Robert Graves: the Love Poems by Ian Parks

English Association Bookmarks No. 53

English Association Bookmarks Number 53

Robert Graves: the Love Poems by Ian Parks Scope of Topic The purpose of this Bookmark is to introduce readers to the poetry of Robert Graves (18891985) by suggesting some approaches to the love poems on which his reputation as a poet rests. Equally respected as a novelist, critic, and mythographer, Graves always considered poetry to be his ‘principal calling’ and the love poems - the product of a lifetime’s dedication to the craft of poetry - his finest achievement. And, in the years since his death, critical opinion seems to agree. In this Bookmark certain elements from Graves’ biography together with his idiosyncratic theories about the sources of poetic inspiration will be examined in an attempt to encourage an appreciation of the poems themselves. Books to Read Robert Graves: Selected Poems (Penguin) Notes

Love, begins one of Robert Graves’ most striking and best-known poems, is a universal migraine, / A bright stain on the vision / Blotting out reason. This realistic, some would say

cynical attitude towards the idea of romantic love might, at first glance, appear to be somewhat at odds with our general expectations about the nature of conventional love poetry. In fact, it makes us question whether we are reading conventional love poetry at all. Yet Symptoms of love, which by its very title treats romantic love as a malady, is in many ways typical of Graves’ characteristic approach to the love poem. The unflinching posture adopted by the poet and the resigned tone we encounter in this poem show just how unwilling Graves was to take love or, for that matter, love poetry at face value. When reading the love poetry of Robert Graves we should expect to be surprised and entertained. This is because he has a tendency to view the love poem as not merely a vehicle for expressing unqualified praise for a ‘significant other’ but as a means of exploring a phenomenon that most of us, at some time or other, have experienced. And it is in this area of common experience that the love poem works. That is not to say that Graves’ love poems are entirely subversive: on the contrary they also present a view of romantic love which celebrates its unique qualities and its power to transform lives.

By the time Graves came to write Symptoms of Love he had survived the horrors of the Great War although officially reported as dying of wounds) and, like many others of his generation continued to carry the scars of that experience into later life. He became bitterly disillusioned with modern society and was constantly haunted by the memory of the suffering he had witnessed as a captain in the British army. While Graves wrote a handful of poems in direct response to his experience of trench warfare he is in no sense to be considered as a war poet in the same way as his contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sassoon who sought to change public opinion by their graphic representations of what was happening on the Western Front. Yet any understanding of Graves’ subsequent career as a poet needs to be rooted in an understanding of the impact this conflict had on him: the War is not a subject for Graves’ mature poetry but its effects can be seen wherever we look. It is important for us to acknowledge, for instance, that the symptoms of shell-shock such as nightmares, paranoia, and hallucinations all recur in Graves’ poetry and provide him with some of his most striking and memorable images. In early poems such as The Pier Glass Graves presents the reader with images of haunting, exhaustion, fear, and loss of faith. While others who had experienced the War sought for an answer in organised religion or © English Association and Ian Parks, 2007

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conventional politics, Graves turned increasingly to poetry and the regenerative power of romantic love as a solution for his own problems, seeing in them the beginnings of a healing process which others might share. And, for all its posturing about love’s incapacity to change anything except our Perception of life, Symptoms of Love ends with the resigned question: Could you endure such grief / At any hand but hers? That is, love might not provide us with the perfect answer - but with an answer we can at least live by. ‘I had, by the age of twenty-three’, writes Graves in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, ‘been born, initiated into formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame, and been killed.’ Anyone wanting to understand Graves’ love poetry in relation to the context of his biography is directed towards this candid, fast-moving and engaging account of his life up to the age of thirty-five. It also contains one of the most harrowing and accurate descriptions of the stark realities of trench warfare as experienced by Graves as a captain on the Western Front. The other major approach is through Graves’ enduring interest in myth and classical history - something which preoccupied him throughout his long and productive life as a writer; and we should be careful not to allow ourselves as new readers of Graves to be intimidated by the unfamiliarity of the subjects or their reputation for being difficult or dull. They occupy a central place in Graves’ poetic imagination. His two famous novels about Roman history, I Claudius and Claudius the God are both very readable, providing a psychological insight into the period which makes them attractive to the modern reader; while his splendid version of The Greek Myths is actively concerned with bringing its ancient subject-matter vividly to life. However, as we have seen, Graves’ true calling was as a poet and, as such he came to consider his other activities as being of secondary importance to this central role. For Graves, then, the love poem performs a special function: it reaffirms our faith in others and offers a partial solution to the problems of living in a ravaged, ‘modern’ society in which personal relationships are difficult to sustain. Graves was always careful - some would say too careful - to cover his poetic tracks by not linking his love poems to specific individuals; and in this we can trace something of his upbringing as an English Gentleman. This often means that the love poems have a tendency to become generalised; that the poet appears to be withholding from the reader some significant details which, if it were revealed, might serve to ‘explain’ the poem. In many ways, however, this characteristic is what makes Graves’ love poems so distinctive: he has an ability to transcend the particular circumstances of a relationship and preserve its essential quality. Perhaps the most significant relationship of Graves’ life as a writer was his association with the American poet Laura Riding and, while this is not the place for a discussion of the circumstances which produced the love poems it is important not to underestimate Riding’s influence on Graves and on his developing theory of poetic inspiration. The best way to approach Graves as a love poet is to look fairly closely at a handful of poems which demonstrate something of his range; and for this purpose we will discuss three poems - Apple island, Counting the Beats, and The Face in the Mirror - all of which are concerned with love but which also seek to extend the territory of the conventional love poem. In Apple Island two of Graves’ recurring themes are evident: his interest in myth and his inherent idealism. Myth was important to Graves for several reasons, but as a poet it connected him with past civilisations and also provided him with a series of shared images which could be adapted and explored. The very title of Apple Island alerts the reader to the importance of myth in the poem. The Welsh word for ‘apple’ is ‘afal’ (pronounced ‘aval’) and is the source of Avalon - the magical island where King Arthur was taken to recover from his mortal wound. The connections here between the wounding experience of the Great War and the restorative potential of love are obvious. Apple Island, then, is a place where a stricken person can retreat to in order to find healing and fulfilment. But it is also a dangerous place. This is emphasised by the reference to the halfed apple from your holy tree which reminds the reader of the Jewish creation myth of Genesis where the first woman Eve persuades Adam to eat fruit from the Tree of Life, thereby bringing about the Fall and the © English Association and Ian Parks, 2007

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introduction of sin and death into the world. This effect - which centres on the paradox of life and death, security and danger - is typical of the sort of tension Graves builds into his poems by making reference to myth. His idealism, however, is less complicated. For all of us, islands are often perceived as representations of a place that is removed from the restraints and conventions of society where individuals can invent their own rules in an alternative world. These ‘built-in’ associations with escape and isolation are exploited by Graves in order to emphasis the unique and self-contained world that is created when two people share an intense relationship. Apple Island is at one and the same time a real and an unreal place; a place of myth and a place inhabited by real lovers. Graves’ skill as poet is demonstrated by the way in which he is able to exert control over the poem, holding these disparate elements together, and ending with the powerful image of sharing as implied by the invitation to eat of the fruit. All of this is conveyed in one long sentence which spans the four stanzas, carefully modulated and controlled in one long sentence which spans the four stanzas, carefully modulated and controlled and ending with a question for which there appears to be no satisfactory answer. In marked contrast to Apple Island, Counting the Beats avoids recourse to myth while drawing its images from real experience which, as we have seen, is quite unusual for Graves. In many ways Counting the Beats is the ‘purest’ of the three love poems under consideration here in that it recreates a situation common to most lovers: uncertainty about the future. Graves suggests that time, beautifully represented as being connected to the beating of the human heart, will eventually bring the relationship to an end - either by the indifference which can arise through familiarity, the possibility of one lover leaving for another person, and, inevitably the severance brought about by death. The poem itself seems to be poised and suspended, reflecting the transitory state the lovers are in. Graves uses the natural beating of the heart as the rhythm for the poem and develops it through a series of intricate repetitions to build up to the final stanza: Counting the beats, Counting the slow heart beats, The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats, Wakeful they lie. The real test of any lyric poem must rest on its inability to be subjected to paraphrase; and here Graves merges the form of the poem so inextricably with the content that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. The reader is made to experience the hesitant, yearning quality implicit in the situation and to share the lovers’ doubts and apprehensions. This is deservedly one of Graves’ most anthologised poems.

The Face in the Mirror does not appear at first reading to be a love poem at all, but rather a

detailed examination of a personality through the way in which the speaker’s face appears to him while shaving. The unflinching quality we have come to expect from Graves is nowhere so evident as in this poem where he presents his own features in a painfully honest and decidedly unflattering way. From its arresting opening - Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring / From wide, uneven orbits - we are immediately aware of an individual voice, and of a real person behind that voice addressing the reader. Graves goes on to catalogue his features and somehow manages to convey something of his character through his outwards appearance. He makes reference, for instance, to his participation in the Great War when he draws the reader’s attention to a missile fragment still inhering but immediately dismisses it in a casual, offhand manner, as a foolish record of old-world fighting. Similarly, his private education is hinted at by the mention of his Crookedly broken nose caused by low tackling in a rugby match at school. The whole poem has a disarming, arresting quality which draws the reader into complicity with the poet. Not until the final three lines of the poem, however, is the reader made aware of the point behind Graves’ unrelenting self-scrutiny. How can someone so old, asks Graves, and with so much experience of the difficulties of life, still expect to find romantic love? He stands with razor poised and asks himself why

© English Association and Ian Parks, 2007

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English Association Bookmarks Number 53

He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption, To court the queen in her high silk pavillion. The last line of The Face in the Mirror with its unequivocal reference to the queen in her high silk pavillion should serve to remind us of the importance to Graves of the Muse as the source of inspiration for his poems. No discussion of Graves’ love poetry can ignore the importance to him of this central idea which he went on to develop fully in his book The White Goddess. For our purposes, it is enough to accept that Graves believed that the sources of poetic inspiration originated from an idealised, female figure who had exerted her influence over true poetry from its beginnings in the earliest civilisations and operated through the poetry of Graves himself and other ‘true’ poets like him. As in many other cases of poetic theory, the notion is there primarily for the poet and not necessarily for that poet’s audience. While an awareness and understanding of Graves’ view of the sources of poetic insight and inspiration will obviously help readers to come to a fuller understanding of his work it is, as Graves himself would have said, by no means necessary. For all his posturing there is something genuine behind Graves’ search for the wellsprings of poetry. He maintained throughout his career as a poet that he was sustained by an unshakable belief in ‘the almost practical impossibility of love continuing between a man and a woman’. And that, for his audience, must remain the enduring appeal of Robert Graves’ work, Philip Larkin, a poet as unlike Graves as anyone could imagine wrote that What will survive of us is love. What survives of Robert Graves the poet is his sustained attempt to articulate for his readers the unique experience of romantic love and to affirm it in a language that is at once both beautiful and memorable. Further Reading Robert Graves: Collected Poems (Cassell) Robert Graves: I Claudius and Claudius the God (Penguin) Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That (Penguin) Robert Graves: The White Goddess (Faber) Criticism Richard Perceval Graves: Robert Graves and the White Goddess (Weidenfield and Nicolson) Martyn Seymour-Smith: Robert Graves: His Life and Work (Abacus) © The English Association and Ian Parks, 2007

Robert Graves: the Love Poems by Ian Parks is Number 53 in the Bookmark series, published by The English Association University of Leicester University Road Leicester LE1 7RH UK Tel: 0116 252 3982 Fax: 0116 252 2301 Email: [email protected] Potential authors are invited to contact the following at the address above: Series Editor Victor Hext Shakespeare Bookmarks Kerri Corcoran-Martin

© English Association and Ian Parks, 2007

Primary Bookmarks Louise Ellis-Barrett

Secondary Bookmarks Ian Brinton

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