Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) by Robert Graves
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
THE CHINK
A sunbeam on the well-waxed oak,
In shape resembling not at all
The ragged chink by which it broke
Into this darkened hall,
Swims round and golden over me,
The sun’s plenipotentiary.
So may my round love a chink find:
With such address to break
Into your grief-occluded mind
As you shall not mistake
But, rising, open to me for truth’s sake.
COUNTING THE BEATS
You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.
Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?
Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
THE JACKALS’ ADDRESS TO ISIS
Grant Anup’s children this:
To howl with you, Queen Isis,
Over the scattered limbs of wronged Osiris.
What harder fate than to be woman?
She makes and she unmakes her man.
In Jackal-land it is no secret
Who tempted red-haired, ass-eared Set
To such bloody extreme; who most
Must therefore mourn and fret
To pacify the unquiet ghost.
And when Horus your son
Avenges this divulsion,
Sceptre in fist, sandals on feet,
We shall return across the sand
From loyal Jackal-land
To gorge five nights and days on ass’s meat.
THE DEATH ROOM
Look forward, truant, to your second childhood.
The crystal sphere discloses
Wall-paper roses mazily repeated
In pink and bronze, their bunches harbouring
Elusive faces, under an inconclusive
Circling, spidery, ceiling craquelure,
And, by the window-frame, the well-loathed, lame,
Damp-patch, cross-patch, sleepless L-for-Lemur
Who, puffed to giant size,
Waits jealously till children close their eyes.
THE YOUNG CORDWAINER
She: Love, why have you led me here
To this lampless hall,
A place of despair and fear
Where blind things crawl?
He: Not I, but your complaint
Heard by the riverside
That primrose scent grew faint
And desire died.
She: Kisses had lost virtue
As yourself must know;
I declared what, alas, was true
And still shall do so.
He: Mount, sweetheart, this main stair
Where bandogs at the foot
Their crooked gilt teeth bare
Between jaws of soot.
She: I loathe them, how they stand
Like prick-eared spies.
Hold me fast by the left hand;
I walk with closed eyes.
He: Primrose has periwinkle
As her mortal fellow:
Five leaves, blue and baleful,
Five of true yellow.
She: Overhead, what’s overhead?
Where would you take me?
My feet stumble for dread,
My wits forsake me.
He: Flight on flight, floor above floor,
In suspense of doom
To a locked secret door
And a white-walled room.
She: Love, have you the pass-word,
Or have you the key,
With a sharp naked sword
And wine to revive me?
He: Enter: here is starlight,
Here the state bed
Where your man lies all night
With blue flowers garlanded.
She: Ah, the cool open window
Of this confessional!
With wine at my elbow,
And sword beneath the pillow,
I shall perfect all.
YOUR PRIVATE WAY
Whether it was your way of walking
Or of laughing moved me,
At sight of you a song wavered
Ghostly on my lips; I could not voice it,
Uncertain what the notes or key.
Be thankful I am no musician,
Sweet Anonymity, to madden you
With your own private walking-laughing way
Imitated on a beggar’s fiddle
Or blared across the square on All Fools’ Day.
MY NAME AND I
The impartial Law enrolled a name
For my especial use:
My rights in it would rest the same
Whether I puffed it into fame
Or sank it in abuse.
Robert was what my parents guessed
When first they peered at me,
And Graves an honourable bequest
With Georgian silver and the rest
From my male ancestry.
They taught me: ‘You are Robert Graves
(Which you must learn to spell),
But see that Robert Graves behaves,
Whether with honest men or knaves,
Exemplarily well.’
Then though my I was always I,
Illegal and unknown,
With nothing to arrest it by –
As will be obvious when I die
And Robert Graves lives on –
I cannot well repudiate
This noun, this natal star,
This gentlemanly self, this mate
So kindly forced on me by fate,
Time and the registrar;
And therefore hurry him ahead
As an ambassador
To fetch me home my beer and bread
Or commandeer the best green bed,
As he has done before.
Yet, understand, I am not he
Either in mind or limb;
My name will take less thought for me,
In worlds of men I cannot see,
Than ever I for him.
CONVERSATION PIECE
By moonlight
At midnight,
Under the vines,
A hotel chair
Settles down moodily before the headlines
Of a still-folded evening newspaper.
The other chair
Of the pair
Lies on its back,
Stiff as in pain,
Having been overturned with an angry crack;
And there till morning, alas, it must remain.
On the terrace
No blood-trace,
No sorry glitter
Of a knife, nothing:
Not even the fine-torn fragments of a letter
Or the dull gleam of a flung-off wedding-ring.
Still stable
On the table
Two long-stemmed glasses,
One full of drink,
Watch how the rat among the vines passes
And how the moon trembles on the crag’s brink.
THE GHOST AND THE CLOCK
About midnight my heart began
To trip again and knock.
Looked fierce at me as in he ran,
But fiercer at the clock.
It was, he swore, a long, long while
Until he’d had the luck
To die and make his domicile
On some ungeographic isle
Where no hour ever struck.
‘But now, you worst of clocks,’ said he,
‘Delayer of all love,
In vengeance I’ve recrossed the sea
To jerk at your machinery
And give your hands a shove.’
So impotently he groped and peered
That his whole body shook!
I could not laugh at him; I feared
This was no ghost but my own weird,
And closer dared not look.
ADVICE ON MAY DAY
Never sing the same song twice
Lest she disbelieve it.
Though reproved as over-nice,
Never sing the same song twice –
Unobjectionable advice,
Would you but receive it:
Never sing the same song twice
Lest she disbelieve it.
Never sing a song clean through,
You might disenchant her;
Venture on a verse or two
(Indisposed to sing it through),
Let that seem as much as you
Care, or dare, to grant her;
Never sing your song clean through,
You might disenchant her.
Make no sermon on your song
Lest she turn and rend you.
Fools alone deliver long
Sermons on a May-day song;
Even a smile may put you wrong,
Half a word may end you:
Make no sermon on your song
Lest she turn and rend you.
FOR THE RAIN IT RAINETH EVERY DAY
Arabs complain – or so I have been told –
Interminably of heat, as Lapps complain
Even of seasonable Christmas cold;
Nor are the English yet inured to rain
Which still, my angry William, as of old
Streaks without pause your birthday window pane.
But you are English too;
How can I comfort you?
Suppose I said: ‘Those gales that eastward ride
(Their wrath portended by a sinking glass)
With good St George of England are allied’?
Suppose I said: ‘They freshen the Spring grass,
Arab or Lapp would envy a fireside
Where such green-fingered elementals pass’?
No, you are English too;
How could that comfort you?
QUESTIONS IN A WOOD
The parson to his pallid spouse,
The hangman to his whore,
Do both not mumble the same vows,
Both knock at the same door?
And when the fury of their knocks
Has waned, and that was that,
What answer comes, unless the pox
Or one more parson’s brat?
Tell me, my love, my flower of flowers,
True woman to this man,
What have their deeds to do with ours
Or any we might plan?
Your startled gaze, your restless hand,
Your hair like Thames in flood,
And choked voice, battling to command
The insurgence of your blood:
How can they spell the dark word said
Ten thousand times a night
By women as corrupt and dead
As you are proud and bright?
And how can I, in the same breath,
Though warned against the cheat,
Vilely deliver love to death
Wrapped in a rumpled sheet?
Yet, if from delicacy of pride
We choose to hold apart,
Will no blue hag appear, to ride
Hell’s wager in each heart?
THE PORTRAIT
She speaks always in her own voice
Even to strangers; but those other women
Exercise their borrowed, or false, voices
Even on sons and daughters.
She can walk invisibly at noon
Along the high road; but those other women
Gleam phosphorescent – broad hips and gross fingers –
Down every lampless alley.
She is wild and innocent, pledged to love
Through all disaster; but those other women
Decry her for a witch or a common drab
And glare back when she greets them.
Here is her portrait, gazing sidelong at me,
The hair in disarray, the young eyes pleading:
‘And you, love? As unlike those other men
As I those other women?’
DARIEN
It is a poet’s privilege and fate
To fall enamoured of the one Muse
Who variously haunts this island earth.
She was your mother, Darien,
And presaged by the darting halcyon bird
Would run green-sleeved along her ridges,
Treading the asphodels and heather-trees
With white feet bare.
Often at moonrise I had watched her go,
And a cold shudder shook me
To see the curved blaze of her Cretan axe.
Averted her set face, her business
Not yet with me, long-striding,
She would ascend the peak and pass from sight.
But once at full moon, by the sea’s verge,
I came upon her without warning.
Unrayed she stood, with long hair streaming,
A cockle-shell cupped in her warm hands,
Her axe propped idly on a stone.
No awe possessed me, only a great grief;
Wanly she smiled, but would not lift her eyes
(As a young girl will greet the stranger).
I stood upright, a head taller than she.
‘See who has come,’ said I.
She answered: ‘If I lift my eyes to yours
And our eyes marry, man, what then?
Will they engender my son Darien?
Swifter than wind, with straight and nut-brown hair,
Tall, slender-shanked, grey-eyed, untameable;
Never was born, nor ever will be born
A child to equal my son Darien,
Guardian of the hid treasures of your world.’
I knew then by the trembling of her hands
For whom that flawless blade would sweep:
My own oracular head, swung by its hair.
‘Mistress,’ I cried, ‘the times are evil
And you have charged me with their remedy.
O, where my head is now, let nothing be
But a clay counterfeit with nacre blink:
Only look up, so Darien may be born!
‘He is the northern star, the spell of knowledge,
Pride of all hunters and all fishermen,
Your deathless fawn, an eaglet of your eyrie,
The topmost branch of your unfellable tree,
A tear streaking the summer night,
The new green of my hope.’
Lifting her eyes,
She held mine for a lost eternity.
‘Sweetheart,’ said I, ‘strike now, for Darien’s sake!’
THE SURVIVOR
To die with a forlorn hope, but soon to be raised
By hags, the spoilers of the field, to elude their claws
And stand once more on a well-swept parade-ground,
Scarred and bemedalled, sword upright in fist
At head of a new undaunted company:
Is this joy? – to be doubtless alive again,
And the others dead? Will your nostrils gladly savour
The fragrance, always new, of a first hedge-rose?
Will your ears be charmed by the thrush’s melody
Sung as though he had himself devised it?
And is this joy: after the double suicide
(Heart against heart) to be restored entire,
To smooth your hair and wash away the life-blood,
And presently seek a young and innocent bride,
Whispering in the dark: ‘for ever and ever’?
PROMETHEUS
Close bound in a familiar bed
All night I tossed, rolling my head;
Now dawn returns in vain, for still
The vulture squats on her warm hill.
I am in love as giants are
That dote upon the evening star,
And this lank bird is come to prove
The intractability of love.
Yet still, with greedy eye half shut,
Rend the raw liver from its gut:
Feed, jealousy, do not fly away –
If she who fetched you also stay.
SATIRES
QUEEN-MOTHER TO NEW QUEEN
Although only a fool would mock
The secondary joys of wedlock
(Which need no recapitulation),
The primary’s the purer gold,
Even in our exalted station,
For all but saint or hoary cuckold.
Therefore, if ever the King’s eyes
Turn at odd hours to your sleek thighs,
Make no delay or circumvention
But do as you should do, though strict
To guide back his bemused attention
Towards privy purse or royal edict,
And stricter yet to leave no stain
On the proud memory of his reign –
You’ll act the wronged wife, if you love us.
Let them not whisper, even in sport:
‘His Majesty’s turned parsimonious
And keeps no whore now but his Consort.’
SECESSION OF THE DRONES
These drones, seceding from the hive,
In self-felicitation
That henceforth they will throng and thrive
Far from the honeyed nation,
Domesticate an old cess-pit,
Their hairy bellies warming
With buzz of psychologic wit
And homosexual swarming.
Engrossed in pure coprophily,
Which makes them mighty clever,
They fabricate a huge King Bee
To rule all hives for ever.
DAMOCLES
Death never troubled Damocles,
Nor did the incertitude
When the sword, swung by a light breeze,
Cast shadows on his food –