Graves

[SarahJF]

Call me sentimental, if you like, but I really enjoy this poem:

Love without Hope

Love without hope, like when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squires own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

I find there's something really lovely here - the mood of the words - and the way Graves doesn't labour a point. The image, too - of the birds, flying around her head - and the knowledge of the social gap - the way one wonders how much the bird-catcher (a days hard work?) has lost through his gesture. And the simplicity of the everyday gesture leading to such a beautiful thing. For me, this is an example of how the deceptively simple is, in fact, quite complicated.

And there's nothing slushy, nor laboured here.

It amazes me how good poets can compress image, words, feeling so much that one reads a few lines, yet thinks about them all day.

What do you think about Graves, and this poem?



Sarah

[Jeanne G]

It took me about 3 reads to get it, but if I'm reading it right the simile symbolizes the class differences and the impossibility of a relationship because of it. Yes, heaps w/ very few words. The simile seemed deceptively clunky on the surface, a bird catcher taking off his hat? huh, what could this have to do w/ hopeless love I'm thinking the first 2 reads (yes I'm blond and yes I'm slow). Very effective to deliver a huge concept, yup, deep.


Jeanne

[Monk Bretton]

My copy of Graves’ poetry falls open on this page. I know it by heart. I have been saying it to myself, in quiet moments, for the last fifteen or so years. I love it to pieces. If I were forced, at gun point, to make a top ten of favourite poems it would be in the top three. And in my sadder moments it would probably be number one.

Oh, the loveliness of it. It has birds. It has hats. It even has the Squire’s own daughter. It is the simplest, most profound, most perfect, most crystalline distillation of the experience of unrequited love I could ever conceive of. In this or any other possible world.

Purely on this piece I rate Graves among the greatest of twentieth century poets. Much of his other pieces are seemingly wilfully obscure. He seems only half willing to communicate, unprepared to meet the reader even half way. But this, oh joy!

One might think of it in terms as a model for poems submitted to this site, full of concrete images, aptly described, with writing that makes sense, etc etc. But I never want to think of it in connection with here. It sullies it to mention the two in the same breath. It is a holy thing, for me. (Getting carried away now…)

I am currently halfway through my fourth reading of The White Goddess. And how full of wondrous things that is. And how full of mumbo-jumbo too.

I know a man who knew a woman who, as a girl, was dandled on the knee of Robert Graves. It is my only claim to fame.

Another of his, that has that similar inexplicable quality of genius, is an equally simple little piece:

Part two of Grotesques

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.

Thanks for reminding me to read more Graves.

http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11090/Grotesque/Site%20Images/People/Robert%20Graves.jpgMonk

[HowardM2]

Two of my favorite Graves' poems:

"The Naked And The Nude"

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!



"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, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel 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,
Retreat from too much joy or 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 watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.