fellow who left his legs behind

  In the train at Waterloo,

  And the sixteen-year-old girl student

  Who wrote, with never a blot:

  ‘The land of my birth is the best on Earth’–

  Which wasn’t saying a lot,

  And the hostesses of Mayfair

  Who do nothing out of season,

  And the miners of the Rhondda

  Who are rebels within reason,

  And men who fly to business,

  And women who fly to the Cape,

  (But not that Viscount Castlerosse:

  We disapprove of his shape),

  And the ex-ex-Rector of Stiffkey

  Who crouched in a barrel cozily,

  And the ex-wild-life of Whipsnade

  And ex-Sir Oswald Mosley,

  And almost-our-favourite author

  Who moderates loves and crimes

  For Shorter Notices: Fiction

  In the supplement of the Times,

  And W.H. Day-Spender,

  Who tries, and tries, and tries,

  And the poet without initials –

  The Man with the Staring Eyes,

  And the riveters of the Clyde

  And the coracle-men of Dee,

  And the nightingale in the shady vale

  Who sings for the B.B.C.–

  Now kindest regards to these

  And our love to all the rest,

  And our homage to Mr. Baldwin

  (A Tory retort’s the best),

  And a warning frown to each little bird

  In somebody else’s nest.

  ASSUMPTION DAY

  What was wrong with the day, doubtless,

  Was less the unseasonable gusty weather

  Than the bells ringing on a Monday morning

  For a church-feast that nobody could welcome–

  Not even the bell-ringers.

  The pond had shrunk: its yellow lilies

  Poked rubbery necks out of the water.

  I paused and sat down crossly on a tussock,

  My back turned on the idle water-beetles

  That would not skim, but floated.

  A wasp, a humble-bee, a blue-fly

  Uncoöperatively at work together

  Were sucking honey from the crowded blossom

  Of a pale flower whose name someone once told me–

  Someone to be mistrusted.

  But, not far off, our little cow-herd

  Made mud-cakes, with one eye on the cattle,

  And marked each separate cake with his initials.

  I was half-tempted by the child’s example

  To rescue my spoilt morning.

  THE MOON ENDS IN NIGHTMARE

  I had once boasted my acquain
tance

  With the Moon’s phases: I had seen her, even,

  Endure and emerge from full eclipse.

  Yet as she stood in the West, that summer night,

  The fireflies dipping insanely about me,

  So that that the foggy air quivered and winked

  And the sure eye was cheated,

  In horror I cried aloud: for the same Moon

  Whom I had held a living power, though changeless,

  Split open in my sight, a bright egg shell,

  And a double-headed Nothing grinned

  All-wisely from the gap.

  At this I found my earth no more substantial

  Than the lower air, or the upper,

  And ran to plunge in the cool flowing creek,

  My eyes and ears pressed under water.

  And did I drown, leaving my corpse in mud?

  Yet still the thing was so.

  I crept to where my window beckoned warm

  Between the white oak and the tulip tree

  And rapped– but was denied, as who returns

  After a one-hour-seeming century

  To a house not his own.

  1952–1959

  THE HOUSING PROJECT

  Across the strand of no seaside

  Will two waves similarly glide;

  And always, from whatever strand,

  The long horizon’s drawn freehand.

  Yet nature here must yield to art:

  Look, these ten houses, kept apart

  By the same exact interval,

  Magnificently identical,

  Whose ten same housewives, having now

  Kissed ten same husbands on the brow

  And sent them arm in arm away

  To clock in, work, and draw their pay

  At the same factory, which makes

  Countless identical plum cakes,

  Heave a light sigh in unison

  And back to their same parlours run

  With synchronized abandon, there

  To put soap operas on the air.

  ADVICE TO COLONEL VALENTINE

  Romantic love, though honourably human,

  Is comic in a girl or an old man,

  Pathetic in a boy or an old woman.

  ‘But counts as decent for how long?’ Our nation

  Allows a woman thirty years, tacks on

  Ten more for men resolved on procreation.

  Your decent years, alas, have lapsed? The comic

  Come crowding, yet love gnaws you to the quick

  As once when you were fifteen and pathetic?

  What? Dye your hair, you ask? Dress natty,

  Swing an aggressive cane, whistle and sigh?

  No: that would be true comicality.

  Honour your grey hairs, keep them out of fashion–

  Even if a foolish girl, not yet full grown,

  Confronts you with a scarcely decent passion.

  HIPPOPOTAMUS’S ADDRESS TO THE FREUDIANS

  (He quotes Plutarch’s OF ISIS AND OSIRIS 32, pleading for the revision of the misnomer ‘Oedipus Complex’, which should be ‘Hippopotamus Complex’. His own acts, unlike those of the Theban King Oedipus, were not committed in error, he asserts, but prompted by a genuine infantile libido.)

  Deep in Nile mire,

  Jam etiam:

  ‘I slew my sire,

  I forced my dam.

  Plutarch’s Of Isis

  Dwells on my vices,

  Shameless I am:

  Free from repression

  Or urge to confession,

  Freud’s little lamb,

  I slew my sire,

  In frantic desire

  I forced my dam–

  I and not Oedipus,’

  Roars Hippopotamus,

  ‘You have confounded us

  Jam etiam!’

  TWIN TO TWIN

  Come, ancient rival, royal weird,

  Who each new May must grip my beard

  Till circling time shall cease to be:

  Ground your red lance and mourn with me,

  Though it were briefly –

  Mourn that our wild-flower-breasted Fate,

  Who locked us in this pact of hate,

  Cuckolds us both as here we stand

  And with unmagic mars the strand

  Of her own island.

  Yet, once again, your heart being true,

  Our interrupted strife renew:

  Reach for my beard with heaving breast

  To roar: ‘You lie! She loved me best’,

  And fight your fiercest.

  CONSIDINE

  ‘Why’, they demand, ‘with so much yet unknown

  Anticipate the final colophon

  Where the book fails among appendices

  And indices?

  ‘To count the tale almost as good as done

  Would be intimidation by the Sun,

  That tap-house bully with his mounting score

  Chalked on the door.

  ‘Look at Sam Shepherd, ruinously white,

  With marrow in his bones to leap all night!’

  Yet Considine sits dead from the neck down,

  With not a tooth lost and a beard still brown,

  Curse of the town.

  THE JUGGLER

  (for Henry Ringling North)

  Posturing one-legged on a slack wire,

  He is no illusionist (nor I a liar)

  When his free foot tosses in sequence up,

  To be caught confidently by the joggled head,

  Saucer, cup,

  saucer, cup,

  saucer, cup,

  saucer, cup,

  Each to fall fair and square on its mounting bed.

  Wonder enough? Or not?

  Not:

  for a teapot

  Floats up to crown them; item, following soon,

  Supererogatory lump-sugar, and spoon.

  Thus the possible is transcended

  By a prankster’s pride in true juggling,

  Twice daily for weeks at Ringling’s ring,

  Until the seasonal circuit’s ended–

  An act one degree only less absurd

  Than mine: of slipperily balancing

  Word

  upon word

  upon word

  upon word,

  Each wanton as an eel, daft as a bird.

  THE YOUNG WITCH

  The moon is full,

  Forget all faith and me, Go your own road,

  If your own road it be;

  Below the girdle women are not wise.

  Hecatë hounds you on,

  You dare not stay,

  Nor will she lead you home

  Before high day–

  Here is the truth, why taunt me with more lies?

  BIRTH OF A GREAT MAN

  Eighth child of an eighth child, your wilful advent

  Means, as they say, more water in the stew.

  Tell us: why did you choose this year and month

  And house to be born into?

  Were you not scared by Malthusian arguments

  Proving it folly at least, almost a sin,

  Even to poke your nose around the door –

  Much more, come strutting in?

  Yet take this battered coral in proof of welcome.

  We offer (and this is surely what you expect)

  Few toys, few treats, your own stool by the fire,

  Salutary neglect.

  Watch the pot boil, invent a new steam-engine;

  Daub every wall with inspirational paint;

  Cut a reed pipe, blow difficult music through it;

  Or become an infant saint.

  We shall be too short-handed for interference

  While you keep calm and tidy and never brag–

  But evade the sesquipedalian school-inspector

  With his muzzle and his bag.

  TO MAGDALENA MULET, MARGITA MORA & LUCIA GRAVES

  Fairies of the leaves and rain,

  One from England, t
wo from Spain,

  You who flutter, as a rule,

  At Aina Jansons’ Ballet School,

  O what joy to see you go

  Dancing at the Lírico:

  Pirouetting, swaying, leaping,

  Twirling, whirling, softly creeping,

  To a most exciting din

  Of French horn and violin!

  These three bouquets which I send you

  Show how highly I commend you,

  And not only praise the bright

  Brisk performance of tonight

  (Like the audience), but far more

  The practising that went before.

  You have triumphed at the cost

  Of week-ends in the country lost,

  Aching toes from brand-new points,

  Aching muscles, aching joints,

  Pictures missed and parties too,

  And suppers getting cold for you

  With homework propped beside the plate,

  Which meant you had to sit up late.

  From dawn to midnight fairies run

  To please both Aina and the Nun.

  THE PUMPKIN

  You may not believe it, for hardly could I–

  I was cutting a pumpkin to put in a pie,

  And on it was written most careful and plain:

  ‘You may hack me in slices, but I’ll grow again.’

  I hacked it and sliced it and made no mistake

  As, with dough rounded over, I set it to bake:

  But down in the garden when I chanced to walk,

  Why, there was my pumpkin entire on the stalk!

  MAX BEERBOHM AT RAPALLO

  The happiest of exiles he, who shakes

  No dust from either shoe, who gently takes

  His leave, discards his opera hat, but stows

  Oxford and London in twin portmanteaux,

  To be unpacked with care and loving eyes

  Under the clear blue of Ligurian skies,

  And becomes guardian of such excellence

  As cannot fade nor lose its virtue!

  Hence,

  After their long experience of decay

  And damage, which had sent all wits astray,

  The rueful English to Rapallo went;

  Where Max, unaltered by self-banishment

  Welcomed them to his vine, then (over tea)

  Taught them what once they were, and still might be.

  THE GRANDFATHER’S COMPLAINT

  A Broadsheet Ballad

  When I was ten years old

  And Grandfather would complain

  To me and my two brothers–

  Would angrily maintain:

  That beer was not so hearty,

  Nor such good songs sung,

  Nor bread baked so wholesome

  As when himself was young,