This is a rather unusual poem for Robert Graves: no classical references, no protestations of undying love, no satirical wit, just a sober enough account of what it is like to lie in hospital separated from all that you know and that has given your life meaning, and to wonder what became of it. For me it brings to mind words of my mother towards the end of her long widowhood, reflecting on happier times when she and my father would entertain and the house would be full of life and laughter. ‘Where does it all go?’, she would say, and of course I had no answer.

A Shift of Scene

To lie far off, in bed with a foul cough,
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky; here to watch, all the day long,
For a dove, or a black cat, or a puff of smoke
To cause a shift of scene – how could it do so? –
Or to take a pen and write – what else is there
To write but: ‘I am not dead, not quite, as yet
Though I lie far off, in bed with a foul cough
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky’? Tell me, love, are you sick too
And plagued like me with a great hole in the mind
Where all those towers we built, and not on sand,
Have been sucked in and lost; so that it seems
No dove, and no black cat, nor puff of smoke
Can cause a shift of scene and fetch us back
To where we lie as one, in the same bed?

Robert Graves