Robert Graves delighted in out of the way facts and often built poems around them, as in the case of this slightly enigmatic piece that turns on the idea that maps, at least in the old days, were not entirely accurate and whole parcels of land could be omitted from them: the ‘lost acres’ of the title. [I think this has nothing to do with the modern convention whereby certain installations like weapons factories and nuclear bunkers are deliberately not identified as such on maps for reasons of national security, so if you want to know where they are you have to ask the Russians].

Graves plays with this idea in a typically offbeat way, using the lost acres as a metaphor for the edge places of the mind that so fascinated him and ascribing to them an otherworldly quality, along with the perils that otherworlds traditionally possess: ‘to walk there would be loss of sense’. But why? The usual sense lost in otherworld venturings is that of time, when travellers to Tír na nÓg or explorers of fairy mounds return after what seems to them a short stay to find that anything from seven to hundreds of years have passed at home, but I believe that what Graves is suggesting here is that our fragile sanity depends on having things mapped and named, and these places by their nature imperil that sanity: that fear of ‘a substance without words’ reminds one of his reflections in ‘The Cool Web’ (see week 380). But as I say I find the poem slightly enigmatic, so if anyone has any better ideas on how to read it I’d be interested to hear them.

Lost Acres

These acres, always again lost
By every new ordnance-survey
And searched for at exhausting cost
Of time and thought, are still away.

They have their paper-substitute –
Intercalation of an inch
At the so-many-thousandth foot:
And no one parish feels the pinch.

But lost they are, despite all care,
And perhaps likely to be bound
Together in a piece somewhere,
A plot of undiscovered ground.

Invisible, they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring-chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.

Yet, be assured, we have no need
To plot these acres of the mind
With prehistoric fern and reed
And monsters such as heroes find.

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,
Their trees behind the phantom fence,
But of a substance without words:
To walk there would be loss of sense.

Robert Graves