There are perhaps too many poems written by poets about the process of writing poems, but I think this is one of the better ones. I like the image of the slowly filling pool, though I tend myself to think more in terms of electricity, a static of observation and emotion slowly building till it finds its discharge. 

A Time of Waiting

The moment comes when my sound senses
Warn me to keep the pot at a quiet simmer,
Conclude no rash decisions, enter into
No random friendships, check the runaway tongue
And fix my mind in a close caul of doubt –
Which is more difficult, maybe, than to face
Night-long assaults of lurking furies.

The pool lies almost empty; I watch it nursed
By a thin stream. Such idle intervals
Are from waning moon to the new – a moon always
Holds the cords of my heart. Then patience, hands;
Dabble your nerveless fingers in the shallows;
A time shall come when she has need of them.

Robert Graves

My birthday this week, and to adapt Housman slightly, now of my threescore years and ten, seventy will not come again. I’ve done the math and it doesn’t look good, nor am I entirely convinced by reassurances that seventy is the new twenty. So I thought I’d mark the occasion with one of my favourite poems by Robert Graves, which begins to take on a very personal note.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the legend, Oisin was the son of the Irish hero Finn mac Cumhaill, leader of the Fianna. He was lured away to Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young, by the beautiful Niamh, daughter of its king, but eventually wanted to see his own land and people again: he was given leave to do this, but warned he must on no account get down from his horse. But time passes differently in that country, and he returned to find a diminished Ireland and all the Fianna long dead.

The Broken Girth

Bravely from Fairyland he rode, on furlough,
Astride a tall bay given him by the Queen
From whose couch he had leaped not a half-hour since,
Whose lilies-of-the-valley shone from his helm.

But alas, as he paused to assist five Ulstermen
Sweating to raise a recumbent Ogham pillar,
Breach of a saddle-girth tumbled Oisin
To common Irish earth. And at once, it is said,
Old age came on him with grief and frailty.

St Patrick asked: would he not confess the Christ? –
Which for that Lady’s sake he loathed to do,
But northward loyally turned his eyes in death.
It was Fenians bore the unshriven corpse away
For burial, keening.

Curse me all squint-eyed monks
Who misconstrue the passing of Finn’s son:
Old age, not Fairyland, was his delusion.

Robert Graves

Through Nightmare

Never be disenchanted of
That place you sometimes dream yourself into,
Lying at large remove beyond all dream,
Or those you find there, though but seldom
In their company seated –

The untameable, the live, the gentle.
Have you not known them? Whom? They carry
Time looped so river-wise about their house
There’s no way in by history’s road
To name or number them.

In your sleepy eyes I read the journey
Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs
My loving admiration, that you should travel
Through nightmare to a lost and moated land
Who are timorous by nature.

Robert Graves

Back in nineteen sixty-nine I met Robert Graves in London, and we were leafing through his newly published ‘Poems About Love’ together. I remember lighting on ‘Through Nightmare’, long a favourite of mine for the haunting otherworldly quality of that second stanza, and saying, with the cheerful patronage of the young, ‘This is very good, you know’. He smiled a pleased but slightly ironic smile; coming to think of it, he probably did know…