Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) by Robert Graves

  He suffered from delusions towards the finish,

  Undertook business far beyond his means

  And drove the office-staff nearly distracted.

  He left us terrible liabilities

  (I make no secret). Now he’s dead, however,

  We have regained the confidence of the Banks.

  Business increases nicely, every day

  We get new clients…still if you mistrust…

  THE OTHER. No, talk by all means.

  LAWYER. Well, sir, I hear rumours,

  Deterioration of the property,

  Domestic differences, complaints and so on.

  Let us assume your title, for the moment,

  And now suggest a method of improving

  The rentable value of this fine estate.

  If you approve this, we would ask the favour

  Of taking legal steps on your behalf.

  (Then he continues with the passage).

  ‘Then landlord when your tenants make complaint

  As I have ample evidence that they will.’

  The Other answers him as before

  ‘I must confess myself vastly surprised’, et cetera,

  But goes on:

  Then too, though you assume my landlord’s claim

  I’m not a landlord in the legal sense,

  Nor do I wish to press a legal claim.

  My ancestors last held that property

  By arch-druidic right in Celtic times.

  So I possess no title deeds to show

  Beyond a hopeful old prophetic verse

  Engraved on a bronze bowl in Ogham writing,

  That says, this property was one time ours

  And will eventually be ours again –

  Two thousand years is mentioned, from what date

  Does not appear exactly – ‘Then’, it runs,

  ‘The existent legal titles will fall through

  Confirmed by whatsoever authority.’

  LAWYER. My dear sir, if this bowl is genuine,

  And if your genealogy runs down true…

  THE OTHER. No! understand that I prefer to wait.

  Then Mr. League, when these two thousand years

  Expire, and the whole property reverts

  Either to me or to my heirs-at-blood,

  Then, on the day that we resume the house,

  In a most real sense we become the house,

  A house that’s continuity of the tenants

  Through whom by slow accretion it evolved,

  Taking the individual stamp of each,

  Often at odds, room against room divided,

  Waiting the landlord-absentee’s return,

  Long while despaired of such reintegration.

  We being the house then, a house whole and free,

  Become the continuity of these ghosts,

  And there can be no question of annoyance

  Or hauntings in the former vicious mode.

  No one will claim possession; if ghosts come

  They’ll come as guests laughing at ancient frays

  And what new conflicts rise in future years

  Between my heirs, or my heirs’ assignees

  Those we can leave trustfully to their fate:

  That man’s a monument of discontent

  Who grieves beyond the next millennium’s promise.

  LAWYER. There’s nothing to be done, you say, but wait?

  Deterministic sloth! what place is left

  For self-control and social betterment

  If you leave conflicts to be solved by fate?

  Settle the house, now: show them who is landlord.

  (We’ll arm you with imposing parchment deeds

  To prove their lease is held from you direct)

  Where diplomatic tact has failed, use force,

  Threaten eviction, hint a legal loophole

  By which their lease can be foreclosed at will.

  THE OTHER. Such restlessness can spare no time for thought.

  It’s do, do, do! Hack through, or muddle through!

  But my mind runs ahead to consequences.

  How can I oust the present landlordry

  (There are three rival claims to this estate)

  Without ill-will all round? as for the tenants

  How can I hope to impose my dominant will

  Without the unavoidable repercussion

  Of subjugation to another’s will?

  And what’s the end of muddling through, but muddle?

  As for your self-control, when have you tried it?

  When have you ever yet refused a brief

  Even though you knew your client had no case?

  When have you ever abstained from good advice

  Even though you knew it could not be accepted?

  Does litigation make for social peace?

  Go your own way, sir, with your files and ledgers,

  Support the likeliest of these rival claimants.

  I’ll stand aside.

  LAWYER. You’ll not impede our action?

  THE OTHER. I’ll give you that assurance.

  LAWYER. Come! In writing?

  THE OTHER, (writes it out). Now leave me to my hopeful feats of sloth,

  The absentee’s profession that you loathe.

  Philosopher. I am not sure whether you have seen one point that for me comes out clearly. That while there are several claimants to the position of landlord, the domestic troubles between the tenants and the ghosts can hope for no solution. In fact, while the friction continues between political groups the moral conflicts within the individual cannot disappear. We noticed in the European War how the breakdown of the Ten Commandments in their regulation of the political conduct of nations involved the weakening of these commandments in the individual or small group. I believe that all these problems of conflict can only find a settlement together, and that League of Nations ideals which are as old as human society, and not a new discovery of 1919, must in practice always be defeated so long as the idea embodied in the word Nation remains. I think we are seeing things more clearly now: but your poem is not ended yet.

  Poet. That may be, but let us record it so far and put a book-mark in until next week or next month, or next year, or ten years hence. Neither are you ended or I ended: but as in each phase of our life we are self-sufficient and complete, so these different stages of the poem.

  Philosopher. In your next version what perhaps ought to be made clear is that we are raising no objection to imperialists as being villainous, or more villainous than the people they oppress. As you have shown, in its beginnings imperialism has its positive value: though not a permanent solution of political difficulties between those groups whom the imperial power discovers at odds, intervention is a relief, and an inevitable step towards final harmony. Further, we are holding that wherever unpleasant traits appear in imperialism we cannot judge the subject races to be innocent; where a Gandhi and a Dyer come in conflict it would be ridiculous to claim that either is an angel while his opposite is a demon. Our point is that either they are both angels or both devils. Beggary is as offensive to mockers as mockery to beggars.

  Poet. To make an analogy from painting; if we decide ‘in this painting yellow is going to stand for white,’ then nobody need object to the relation between two objects appearing in the painting, one of which has hitherto appeared bright blue and is now shown as bright green, and another which has hitherto appeared dark blue and is now shown as dark green; the relation between the two objects remains virtually the same. But to paint the first object bright green and the second dark blue, that causes popular confusion unless many people are involved in the same sort of conflict that has altered the painter’s conventional colour-values.

  Philosopher. Yes, what we are trying to point out is this, I believe, that hitherto attempted solutions of political and individual conflicts have always taken the form of judging one party or one mode of behaviour to be better or worse than the opposing party according as it
conforms to a code of ethics, pretending to be absolute, adopted by the dominant political group or culture. The ‘better’ interest has been rewarded, the ‘worse’ punished. That is a matter of history, and it is also a matter of history that, so to speak, the swing of the quintain has always knocked the tilter off his horse. You and I are not condemning the lawyer for believing that laws can be absolute; if we could understand the history of human relationships before any moral codes were formulated, we would sympathize with him wholeheartedly. All that we are suggesting is that the time must come, now that the absolutist claim has been recognized and questioned and an alternative proposed, when there will be no further use for the lawyer or imperialist of tradition, when human relationships can be conducted according to a different system: that is, mutual abstention from conflict when conflict is recognized as obtaining, and a positive faith that the very fact of abstention and endurance will introduce a new element to solve existing differences.

  Poet. I agree; but I hope that I have already made it clear that between the lawyer and the Other (that is, I suppose, the traditional view and the view that we are holding) there is no conflict. The lawyer has his important part to play in history; but so have we.

  THE RAINBOW AND THE SCEPTIC

  ‘Decrees of God? Of One Prime Cause?

  Predestinate for men,

  Whose only knowledge of such laws

  Is change and change again?

  ‘Made free or fated, what care I

  In truth’s grand overthrow?

  Since knowledge is but folly’s spy

  It is not sane to know.

  For Fate’s a word of trivial sense

  And Freedom is knocked blind,

  If there is nowhere permanence,

  If God can change His mind.’

  Disconsolate and strange enough

  He walked the forest side,

  The sun blazed out, the shower drew off,

  The rainbow straddled wide.

  It stained with red the chalky road,

  It leapt from sea to hill;

  A second arch more faintly showed,

  A third arch faintlier still.

  The black blaspheming furious mood

  Passed from him gradually:

  Wry-mouthed in cynic pause he stood

  And smiled: ‘The Golden Key.

  ‘The elf-key at the rainbow’s rise:

  Watch it and walk with care!

  It vanishes beneath your eyes,

  It passes on elsewhere.

  ‘So laws like rainbows move and mock,

  So wisdom never brings

  The airy treasure to unlock

  The essential heart of things.’…

  A spirit of air in answer spoke

  With strange and solemn sense:

  Music and light about him broke

  In seven-toned effluence.

  ‘Man, Man, accept this new degree

  Of beauty as you go;

  Observe the march of what must be,

  The bend of each new bow.

  ‘Then since laws move in rainbow-light

  Let faith be therefore strong,

  That change can never prove you right,

  Nor either prove you wrong.

  ‘shall Time-the-present judge Time-past

  Once blotted from its view?

  Each key must vary from the last,

  Because each lock springs new.

  ‘Knowledge of changing lock and key,

  So much the FINITE is;

  Let the bow beckon “Follow me,

  Whose hopes are certainties”;

  ‘Yet beyond all this, rest content

  In dumbness to revere

  INFINITE God without event,

  Causeless, not there, not here,

  ‘Neither eternal nor time-bound,

  Not certain, nor in change,

  Uncancelled by the cosmic round,

  Nor crushed within its range.’

  Welchman’s Hose

  (1925)

  ALICE

  When that prime heroine of our nation, Alice,

  Climbing courageously in through the Palace

  Of Looking Glass, found it inhabited

  By chessboard personages, white and red,

  Involved in never-ending tournament,

  She being of a speculative bent

  Had long foreshadowed something of the kind,

  Asking herself: ‘Suppose I stood behind

  And viewed the fireplace of Their drawing-room

  From hearthrug level, why must I assume

  That what I’d see would need to correspond

  With what I now see? And the rooms beyond?’

  Proved right, yet not content with what she had done,

  Alice decided to prolong her fun:

  She set herself, with truly British pride

  In being a pawn and playing for her side,

  And simple faith in simple stratagem,

  To learn the rules and moves and perfect them.

  So prosperously there she settled down

  That six moves only and she’d won her crown –

  A triumph surely! But her greater feat

  Was rounding these adventures off complete:

  Accepting them, when safe returned again,

  As queer but true – not only in the main

  True, but as true as anything you’d swear to,

  The usual three dimensions you are heir to.

  For Alice though a child could understand

  That neither did this chance-discovered land

  Make nohow or contrariwise the clean

  Dull round of mid-Victorian routine,

  Nor did Victoria’s golden rule extend

  Beyond the glass: it came to the dead end

  Where empty hearses turn about; thereafter

  Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,

  The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass

  Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,

  Where young Gargantua made whole holiday….

  But farther from our heroine not to stray,

  Let us observe with what uncommon sense –

  Though a secure and easy reference

  Between Red Queen and Kitten could be found –

  She made no false assumption on that ground

  (A trap in which the scientist would fall)

  That queens and kittens are identical.

  BURRS AND BRAMBLES

  Discourse, bruised heart, on trivial things

  With laughter vague and hollow,

  Conceal the sudden tear that stings,

  The lump that’s hard to swallow;

  These are mere manners, these no part

  Of the self-deceiver’s art,

  And rankly here grow nettles

  With burrs and brambles prickly,

  Here slide snakes across the brakes

  Whose tongues do murder quickly.

  Make light of that embrace you lost

  And the long anguish sequent,

  Prove it was bought at slender cost,

  A light romance, be frequent

  With every subterfuge and lie

  That masks the soul of misery,

  For rankly here grow nettles

  With burrs and brambles prickly,

  Here slide snakes across the brakes

  Whose tongues do murder quickly.

  Choose any way of countless ways

  To ease the jealous gnawing,

  Fire, if you must, that angry blaze

  From which there’s no withdrawing:

  Let all Hell’s demons guide your hate:

  Or, if you must, be mean and wait,

  For rankly here grow nettles

  With burrs and brambles prickly,

  Here slide snakes across the brakes

  Whose tongues do murder quickly.

  Do what you must, yet nevermore

  Think, when this torment ceases

  That warned befo
re is armed before

  Against false-love’s caprices,

  Never by any force withstood,

  So unforeseen and sly and rude,

  For rankly here grow nettles

  With burrs and brambles prickly,

  Here slide snakes across the brakes

  Whose tongues do murder quickly.

  FROM OUR GHOSTLY ENEMY

  The fire was already white ash

  When the lamp went out,

  And the clock at that signal stopped:

  The man in the chair held his breath

  As if Death were about.

  The moon shone bright as a lily

  On his books outspread.

  He could read in that lily light:

  ‘When you have endured your fill,

  Kill!’ the book read.

  The print being small for his eyes,

  To ease their strain

  A hasty candle he lit,

  Keeping the page with his thumb.

  ‘Come, those words again!’

  But the book he held in his hand

  And the page he held

  Spelt prayers for the sick and needy,

  ‘By God, they are wanted here,’

  With fear his heart swelled.

  ‘I know of an attic ghost,

  Of a cellar ghost,

  And of one that stalks in the meadows,

  But here’s the spirit I dread,’

  He said, ‘the most;

  ‘Who, without voice or body,

  Distresses me much,

  Twists the ill to holy, holy to ill,

  Confuses me, out of reach

  Of speech or touch;

  ‘Who works by moon or by noon,

  Threatening my life.

  I am sick and needy indeed.’

  He went then filled with despairs

  Upstairs to his wife.

  He told her these things, adding

  ‘This morning alone,

  Writing, I felt for a match-box;

  It rose up into my hand,

  Understand, on its own.

  ‘In the garden yesterday

  As I walked by the beds,

  With the tail of my eye I caught

  “Death within twelve hours”

  Written in flowers’ heads.’

  She answered him, simple advice

  But new, he thought, and true.

  ‘Husband, of this be sure,

  That whom you fear the most,

  This ghost, fears you.

  ‘Speak to the ghost and tell him,

  “Whoever you be,

  Ghost, my anguish equals yours,

  Let our cruelties therefore end.

  Your friend let me be.”’