We are grateful to the Board of Literary Management of the late Laura (Riding) Jackson for permission to reprint ‘Midsummer Duet’, from Laura Riding’s Collected Poems (London: Cassell, 1938; and Manchester: Carcanet, and New York: Persea Books, 1980), copyright © 1938, 1980; and ‘Majorcan Letter, 1935’, from Focus, 4 (Dec. 1935). The Board, ‘in conformity with her wish’, asks us ‘to record that, in 1941, Laura (Riding) Jackson renounced, on grounds of linguistic principle, the writing of poetry: she had come to hold that “poetry obstructs general attainment to something better in our linguistic way-of-life than we have’”.
We should like to thank again the many others whose help is acknowledged in the three-volume annotated Complete Poems, from which the texts for this edition have been reproduced.
Dunstan Ward gratefully acknowledges a grant from the British Academy to visit libraries and collections in the United States, and the support of the University of London’s British Institute in Paris.
Finally, we wish to thank our editor, Ms Sarah Rigby, for her care and patience.
THE BEGINNING
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First published in one volume in the UK by Carcanet Press Limited 2000
First published in Penguin Classics 2003
Copyright © Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2003
Editorial matter copyright Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-241-19767-7
Whipperginny
* Gabriel hounds, a spectral pack hunting the souls of the damned through the air at night: the origin of this belief some find in the strange noise made by the passage of flocks of wild geese or swans.
Mock Beggar Hall
* The local name for an important establishment in this neighbourhood; architecturally the first-fruits of Ruskin’s Oxford lectures.
§ Feng shwee. I do not know if this is a correct transliteration of the convenient Chinese term meaning the feeling about the house, its ghost, aroma, genius.
* The reference is to the interruption of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
§ My friend Miss Winstanley, of Aberystwyth University, had given me this explanation of Antigonus, promising chapter and verse from the pamphleteers. I used it, without the question of its accuracy arising, as a type of a surprising development of literary history
Welchman’s Hose
* Pellibus et sutis arcent mala frigora braccis.
* ‘Payment is customarily made at the close of the month in which the contributions appear…’ – The Trade of Authorship.
* From Mr. Hardy’s Poem, ‘An Ancient to Ancients’.
* A reminiscence from Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’.
* Written in January, 1924, but prophetic of the Mallin-Brousse boxing episode and the ill-feeling that followed. This poem was awarded a medal at the Olympic Games themselves.
From Poems 1938–1945
1 See: Charles R. Stockard and collaborators: The genetic and endocrinic basis for differences inform and behaviour, as elucidated by studies of contrasted pure-line dogbreeds and their hybrids. (Philadelphia, 1941.)
From Poems 1965–1968
* A fragment by the Dorian Greek poet Alcman, seventh century B.C., found among the Oxyrhynchus papyri.
Beyond Giving
* This poem, with its English translation, was read at the Mexican Cultural Olympiads and awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry.
From Poems 1968-1970
* Psalms 40. 10.
§ I Kings 1. 1-15.
Uncollected Poems
* The First Voice is Laura Riding.
* With Laura Riding.
Robert Graves, Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)
(Series: # )
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