And lead you toward the ancient dripping hazel,
Crying: ‘Brother of our immortal blood,
Drink and remember glorious Samothrace!’
Then you shall drink.
You shall drink deep of that refreshing draught,
To become lords of the uninitiated
Twittering ghosts, Hell’s countless populace –
To become heroes, knights upon swift horses,
Pronouncing oracles from tall white tombs
By the nymphs tended. They with honey water
Shall pour libations to your serpent shapes,
That you may drink.
THESEUS AND ARIADNE
High on his figured couch beyond the waves
He dreams, in dream recalling her set walk
Down paths of oyster-shell bordered with flowers,
Across the shadowy turf below the vines.
He sighs: ‘Deep sunk in my erroneous past
She haunts the ruins and the ravaged lawns.’
Yet still unharmed it stands, the regal house
Crooked with age and overtopped by pines
Where first he wearied of her constancy.
And with a surer foot she goes than when
Dread of his hate was thunder in the air,
When the pines agonized with flaws of wind
And flowers glared up at her with frantic eyes.
Of him, now all is done, she never dreams
But calls a living blessing down upon
What he supposes rubble and rank grass;
Playing the queen to nobler company.
LAMENT FOR PASIPHAË
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
My eye, dazzled with tears, shall dazzle yours,
Conjuring you to shine and not to move.
You, sun, and I all afternoon have laboured
Beneath a dewless and oppressive cloud –
A fleece now gilded with our common grief
That this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
Faithless she was not: she was very woman,
Smiling with dire impartiality,
Sovereign, with heart unmatched, adored of men,
Until Spring’s cuckoo with bedraggled plumes
Tempted her pity and her truth betrayed.
Then she who shone for all resigned her being,
And this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
The impassioned child who stole the axe of power,
Debauched his virgin mother
And vowed in rage he would be God the Father,
Who, grown to strength, strangled her lion twins
And from a cloud, in chains,
Hung her with anvils at her ankle bones,
Who whipped her daughters with a bull’s pizzle,
Forced them to take the veil
And heard their loveless prayers with a lewd smile –
Senile at last the way of all flesh goes:
Into the kitchen where roast goose,
Plum-pudding and mince-pies his red robes grease.
She from the tree-top, true to her deserts,
With wand and silver skirts
Presides unravished over all pure hearts.
COLD WEATHER PROVERB
Fearless approach and puffed feather
In birds, famine bespeak;
In man, belly filled full.
TO JUAN AT THE WINTER SOLSTICE
There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.
Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?
Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.
Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.
Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?
Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses:
There is one story and one story only.
Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-grey eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.
SATIRES AND GROTESQUES
THE PERSIAN VERSION
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer’s expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.
THE WEATHER OF OLYMPUS
Zeus was once overheard to shout at Hera:
‘You hate it, do you? Well, I hate it worse –
East wind in May, sirocco all the Summer.
Hell take this whole impossible Universe!’
A scholiast explains his warm rejoinder,
Which sounds too man-like for Olympic use,
By noting that the snake-tailed Chthonian winds
Were answerable to Fate alone, not Zeus.
APOLLO OF THE PHYSIOLOGISTS
Despite this learned cult’s official
And seemingly sincere denial
That they either reject or postulate
God, or God’s scientific surrogate,
Prints of a deity occur passim
Throughout their extant literature. They make him
A dumb, dead-pan Apollo with a profile
Drawn in Victorian-Hellenistic style –
The pallid, bald, partitioned head suggesting
Wholly abstract cerebral functioning;
Or nude and at full length, this deity
Displays digestive, venous, respiratory
And nervous systems painted in bold colour
On his immaculate exterior.
Sometimes, in verso, a bald, naked Muse,
His consort, flaunts her arteries and sinews,
> While, upside-down, crouched in her chaste abdomen,
Adored by men and wondered at by women,
Hangs a Victorian-Hellenistic foetus –
Fruit of her academic god’s afflatus.
THE OLDEST SOLDIER
The sun shines warm on seven old soldiers
Paraded in a row,
Perched like starlings on the railings –
Give them plug-tobacco!
They’ll croon you the Oldest-Soldier Song:
Of Harry who took a holiday
From the sweat of ever thinking for himself
Or going his own bloody way.
It was arms-drill, guard and kit-inspection,
Like dreams of a long train-journey,
And the barrack-bed that Harry dossed on
Went rockabye, rockabye, rockabye.
Harry kept his rifle and brasses clean,
But Jesus Christ, what a liar!
He won the Military Medal
For his coolness under fire.
He was never the last on parade
Nor the first to volunteer,
And when Harry rose to be storeman
He seldom had to pay for his beer.
Twenty-one years, and out Harry came
To be odd-job man, or janitor,
Or commissionaire at a picture-house,
Or, some say, bully to a whore.
But his King and Country calling Harry,
He reported again at the Depôt,
To perch on this railing like a starling,
The oldest soldier of the row.
GROTESQUES
I
My Chinese uncle, gouty, deaf, half-blinded,
And more than a trifle absent-minded,
Astonished all St James’s Square one day
By giving long and unexceptionably exact directions
To a little coolie girl, who’d lost her way.
II
The Lion-faced Boy at the Fair
And the Heir Apparent
Were equally slow at remembering people’s faces.
But whenever they met, incognito, in the Brazilian
Pavilion, the Row and such-like places,
They exchanged, it is said, their sternest nods –
Like gods of dissimilar races.
III
Dr Newman with the crooked pince-nez
Had studied in Vienna and Chicago.
Chess was his only relaxation.
And Dr Newman remained unperturbed
By every nastier manifestation
Of pluto-democratic civilization:
All that was cranky, corny, ill-behaved,
Unnecessary, askew or orgiastic
Would creep unbidden to his side-door (hidden
Behind a poster in the Tube Station,
Nearly half-way up the moving stairs),
Push its way in, to squat there undisturbed
Among box-files and tubular steel-chairs.
He was once seen at the Philharmonic Hall
Noting the reactions of two patients,
With pronounced paranoiac tendencies,
To old Dutch music. He appeared to recall
A tin of lozenges in his breast-pocket,
Put his hand confidently in –
And drew out a black imp, or sooterkin,
Six inches long, with one ear upside-down,
Licking at a vanilla ice-cream cornet –
Then put it back again with a slight frown.
IV
A Royal Duke, with no campaigning medals
To dignify his Orders, he would speak
Nostalgically at times of Mozambique
Where once the ship he cruised in ran aground:
How he drank cocoa, from a sailor’s mug,
Poured from the common jug,
While loyal toasts went round.
V
Sir John addressed the Snake-god in his temple,
Which was full of bats, not as a votary
But with the somewhat cynical courtesy,
Just short of condescension,
He might have paid the Governor-General
Of a small, hot, backward colony.
He was well versed in primitive religion,
But found this an embarrassing occasion:
The God was immense, noisy and affable,
Began to tickle him with a nervous chuckle,
Unfobbed a great gold clock for him to listen,
Hissed like a snake, and swallowed him at one mouthful.
VI
All horses on the racecourse of Tralee
Have four more legs in gallop than in trot –
Two pairs fully extended, two pairs not;
And yet no thoroughbred with either three
Or five legs but is mercilessly shot.
I watched a filly gnaw her fifth leg free,
Warned by a speaking mare since turned silentiary.
THE EUGENIST
Come, human dogs, interfertilitate –
Blackfellow and white lord, brown, yellow and red!
Accept the challenge of the lately bred
Newfoundland terrier with the dachshund gait.1
Breed me gigantic pygmies, meek-eyed Scots,
Phlegmatic Irish, perfume-hating Poles,
Poker-faced, toothy, pigtailed Hottentots,
And Germans with no envy in their souls.
1805
At Viscount Nelson’s lavish funeral,
While the mob milled and yelled about St Paul’s,
A General chatted with an Admiral:
‘One of your Colleagues, Sir, remarked today
That Nelson’s exit, though to be lamented,
Falls not inopportunely, in its way.’
‘He was a thorn in our flesh,’ came the reply –
‘The most bird-witted, unaccountable,
Odd little runt that ever I did spy.
‘One arm, one peeper, vain as Pretty Poll,
A meddler, too, in foreign politics
And gave his heart in pawn to a plain moll.
‘He would dare lecture us Sea Lords, and then
Would treat his ratings as though men of honour
And play at leap-frog with his midshipmen!
‘We tried to box him down, but up he popped,
And when he’d banged Napoleon at the Nile
Became too much the hero to be dropped.
‘You’ve heard that Copenhagen “blind eye” story?
We’d tied him to Nurse Parker’s apron-strings –
By G–d, he snipped them through and snatched the glory!’
‘Yet,’ cried the General, ‘six-and-twenty sail
Captured or sunk by him off Tráfalgár –
That writes a handsome finis to the tale.’
‘Handsome enough. The seas are England’s now.
That fellow’s foibles need no longer plague us.
He died most creditably, I’ll allow.’
‘And, Sir, the secret of his victories?’
‘By his unServicelike, familiar ways, Sir,
He made the whole Fleet love him, damn his eyes!’
AT THE SAVOY CHAPEL
[From World’s Press News, 22 February, 1945. ‘Alexander Clifford, the war correspondent, is today marrying Flight Officer Jenny Nicholson, daughter of Robert Graves. They met in the front line.’]
Up to the wedding, formal with heirloom lace,
Press-cameras, carnations out of season,
Well-mellowed priest and well-trained choristers,
The relatives come marching, such as meet
Only at weddings and at funerals,
The elder generation with the eldest.
Family features for years undecided
What look to wear against a loveless world
Fix, as the wind veers, in the same grimace.
Each eyes the others with a furtive pity:
‘Heavens, how she has aged – and he,
&n
bsp; Grey hair and sunken cheeks, what a changed man!’
They stare wistfully at the bride (released
From brass buttons and the absurd salute)
In long white gown, bouquet and woman’s pride.
‘How suitable!’ they whisper, and the whisper
‘How suitable!’ rustles from pew to pew;
To which I nod suitably grave assent.
Now for you, loving ones, who kneel at the altar
And preside afterwards at table –
The trophy sword that shears the cake recalling
What god you entertained last year together,
His bull neck looped with guts,
Trampling corpse-carpet through the villages –
Here is my private blessing: so to remain
As today you are, with features
Resolute and unchangeably your own.
From Collected Poems (1914–1947)
(1948)
TO POETS UNDER PISCES
Until the passing years establish
Aquarius who with fruitful spate
All dried pools will at last replenish,
Resign yourselves to celebrate,
Poets, with grief or hate,
These gasping rainbowed flurries of the Fish.
JUNE
June, the jolly season of most bloodshed:
Soldiers with roses in their rifle barrels
And children, cherries bobbing at their ears,
Who roar them on like furious adjutants
Where the broad oak its feathered bonnet rears.
THE LAST DAY OF LEAVE
(1916)
We five looked out over the moor
At rough hills blurred with haze, and a still sea:
Our tragic day, bountiful from the first.
We would spend it by the lily lake
(High in a fold beyond the farthest ridge),
Following the cart-track till it faded out.
The time of berries and bell-heather;
Yet all that morning nobody went by
But shepherds and one old man carting turfs.
We were in love: he with her, she with him,
And I, the youngest one, the odd man out,
As deep in love with a yet nameless muse.
No cloud; larks and heath-butterflies,
And herons undisturbed fishing the streams;
A slow cool breeze that hardly stirred the grass.
When we hurried down the rocky slope,
A flock of ewes galloping off in terror,