The Complete Poems Read online

  The Intruders

  Teiresias

  Song: The Smile of Eve

  [Verse Composed over the Telephone]

  [Fir and Yew]

  Song: Gardens Close at Dusk

  [Privacy]

  Matador Gored

  Confiteor Ut Fas

  New Moon Through Glass

  Dynamite Barbee

  When a Necklace Breaks

  A Queen

  If Love Becomes a Game

  Queen Silver and King Gold

  Learn That By Heart

  Song: One in Many

  A Late Daffodil for the Prince of Gwynedd

  1999

  Angry Gardener

  Song: Weather

  Fiery Orchard

  Defeat of Time

  Six Blankets

  The Note

  The Hedgepig

  When He Sat Writing

  Four Poems from DEYA A PORTFOLIO (1972):

  [Ours has no bearing on quotidian love]

  [Love makes poor sense in either speech or letters]

  [Is there another man?]

  [Confess, sweetheart, confess]

  The Noose

  The Moral Law

  Bodies Entranced

  Who Must It Be?

  This Is the Season

  Unco

  UNPUBLISHED AND POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED POEMS JUVENILIA: 1910–1914

  The First Poem

  Nightmare

  The Dragon-Fly

  Boy-Morality

  The Coracle

  1915–1919

  The Last Drop

  Trench Life

  Through the Periscope

  Machine Gun Fire: Cambrin

  The Fusilier

  O

  To My Unborn Son

  Return

  The Savage Story of Cardonette

  Died of Wounds

  Six Poems from ‘The Patchwork Flag’ (1918):

  Foreword

  Letter to S.S. from Bryn-y-pin

  Night March

  Poetic Injustice

  The Survivor Comes Home

  The Pudding

  Mother’s Song in Winter

  To Jean and John

  1920s–1930s

  From an Upper Window

  Drink and Fever

  Vestry

  The End

  The Sand Glass

  This What-I-Mean

  The Fingerhold

  Then What?

  Historical Particulars

  Address to Self

  Prosperity of Poets

  1940s–1950s

  Diotima Dead

  The Hearth

  In the Lion House

  An Appeal

  A Ghost from Arakan

  1960s–1970s

  Robin and Marian

  Never Yet

  Tanka

  House on Fire

  The Lilac Frock

  Departure

  North Side

  A

  Song: John Truelove

  Requirements for a Poem

  The Atom

  The Cupid

  Olives of March

  The Undying Worm

  Song: Though Time Conceals Much

  Always and For Ever

  ACROSS THE GULF (1992)

  The Snapped Rope

  The Goldsmiths

  Adam in Hell

  The Cards Are Wild

  Unless

  The Poised Pen

  [Fragment]

  [How Is It a Man Dies?]

  Green Flash

  Peisinoë

  Across the Gulf

  To His Temperate Mistress

  Foot-Holder-Royal

  The Pressure Gauge

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Complete Poems

  Beryl Graves, the poet’s widow, met Robert Graves in London in 1937 and returned with him at the end of the Second World War to Mallorca, where she still lives at Canelluñ, the house he built in 1931–2 in Deyá. She assisted Graves with many of his late works.

  Dunstan Ward teaches English in Paris at the University of London’s British Institute. President of the Robert Graves Society, he co-edited with Beryl Graves the three-volume annotated Complete Poems from which the texts in this edition have been reproduced.

  Introduction

  Fierce poems of our past –

  How can they ever die,

  Condemned by love to last

  Word for word and exactly

  Under a wide and changeful sky?

  (‘If No Cuckoo Sings’)

  There were two dramatic turning-points in the life of Robert Graves (1895–1985). One was his ‘death’ from wounds in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, just before his twenty-first birthday (it was even reported in The Times). The other was in 1929, when he said ‘Good-bye to all that’ (the title of his classic autobiography) and, accompanied only by the American poet Laura Riding, left England for a remote mountain village in Mallorca.

  If his extraordinary survival seemed to confirm his poetic destiny, his departure was no less symbolic. It affirmed Graves’s absolute commitment to his vocation, which shaped both his artistic and his personal life: ‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles’.1

  Graves’s poetry falls into three main periods, 1910–1926, 1927–1959 and 1960–1975, delimited by the publication of major collections, and bearing the impress of the relationships that inspired many of the poems they contain.

  Intimations of his dedication to poetry can already be found in ‘The First Poem’, written in January 1910 during his unhappy schooldays at Charterhouse, and in ‘The Poet in the Nursery’, which opens his first book, Over the Brazier (1916), published while he was on service in France (he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers a week after Britain declared war).

  The personal background to the poetry of this period includes his romantic attachment to a younger schoolmate, and his friendships with Edward Marsh, editor of the influential Georgian Poetry anthologies, and with the poet and fellow-Fusilier Siegfried Sassoon; his traumatic experiences as a young officer in the trenches; the aftermath of shell-shock and religious crisis; his marriage in 1918 to Nancy Nicholson (daughter of the painter William Nicholson), and the birth of their four children; studies at Oxford; his intense if short-lived involvements in psychology and philosophy, through two mentors, the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers and the Bengali philosopher Basanta Mallik; the beginning of his relationship with Laura Riding (they met on 2 January 1926); and his sole spell of conventional employment – six months as Professor of English at the University of Cairo.

  By December 1926, when Graves was thirty-one, he had published nineteen books, of which eleven were verse. He had acquired a reputation as a poet during the war, but his post-war poetry attracted little attention from the critics or the public.

  Poems (1914–26) marks the end of this period. His first ‘collected’ volume, it was, however, ‘selective rather than collective, intended as a disavowal of over half the poetry that I had so far printed’;2 from more than 280 poems he chose only 134.

  This drastic thinning-out continued through the six volumes of Collected Poems (two of them American) that appeared in 1938, 1948, 1955, 1959, 1961 and 1965, with the result that the greater proportion of the poetry written before 1960, among it some of Graves’s finest work, was eliminated from the canon.

  The second period, 1927–1959, divides into two. The first is defined by Graves’s association with Laura Riding, whom he came to identify with the ‘Sovereign Muse’. After the break with her in 1939, his relationship with Beryl Hodge, whom he had met in London in June 1937, establishes the other period, during which the White Goddess becomes the central presence.

  If, as he afterwards stated, Graves was ‘learning all the time’ while he was with Riding,3
these were also years of drama and upheaval: the end of his first marriage; Riding’s attempted suicide; their departure abroad, and the sensation created by Good-bye to All That; seven years in Mallorca where, for all that is positive in his diary, their life together ‘grew more and more painful’;4 then, uprooted by the Spanish Civil War, exile in England, Switzerland, France and America; finally, the ‘horror’ of their parting, evoked in ‘The Moon Ends in Nightmare’.

  In contrast, the following two decades – despite World War II, in which his eldest son, David, was killed – brought Graves stability, with his marriage to Beryl Hodge, another family of four children, and his return in 1946, after six years in Devon, to his Mallorcan home in Deyá.

  During the period with Laura Riding his poetry did not reach a large readership. Besides being geographically isolated, he had virtually ceased contributing to periodicals and anthologies, and of the six books up to 1938, four were limited editions amounting to just 740 copies.

  The publication in November 1938 of Graves’s second Collected Poems was the culmination of his literary collaboration with Riding. For more than a decade he had submitted every poem to her as it was written. Most had to be further revised before she eventually ‘passed’ them; some were destroyed. Then, in preparing his new collection, he went over all his work again with her, rewriting and deleting. Collected Poems (1938) is consequently ‘selective rather than collective’, like Poems (1914–26), from which only forty-one poems are preserved. The ‘Foreword’ offers an explanation: ‘I have suppressed whatever I felt misrepresented my poetic seriousness at the time when it was written.’5 But it was Riding, in fact, who formulated this, and Graves’s own attitude is better conveyed in his foreword to Poems and Satires 1951: ‘A volume of collected poems should form a sequence of the intenser moments of the poet’s spiritual autobiography’; in suppressing (and occasionally restoring) his poems, and reordering them in their sections – from 1938 designated simply by a roman numeral (like the chapters in Good-bye to All That) – he was reshaping, with the canon, his life ‘story’.6

  In the 1940s came his most creative phase, in prose and verse alike, with eleven prose books as well as three volumes of poetry and two selections. ‘These last years […] with Beryl’, he wrote, ‘have been the happiest of my life and I have done my best work in them.’7 The rigour he had achieved in his poetry was now combined with a renewed lyricism, as revealed in Work in Hand (1942) and Poems 1938–1945, and epitomized by ‘Mid-Winter Waking’; in such poems as ‘Despite and Still’ and ‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’, gentler personal emotions have recovered the right to be expressed openly.

  From ‘a sudden overwhelming obsession’8 in 1944 emerged The White Goddess, eventually published (through the perceptiveness of T.S. Eliot) in 1948 – a whole system of thought and belief within which lifelong poetic preoccupations could find their place.

  The Goddess – ‘the ancient power of love and terror’9 – pervades Graves’s poetry. Anticipated in the early work (‘The God Called Poetry’, ‘Love in Barrenness’, ‘The Red Ribbon Dream’, for example, and in those poems that feature moon imagery), she is prefigured while he is in the service of an exacting muse (in ‘On Portents’, or ‘As It Were Poems’, iii, where she is actually named), then celebrated by the poet as her mythologist and, increasingly, her devotee (in such numinous poems as ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’, ‘The White Goddess’, ‘Rhea’). In his mid-fifties he experienced again – through his encounter with a girl of seventeen – her inspiration and apparent betrayal, a pattern that was to continue and dominate the future.

  The favourable critical reception of Poems 1938–1945 marked a watershed in Graves’s reputation. In the 1950s the number of poems he published in periodicals climbed back to the level of the early 1920s; paperback editions in 1957 and 1958 made his poetry widely available; lecture tours in America and television appearances swelled his audience. By the end of the decade he had become a celebrity, receiving – or refusing – awards and honours. Yet the newer verse caused him some misgivings; when he wrote the last addition to Collected Poems 1959, ‘Around the Mountain’, he was wondering whether he had reached his ‘menopause’.10 But if his major poetic achievement was behind him, his most prolific years still lay ahead.

  Nearly half the 1202 poems in this book were written in the fifteen years from 1960 to 1975 – an astonishing late outpouring.

  ‘Love is the main theme and origin of true poems’, Graves declared in 1965.11 Most of the poems of the last period are, indeed, love poems (or, to use his own distinction, poems about love); their focus is ‘the personal Muse’, an incarnation (as he now believed) of the Goddess. The period can thus be divided into three phases: 1960–1963, 1963–1966 and 1966–1975, corresponding to Graves’s relationships with his so-called ‘muses’, though the continuities are perhaps more significant than the contrasts. During the first phase, Graves sought to ‘dramatize, truthfully and factually, the vicissitudes of a poet’s dealings with the White Goddess, the Muse, the perpetual Other Woman’. His quest then turned to the White Goddess’s ‘mysterious sister’, the Black Goddess of Wisdom, who ‘represents a miraculous certitude in love’.12

  The ‘muses’ were a source not only of inspiration but also of frequent disquiet. In the later work there are still, however, a number of witty, light-hearted or ironic poems. It was this ability to distance himself that to a large extent helped him through some difficult emotional situations. (For example, he wrote ‘Ann at Highwood Hall’ in a few days at a particularly distressing time in his personal life.)13

  The twenty-three books of verse that Graves published during this period include three Collected Poems. In the 1965 volume he suppressed almost a quarter of the contents of Collected Poems 1959, mainly on the grounds of suspected ‘lovelessness’;14 but he reprinted the mass of recent love poetry, as he did again in his last volume, published in 1975 when he was eighty: the final version of his ‘spiritual autobiography’ was designed to tell ‘one story only’…

  Graves’s fame attained its height in the 1960s. Each new book of poetry received virtually unanimous praise from the reviewers (until the predictable reaction). The 1961 paperback edition of The White Goddess even made him ‘something of a cult-figure’.15 His lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1961 to 1965 drew exceptional audiences, and their publication, among half a dozen books of essays, ensured a wider circulation for his views. He gave numerous talks and readings; besides his frequent visits to America, he travelled to Greece, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Mexico and Australia. He was awarded a gold medal at the 1968 Mexican ‘Cultural Olympics’, and, later that year, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. But he was never part of the literary establishment, remaining obstinately removed.

  In his last years Graves suffered increasingly from ill health and loss of memory, yet to the end of this third period he worked as he had always done, producing draft upon draft in his life-long ‘obsession about getting poems right’.16 Among the latest poems are some of his most poignant: ‘Unless’, ‘The Moon’s Last Quarter’, ‘The Unpenned Poem’, ‘The Green Woods of Unrest’; he left another fifty completed poems in manuscript. Until he could no longer write, he continued to ‘treat poetry with a single-minded devotion which may be called religious’.17

  ‘I can promise that no silver spoons have been thrown out with the refuse, and that I have been fair to my younger, middle and elder selves’, wrote Graves in Collected Poems 1959, which contained considerably less than half his output to date. If both those claims might have been questioned in 1959, it is evident that the 1975 Collected Poems favoured the elder self at the expense of the middle and younger: of the 632 poems, more than two-thirds were from the last fifteen years. The canon was left unbalanced.

  The present edition shows the full range of Graves’s poetic work. It brings together all the 1133 poems that he published, with sixty-nine chosen from his unpublished and posthumously published poetry. The three-
volume annotated edition of the Complete Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995, 1997, 1999) records his changes to the canon, summarizing the publication history of the individual poems, and listing the contents of the successive volumes of Collected Poems.

  All the known uncollected poems (printed only in periodicals and the press) have been included, several of them not previously recorded; any further poems traced will be added in the future.

  In making what is inevitably a personal selection from over two hundred unpublished and posthumously published poems, the editors have given priority to poems whose publication was approved by Graves, but was prevented by some external factor (as was the case, for example, with ‘Diotima Dead’, removed from Work in Hand when the printers requested cuts). Apart from these, they have chosen poems that were treated by Graves as ‘finished’ (or that reached a comparably ‘finished’ state), and which are, in their judgement, of literary, historical or biographical interest, and representative of Graves’s poetry at the time.

  The arrangement of the poems from Graves’s books of verse corresponds to the first editions, and follows the order within them. ‘From’ before the title of a book (e.g. ‘From Fairies and Fusiliers’) indicates the omission of a poem or poems already included in an earlier book (or incorporated into a later poem); the full contents of each book are listed in the three-volume edition.

  The uncollected poems are in order of first publication (for publication details, see the annotated Complete Poems, Volume III). The unpublished and posthumously published poems are in order of composition, to the extent that it has been possible to determine this.

  In accordance with Graves’s practice, this edition prints the latest texts of the poems, reproducing them from the annotated Complete Poems. The poems from Graves’s books and the uncollected poems appear in the last version that he published, with further revisions (e.g. in his own copies of his books) incorporated, and the unpublished and posthumously published poems in the version of the latest manuscript/typescript. Anomalies and misprints have been corrected in the light of manuscripts and previous printings (as reported in the three-volume Complete Poems notes); when an earlier printed variant in wording or punctuation has been adopted, it has been checked wherever possible against manuscripts and proofs, as have the texts of the uncollected poems.