Menu

Difficult Questions, Easy Answers (1)

From: mathias rebmann:

Dated : January 29, 1999 at 03:16:49
Subject: robert graves' poem "prometheus"

>I'm a student of English literature at the University of Saarbruecken, Germany
>and I need information about Robert Graves'poem "Prometheus".
>I would be pleased getting some information.

Thanks,

M. Rebmann

Dear Mathias,

You didn't say whether or not you have access to the poem: in case you don't it was first published in "Poems and Satires" 1951. The text of the poem is also available in Martin Seymour-Smith's "Robert Graves: his Life and Work", pp431-2, (expanded edition), London 1995. The poem of course uses the mythic imagery of Prometheus chained to a rock, having his liver devoured every night by a vulture: the liver is regenerated each day, and so the torment is never ending. The experience to which the imagery relates is most likely his love of his muse, Judith Bledsoe. That the myth of Prometheus was in his mind around this time might be connected with the commissioning of Graves to produce a definitive handbook of the Greek myths: the contract was signed in 1951 (published in 1955). His account of the myth is number 39 in vol. 1 of the collection (Atlas and Prometheus). Graves detailed notes for this myth indicate just how complex the body of ideas surrounding one of his apparently simple poems might be, though in this case the poem is pretty straightforward.

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 20:46:54 +0000
Subject: Re: Enquiry re 'A Slice of Wedding Cake' by Robert Graves

>As part of my Grade 8 LAMDA Exam I am performing 'A Slice of Wedding Cake'.
>I would be most appreciative if you could send me any information you may
>have regarding the backround to this poem, why it was written etc.

This poem was published originally in "The Crowning Privilege" (September 1955) as "A Slice of Wedding Cake". This volume collected together 16 poems, written or re-written since 1953; the Clark lectures on Poetry, which Graves gave in Cambridge in 1954-5 (these lectures were received well by students, but less enthusiastically by the academics); and some reviews. R.P. Graves in "Robert Graves and the White Goddess" (Chaps 4 and 5) suggests that at this time "...what Graves really wanted was ... the arrival of another muse", and refers to the poem "The Face in the Mirror", published in "Steps" (1958), whose final lines are: "He still stands ready, with a boy's presumption/ To court the queen in her high silk pavilion". Graves had not had a muse since 1953: in the first of the lectures (11th October 1954) Graves emphasised that it was the 'crowning privilege' of every true English poet to receive the 'silent benediction' of 'the Muse, their divine patroness'.

The poem itself can be read as a recognition by Graves that his pursuit of "the Goddess" has lead him to unduly deprecate men. It can also be read as an expression of exasperation at the fickleness and unpredictability of love, recognised since time immemorial as "blind": i.e., the poet may identify his muse, but the muse may not be interested in the poet. Later the poem was entitled "Bitter Thoughts on Receiving a Slice of Cordelia's Wedding Cake", which might give the poem a more specific focus.

From: Marge Mick: Dated : February 08, 1999 at 11:52:53
Subject: A Pinch of Salt

>Would like a discussion of poetic devices used in this poem. Would appreciate
>any analysis of this poem or any discussion of Graves's techniques.

This poem is available on the web in the Project Bartleby edition of "Fairies and Fusiliers". Two ideas are being compared in the poem, though the second of them is masked: first, the obsessive pursuit of an idea by a poet, and second, the courting of a lover.

Graves regarded his intuition very highly, and felt that he could arrive at the right answer to problems before he was able to establish the steps by which such insights could be justified. The whole of the later "White Goddess" is the result of the artful pursuit of an intuitive insight: Graves was sure that the book could not have been written if he had set out on a systematic enquiry dealing with his subject (hence the absence of footnotes). As such he sidled up to the theme of the book from many angles. The argument of "A Pinch of Salt" is that guile and cunning, deception and above all, artfulness, are all part of the successful pursuit of a prized goal.

The lines

When a dream is born in you/With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true/And lovely, with no flaw or stain,

can easily be read as referring to the initial stages of a love affair, in which the longing for the beloved may engender physical pain, and the beloved exists (to the lover) as a being who more or less transcends rational apprehension. The lines which follow,

O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch/You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much

will strike a chord with those who have been in this dangerous condition: the pairing of lover and beloved depends to a great extent on their mutual transcendence of the normal rules of engagement between human beings. Actions which breach the enchantment can break the spell.

The first verse gives no gender to the "dream": in the second a bird is the chosen metaphor, but perhaps surprisingly the bird's sex is given as male. It may be that here Graves is taking his own advice, given in the final verse,

Poet, never chase the dream./Laugh yourself and turn away. Mask your hunger, let it seem/Small matter if he come or stay;

I.e., the true matter of the poem has been obscured, as it should be, according to its own argument. And, in keeping hold of its own artfulness, the poem secures the poet's dream:

But when he nestles in your hand at last,/Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 20:40:58 +0000
Subject: Re: Graves method (mythology)

>I am a college student at Carroll College in Helena, Mt. I am currently
>enrolled in a class of Greek Mythology. We have a paper due soon on "What
>does Grave's method suggest about the nature of myth?" I was wondering if
>you could give me some pointers and exactly what his method does suggest.
>I am using The Greek Myths complete edition. By Robert Graves, copyrighted in
>1955, and published by Penguin Books. Thank you.

Graves definition of mythology is idiosyncratic and is given in the introduction to the two volume edition of the Greek Myths (1955) - you say you have the one volume edition: I don't have this and don't know if the introduction has been omitted or abridged.

As a student at Oxford Graves was influenced by the works of J.G. Frazer (author of "The Golden Bough", etc) and more particularly by Jane Harrison (author of the "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion"). For most classical scholars mythology is about Gods and Heroes: for Graves (following Harrison's lead in defining art as a pictorial rendering of ritual), myth is narrative spun around ideas and events enshrined in ancient ritual. And the narratives which have come down to us are not always accurate - hence Graves attempted reconstructions of historical events.

If you can't find Harrison's "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion", try to find her "Ancient Art and Ritual", which also has lots of relevant material.

... Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 18:36:35 +0000
Subject: Re: World War One Poetry

>I am a Junior at Beth Tfiloh High School in
>Baltimore, Maryland. In my British Literature class, I am in the midst
>of a research paper/ thesis about world war one poetry. My thesis
>revolves around the fact that however romantically they may have felt
>about the war when they first joined up, the poets who were on the front
>soon realized its full horror. I'm off to a good start and I'm
>researching poets like Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen,
>and others. What I was wondering was whether you by any chance had
>contacts with people who were English citizens at time of the war or
>know of poets now who have a good deal to know about the war. I was
>wondering if you had any e-mail adresses for them or if you had
>available primary sources which could be of some use in my project.

Thanks for your mail. You didn't actually mention Robert Graves as an example of a poet who very quickly realised the horror of the war - maybe you know this already. If not, you should have a look at Graves' autobiography "Goodbye to all That", first published in 1929 (revised edition 1957): it contains one of the best descriptions of life in the trenches, and also recounts the story of how Sassoon was nearly court-martialled for declaring that the war was pointless. Graves also describes his own attitudes clearly. There are some extracts from the autobiography available on the web (in Stuart Lee's Isaac Rosenberg tutorial at Oxford - the link is available from my prose page).

Stuart Lee has also created the Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Archive (WOMDA), which contains lots of useful material and links - you can find it from the home of the JTAP project at: http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/. Try also Michelle Fry's Sassoon site, which is probably the most useful around - you can find it by following the link to her pages from my biography page.

Both the Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Archive and the Sassoon site should lead you to information about the war memories of ordinary soldiers (there are more of these accounts available than you might think): it wasn't just the poets who felt the horror.

You asked about contacts I might have with people involved in WW1: I am old enough to have known people who fought in it, but of course it was a long time ago and those who remain alive now are few in number and very old - I think last year was the first year since the end of the war when the veterans did not gather for a reunion in France, or march to the Cenotaph in London. So I think we have all the first hand accounts we are going to get for WW1. But there are plenty of these, as I said, and quite a few now on the web. You could try following the links on my related sites page to find some more.

Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 21:12:31 +0000
Subject: Re: hercules, my shipmate

>Thank you for your archive. I just bought Robert Graves "Hercules, My
>Shipmate." I have never heard of this book and do not find it on any of
>the online bibliographies. Do you have any information on this title?

The book you have bought bears the title given to it by its first US publisher: in the rest of the world it is known as "The Golden Fleece". It is listed in the bibliographies on the web, but only as an alternative title, so it helps to know where to look. The same thing happened to "Seven Days in New Crete", which is sold in the US under the title "Watch the North Wind Rise". In neither case is the alternative title Graves' own choice.

The book is a retelling of the voyages of the Argo. Our main source for this very old story is not very ancient (Apollonius of Rhodes), and presents various problems: several times Graves attempted to solve problems of myth and history by writing a novel (King Jesus, for example - in effect the resulting novel would pay for the research and provide a discipline for the exercise). It was written in England while Graves was in exile from Majorca during WWII, and was the work which engaged him immediately before "The White Goddess". Graves picture of a world populated by matriarchies is much in evidence in "The Golden Fleece". At the time he switched his attention to "The White Goddess" he was working with large scale British Admiralty charts to establish the true course of the Argo.

Graves himself wrote that:

"The Greeks, on the whole a level-headed people, regarded the voyage as an historical event that took place about two generations before the fall of Troy... The voyage was a good deal nearer in time for Homer and Hesiod than Columbus's discovery of America is for us; and though in the fifth century B.C. Thucydides found the story too intractable for inclusion in the First Book of his history, no Greek, so far as I know, ever ventured to deny that Argo was a real ship which sailed from Thessalian Iolcos to Aea on the Colchian river Phasis - and back again".

[The Golden Fleece, p11].

Graves studied all the surviving accounts of the voyage, and:

"using a combination of shrewd detective work, imaginative reconstruction, and what he called analeptic thought (....by which Graves believed that he could find solutions to historical, religious, moral and poetic problems that could not be solved by reason alone) ... [presented] the most truthful narrative possible of what had actually occurred".

[both quotations sourced from: Richard Perceval Graves, "Robert Graves and the White Goddess 1940-1985" 1995, p57]

Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:14:04 +0000
Subject: Re: Alexander the Great


>I am enjoying The Robert Graves Archives. I am trying to find a Graves
>poem about Alexander the Great faking his own death and going to live in
>peace. I would be grateful if you could tell me the title of the poem,
>if such a poem exists? Thank you for your time.

Thanks for writing to the Archive. The poem you are looking for is 'The Clipped Stater', first published in "Welchman's Hose" in 1925. The poem is currently available in: Robert Graves: 'Selected Poems', Edited by Paul O'Prey, Penguin Books, (1986).

The story told in the poem is not exactly as you describe it: Alexander's 'death' makes possible his final conquest, since he decides that: 'finity is true godhead's final test', and that he must fulfill himself by self-destruction, living an ordinary flesh and blood life, far beyond the limits of his empire (the idea of the incarnation of Christ is clearly peeking out here as part of the weave).

The poem also reflects an interest in Hellenistic arguments about the nature of divinity: one of our main sources for the history of Alexander and his campaigns is by Arrian (1st-2nd centuries AD), and he gives the question of Alexander's divinity some importance in his account.

In Graves poem, Alexander originally assumes his divinity because no man or state has offered successful resistance to his power. This is a pragmatic definition of divinity, whereas traditionally the Greeks regarded divinity as something which could not be granted to a living man, since it implied transcendence of movement, limitation, action, etc.

So the poem owes its origin to a real debate among the Greeks, but takes its form from questions about divinity which have a Christian background.

Dated : April 11, 1999 at 08:40:22
Subject: Re: Symptoms of Love

>I am trying to do an analysis of the poem "Symptoms of Love" by Robert Graves.
>I would appreciate it if someone could help me with poetic devices
>or any techniques or background relevant.

>Thank you very much

>Katherine L. Walz

The first verse metaphorically defines Love itself as a kind of illness for the purpose of the poem. Graves uses the image of a migraine headache, and describes it as "universal": use of metaphor suggests a more powerful phenomenon than a mere comparison, and this is further intensified by the suggestion that the experience has an omnipresence. Migraine headaches are at least by reputation the most disabling and intense of headaches, with characteristics described in the second and third lines:

A bright stain on the vision/Blotting out reason

Does "universal" refers to the intensity of the experience of love, or suggest that its power shapes the entire reality of the experience? This is undefined.

The next three verses speak of the symptoms of love, and focus on the disabling and unsettling characteristics of the experience. The verses constitute a list, so that the effect is conveyed only by the general associations of the words: "leanness", "jealousy","laggard", "omens", "nightmares". The intensification of reality which love produces is conveyed by the suggestion that the lover finds himself

Listening for a knock/Waiting for a sign

However these lines also conjure up a reality which is magical, in which events contain clues as to what is going on - in which the power of love might be considered to have a universal and shaping scope.

The poem concludes with a reversal: the lover is urged to take courage despite the horror of the symptoms of love. Survival of "illness" is turned to a measure of the power of the beloved:

Could you endure such grief/At any hand but hers?

This is the kind of poem which can be further illuminated by comparison with other poems on love by Graves. You might try "The Oath", which was written for Beryl Hodges (later Graves wife) nearly twenty years before. "Symptoms of Love" is muse poetry which reflects a different kind of experience - in this case the experience of the muse Margot Callas in 1959. Try also "In Single Syllables" (in More Poems 1961).

Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 21:07:26 +0000
From: Perlesvaus
Subject: Re: poems by robert graves


>I have been searching for a copy of two sets of three poems each
>published in the 1960's. The first set, THREE LOVE POEMS, was published
>in an American magazine, perhaps LOOK or LIFE, around 1961 or 1962. The
>second set, THREE MORE LOVE POEMS, was also published in an American
>magazine--a women's magazine, perhaps LADIES' HOME JOURNAL or McCALLS.
>Can you advise me where I might find these? Thank you!

Graves published a great deal of poetry in magazines in the late fifties and early sixties, and it is quite difficult to pin down what first appeared where. I have not been able to identify the groups of poems you are looking for, but I can suggest how you might find them.

Graves practice was to bring together recently published poetry in both his collected and occasional publications: the former published irregularly throughout his life. For instance, there were editions of his "Collected Poems" in 1955, 1959, 1961, 1965 and 1966. These editions differed in content, since he pruned poems from successive editions which he felt did not wear well. The chances are high that, unless Graves tired of these two groups of poems more or less immediately upon publication, they appear in one or both of the latter two collections. There should also be some indication in these volumes as to the place and time of first publication, which should enable you to identify the groups.

Graves put greater and greater emphasis on his love poetry, until in the last "Collected Poems" (1975), this class of poem seriously overbalanced the representation of his life's work. The two sets of poems may also appear in that volume, but it is unlikely that the original place of publication will be detailed. I should look in the "Collected Poems" for 1965 and 1966.

Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:47:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: mobydick@westerncanon.com
Subject: Lecture Hall Message 18

From: Philip Hunter:

Dated : April 25, 1999 at 13:47:09
Subject: Re: The White Goddess

>I am a junior at Malone College in Canton, OH and I am taking
>Modern British Writers. For our final project, the professor has
>asked us to analyze a poet and his works. My friend and I are going
>to do a type of interview situation, where he is Graves and I am
>the interviewer. We want to focus specifically on "The White Goddess"
>and "Succubus." If anybody has any information or comments on either
>of these poems, please share them with me. Also, share what types of
>questions you might ask Graves about these particular poems.

Nicole,

You have given yourselves a very tall order by focussing on two important poems by Graves, the first of which is of central importance to the second part of his life. I can however give you a number of pointers about "The White Goddess" which might help you to narrow down your target.

Another of Graves important poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice", begins with the lines:

There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling

From the mid-forties onwards, much of Graves' prose and poetry was shaped by this belief. Interestingly there is a passage in "The Shout", a short story written in 1924, which prefigures this approach:

"My story is true", he said, "every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is 'true'", I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore true".

Graves' stated opinions about the White Goddess, which resulted in the poem and the book of the same name, should be looked at the same way. Both Graves' prose and poetry attempt to retell his understanding of a truth by recasting detail and character. The specific reference is (according to Graves) always the same, but the incidentals change and the details blur and intertwine. The poem "The Clipped Stater" for example, can be read in terms of its references to Alexander, which are explicit, or to the phenomenon of the Incarnation of Christ, or even to the transformation of T. E. Lawrence into "Aircraftsman Shaw". In fact it should be read in terms of (at least) all three: if there is "one story and one story only", the real focus of Graves' interest is beyond the incidental details of the poem, and the blurring and braiding of detail allows us to look at the real subject, as it were, slantwise.

The first two lines of "The White Goddess" [the version in "Selected Poems", ed. Paul O'Prey, 1986] express Graves' view that his subject is one uncomfortable to the reasoning mind: and thus a subject which the dominant forces in European civilization over at least the past two and a half thousand years have tried to reject ("All Saints revile her"). Very quickly however (line 3) the poem is about a voyage in search of the Goddess: this is particularly interesting as Graves' views on ancient matriarchy surfaced first in "The Golden Fleece" [pub 1944] (US: "Hercules, My Shipmate" [pub 1945]), and Graves' was working on his translation of the story of the voyage of the Argo immediately before writing his monumental study: "The White Goddess" (to which a version of the poem is prefaced "in dedication"). The sailors sail to find her "in scorn" of those "ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean". This might be read as a re-interpretation of the real mission of the Argo, or a metaphor of Graves' own studies, or more broadly as a characterization of any attempt to escape from (as Graves believed) the rigid, plodding patterns of Cartesian thought sanctioned as "valid" by our civilization (the version prefaced to "The White Goddess" speaks in the first person).

The second stanza continues the speaker's identification with the crew of the ship:

It was a virtue not to stay/To go our headstrong and heroic way

The following three lines describe the extremes to which they are prepared to go to find the elusive Goddess. Paradoxically she is then given a precise physical description, clear enough to pick her out of a crowd. That it might not be wholly healthy to actually encounter her is suggested by the striking description of her brow as: "white as any leper's".

In the third stanza it is clear that there have been (and will be) good times for the Goddess, when all recognise her and the universality of her significance:

The green sap of spring in the young wood astir/Will celebrate the Mountain Mother

However the crew of the ship are gifted to recognise, "even in November", her "nakedly worn magnificence". Thus the ability to discern the Goddess in her elusiveness is given more importance by Graves than her mere celebration. Here Graves alludes to the different qualities required of devotees of the Goddess in secular (i.e., modern) times, to those qualities required in times when her reality is taken for granted.

The penultimate line reveals that the sailors have undertaken the voyage, not in ignorance, but in full knowledge of the dangers: since they have experienced "cruelty and past betrayal". They have met her before, in one form or another. They are also, like those in love:

Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

"Bolts" are of course more commonly associated in Greek Mythology with Zeus, king of the gods. But Graves regarded Zeus as a usurper, and believed that real power belonged to the Goddess (See for example "The Greek Myths" 9.7: Zeus and Metis, where Graves quotes Jane Harrison who described the story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions').

Graves more and more came to regard the White Goddess as the real source of inspiration for poets, so that he began to view poetry written for any other reason as fakery. In his study "The White Goddess" he describes her in similar terms to those used in the poem:

...a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. ... I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess... The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living... [TWG: Ch. One, "Poets and Gleemen"]

Hence it is that Graves' concept of the White Goddess is entwined with the craft of poetry: poetry is an invocation of the Goddess, and to write "true poetry" the poet has to love someone in whom the Goddess temporarily manifests. Graves' book on the White Goddess has to be read therefore as a braid, made up of a historical reconstruction of poetic grammar, as well as his personal experience of the Goddess in his association with Laura Riding, and possibly also his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves.

The Graves Interview:

You are going to have to do a lot of research to do this properly! You can find most of what you need in three books: Robert Graves "The White Goddess" for Graves own account of his ideas; Richard Perceval Graves: "Robert Graves and the White Goddess 1940-1985" [pub 1995]; and "Robert Graves: The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940" [pub 1990]: these last two volumes give the relevant details about Graves' collaboration with Laura Riding, and his later muse poetry. Other information about Graves' picture of ancient matriarchy can be found in his novel "King Jesus" [pub 1946] and "Seven Days in New Crete" [pub 1949] (US "Watch the North Wind Rise"). Some useful critical remarks about the thesis of "The White Goddess" can be found in Martin Seymour-Smith's "Robert Graves: His Life and Work" [1982; expanded edition pub 1995]

It might be worth asking "Graves" to expand on the method of thinking he associates with the Goddess, which he opposes to "the God Apollo's golden mean": Graves says quite a bit about this (that poetic thought is not really viable in a scientific and rational civilization) in various parts of "The White Goddess". He also wrote an interesting preface in 1976 to John Biram's book "Teknosis", in which he seriously criticises modern industrial civilization (may be hard to find this book). And/or you might ask "Graves" to describe the background to the writing of the poem "The White Goddess", showing the different elements in both his writing and his personal life which he weaves together to make a successful artistic whole. You might also ask "Graves" to compare and contrast some related poetry (such as"Juan at the Winter Solstice"; "The White Goddess" and "The Succubus").

>Dated: April 19, 1999 at 22:56:57
>Subject: Warning to Children

>I am a senior at Menchville High School and am currently studying
>the poem "Warning to Children" by Robert Graves. I would greatly
>appreciate any help you can provide me with the theme and symbolism
>of the parcel discussed in the poem.

> thank you,
> Priya Patel

"Warning to Children" was first published in "Poems 1929", and belongs at the end of a period in Graves life when his poetic subjects were sometimes shaped by his interest in philosophy.

Leaving the background aside for the moment and looking at the text itself, it is interesting that, given the complexity and length of the poem, it is delivered in a single stanza. The tone of the speaker is admonitory, and warns of the dangers of thinking about philosophical abstractions, in the manner of an adult giving salutary advice to a child. It concernes the problematic nature of understanding a universe which has no limits (the "endless world" in which the child has declared he lives). The universe which is explored in the course of the poem is recursive and interconnected with itself: it exists at several levels, and, sometimes when it looks as though the whole mystery is neatly wrapped up - as in a "neat brown paper parcel" - the inhabitant of this world is back where he/she started.

Parcels are tempting things to unwrap, particulary for children: the equation of a parcel with a present is easy to make. But not all parcels are presents, and not all parcels are welcome. The parcel is not the first level of the recursive universe encountered in the poem, but rather the strange imagery of "blocks of slate" and "dappled red and green": the problems came first. This reflects Graves own experience with philosophical issues - he became interested in order to resolve certain problems, not because he was by inclination a philosopher. Neat resolutions are however rare in philosophy, and usually suspect where they are presented.

The Indian philosopher Basanta Mallik was a great influence on Graves view of the world during part of the twenties, and provided some philosophical neatnesses. Both Graves and Mallik shared the belief that it was foolish to seek for first causes. Graves rejection of philosophy as a tool for understanding the world, and possibly also his rejection of Mallik as a guru ("Gravesian guru Mark III", according to Martin Seymour-Smith), underpins this poem.

>Date: Sat, 29 May 1999 18:07:30 -0700
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Subject: cause

>What aspects of Robert Graves' "Good-bye to All That" helped
>illustrate the causes for the state of decline of Great Britain?

This looks like an essay question. You may already have discussed it with your teacher or supervisor before settling the form of the question. However, just looking at it cold, it begs more questions than it asks: in the form in which you have stated it the question is asking how one thing (the text of 'Goodbye to All That') can be used to illustrate the causes of a given (the state of decline of Great Britain). However, is the given part of the question secure?

How do you define the decline of a country? Industrial historians and economists sometimes suggest that Britain began to decline in the 1870's, and that WWI was in some senses the inevitable outcome of this decline, since Britain's principal industrial competitor in the first decades of the new century was Germany. Arguments of this kind of course depend on detailed economic and statistical analyses, and Graves' book offers none of these. How else might a country's decline be illustrated? It's ethical stance on various issues? The state of it's legal system? It's social structure? The relationships between its social classes? How it responds to emergencies? How it conducts its wars? The nature of life in the Army?

The phrase "helped illustrate the causes" suggests that the book at some definite point in time did illustrate not only the 'decline of Great Britain', but also the 'causes' of this decline. This is a much taller order than illustrating a mere decline, and not the kind of thing that a swiftly written autobiography might be expected to do. The book struck a chord with many of the veterans of the war: it reflected their own experiences. But was 'Goodbye to All That' ever received as illustrating the causes of a agreed national decline? When was the book received in this way, and by whom?

Robert Graves certainly wanted to leave Britain and a whole battery of things behind when he wrote 'Goodbye to All That' and decamped to Majorca. However his personal response to the experiences of the first 33 years of his life has to be recognised for what it is: a personal response. It might coincide with an objective analysis of the state of Great Britain, but it does not follow as a matter of course that it does. Graves does not offer such a detailed and objective analysis. He got into a lot of trouble at the time of first publication because of the kind of inaccuracies and subjective distortions which are inevitable in a hastily written personal memoir written some fifteen years after a series of traumatic experiences. Graves' own father wrote a full length reply to 'Goodbye to All That' to correct what he perceived to be his son's misrepresentations. Many of Graves' friends were also highly critical.

In other words I think the given part of the question is insecure in itself. Essay questions often contain a false premiss (sometimes more than one): I think that is the case here. The weakness of the question is a legitimate focus of your response.

>Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 17:21:14 -0400 (EDT)
>From: mobydick@westerncanon.com
>Subject: Lecture Hall Message 22

>From: marie foliard:

>Dated : June 20, 1999 at 17:21:12
>Subject: the Shout and Other Stories

>I am in fourth year at university in France and I am preparing
>a study on Robert Graves and the importance of fantasy,
>unreality in reality, and the flavour of 'supernatural' in his
>English short stories. It would be great to have some comments
>about that and about any link it could have with his poetry.

This is a particulary interesting question. Graves' short stories are quite different from most of his novels, in that the stories reflect aspects of his personal experience in a significantly modified form. The novels by contrast are reworkings of existing narratives, usually with some interpretative spin (Graves spoke of I, Claudius as an interpretative biography). His most famous short story is 'The Shout', written not sooner than his period of professorship in Egypt (and not, as stated by Graves himself in his 1965 preface to the Collected Short Stories, dating from 1924). Exactly why Graves wrote 'The Shout' is unclear: the couple in the story is loosely based on himself and his wife Nancy, but no known incident in his life up until its writing seems to fit. There is a later incident however, which does seem to reflect aspects of the story: the breaking up of Schuyler Jackson's marriage by Laura Riding.

In the Introduction to the Collected Short Stories Graves acknowledges that: "Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range: I fetched back the main elements of The Shout from a cricket-match at Littlemore Asylum, Oxford." However elsewhere he says that the idea of the story occurred to him "one day while I was walking in the desert near Heliopolis in Egypt and came upon a stony stretch where I stopped to pick up a few mis-shapen pebbles; what virtue was in them I do not know, but I somehow had the story from them." [see Richard Perceval Graves, The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940, Ch. 7: 'Seeing Ghosts'; and note 73 to the Chap.]. Given the way Graves worked his material, both accounts are likely to be correct, and 'The Shout' is a composite of these elements forged together in part by his unconscious (during the twenties Graves was heavily influenced by Freudian ideas, and wrote a book on the meaning of dreams). The story also reflects an interest in whether or not the soul is bound to the body during every moment of life - perhaps prompted by a wish to explain the phenomena of the shared dream, premonitions, and also ghosts.

My own guess is that the man with the 'terror shout', Charles, actually represents Laura Riding, who was in Egypt with Robert and Nancy. The story would therefore reflect the destructive impact of Riding on the relationship between Robert and Nancy. Except that, in the story, 'Charles' is exorcised by the breaking of the stone which holds his soul. In real life the outcome was quite different.

The same technique (incubation of an idea in the unconscious) seems to underlie much of Graves poetry. 'The Clipped Stater,' which is notionally about Alexander the Great, utilises elements from a number of sources, including events in the life of T.E. Lawrence. This braiding together of ideas could of course, in theory, be done consciously, but Graves felt that poets who wrote in this way, under the tutelage of the god Apollo, were frauds.

In Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), Graves included a poem (available on the web) which is an example of the fantastic intruding into reality: 'Corporal Stare'. It appears to recount an incident which happened during his time in the trenches: a man who had been killed appeared to Graves and his companions while they were having a meal:

Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man - Corporal Stare!
Stare! Killed last May at Festubert.
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire,
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire!
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind

In the later Goodbye to All That Graves recounts an incident which seems to be the basis of the poem:

At Béthune, I saw the ghost of a man named Private Challoner... When he went out [to France] with a draft to join the First Battalion, he shook my hand and said "I'll meet you again in France, sir". In June he passed by our 'C' Company billet, where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy... Private Challoner looked in at the window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, or the cap-badge he wore; yet no Royal Welch battalion was billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up, looked out of the window, and saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May.
[Chapter 14 of the 1957 edition]

In the same passage Graves gives details of the civilised menu of the dinner: in the circumstances, an equally fantastic intrusion into the unreal reality of the war in France.

Not much has been changed here - perhaps because the incident has power and meaning in itself, in its strangeness, without the necessity of a literary metamorphosis to make the hair on the back of the neck stand. Graves has however altered the rank and name of the soldier, collapsing together the ghost and his reaction to the apparition.

Graves is unusual as a poet in supplying a good deal of useful detail about his working methods: to some extent his writings on poetry illuminate aspects of his prose technique also. I would recommend that you consult: the Collected Writings on Poetry, edited by Paul O'Prey, 1995; The White Goddess, (1961 edition); The Meaning of Dreams, 1924; and also Poetic Unreason and other Studies, 1925. Richard Percival Graves three volume biography is probably the best available for the study you propose, followed by Martin Seymour-Smith's Robert Graves: His Life and Work, 1982; expanded edition, 1995].

>Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 18:43:43 -0400 (EDT)
>Subject: Re: The Cool Web

>: Can anyone tell me anything about this poem? Criticsm?

'The Cool Web' was first published in Poems 1914-1926, (1927). The text I have used is the final one, as published in the Selected Poems, edited by Paul O'Prey, 1986. There are interesting differences between this last edition, and the original version, which do not alter the sense of the poem.

The subject of the poem is the ambiguous use of language. On the face of things, language is a useful tool with which we can make maps of reality and come to accurate judgements about the world in which we live.

The opening line of the poem is itself ambiguous:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is

What does this mean? That children lack the words to properly express the reality which they attempt to describe? Or that they are foolish to say (as children famously do) 'how it is,' so directly?. The latter meaning depends on what was, at the time of the poem's publication, an expressly American usage of English, to which Graves was particulary exposed through his relationship with the poet Laura Riding, which began in 1926.

The ambiguity is not resolved in the second stanza, though Graves' intention becomes clearer:

But we have speech, to chill the angry day

By 'we' Graves means the adult world. The child is dumb and relatively speechless, but nevertheless contrives to use language in a way quite different from adults. In the first stanza, children can say:

How hot the scent the scent is of the summer rose,/How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,/How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

Adult speech, by contrast chills "the rose's cruel scent."

We spell away the overhanging night,/We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

The third stanza contains the central argument about the nature of language: it is characterized as a 'cool web' which 'winds us in' as we 'retreat from too much joy or too much fear'. This apollinian, reasoned, and essentially cold use of language, which almost inevitably ensnares us as we grow older, is however not wholly to be fought. In the final stanza Graves explores the likely consequences of not surrendering to the 'cool web': 'if we let our tongues lose self possession.... before our death, instead of when death comes,' the likelihood is madness and death in any case.

This is one of Graves' finest and most compact poems. There is much to repay interest here in terms of structure, language, imagery, ideas, and tone, despite the fact the poem has only four stanzas.

Posted by Philip Hunter on July 01, 1999 at 19:49:17:

In Reply to: Lost Acres posted by michelle on June 21, 1999 at 05:11:45:

: what is the hidden meaning behind the poem 'Lost Acres'? any analysis you can offer me!

'Lost Acres' was first published in Poems 1914-1927. The poem therefore belongs to the period in which Graves was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology. The 'lost acres' are those parts of the mind which are not easily surveyed:

Invisible they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.

[the text is from the first published edition].

Graves was interested in the unconscious mind partly because he was concerned with the mechanics of his own creative process. Graves interest has given us extensive writings on the craft of poetry.

On the face of it, it looks as though the poem was written at a time when Graves was experiencing some ambivalence about the worth of the investigation of the unconscious mind. He writes:

Yet there's no scientific need/To plot these acres in the mind/
...To walk there would be loss of sense.

In fact Graves is speaking ironically, using the voice of one for whom poetry is of no consequence or interest, because of its association with 'unreason' and the unconscious processes of the mind, and because it is not easily susceptible to 'measure' (a perceived requirement of formal science).

Graves published a book entitled Poetic Unreason in the mid-nineteen-twenties, exploring the craft of the poet (not always satisfactorily, by his own estimation); he understood this craft to require a departure from normal human intellectual processes. He maintained this during his entire career, but abandoned the psychoanalytic model quite early on.

To: perlesvaus@easynet.co.uk
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 11:29:05 +0600

>Many years ago I read a poem in Russian translation
>about a boy who found a mirror and showed it to a sailor,
>to a monk and to somebody else, and none of them
>recognized themselves. I don't remember the title
>and the author. the question is - was the poem by
>Robert Graves and what was its name? I need to know it.

The poem is by Robert Graves: it was first published in 'The Pier-Glass' (1921) and is called 'The Magical Mirror'.

Glinting on the roadway
A broken mirror lay:
Then what did the child say
Who found it there?
He cried there was a goblin
Looking out as he looked in --
Wild eyes and speckled skin,
Black, bristling hair!

The boys father, a sailor, sees:

"... a portrait aptly done
Of Admiral, the great Lord Nelson
When a young man."

However his wife sees yet another quite different image:

"Viper and fox," she cries,
"To trick me with such lies,
Who is this wench with the bold eyes?
Tell the full truth!"

Each person who looks into the broken mirror sees what they take to be an objective portrait of another, rather than a reflection of themselves. When the priest arrives on the scene,

Fresh marvels came to pass
"A saint of glory, by the Mass!
"Where got you this?"
He signed him with the good Sign,
Be sure the relic was divine,
He would fix it in a shrine
For pilgrims to kiss.

There the chapel folk who come
(Honest, some, and lewd, some),
See the saint's eyes and are dumb,
Kneeling on the flags.
Some see the Doubter Thomas,
And some Nathaniel in the glass,
And others whom but old Saint Judas
With his money bags?

I remember vividly a recent visit to the cathedral in Granada, where, in a side chapel, there were mirrors hanging from the walls, angled so that the supplicant before the icons could see his or her own kneeling image. This poem of course dates from before Graves' encounter with Spain; however it may be that Graves saw a similar arrangement of mirrors in a Catholic Church while in France during WW1, or even by a roadside shrine (possibly shot up: Graves refers to troops taking pot-shots at roadside shrines in 'Goodbye to All That'). The ordinary 'chapel folk' in the poem see less glamorous images in the mirror than the sailor and the priest. They: 'See the saint's eyes and are dumb,' and see themselves perhaps as Graves imagines they are, and not as they would prefer themselves to be.

This is one of Graves' lesser known poems, and it is interesting to know that it was translated into Russian some time ago. I think it deserves more attention.

Delivered-To: perlesvaus
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 15:47:49 -0400 (EDT)
From: mobydick@westerncanon.com
Subject: Lecture Hall Message 33
Reply-To: perlesvaus@easynet.co.uk

Subject: Re: In The Wilderness

: I'd like to get a short (if possible) interpretation or
: analysis of "In The Wilderness". I'd like to understand
: the poetry because I'm studying Samuel Barber's adaption
: of it in the Despite and Still song cycle.

'In the Wilderness' is an early poem, first published in "Over the Brazier" (1916). The poem has only thirty lines, and is one of Graves' most compact offerings. The versions published in "Over the Brazier" and in the "Selected Poems" (1986) differ very little in language and meaning, and the poem's structure remained unchanged. It repays the kind of close textual analysis which Graves (and his collaborator Laura Riding) introduced to literary criticism in the 1920s.

The notional subject of the poem appears to be Christ's sojourn in the Wilderness. I say 'notional subject', since the poem is not in any way a versification of the gospel accounts of the forty days: rather an exploration of the ideas of 'wilderness' and the 'cast out'.

The poem is in one stanza which can be broken down into three main sections. The first twelve lines tell of the wanderer in the wilderness addressing as equals those far from the centre of things: 'lost desert folk', the bitterns calling from 'ruined palace wall, ' and of 'communion with the she-pelican/Of lonely piety.'

The second section has eight lines, and describes the more disturbing creatures which 'flocked to his homilies,' the 'Basilisk, cockatrice.../With mail of dread device,/with monstrous barbed stings...

The final ten lines describe 'the guileless old scape-goat' which: 'Sure guard behind him kept'.

This poem requires knowledge of a great deal of external information if it is to be understood properly. For instance, the she-Pelican is a long-standing christian symbol: in the popular imagination of the middle ages the bird was reputed to wound its own breast in order to feed its young. The parallel with the wounding of Christ on the Cross for the redemption of man is not hard to see. St Jerome relates the story of 'the pelican restoring its young ones destroyed by serpents, and his own salvation by Christ'. One of Graves' favourite poets, John Skelton, penned the lines:

Then sayd the Pellycane,/When my byrdis be slayne/ With my bloude I them reuyue,/Scripture doth record/ The same dyd our Lord,/And rose from death to lyue

(From the 'Armoury of Birdis')

The cockatrice, like the basilisk, is a fabulous creature: it has the wings of a fowl, the tail of a dragon, and the head of a cock. In Isaiah chapter xi, verse 8, Isaiah says that: 'the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den', conveying that the weakest of God's creatures remains unharmed by the most unpleasant inhabitants of the creation. The cockatrice is perhaps a recollection of the fabulous animals which decorated the royal palaces of Assyria, and which were drawn from Mesopotamian mythology and ritual.

All the creatures in the poem are in some sense outcast, which binds them together.

Is the central figure Christ? The last part of the poem seems to make it clear that Jesus is intended:

The guileless old scapegoat;/For forty nights and days/ Followed in Jesus' ways/

However it is more likely that Graves' poem on the sojourn in the wilderness is a conflation of ideas, drawing perhaps on the story of the temptation of St Anthony (who 'followed in Jesus' ways'), as well as some aspects of his experiences in the First World War.

X-Sender: perlesvaus@mail.easynet.co.uk
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 23:00:15 +0000
Subject: Re: "Seven days in New Crete"

>I am an Italian university student. I am specializing in English
>literature at the University of Pescara, Italy and, for my thesis, I am
>preparing a study on Robert Graves' fiction... I have found this archive and I have
>thought to call for help. In a chapter of my thesis I have to tell about a Graves'
>novel, called "Seven days in New Crete", but in my country I was not able to
>find any news about it. It would be great to have some critical comments
>on this novel and any link it could have with another novel, called
>"1984" by George Orwell about the utopian thematic. I would be very happy
>if somebody paid attention to my help request. Thanks a lot, Alessandra.

Alessandra,

'Seven days in New Crete' is one of several works in which Graves explored his thesis that the original theological and social structures of the human race were matriarchal. In other words,that the principal divinity - in fact the only original divinity - was once 'The Goddess', and that, formerly, social organization had feminine characteristics, as contrasted with the 'masculine' social structures of the modern world.

The principal discussion of this thesis can be found in 'The White Goddess', first published in 1948. The idea first surfaced in 'The Golden Fleece'. It quickly dominated Graves thoughts, and 'The Golden Fleece' was put aside while Graves wrote the first draft of 'The White Goddess' (originally titled 'The Roebuck in the Thicket'). The matriarchial idea also plays a significant role in the novel 'King Jesus'. Graves translated Apuleius' 'Golden Ass' in the same decade, and Apuleius' work seems to have confirmed Graves in the belief that he was on the right track. The 'Goddess' is a key figure in Apuleius's novel, though in his work it is a specific goddess who is referred to (Isis), rather than 'The Goddess' of Graves' thesis.

The novel fits broadly into the category of science fiction, and explores a utopian future. Graves began planning a utopian novel in the summer of 1940 [see: Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess': 'Work in Hand', p18] whose ideas of social and political organisation were founded chiefly upon former ideas of Laura Riding which he hoped would eventually inspire a 'practical organization of decent people'. He told his son David of his idea for the novel: David was however not impressed, and said that 'any practical organization of decent people would be suppressed at once by the government' and that he thought it 'time this Western industrial civilization was ended'. Possbily because of this criticism, the novel was laid aside for nearly seven years.

New Crete is divided into kingdoms, but powers of the kings are 'entrusted to them by their queens'. The governing principle is a custom based 'not on a code of laws, but for the most part on the inspired utterances of poets' who receive the guidance of the Muse (the Goddess). The system is run by women who 'act directly on behalf of the Goddess'. Thus women are 'naturally' treated by men as the superior sex. RPG comments that:

'This is a society living in harmony with the natural world; and each individual is allocated to one of the 'five estates' not by birth but by capacity. Money has been abolished; different villages have different social customs, so that one may live in a monogamous, polygamous, or even polyandrous society and yet be perfectly virtuous; there are even 'bagnios', brothels which it is no disgrace to visit, and 'where one goes when one isn't in love with anyone in particular but feels unhappily lecherous'; while war has become ritulalized into a kind of moderately violent rugger, so that the only deaths, apart from those by natural causes, occur as part of the ritual of goddess-worship.' [Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess' p143-4].

'Seven Days in New Crete' is not in fact a serious utopia: its inhabitants are unhappy with its complacency and indifference: the New Cretans do not possess 'the quality that we prize as character: the look of indomitability which comes from dire experiences nobly faced and overcome'. Therefore the rulers have deliberately introduced 'a seed of trouble... since true love and wisdom spring only from calamity'. Graves novel is therefore anti-utopian.

On the face of it, there isn't much to connect Orwell's '1984' and Graves' utopian novel. They were both composed in the late 1940's, and both result from an anxiety about evident tendencies in the modern world. Orwell's literary sources included Wells, London, Huxley and Zamyatin (principally Zamyatin): I do not know whether or not Orwell read Graves' book. However both works are responses to the political and social dislocations of the early twentieth century. Both men wished for the creation of a new social order, but were rather pessimistic about the practicalities of this. Graves was particularly influenced by Laura Riding's ideas on politics and society during their time together, though afterwards he reacted against them: it is therefore interesting to speculate on the nature of 'Seven Days in New Crete' had Graves written it while still under the spell of Riding. It might have been whole-heartedly utopian in outlook.

Are there significant parallels between the novels? In both novels society is split up into different areas and levels, which have different rules of behaviour, as if they were autonomous societies: in Orwell's novel these are the 'zones of influence'; and in Graves' future society different areas of New Crete have different customs and mores. War has been ritualised in both societies: in '1984' it serves to underpin inequality and to soak up overproduction. Also, in both Orwell's and Graves' novels there is a social hierarchy: in '1984' membership of the oligarchy (the party) is presented as essentially non-hereditary - this is because the oligarchy's purpose is to preserve itself, rather than the families of its members; in 'Seven Days in New Crete' status is acquired on the basis of 'capacity'. Both societies continue because the ruling elite has the power to nominate its successors. Thus in both cases the society is totalitarian, in that all the reins of power are in the hands of a small oligarchic group, whatever the outward appearances of difference and diversity.

Both these novels owe a great deal to the circumstances of their creation, and looking at the context of their creation is probably the best way to make useful comparisons.

To: < perlesvaus@easynet.co.uk>
Subject: My name and I by Robert Graves
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 12:16:12 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300

>I am a college freshman and we are discussing
>'My Name and I' by Robert Graves.
>I was wondering if you could tell me what the poem
>is about and why he wrote it.
>I think it has something to do with identity
>and the community.
>
>Thank you for your time.

This is an interesting poem to take apart, but I won't spoil the pleasure of it by doing the whole thing for you. Instead I will look at the apparent theme of the poem, and suggest how you might unpick the real one.

To name something is different from having knowledge of that thing. Robert Graves, like everyone else, had no choice in his naming. His surname, as he says, was 'an honourable bequest' from his male ancestry, handed down according to the custom, very much in the same way as 'Georgian silver and the rest'. Christened 'Robert', the name bears only as much relation to his 'I' as what his parents '...guessed ... When first they peered' at him. His 'I was always I, illegal and unknown,' yet the Law 'enrolled a name' for his use, irrespective of what that use might be.

It looks as though the poem is a meditation on the difference between name and substance. However the tone and language in the fifth stanza points to the real subject. Here Graves' normal precision in language is replaced with what might be read as the rather cliched and overblown use of language associated with the social class to which he belonged. This is the language of his parents, recalled in the third stanza:

...see that Robert Graves behaves,/Whether with honest men or knaves,/Exemplarily well.

He says in the fifth stanza that he

...cannot well repudiate/this noun, this natal star,/ This gentlemanly self, this mate/So kindly forced on me by fate.

But Graves, like anyone else in England, could have changed his name with the sanction of the Law, if he so chose. It was not the inexorable burden of a legal system which forced Robert Graves to live forever with that name, but another, less tangible, but no less powerful force. Evidence of the real reasons for remaining yoked to his name are scattered throughout the poem.

The text repays close reading, and will yield up what you need. Outside the text, you might investigate if Graves really stuck to his given name throughout his career, or if this is just a necessary presumption for the purpose of the poem. It is also worth digging around to see if Graves knew anyone who had chosen to live life under another name.

The poem was published in Poems and Satires (1951), and is available in the Selected Poems, edited by Paul O'Prey in 1986 (currently in print).

***

Page first mounted 6 March 1999.

special collections related sites prose poetry	major sites graves criticism bibliography fringe sites	conferences and events booksellers lists biography audio	archived files discussion lists digitization Archive updates

Page updated 13 November 1999

Home Page | Email the Archive