The Lunatic 

The temporary writing of poetry by normal single-track

minds is most common in youth when the sudden realization of

sex, its powers and its limited opportunities for satisfactory

expression, turns the world upside down for any sensitive boy

or girl. Wartime has the same sort of effect. I have definite

evidence for saying that much trench poetry written during the

late war was the work of men not otherwise poetically inclined,

and that it was very frequently due to an insupportable conflict between suppressed instincts of love and fear; the officer's actual love which he could never openly show, for the boys he

commanded, and the fear, also hidden under a forced gaiety, of

the horrible death that threatened them all. (On English Poetry 37-8)

We can all in reflection see in our own lives the accuracy of this observation, for those who will spend their lives with poetry and those who found poetry only a fleeting answer.

Disguised by the persona who is not "poetically inclined," this passage succintly categorizes the poetry Graves published in Over the Brazier and indicates why it lacks the immediacy and power not only of his later poetry but also why the poems Graves wrote during the War express neither the horror nor the outrage that characterize the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. That Graves was younger than these fellow poets is significant, but moreso he had never had either the necessity or occasion to understand his own self or values. He accepted the Victorian world of his parents so well imagined by Stevenson in Dr. Jeckyll, the scientist who respects the proprieties of his society. Robert worked for his prizes, accepted the course he would follow from public school to university, accepted the public schoolboy's love for another boy, accepted the bullying and discrimination so much a part of the public school. In brief, he accomodated himself to the world in which he lived, a world of unquestioned cause and effect. If the great Queen ruled the Empire, Aristotle ruled the minds of her subjects: Reason and predictability were the essence of reality. And the task of the poet was to sing, without irony, of a world in which all is right, in which the past succumbs reasonably to the future, "lest one good order spoil the world," to quote from the dying words of Tennyson's Arthur. For such poets as had tamed the Romantic's awe, Nature was predicably tame as an English garden filled with Georgian poets, scones, and tea. The woods were green, the air was sweet, the sounds were gentle and melodious. At night arose "The Jolly Yellow Moon":

Oh, now has faded from the West

A sunset red as wine,

And beast and bird are hushed to rest

When the jolly yellow moon doth shine.

(Over the Brazier 10)

The schoolboy's watered-down Romanticism and Victorian diction indicate the necessity for Edward Marsh and the Georgians: English poetry was bankrupt. Yet never would it abandon the circumscribed reality of the priviledged classes: the public school, the university commons under an English sky, and often the regimental mess.

In retrospect, the Georgian world is for us as Graves saw it after he had become an "Edwardian": a retreat from the mechanized hell of World War I and its progeny, the inhumanity of a mass-produced culture: quote from survey.

When I visited Graves in Deya, I saw the indelible mark that the culture of the Georgians left. With only the most necessary exceptions, Graves would only allow handmade objects in his house.

However unconsiciously, Graves's psyche and poetic during the War and the twenties articulated a conflict that rejected the answers of the Georgians just as much as those of his father. Still the schoolboy with an "unerotic" crush on a younger boy, Graves was a soldier in a war no one could describe. But he was becoming a different poet:

I've watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow

In the fields between La Brassee and Bethune;

Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,

Red poppy floods of June,

August, and yellowing Autumn, so

To Winter nights knee-deep in mud and snow,

And you've been everything.

Dear, you've been everything that I most lack

In these soul-deadening trenches--picutres, books,

Music, the quiet of an English wood,

Beautiful comrade-looks,

The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,

The borad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,

And Peace, and all that's good. (Over The Brazier 30)

The traces of Keats would come naturally from Graves's education, and he carried with him at this time a copy of the Everyman edition of The Poems of John Keats, inscribed by his father "To Robbie R. Graves" and given to his son in 1915. This poem pitiably clings to the illusion that he and the boy he referred to as "Dick" had a pure and courtley love. Later, Graves would see this kind of idealistic homosexuality as destructive in ways an actual physical relationship could not be. In this poem, Graves and his lover exist in a past that is not only irrelevant to his life in the trenches but, as he found out, based on deceit: Dick was arrested for sexually soliciting a soldier. Although Miranda Seymour does not agree, I think that Graves was as innocent and deluded as he describes himself in Good-Bye To All That. Heterosexual, he lived only in a single sex society until he married Nancy Nicholson. Public schools and then the army provided opportunity for any form of sexual experience, yet he claims he was a virgin until he married. The persona of "1915" appears again in "Familiar Letter to Sigfried Sassoon" (1916). He anticipates the idealized life he and Sassoon will share after the war, a life of poetry writing and childish travel:

Perhaps eventually we'll get

Among the Tartars of Thibet,

Hobnobing with the Changs and Mings,

And doing wild, trememdous things

In free adventure, quest and fight,

And God! what poetry we'll write!

"Naive" or "innocent" seem fitting to describe the persona of this poem, not "dissolute", not "erotic". Graves seems to have been unaware of or unconcerned with Sassoon's homosexuality. As with the poem to Dick, this one is quite childish, not even adolescent, in creating and clinging to stories an adolescent with any experience of the world would be too self-conscious to write.

Graves held to these childish fantasies to protect himself from the grisly reality of the War. But in "1915" being "knee-deep in snow and mud" interrupted his imaginary world. "Familiar Letter to Sigfried Sassoon" is completed without discord or interuption, but Graves ends it with "Fragment included at the end of this letter":

...to-day I found in Mametz wood

A certain cure for lust of blood,

Where propped against a shattered trunk

In a great mess of things unclean

Sat a dead Boche: he scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green:

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard. Poems (1914-1926) 56-57)

As much as anyone's, Graves's childhood and youth were the stuff of A Child's Garden of Verses, and such horrors as these were not found under a child's bed, in the corners of the nursery, or on the playing fields of Charterhouse.

In that volume of Keats's poetry Graves carried with him to France, he wrote early drafts of poems. Three of them he published together in Over the Brazier with the title "(Nursery Memories)": "I.--The First Funeral," "II.--The Adventure," and "III.--I Hate the Moon". The first has the note beneath the title: "(The first corpse I saw was on the German wires, and couldn't be buried)". The poem recalls when he and his sisters found a dead dog with a swollen belly, like that of the Boche in the fragment attached to his letter to Sassoon; but the end of the dog is very different from that of the Boche and the dead man on the German barbed war barricades:

"You bury all dead people,

When they're quite really dead,

Round churches with a steeple:

Let's bury this," Rose said.

"And let's put mint all round it

To hide the nasty smell."

I went to look and found it--

Lots, growing near the well.

We poked him through the clover

Into a hole, and then

We threw brown earth right over

And said: "Poor dog, Amen!" (24)

The second tells of a boy who kills a tiger outside his shack, though the body disappears, presumed to have been dragged home by its mate. The note to this poem gives its source: "(Suggested by the claim of a machine-gun team to have annihilated an enemy wire party: no bodies were ever found however)". Graves's retreat into a nursery tale, though, is incomplete:

But, anyhow, I killed him by the shack.

'Cause--listen!--when we hunted in the wood

My brother found my pointed stone all black

With the clotted blood. (25)

The detail of the "clotted blood" would come from battle, not from the nursery. In the third of the nursery memories, Graves is unable to escape from his present to the idealized past of the nursery. He explains in his note that "III.--I Hate The Moon" was written (After a moonlight patrol near the Brickstacks). No nursery memory or tale draws him away from the terror he felt under the glare of the moon while crossing No Man's Land:

I like the stars, and especially the Big Bear

And the W star, and one like a diamond ring,

But I hate the moon and its horrible stony stare,

And I know one day it'll do me some dreadful thing. (26)

The moon is an emblem, or icon, here that has lost its earlier "jolly" cast. Later, the moon goddess will inspire in Graves the same sense of threat; and he may well recall in her face the moon over France. In "I Hate the Moon," he executes a personal and simplistic restoration of meaning to an icon he had come to believe had been misinterpreted. Throughout his writing, Graves would correct the misinterpretation he called "iconotropy," the intentional misinterpreting of an icon's real (i.e., traditional or original) values.

He lets the stars remain benign, needing some touchstone, some memory to keep the sound and feel of war from becoming his only reality. Although no one then understood the effects of long periods of unrelieved battle, the necessity for peace and quiet after battle is clear in Graves's poems:

After a week spent under raining skies,

In horror, mud and sleeplessness, a week

Of bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries

And the ever-watchful sniper: where the reek

Of death offends the living...but poor dead

Can't sleep, must lie awake with the horrid sound That roars and whirs and rattles overhead

All day, all night, and jars and tears the ground;

And the dying whisper: "Parapet's too low,

Collect those bodies..quick..build them up there!"

And then one night relief comes, and we go

Miles back into the sunny cornland where

Babies like tickling, and where tall white horses

Draw the plough liesurely in quiet courses. (22)

Because of its linear narrative and attention to detail, this poem seems more a record of Graves's experiences than the nursery recollections, those bruises of battles. But the title of this poem suggests that he does not believe he can ever live as he had before: "Limbo". Caught between Heaven and Hell, he has no hope for redemption. His Hell is battle, and the only Heaven he knows is a past to which he can not return, which may never have existed. The images of the last three lines are like memories of illustrations in a book read in the nursery, distant and idealized.

The three poems gathered together as "Nursry Memories" do not separate the images of peace and war as do "1915" and "Limbo"; they do not offer an idealized world as a resting place for the bruised psyche. Instead, the trauma of war has resonances in his childhood. After talks with Rivers, Graves discussed poetry and dream as having manifest and hidden meanings. In these three poems, the hidden meaning is that childhood held horrors, real or imagined, that battle and shell-shock forced him to recall.

Six years later in Country Sentiment, Robert's anxiety and trauma had not lessened, though Rivers had predicted they would when the threat of war was ended. The reasons the terror remained are tangled as "A First Review," the last poem in Country Sentiment, notes but does not explain:

Are here descreetly blent;

My Country Sentiment. (104)

Here Graves clearly equates the traumas of childhood, war, and love. Most troubling is to look for the common denominators: helplessness and violence. Both color much of his writing, and he works to accomodate their presence.

Though Robert had left the optimism and jingoism of the Victorians in the trenches, he had not left his loyalty to his comrades there. He held as well to a much less definable loyalty: "Poor fool, knowing too well deep in his heart/That he'll be ready again if urgent orders come" (89). This is Robert's explanation to his daily terrors, to being "Haunted":

Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,

Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing

And lay ghosts hands on everything

But leave the noonday's warm sunshine

To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,

Strangers assume your phantom faces,

You grin at me from daylight places,

Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet

Dead men down the morning street. (82)

Graves was one of many who saw the streets of home littered with the bodies of their comrades, who saw the faces of the dead walking on the bodies of the living. The manifest, rational, reason for what he calls haunting is that war could come again. If so, he would go as he tried to do in 1940. He had left behind big words such as "duty" and "patriotism": but he remained a Welch Fusillier proud of being called "Captain Graves" and forever a celbrant of his comrades:

Here they lie who once learned here

All that is taught of hurt or hear;

Dead, but by free will they died.

They were true men, they had pride.

His reasons are similar to those of Siegfried Sassoon, known to his men as Mad Jack, who was saved from the triviality of cricket and hunting by the war; but for Graves life began rather than ended in the trenches. In war, he discovered not only comradeship and his natural ability for strategy but a doorway into the unknown, into a reality not ordered by reason and predictability. Such understanding did not come during battle, though, but was "recollected in tranquility," in the English countryside during a time of peace, when so many stimulii could take away the quiet and the peace as when:

Four collier lads from Ebbow Vale

Took shelter from a shower of hail,

And there beneath a spreading tree

Attuned their mouths to harmony. (96)

They sang the Welsh song, "Sospan Fach (The Little Saucepan), which Graves had last heard "With Fusiliers in Mametz Wood":

Fierce burned the sun, yet cheeks were pale,

For ice hail they had leaden hail;

In that fine forest green and big,

There stayed unbroken not one twig. (97)

Graves's memory of war in Country Sentiment brings a terror only suggested by the poems he wrote during battle. So stunned by the experience, he had clung to reason lest he lose it, had clung to the past lest the present become all, had clung to dreams when reality was nightmarish.

Because the dreams and memories of war would not leave him, Graves followed them and found other dragons he probably thought were long since abandoned with the toys of the nursery and the demons who lived under the bed and in the closets. With Dr. Rivers as his Virgil, Graves went into the hidden world of the unconscious. The images of war mingle with those of childhood and with those of love and sex, which a reconstructured Freudian such as Rivers would see as inevitable.

Again, on the level of manifest meaning, Graves saw in the war the abuse of both children and women and brought them literally into poems

"Give us Peace, Peace." said the peoples oppressed,

"Not so many Flags

Not so many Flags."

But the Flags fly and the Drums beat, denying rest,

And the children starve, they shiver in rags. (39)

Such a poem W.H. Auden (who so admired Graves) may have read and remembered when he wrote in "The Dictator": "When he scowled the little children died in the streets". The stories and poems have a grim similarity of flags and armies of the dispossessed until World War I made the horror inescapable, though in the above lines from "Give Us Rain" Graves describes a war that could have been fought in Homer's Troy or the United Nation's Bosnia. In all, mothers have cautioned their daughters to avoid soldiers and fathers have slapped their sons on the back.

But as Rivers observed, the 1914 war, the first war of the Machine Age, produced thousands of mental casualties and gave modern psychiatry its first large-scale opportunity to test and develop its theories. Granted that the surgeons practiced their trade, but they had established techniques and tested theories for a long time. This war was a first for the world and for psychiatry, as Graves probably discovered on reflection or in nightmare, both of which led him back to the nursery. There he first found terror and comfort. The comfort came from his mother, over-protective though she was. As have many, he seems to have thought himself better served by a proxy, by someone who needed to give care as much as he needed to receive it:

By Neux-les-mines

Lived old Adelphine,

Withered and clean,

She nodded and smiled,

And used me like a child.

How that old trot beguiled

My leisure with her chatter,

Gave me a china platter

Painted with Cherubin

And mottoes on the rim.

But when insstead of thanks

I gave her francs

How her pride was hurt! (101-2)

Unlike his own mother, Adelphine shared the War with him, not the homefront. Such descriptive passages give us Graves in place, withdrawing from the present to the momentary comfort of a mother, to a fictitious childhood. He needed her comfort and more when the nightmares of war opened the nursery door.

Even in Country Sentiment, Graves advises his readers to look for the less obvious meanings of seemingling trivial rhymes. As he would later with the riddles of Taliesin, so now with nursery tales, which in "To E.M.--A Ballad Of Nursery Rhyme," he traces back to the shepherd boy Tom whose primitive tales were polished and emended by his sister Kate:

Yet as when Time with stealthy tread

Lays the rich garden waste

The woodland berry ripe and red

Fails not in scent and taste,

So these same rhymes shall still be told

To children yet unborn,

While false philosophy growing old

Fades and is killed by scorn. (74-5)

Though he would fall under the influence of philosopers and philosophic systems from Rivers to Riding, his constant guide was what had been packed in the salt of time and tradition and came to him with his mother's milk.

The connections Graves made between the battlefield and the nursery are, clearly, of two kinds: observations of the effect of war on children and associations between terror he felt in the nursery and on the battlefield. In the first, he recalls scenes in which children, and women, are injured as in "Give Us Rain" from Country Sentiment:

GIVE US RAIN

"Give us Rain, Rain," said the bean and the pea.

"Not so much Sun,

Not so much Sun."

But the Sun smiles bravely and encouraginly,

An no rain falls and no waters run.

"Give us Peace, Peace," said the peoples oppressed,

"Not so many Flags,

Not so many Flags."

But the Flags fly and the Drums beat, denying rest

And the children starve, they shiver in rags. (39)

As Graves undoubtedly did, we must feel pity for these children and we must, as well, recognize that such abuses will continue as long as there are wars, as long as children are helpless. But our response is aroused not by the poem, but images apart from the poem of children starving, victims of wars and neglect. The poem itself does not arouse such feelings; the images are simply codes for an experience other that what the poem offers.

"Country At War", a consciously Georgian poem, evokes deeper and more complex emotions than is usually true of Graves's war poems. The poem begins as soldier in France asks: "And what of home--how goes it boys,/While we die here in stench and noise?" (94). The reply to this predictable question is specific and detailed and ends in the nursery:

Children play at shop,

Warm days, on the flat boulder-top,

With wildflower coinage, and the wares

Are bits of glass and unripe pears.

Crows perch upon the backs of sheep,

The wheat goes yellow: women reap,

Autumn winds ruffle brook and pond,

Flutter the hedge and fly beyond,

So the first things of nature run,

And stand not still for any one,

Contemptuous of the distant cry

Wherewith you harrow earth and sky.

And high French clouds, praying to be

Back, back in peace beyond the sea,

Where nature with accustomed round

Sweeps and garnishes the ground

With kindly beauty, warm or cold--

Alternate seasons never old:

Heathen, how furiously you rage,

Cursisng the blood and brimstone age,

How furiously against your will

You kill and kill again, and kill:

And thought of peace behind you cast,

Till like small boys with fear agast,

Each cries for God to understand,

"I could not help it, it was my hand". (94-5)

Graves does not need to add "under an English sky," in the manner of Brooke. The little England of the Georgians is clear and predictable, but the ending troubles with what is probably a reference to Lear's "like flies to wanton boys, they kill us for their sport," as he looks for causes to his troubles in the will of his gods. Graves sees violence indigenous to humanbeings and strongly indicates that not only does he regard the will to violence as stronger than human resolve, but places human awareness of the condition in childhood. This poem, though, is schocking because of the contrast between the idealized childhood of summer play that is refocused into anger intensive enough to make the child a killer, a view Graves might not have recognized had he not fought in the Grreat War. Reflecting on Charterhouse, Graves acknowledged the cruely of his classmates and his own capacity for violence; but even in Good-Bye To All That, he did not equate them with the violence of war. Probably he was kept from such a conclusion by his own ties to a little England, one which he never completely abandoned, inspite of his celebrated good-bye.

The throes of marriage and parenthood did not make him more ameloriative in accomdating his present life to that ideal past. He does, though, continue his practice of escapist verse, as in "The Land of Whipperginny":

Come closer yet, sweet honeysuckle, my coney, O my Jinny.

With a low sun gilding the bloom of the wood,

Be this Heaven, be it Hell, or the Land of Whipperginny,

It lies in a fairy lustre, it savours most good.

Then stern proud psalms from the chapel on the moors

Waver in the night wind, their firm rhythm broken,

Lugubriously twisted to a howling of whores

Or lent and airy glory too strange to be spoken. (17)

The poem begins as a poem for his daughter Jinny's amusement and delight but quickly reveals the source Graves gave between title and poem: "('Heaven or Hell or Whipperginny.'--Nashe's Jack Wilton)".

Though the second stanza of "The Land of Whipperginny" was inappropriate for his "sweet honeysuckle" (then age six), the poem does not seem to have been written for her but instead about the unease in a parent's mind as he reflects on the life he has helped into existence. Still ridden by the death he saw and barely escaped, Graves cannot write unwaveringly of a happy land nor can he accept full responsibility for bringing children into a world where violence so quickly dismisses comfort and joy. "The Children of Darkness" attributes the procreative drive to the desire of children to be born, not in desire of the parents for the erotic or to see themselves writ small:

We spurred our parents to the kiss

Though doubfully they shrank from this--

Day had no courage to review

What lusty dark alone might do--

Then were we joined from their caress

In heat of midnight, one from two.

This night-seed know no discontent,

In certitude his changings went;

Though there were veils about his face,

With forethought, evento that pent place,

Down towards the light his way he bent

To kingdoms of more ample space.

Was Day prime error, that regret

For darkness roars unstifled yet?

That in this freedom, by faith won,

Only acts of doubt are done?

That unveiled eyes with tears are wet,

They loathe to gaze upon the sun? (14)

When Freud first wrote his paper on "Hysteria in Women," he asserted not only that sexual abuse was the primary cause but that he had been sexually abused by his father. Meeting a cool reception from his peers, he then placed the blame on the child and christened the now familiar Oedipus Complex. In a most predictable manner, Graves places the responsibility for conception on the child rather than on parents who "shrank" from intimacy. That the child lives to be born as well is not the responsibility of the parents but on the resonance of the night that drove them to sex and on the sanctity of that union. The parents in this published draft seem more sinned against than sinning.

Of the eleven extant drafts of this poem, only what I assume to be the last three (very similar) drafts have the title "The Children of Darkness;" and only one other closely resembles them, though with the title "Error". The earlier drafts and titles are much darker and indicate that Graves was not only concerned with the meaning of marriage, but with the significance of life. Discarded titles for this poem are "Darkness and Birth," "The Dark Birth," "Suicide's Philosophy of Birth," and "Philosophy of Suicide". I assume this to be the final draft of the early version:

We pricked them to embrace,

And they each other knew,

So in her warm dark we together drew.

We changed to I, I of most ancient race

Then I, joy's child, knowing no discontent

With certitude about my business went;

Fancying means & use in that close place

Down to the light I grew

But light proved error; soul's regret

For friendly darkness roars unstifled yet.

The early drafts have only the one persona, that of the embryo. The introduction of a second persona, one who reflects on the embryo's existence, changes neither the darkness of the poem nor the despair of the narrator. But in adding the second persona, Graves takes the poem out of the terror of the child approaching life to provide an expiation for the parent who brings a child into such a world.

In the early version, Graves has withdrawn again to childhood, seeking sanctuary from the trauma of adulthood. As in the nursery poems, he does not find peace of mind. Instead, what frightened him in the outer world echoes in his sanctuary. Recalling the poem "I Hate The Moon," we can easily imagine soldiers drawing back into the protection of the darkness, knowing that they will be forced into the light. Even the "roaring darkness" is preferable to being in the light, which leaves them no place to hide. That the darkness is "roaring" yet safe indicates the degree to which Graves's (or anyone's) ordinary understanding of a sanctuary has changed.

A world of sound has replaced the predictable quietness in the poems of Keats he carried in his pocket during the war. The poems he wrote on the blank pages of that volume are made horrifying rather than ironic by their context. Keats's beautiful lady was awful, inspiring depair and terror in all:

and no birds sing

Though this passage could describe the aftermath of a battle, normal human referents are still present, not reversed as they were in Graves's war. Such disorientation as Graves and his comrades experienced made whatever remained of the normal past desireable. As did so many others, Graves would find that marriage and the family as they had been for his parents were not possible. Understandably, thoughts of death and suicide would occur as he watched, and participated in, the creation of new life. Such connections would not be made in a reasonable and predictable mind, but Graves was recording the accumulation of the irrational, of associations. To understand his poetic, we must move from manifest to hidden meanings. In "Children of Darkness," we move from pity to terror.

Graves, as expressed in "Author's Note," considered Whipperginny a watershed volume:

The Pier Glass, a volume which followed Country Sentiment,

similarly contains a few pieces continuing the mood of this year, a desire to escape a painful war neurosis into an Arcadia

of amatory fancy, but the prevailing mood of The Pier Glass is

agressive and disciplinary, under the stress of the same neurosis, rather than escapist. Whipperginny for a while continues so, but in most of the later pieces will be found

evidences of a greater detachment in the poet and the appearance

of a new series of problems in religion, philosophy, and psychology, no less exacting than their predecessors, but

it may be said, of less emotional intensity. (v)

The "greater detachment" of which Graves wrote may be evident in his attention to narrative, as in "The Lord Chamberlain Tells of a Famous Meeting." East and West meet under the observing eye of the Lord Chamberlain, who admonishes his readers not to be tricked by reports of this meeting:

Do not believe them, seem they never so wise,

Credibly posted with all new research,

Those elegant essayists, vagabond dramatists,

Authentic and approved biographers,

Solemn annalists, allegorical

Painters, each one misleading or misled.

One thing is true, that of allthe sights I have seen

In any quarter of this world of men,

By night, by day, in court, field, tavern, or barn,

That was the nobelest, East encountering West,

Their silent understanding and restraint,

Meeting and parting like the Kings they were

With plain indifference to all circumstance;

Saying no good-bye, no handclasp and no tears,

But letting speech between them fadeaway

In casual murmurs and half compliments,

Each sauntering out for fresh intelligence,

And West shuffling away, not looking back,

Though each knew well that this chance meeting stood

For turning movement of world history.

And I, I trembled, knowing these things must be. (47)

Perhaps, Graves considered this to be a poem that contains less "emotional stress" than ones in which the world of dreams informs the poem. Yet I, like, the Lord Chamberlain, trembled and was disturbed by the seeming casualness of the decisions of the mighty, knowing well that I lack the poet's calm at such moments. Implied in this poem is a poet with greater experience than a line officer could have. The source of such understanding may have been Graves's friendship with T.E. Lawrence since, with Basil Liddel-Hart, he had been chosen by Lawrence to correct the view given by the first biographer, Lowell Thomas. Probably Graves knew even at this time that Lawrence had lied to all his "approved biographers" (45) but considered that he had the benefits of friendship and class with his subject. Then, too, both knew war.

That Graves could write easily of such monumental meetings does not give ease to this reader, but cofirms his suspicion that the world is run this way. Whether dealing with the Roman Emperors or the White Goddess, Graves would always write as an insider, one privy to council chamber and bedroom. As in "The Lord Chamberlain," he would always strike a true note, one that frequently caused the reader to "tremble," in part because such powers must be as Graves presented them and in part because the disquiet Graves would escape or dismiss is clearly and powerfully present.

The war had closed the door on the Victorian Age and opened another one, first called Georgian, then Edwardian, and finally Modernist. Whatever the appelation, basic to all is the power of association, usually to overcome quiet and reason. In "The Sewing Basket," a poem Robert wrote to accompany a wedding presesnt from his daughter Jenny to Winifred Roberts, the basket contains the ordinary childish pins, dolls, and lace as well as

an anomaly from the world of men:

And the badges of a Fireman and a Fusilier. (49)

For this volume, at least, Graves has checked the intensity of dreams, writing as Rivers had said a poet must, by giving the dreams shape through image, character, and plot. Yet Graves's psyche now contains experiences as terrifying as any of those in Mametz Wood.

Unable to dismiss the war from his poetry, he found himself led by such memories to the nursery, another occasion for primitive thought. The cause and affect world of his parents' reality, of the reality to which Aristotle had given narrative form had scant control

in either the trenches or the nursery. Such reality found, for Graves, expression in dreams of "deeper sleep," as he discussed in The Meaning of Dreams:

Dreams of deeper sleep are often so absurd and muddled when

remembered that they sound like madness; but it is now widely

held that such dreams which go in the way that young children

think and talk, though not necessarily concerned with childish

problems, have their own sense and order and methold and are not to be despised. (34)

The order and method we will look at, but we must recognize as well the terror underlying such dreams:

The worst casses in the madhouse are those in which the patient is in such a deep sleep that nobody can make any

sense of his utterances. From a study of dreams it is now

possible to understand cases of insanity that hitherto

seemed hopeless: and knowledge is half way though, indeed, not more than half way to a cure. We can be confident that

Shakespeare's lines about the "tale told by an idiot full of

sound and fury, signifying nothing" are not any longer

justified. As well say that we are the idiots for not understanding him, this is no more unture; the idiot is

genuinely and rightly furious with somebody or something,

but we have no clue to the sympathy which he is demanding

when he pours his aggrieved tale into our logically-tuned ears.

(34)

Graves's "we" in this paragraph is clearly rhetorical. He knows well tales that verged on madness. In writing these tales, he reminds me of Virginia Woolf's writing of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. Both Graves and Woolf gave characer and plot to their own awareness, and fear, of madness. Probably they hoped that the view held by Rivers was right: giving narrative form to the latent meanings of dreams would, ultimately, allow the dreamer to be rid of them, cured by accepting that since the cause of the disturbance was no longer present then the disturbance would disappear. With the war over, the violent dreams would cease. Yet I doubt that either was convinced. For Graves, and I suspect for Woolf as well, madness provided a view of reality that was even more terrifying than mechanized war, a reality in which terror and chaos struggled with order.

For Graves to use the nursery tale to communicate the shock war gave his innner reality is for him to admit he can no more write again a "logically-tuned" tale than he can be someone other than who was born to be. Graves found form as well as content in his disturbance. Predictably, he found a touchstone for his own tales in the writings of Lewis Carol, as we seen in "Alice," the first poem in Welchman's Hose:

For Alice though a child could understand

That neither did this chance-discovered land

Make nowhow or contrariwise the clean

Dull round of mid-Victorian routine.

Nor did Victoria's golden rule extend

Beyond the glass. It came to the dead end

Where empty hearses turn about: thereafter

Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter.

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

Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,

Where young Gargantua made whole holiday....

But farther from our heroine not to stray.

Let us observe with what uncommon sense--

Though a secure and easy reference

Between Red Queen and Kitten could be found--

She made no false assumption on that ground

(A trap in which the scientist would fall)

That queens and kittens are identical. (cp 1 249-50)

Graves's tacit acceptance of a distinction between Queen and Kitten seems, at first, at odds with the associate process of his poems, a process that equated the battlefield and the nursery. Such a distinction recalls for me a poem by e e cummings, a poet Graves liked: "Old Doc Einstein's abolished time, but they haven't got the word at Sing Sing yet". Both poets had their secret gardens, their pretty how-towns; and both knew well the duplicitcy of the human spirit and had seen first hand its violence.

By 1925, when Welchman's Hose was published, Graves had not exorcised the war demons from his dreams; but he other terrors had led him to awe: woman and power. In time, he would combine the two into one icon: The White Goddess. But not now. Now the woman would trouble his dreams, leading him deeper into the terror of "deeper sleep". The power of kings and warriors, though able to cause terror, seems to become his familiar, the talisman leading him out of the psyche, allowing him to distinguish between queens and kittens. He would maintain the distinction in Poems (1914-1926), the first of his collected poems. As in the one to follow, Graves used this volume to portray his poetic concerns at the time. He began the volume with "The Poet in the Nursery," which tells of his theft of a book from the library of an older poet:

The book was full of funny muddling mazes

Each rounded off into a lovely song,

And most extraordinary and monstrous phrases

Knotted with rhymes like a slave-driver's thong,

And meter twisting like a chain of daisies

With great big splendid words a sentence long.

I took the book to bed with me and gloated,

Learning the lines that seemed to sound most grand;

So soon the lively emerald green was coated

With intimate darkstains from my hot hand,

While round the nursery for long months there floated

Wonderful words no one could understand. (3-4)

What this poem expresses is the craft of the poet, not the terror and awe that people the unconscious, scarcely the tune Graves consistently played in his nursery poems. Almost predictably Graves had echoed the views; and his departure in "The Poet in the Nursery" is implied in Rivers's own discussion in Conflict and Dreamof the poet and the dreamer:

It is possible to take the images of the manifest content of

a poem and discover more or less exactly how each has been

suggested by the experience, new or old, of the poet. It is also

possible, at any rate in many cases, to show how these images are symbolic expressions of some conflict which is raging in

the mind of the poet, and that the real underlying meaning or

latent content of the poem is very different from that which

the outward imagery would suggest. Moreover, it is possible

to show the occurrence of a process ofcondensation by means of

which many different experiences are expressed by means of a

simple image. (148)

Graves's adherence to this method is evident, but his divergence from it is as obvious in the poems he selected for Poems (1914-1926), a selection which illstrates Rivers' caveat in Conflict and Dream:

I cannot giveyou direct evidence for this, for the obvious reason that, unfortunaately, I am not a poet. Just as I believe

that a really satisfactory analysis of a dream is only possible

for the dreamer himself or the one who knows the conflicts and

experiences of the dreamer in a most unusual way, so do I believe that only when poets and other artists have set to work

to analyze the products of their artistry can we expect to

understand the real mechanism of artistic production. (149)

As if lecturing Rivers, as well as all his readers, Graves began Poems (1914-1926) with a poem about the maze of language, not of physical or psychological reality. Entranced by the beauty of an incomprehensible language, the young poet abandoned his own naarratives of adventure. Poems of mazes and webs continue in this collection, such as "Attercop: the All-Wise Spider". I would not stress these poems so much here if Graves had not chosen to close the volume with one of his best-known poems, "The Cool Web":

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,

How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,

How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, that cools the hottest sun,

And speech that dulls the hottest rose's scent.

We spell away the overhanging night,

We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in;

Between retreat from too much gladness, too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die

In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,

Throwing off language and its wateriness

Before our death, instead of when death comes,

Facing the brightness of the children's day,

Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,

We shall go mad no doubt and die that way. (215-16)

Long before the Confessionalist poets preened their neuroses, Graves considered the danger to the poet of losing touch with primitive terror and awe: poems become academic. Yet if the poet

does not "spell away" that reality, madness is inevitable. Having lived in the madness of war and its bruising aftermath, a deranged peace, Graves knew what to expect. Yet he almost seems willing to run the risk. Almost but not quite. As Graves looked into the mazes, webs, and riddles of his culture, he would find their intent was not to dimish awe but to allow only the deserving to experience it.

When I met Robert Graves in his study, he showed me strands of his web, though I could recognize few:

"Do you know who sheared the sheep, spun the wool, and wove the

rug?"

"Do you know what the inscription on this ring says?"

"Do you know why I have this dagger?"

With Robert Graves dead, I search as I think he would have wished me to: in the intricacies of his life and work, in the extablished texts and in the apocrapha.

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