Thus he stabs ‘em; there, they lie. - Robert Graves in 1921

The Pier-Glass (1921) is the third book of poems by Robert Graves, or sixth if I count three chapbooks.  That’s a book of some kind every year since 1916.  The Pier-Glass is only fifty-three pages, counting just the poems, heading towards chapbook territory.  Graves, judging by his bibliography, hustles at this pace as a poet for another ten years, and then only somewhat more slowly for another forty.

The memoir and novels and all of the Greek stuff is in the future.  Graves is still a charming poet.  The great devotee of the White Goddess has begun to show himself, though, just barely, as in the poem “Raising the Stone,” in which druids are raising a menhir by moonlight.  It topples, crushing one of them,

              but we who live raise a shrill chant
Of joy for sacrifice cleansing us all.
    Once more we heave.  Erect in earth we plant,
The interpreter of our dumb furious call,
    Outraging Heaven, pointing
            “I want, I want.”

Less charming than terrifying, and an inversion of William Blake’s engraving.

The next poem, “The Treasure Box,” is Graves at his most charming.  “Ann in chill moonlight” – just like the ancient druids – “unlocks \ Her polished brassbound treasure-box.”  Most of the poem is just a list of the treasures: ribbons tied in a knot, little gloves that “fold in a walnut shell,” dried flowers, a scrap of lace,

A Chelsea gift-bird; a toy whistle;
A halfpenny stamped with the Scots thistle…

Are these the treasures of a child?

Her mother’s thin-worn wedding ring;
A straw box full of hard smooth sweets;
A book, the Poems of John Keats…

No, not a child.  An older woman.  There is also a packet of letters, the greatest treasure, the record of an old love affair so sad that, when the woman tries to read them by moonlight, “the old moon blinks \ And softly from the window shrinks.”

In “The Troll’s Nosegay,” a troll picks a bouquet; in “The Pier-Glass” an old ghost is saved from despair by bees; in “The Gnat” a tormented shepherd, thinking he is dying, murders his beloved horse.  Graves the poet has a strong narrative imagination, an odd one.  I always enjoyed the surprises of his little stories even when I was not sure what they meant.

The last poem, “The Coronation Murder,” is perhaps oddest of all.  It is in four parts, from four points of view: the woman who murders the lecherous, “rat-soul’d” Becker; the victim himself – “His bones are tufted with mildew”; his son, who confronts his father’s ghost; and a parrot, who hears the woman confess in her sleep and thus reveals her crime, maybe:

Soon, when sunlight warms his cage,
    He plots to cheer the passers-by
With burlesque of murderous rage,
    Acting how his victims die:
Thus he stabs ‘em; there, they lie.

It’s a revenge tragedy in five pages.  The war is over, and Graves is no longer a trench poet, but some kind of war continues.

Robert Graves discreetly blends Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys in Country Sentiment

In 1920 Robert Graves was still a young poet, not the baffling omni-author he later became.  Country Sentiment was his third book, if I am counting correctly.  It is a mix of children’s verse, or children’s verse for adults, with some war poems.  In his previous books the two modes were jumbled together, but this time the war poems go in their own section, “Retrospect.”

The final poem is titled “A First Review”:

Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
    Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read you boys,
            My Country Sentiment.

He is mocking me for reading his book.  Wait, I can’t skip the third stanza:

Then Tom, a hard and bloody chap,
    Though much beloved by me,
“Robert, have done with nursery pap,
    Write like a man,” says he.

Graves is mocking me by name!

But I would never such I thing.  I enjoy the nursery pap, although Walter de la Mare is better at it.  My only serious objection is to a “moon / June” rhyme in the first poem, “A Frosty Night.”  Was that not already a much-mocked pop song cliché in 1920?

That poem, like many in the book, are off-kilter dialogues between a parent and child, where one or another introduces an uncanny touch.  In “Dicky,” the poor boy in the title, walking home, encounters a dead man, walking about.  Dicky’s wise mother advises him to play it cool around the dead.

Do not sigh or fear, Dicky,
    How is it right
To grudge the dead their ghostly dark
    And wan moonlight?

Good advice, right?  Graves is always good with a ballad:

One moonlight night a ship drove in,
    A ghost ship from the west,
Drifting with bare mast and lone tiller,
    Like a mermaid drest
In long green weed and barnacles:
    She beached and came to rest.  (from “The Alice Jean”)

That is a good way to begin a story.  The story that follows is pretty good, living up to the beginning about as well as it can in our skeptical age.

The war poems, in effect, become a kind of children’s poem, or vice versa, another way to tell stories about the dead and the many ways they return.  The most explicit attempt is “Haunted,” a more generalized version of a story Graves retells in Good-Bye To All That (1929), when Graves and some fellow soldiers saw, they were sure, a comrade who had been recently killed:

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.

The Robert Graves-to-be, the mythologist, occasionally appears, as in the sinister “Outlaws,” about the creepiest of the fairy folk, old gods shrunken by lack of worshippers:

Proud gods, humbled, sunk so low,
    Living with ghosts and ghouls,
And ghosts of ghosts and last year’s snow
   And dead toadstools.

Ideas to develop after Graves says good-bye to England and the war.

Let it explain / Me its life - the best books of 1916, in a sense

I usually do not mess around with a “best of a hundred years ago” post, however fun it might be, because I am too ignorant to make basic judgments.  To the best of my knowledge, for example, I have read no more than four novels from 1916: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sholem Aleichem’s cheery Motl the Cantor’s Son (I think just the second half, Motl in America, is from 1916), Gustav Meyrink’s well-titled Bats, and L. Frank Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz.  However easy it is to pick out the best book from this group – Rinkitink is awesome – I do not have a good sense of what other novels are in contention.

But this year I have been reading a lot of English-language poetry from 1916 – eight or ten books depending on how I count – plus, recently, plenty of individual poems from French, Italian, German, and Russian from various collections, so I thought I would pull some of them together.  Maybe just the books, to make my task easier.

It is the ferment that is so exciting, the variety, the movement.  On the one hand, Robert Graves, in his first chapbooks Over the Brazier and Goliath and David, sounding like Housman or Hardy, skilled but not radical:

from The Shadow of Death

Here’s an end to my art!
    I must die and I know it,
With battle murder at my heart –
    Sad death for a poet!

The old forms are good enough for war poetry.

Then there’s Lustra of Ezra Pound:

from Further Instructions

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops
You do next to nothing at all.

Which is not really how it seems, reading the poems and their mixture of ancient Greek, classical Chinese, and now.

H. D. wants her songs to do something.  In Sea Garden she strips them down more than Pound, merging the Maine coasts with ancient Greek myths to create her new voice:

from Sheltered Garden

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

Make it new, make it new, as explicitly as possible, in this year of the birth of Dada.

Even for Pound, though, “newness” was less a goal of its own than a search for a voice, which is closer to what I see in 1916.  Many poets, not all but many, found the old poetic modes inadequate, at least not them, thus all the improvisation, innovation, and flailing about.  What, in Amores, is D. H. Lawrence trying to do that is new other than express himself?

from Restlessness

But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good.
There is something I want to fell in my running blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret.

I am not sure that is good, but is it ever Lawrence.  Their flavors are not as strong as Lawrence’s, but H. D. is working on a similar problem; so are Isaac Rosenberg (Moses) and Conrad Aiken (The Jig of Forslin, A Symphony and Turns and Movies).  Edwin Arlington Robinson (The Man against the Sky) has already found a strong voice. Robert Frost is only on his third book, Mountain Interval, but it feels as if he had been Frost forever.  Maybe I should have started this post with Frost.  What a confident poet.

from The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

And, I remind myself, I have heard poets singing just as loudly in Russian, German, Italian, and French.  The list is long; the idea of “best” becomes moot.

Poetry makes both better - Robert Graves, war poet

Robert Graves is an author I have barely read – until recently just his translation of The Golden Ass (1951) – but I have acquired the illusion that I know a lot about him because of all the magazine articles I have read about him.  Reviews of Graves biographies, and biographies of the many other famous people in his life, and who knows what else.  I knew that Graves had been severely injured in World War I – details in the memoir Good-Bye to All That (1928), which I have not read – but it had never sunk in that he got his start as a writer as a war poet.

His first two chapbooks, Over the Brazier and Goliath and David, are from 1916, the same year Graves suffered an injury at the Battle of the Somme.  Most of the poems appear again in his first book, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917).  That odd title is accurate, even in its ordering.  Poems about the experience men at war, gritty but ironic, slide over towards poems about a magic-tinged childhood, where if fairies and fauns are not quite real it is easy enough to imagine that they are.  Then the poems slide back to the trenches, simultaneously real but unreal.

The perfect example in a single poem is “Sorley’s Weather.”   Charles Sorley was a young poet killed in action in 1915.  His only book was published in 1916:

Sorley’s Weather

When outside the icy rain
  Comes leaping helter-skelter,
Shall I tie my restive brain
  Snugly under shelter?

Shall I make a gentle song
  Here in my firelit study,
When outside the winds blow strong
  And the lanes are muddy?

With old wine and drowsy meats
  Am I to fill my belly?
Shall I glutton here with Keats?
  Shall I drink with Shelley?

Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good:
  Poetry makes both better.
Clay is wet and so is mud,
  Winter rains are wetter.

Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill,
  For though the winds come frorely,
I’m away to the rain-blown hill
  And the ghost of Sorley.

The archaic “frorely” just means “coldly.”  The narrator is not a child, but he has written something close to a child’s poem about the comforts of reading poetry on a stormy night.  But the reader, the narrating reader, is also taken back to a different setting of mud, rain, and wind.  Perhaps the “rain-blown hill” in France is the reality of the speaker, and the study the fantasy.  They co-exist, somehow.

The next poem, “The Cottage,” repeats the idea more bluntly.  The poet is in a place where “Snug inside I sit and rhyme,” yet nothing, no weather or flowers or “magic keep me safe to rhyme,” since “Death is waiting by.”  The act of writing a poem during war is classically pastoral.  Death is in Arcadia, even; Death is everywhere.

Near the end of the collection, Graves again writes about reading poetry in “The Poet in the Nursery.”  He is a child, although a poet himself, “the youngest poet,” who finds a book “full of poetry” in a library while the “ancient poet” wrestles with his own work – “rhymes were beastly things and never there.”

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 metre twisting like a chain of daisies
  With great big splendid words a sentence long.

No hint of the war here.  Perhaps this celebration of the joy of poetry dates to some time before it.

This is, for all its necessary ugliness, a lovely book.