One has to be careful these days with humour at the expense of ethnic minorities, but I hope that this week’s offering by Robert Graves can be seen for what it is, as a piece of affectionate teasing based on the idea that the Welsh have a certain tendency to prolixity and rhetorical vagueness. I have to say that this is not at all my own experience: it seems to me that Welsh poets and prose writers are perfectly capable of economical, coherent and lucid storytelling. I suppose that the classic Welsh story ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’, that forms part of the collection of tales known as the Mabinogion, could be seen as a bit long-winded with its roll-call of warriors assigned by Arthur to assist Culhwch in his quest for the hand of the giant’s daughter, but for some it would be a pity to lose a single one of those glimpses into a whole lost legendarium.

Anyway, to Graves’ irreverent, unjust but rather entertaining take on the matter…

Welsh Incident

‘But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’
‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’
‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’
‘What were they, then?’
                                      All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.’
‘Describe just one of them.’
                                          ‘I am unable.’
‘What were their colours?’
                                           Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.’
                                ‘Tell me, had they legs?’
‘Not a leg or foot among them that I saw.’
‘But did these things come out in any order?’
What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?’
‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thirty-seven shimmering instruments
Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder
Did something recognizably a something.’
‘Well, what?’
                   ‘It made a noise.’
                                              ‘A frightening noise?’
‘No, no.’
              ‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’
‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise —
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second psalm.’
‘What did the mayor do?’
                                        ‘I was coming to that.’

Robert Graves

This touching but slightly enigmatic lyric is one of Robert Graves’s final poems, written not long before the dementia twilight of his last years, and haunted by the consciousness that his powers and memories were slipping away from him, like a handful of dry sand trickling grain by grain between the fingers, however tight the grasp that tries to retain them.

It presents, at least for me, some challenges of interpretation. The first stanza is perfectly clear, but then things become more difficult. ‘Grappling a monster never seen before’ – this sounds to me like a scene from Greek myth, on which Graves was an authority, but I can’t quite place it. Echoes maybe of Nike, sometimes seen as an aspect of Athene, helping Zeus in his battle with the Titans? Or even of the Indian demon-slaying goddess Durga? Anyway, I take it to be an image of his Muse, representing beauty, order and clarity, struggling against the chaos threatening to overwhelm his mind, while Graves himself, rather pathetically, not only feels guilt at the situation but feels that she is holding him accountable.

And then I find the last line problematic. ‘Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire’. What’s this about? If you want to start a fire, green leaves do not seem a very good choice of material, but setting that aside, is this Graves’s way of saying that he has always been true to his poetic faith, where the ‘green leaves’ represent poetry – of protesting that he has never ignored the Muse’s calls upon him nor betrayed her by using his gift in the service of anything else, the ‘alien fire’ representing as it were an offering to some other divinity? (Incidentally, as far as the green leaves go, I am minded here of a beautiful image in R.S.Thomas’s poem ‘Prayer’: ‘the tree of poetry/that is eternity wearing/the green leaves of time’).

Anyway, an intriguing and moving poem, and if anyone has any better ideas about its imagery I should be glad to hear them.

At The Gate

Where are poems? Why do I now write none?
This can mean no lack of pens, nor lack of love,
But need perhaps of an increased magic –
Where have my ancient powers suddenly gone?

Tonight I caught a glimpse of her at the gate
Grappling a monster never seen before,
And jerking back its head. Had I come too late?
Her eyes blazed fire and I could look no more.

What could she hold against me? Never yet
Had I lied to her or thwarted her desire,
Rejecting prayers that I could never forget,
Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire.

Robert Graves

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

An intriguing if slightly macabre insight into Robert Graves’s way of working, though perhaps more in his role as a historical novelist than as a poet. One anecdote relates how he would become so absorbed in recreating a particular character that he would lay a place for him at dinner. I can’t say that my own forgetfulness has ever gone that far, but I will say that sometimes when translating a poem from another language I will begin by just writing out the literal meaning and then it is as if the words start to rearrange themselves, with an unseen hand suggesting a rhyme here, a rhythm there, and I am no more than a passive observer watching patterns in a verbal kaleidoscope swirl and settle. As a firm rationalist I don’t believe that this is anything more than some kind of mental muscle memory at work, but I can see how those so inclined might feel that there is something spooky going on.

To bring the dead to life

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
 
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.
 
Limp as he limped,
Swear by the oaths he swore;
If he wore black, affect the same;
If he had gouty fingers,
Be yours gouty too.
 
Assemble tokens intimate of him —
A ring, a hood, a desk:
Around these elements then build
A home familiar to
The greedy revenant.
 
So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.

Robert Graves

I see that in this blog so far I have rarely if ever featured the poetry of wit and humour, despite the fact that I relish a well-turned parody or satire as much as anyone, so here to make some amends is a report on the Battle of Marathon as seen from the Persian point of view. Robert Graves, though primarily a love poet, could also be very funny – as witness, for example, the poem ‘Welsh Incident’ – and here he takes aim at political/military spin, though in my experience the satire could equally apply to the desperate quest for morale-boosting positivity engaged in by corporate bodies generally.

The Persian Version

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer’s expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.

Robert Graves

I think this is the kind of poem that shows Robert Graves at his best as a lucid yet profound explorer of the human psyche. This one is always associated in my mind with the time my small son, then not quite two, was toddling down the garden path when he suddenly started crying inconsolably, shaking and pointing at something in the border. I hurried to him thinking he must have been stung by a bee, but then saw a small yellow frog hopping away into the undergrowth. ‘It’s just a little frog, it won’t hurt you’, I reassured him. He relaxed visibly. ‘Fwog’, he said, and I thought this is it, the cool web at work, another piece of the world’s strangeness and otherness named, tamed, pigeonholed, filed away. And paradoxically, it is part of the role of poetry to undo that naming and taming, to make us see again that disconcerting otherness and strangeness. Not that I want us to be terrified of frogs, you understand…

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

Robert Graves

I thought this poem, one of my favourite Graves love lyrics, would make a suitable piece for the winter solstice.

Mid-Winter Waking

Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And presently dared open both my eyes.

O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,
Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;
And you, sudden warm airs that blow
Before the expected season of new blossom,
While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go –

Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,
I found her hand in mine laid closely
Who shall watch out the Spring with me.
We stared in silence all around us
But found no winter anywhere to see.

Robert Graves

One of those neat idiosyncratic lyrics, slipping so effortlessly into the memory, that Robert Graves excelled at.

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has – who knows so well as I? –
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves

This is an early Robert Graves poem, maybe the first in which he found his true voice, and it remains a favourite of mine, perhaps the more so because I believe the inspiration for it to be the Rhinog country near Harlech in North Wales where I had a fine day’s walking with my eldest son some thirty years ago, taking in the Roman Steps, Rhinog Fawr and Rhinog Fach. It’s pretty rough terrain – boulders, bog and bracken, and that’s just the footpaths – but I was very fit then from running half-marathons, and my son equally fit from fifty-mile hikes with the Venture Scouts, and we covered a lot of ground. Reading the poem brings it all back: the white stars of saxifrage between the slabs of the Steps, the sunlit quietness of the morning, the view north from Rhinog Fawr to the mountains of Snowdonia, only the peaks in mist, the fierce rhythmic climbs to the summits, sweat dripping on every stone, then the glissades down the boulders, like a kind of physical chess, moving from slab to slab, with a cool shower of rain passing over to leave a sweetness in the still air. Ah, those were the days.

Note: Graves was a great reviser of his poems after publication, something that I find a bit annoying especially as I don’t think the changes were always for the better, and slightly different wordings exist, especially in the first verse; not being sure of the chronology, I have stuck with the version I know.

Rocky Acres

This is a wild land, country of my choice,
With harsh craggy mountain, moor ample and bare.
Seldom in these acres is heard any voice
But voice of cold water that runs here and there
Through rocks and lank heather growing without care.
No mice in the heath run nor no birds cry
For fear of the dark speck that floats in the sky.

He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings,
He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye,
He catches the trembling of small hidden things,
He tears them in pieces dropping from the sky:
Tenderness and pity the land will deny
Where life is but nourished from water and rock,
A hardy adventure, full of fear and shock.

Time has never journeyed to this lost land,
Crakeberries and heather bloom out of date,
The rocks jut, the streams flow singing on either hand,
Careless if the season be early or late.
The skies wander overhead, now blue, now slate:
Winter would be known by his cold, cutting snow
If June did not borrow his armour also.

Yet this is my country beloved by me best,
The first land that rose from Chaos and the Flood,
Nursing no fat valleys for comfort and rest,
Trampled by no hard hooves, stained with no blood.
Bold immortal country whose hill-tops have stood
Strongholds for the proud gods when on earth they go,
Terror for fat burghers in far plains below.

Robert Graves

I know of very few poems on the subject of physical pain. Perhaps this is because there is nothing much useful to be said about it; perhaps we just don’t have the vocabulary. After all, don’t you just hate the modern fad whereby health services ask you to ‘rate your pain’? So you go to consult about something irksome but fairly minor on the scale of human affliction, say acute sciatica, and you get: ‘And how do you rate that on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst pain you can imagine?’ What do you say? A truthful ‘Well, compared with being burned alive or torn to pieces on the rack or dying of strangury, about 0.01’ seems likely to elicit a response of ‘So, why are you wasting my time?’, whereas a confident ‘Oh, at least six’ surely marks you out as a big wuss with a very limited imagination.

So all credit to Robert Graves in this poem for managing to convey something about the nature of the beast in his usual distinctive way.

Surgical Ward: Men

Something occurred after the operation
To scare the surgeons (though no fault of theirs),
Whose reassurance did not fool me long.
Beyond the shy, concerned faces of nurses
A single white-hot eye, focusing on me,
Forced sweat in rivers down from scalp to belly.
I whistled, gasped or sang, with blanching knuckles
Clutched at my bed-grip almost till it cracked:
Too proud, still, to let loose Bedlamite screeches
And bring the charge-nurse scuttling down the aisle
With morphia-needle levelled….

Lady Morphia –
Her scorpion kiss and dark gyrating dreams –
She in mistrust of whom I dared out-dare,
Two minutes longer than seemed possible,
Pain, that unpurposed, matchless elemental
Stronger than fear or grief, stranger than love.

Robert Graves