Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) by Robert Graves
To know our destiny is to know the horror
Of separation, dawn oppressed by night:
Is, between hyssop and axe, boldly to prove
That gifted, each, with singular need for freedom
And haunted, both, by spectres of reproach,
We may yet house together without succumbing
To the low fever of domesticity
Or to the lunatic spin of aimless flight.
GOLD AND MALACHITE
After the hour of illumination, when the tottering mind
Has been by force delivered from its incubus of despair,
When all the painted, papier mâché, Mexican faces
Of demons grinning at you from hell’s vaulted roof
Fade and become angelic monitors of wisdom –
Slowly the brisk intelligence wakes, to mutter questions
Of when, where, how; and which should be the first step forward….
Now is the crucial moment you were forewarned against.
Stop your ears with your fingers, guard unequivocal silence
Lest you discuss wisdom in the language of unwisdom;
Roam instead through the heaped treasury of your heart:
You will find her, from whom you have been so long estranged,
Chin to knees, brooding apart on gold and malachite.
But beware again: even a shy embrace would be too explicit –
Let her learn by your gait alone that you are free at last.
AMBIENCE
The nymph of the forest, only in whose honour
These birds perform, provides an ambience
But never leads the chorus: even at dawn
When we awake to whistle, flute and pipe,
Astonished they can so extemporize
Their own parts, as it were haphazard
Each in his own time, yet avoid discordance
Or domineering, however virtuose
Or long sustained each voluntary of love.
The rare silences, too, appear like sound
Rather than pause for breath or meditation….
Nor is the same piece ever given twice.
THE VOW
No vow once sworn may ever be annulled
Except by a higher law of love or mercy –
Search your heart well: is there a lie hidden
Deep in its convolutions of resolve?
For whom do you live? Can it be yourself?
For whom then? Not for this unlovely world,
Not for the rotting waters of mischance,
Nor for the tall, eventual catafalque.
You live for her who alone loves you,
Whose royal prerogative can be denied
By none observant of the awakening gasps
That greet her progress down whatever hall.
Your vow is to truth, not practicality;
To honour, not to the dead world’s esteem;
To a bed of rock, not to a swan’s-down pillow;
To the tears you kiss away from her black eyes.
They lament an uninstructible world of men
Who dare not listen or watch, but challenge proof
That a leap of a thousand miles is nothing
And to walk invisibly needs no artifice.
THE FROG AND THE GOLDEN BALL
She let her golden ball fall down the well
And begged a cold frog to retrieve it;
For which she kissed his ugly, gaping mouth –
Indeed, he could scarce believe it.
And seeing him transformed to his princely shape,
Who had been by hags enchanted,
She knew she could never love another man
Nor by any fate be daunted.
But what would her royal father and mother say?
They had promised her in marriage
To a cousin whose wide kingdom marched with theirs,
Who rode in a jewelled carriage.
‘Our plight, dear heart, would appear past human hope
To all except you and me: to all
Who have never swum as a frog in a dark well
Or have lost a golden ball.’
‘What then shall we do now?’ she asked her lover.
He kissed her again, and said:
‘Is magic of love less powerful at your Court
Than at this green well-head?’
THOSE WHO CAME SHORT
Those who came short of love for me or you,
Where are they now? Ill-starred and bitter-mouthed,
Cursing us for their own contrariness,
Each having fallen in turn, head over heels,
From that illusive heaven at which they flew.
Are we then poison of love-perfection
To all but our own kind? Should we beware
Of handling such intemperate shaggy creatures
As leap on us like dogs to be cosseted
And, after, claim full rights of jealousy?
At once too simple and too various
Except for ourselves, should we awhile conceal
Our studies from the world, in cool forbearance
Watching each night for another dawn to break
And the last guest to straggle home?
WHOLE LOVE
Every choice is always the wrong choice,
Every vote cast is always cast away –
How can truth hover between alternatives?
Then love me more than dearly, love me wholly,
Love me with no weighing of circumstance,
As I am pledged in honour to love you:
With no weakness, with no speculation
On what might happen should you and I prove less
Than bringers-to-be of our own certainty.
Neither was born by hazard: each foreknew
The extreme possession we are grown into.
THIS HOLY MONTH
The demon who throughout our late estrangement
Followed with malice in my footsteps, often
Making as if to stumble, so that I stumbled
And gashed my head against a live rock;
Who tore my palms on butcher’s broom and thorn,
Flung me at midnight into filthy ditches
And multiplied the horrors of this house
When back I limped again to a hard bed;
Who simultaneously plagued you too
With sleeplessness, dismay and darkness,
Paralysed your hands, denied you air –
We both know well he was the same demon,
Arch-enemy of rule and calculation,
Who lives for our love, being created from it,
Astonishes us with blossom, silvers the hills
With more than moonlight, summons bees in swarms
From the Lion’s mouth to fill our hives with honey,
Turns flesh into fire, and eyes into deep lakes;
And so may do once more, this holy month.
THE BLOW
You struck me on the face and I, who strike
Only to kill, stood in confusion like
Death’s fool: your ugly blow
Had fallen soft as snow.
Love me for what I am, with liberty
To curb my rage; I love you for what will be –
Your urgent sun – therefore
Acquitting you of error.
Laughter becomes us: gift of the third eye
That passes nothing by.
THE IMPOSSIBLE
Dear love, since the impossible proves
Our sole recourse from this distress,
Claim it: the ebony ritual-mask of no
Cannot outstare a living yes.
Claim it without despond or hate
Or greed; but in your gentler tone
Say: ‘This is ours, the impossible,’ and silence
Will give consent it is ours alone.
The impossible has wild-cat claws
Which you would rather meet and die
Than
And break our oath; for so would I.
THE FETTER
Concerned, against our wish, with a sick world,
Self-neglectful, tuned to knock or summons,
We make amends for follies not our own.
We have taken love through a thousand deaths;
Should either try to slip our iron fetter,
It bites yet deeper into neck and arm.
As for that act of supererogation,
The kiss in which we secretly concur,
Let laughter mitigate its quiet excess.
Could we only be a simple, bickering pair
In the tied cottage of a small estate,
With no tasks laid on us except to dig,
Hoe, fatten geese and scrape the quarter’s rent,
How admirable our close interdependence;
Our insecurity how fortunate!
IRON PALACE
We stood together, side by side, rooted
At the iron heart of circumambient hills,
Parents to a new age, weeping in awe
That the lot had fallen, of all mankind, on us
Now sealed as love’s exemplars.
We could not prevaricate or argue,
Citing involvement in some alien scene,
Nor plead unworthiness: none else would venture
To live detached from force of circumstance
As history neared its ending.
We told no one. These were not strange dreams
Recalled at breakfast with a yawning smile,
Nor tales for children, on the verge of sleep,
Who ask no questions. Our predicament
Remained a silent burden.
We had no token or proof, and needed none
Of what we learned that day; but laughed softly
Watching our hands engage, in co-awareness
That these red hills warned us, on pain of death,
Never to disengage them.
Woman, wild and hard as the truth may be,
Nothing can circumvent it. We stand coupled
With chains, who otherwise might live apart
Conveniently paired, each with another,
And slide securely graveward.
TRUE JOY
Whoever has drowned and awhile entered
The adamantine gates of afterwards,
Stands privileged to reject heavenly joy
(Though without disrespect for God’s archangels)
With ‘never again’ – no moon, no herbs, no sea,
No singular love of women.
True joy, believe us, is to groan and wake
From the hallelujah choir on Fiddler’s Green,
With lungs now emptied of salt water,
With gradual heat returning to clammed veins
In the first flicker of reanimation,
Repossession of now, awareness
Of her live hands and lips, her playful voice,
Her smooth and wingless shoulders.
TOMORROW’S ENVY OF TODAY
Historians may scorn the close engagement
Of Moon with Lion that we have witnessed
Here in this lair, here in this numinous grove,
May write me down as imbecile, or presume
A clot of madness festering in your heart –
Such is tomorrow’s envy of today.
Today we are how we are, and how we see:
Alive, elate, untrimmed, without hazard
Of supersession: flowers that never fade,
Leaves that never shrivel, truth persistent
Not as a prophecy of bliss to fall
A thousand generations hence on lovers
More fortunately circumstanced than we,
But as a golden interlock of power
Looped about every bush and branching tree.
THE HIDDEN GARDEN
Nor can ambition make this garden theirs,
Any more than birds can fly through a window pane.
When they hint at passwords, keys and private stairs,
We are tempted often to open the front gate,
Which has no lock, and haul them bodily in,
Abashed that there they wait, disconsolate.
And yet such pity would be worse than pride:
Should we admit as love their vain self-pity,
The gate must vanish and we be left outside.
THE WEDDING
When down I went to the rust-red quarry
I was informed, by birds, of your resolve
To live with me for ever and a day –
The day being always new and antecedent.
What could we ask of Nature? Nothing more
Than to outdo herself in our behalf.
Blossoms of caper, though they smell sweet,
Have never sailed the air like butterflies
Circling in innocent dance around each other
Over the cliff and out across the bay;
Nor has broom-blossom scorched a man’s finger
With golden fire, kindled by sun.
Come, maids of honour and pages chosen
To attend this wedding, charged to perform
Incomparable feats – dance, caper-blossom!
Scorch, blossom of broom, our married fingers –
Though crowds of almost-men and almost-women
Howl for their lost immediacy.
WHAT WILL BE, IS
Manifest reason glared at you and me
Thus ringed with love. Entire togetherness
Became for us the sole redress.
Together in heart, but our over-eager bodies
Distrained upon for debt, we shifted ground;
Which brought mistiming. Each cried out in turn,
And with a complementary delusion:
‘I am free; but you? Are you still bound?’
In blood the debts were paid. Hereafter
We make no truce for manifest reason
From this side of the broad and fateful stream
Where wisdom rules from her dark cave of dream
And time is corrigible by laughter.
Moon and Sun are one. Granted, they ride
Paths unconformable to the calendar,
And seldom does a New Moon coincide
With a New Year; yet we agree:
‘What will be, is’ – rejoicing at a day
Of dolphins jostling in the blue bay,
Eagles in air, and flame on every tree.
SON ALTESSE
Alone, you are no more than many another
Gay-hearted, greedy, passionate noblewoman;
And I, alone, no more than a slow-witted
Passionate, credulous knight, though skilled in fight.
Then if I hail you as my Blessed Virgin
This is no flattery, nor does it endow you
With private magics which, when I am gone,
May flatter rogues or drunken renegades.
Name me your single, proud, whole-hearted champion
Whose feats no man alive will overpass;
But they must reverence you as I do; only
Conjoined in fame can we grow legendary.
Should I ride home, vainglorious after battle,
With droves of prisoners and huge heaps of spoil,
Make me dismount a half-mile from your door;
To walk barefoot in dust, as a knight must.
Yet never greet me carelessly or idly,
Nor use the teasing manners learned at Court,
Lest I be ambushed in a treacherous pass –
And you pent up in shame’s black nunnery.
EVERYWHERE IS HERE
By this exchange of eyes, this encirclement
You of me, I of you, together we baffle
Logic no doubt, but never understanding;
And laugh instead of choking back the tears
When we say goodbye.
Fog gathers thick about us
Y
Whirl round and round each other skippingly
As though blown by a wind; pause and subside
In a double star, the gold above the green.
Everywhere is here, once we have shattered
The iron-bound laws of contiguity,
Blazoning love as an eagle with four wings
(Their complementary tinctures counterchanged)
That scorns to roost in any terrene crag.
SONG: THE FAR SIDE OF YOUR MOON
The far side of your moon is black,
And glorious grows the vine;
Ask anything of me you lack,
But only what is mine.
Yours is the great wheel of the sun,
And yours the unclouded sky;
Then take my stars, take every one,
But wear them openly,
Walking in splendour through the plain
For all the world to see,
Since none alive shall view again
The match of you and me.
DELIVERANCE
Lying disembodied under the trees
(Their slender trunks converged above us
Like rays of a five-fold star) we heard
A sudden whinnying from the dark hill.
Our implacable demon, foaled by love,
Never knew rein or saddle; though he drank
From a stream winding by, his blue pastures
Ranged far out beyond the stellar mill.
He had seared us two so close together
That death itself might not disjoin us;
It was impossible you could love me less,
It was impossible I could love you more.
We were no calculating lovers
But gasped in awe at our deliverance
From a too familiar prison,
And vainly puzzled how it was that now
We should never need to build another,
As each, time after time, had done before.
CONJUNCTION
What happens afterwards, none need enquire:
They are poised there in conjunction, beyond time,
At an oak-tree top level with Paradise:
Its leafy tester unshaken where they stand
Palm to palm, mouth to mouth, beyond desire,
Perpetuating lark song, perfume, colour,
And the tremulous gasp of watchful winds,