"Allie" and the Lost War

Robert Graves undoubtedly earned a place "among the poets of The Great War commemorated on the stone in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey" (Graves, Selected Poems, xix). His first four books of poems, Over the Brazier (1916), Goliath and David (1916), Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), and Country Sentiment (1920) include war poems and his Collected Poems, 1914–1926, features a separate section, "War: 1915–19," consisting of seventeen selected poems. Curiously, in his next Collected Poems (1914–1947), the war poems had been sheared away. Graves had banished them from his canon. Although he would declare in the foreword to his Collected Poems, 1955, that the First World War permanently changed his outlook on life (xi), he had renounced his identity as war poet. The war poet Graves had been one of those "younger, clumsier selves" he would play fair with but with which he could no longer identify (Skelton 352). For many years, critical opinion was content to abide by his decision. Recently, with the considerable body of Graves's poetic output made possible by the Complete Poems of Robert Graves, edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward (1995–99), and Fran Brearton's The Great War in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley, critics have energetically contended that not only are his suppressed war poems valuable—aesthetically and intellectually, as poems—but that the War exercised a pervasive and enduring influence on Graves's later work, and continued to shape Graves's identity in ways one could no longer ignore. The War Poet Graves remained a living, indeed a central part of The White Goddess poet Graves and of every successive Graves thereafter.

The reach of the War beyond Graves's defenses had been noted in earlier studies. In The Early Poetry of Robert Graves, Frank Kersnowski writes, "[b]ecause 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. The images of war mingled with those of childhood and with those of love and sex . . ." (89).

With this insight fully in view, I offer a re-reading of one of Graves's best-known children's poems, "Allie," a poem ostensibly concerned with what Longley calls "childhood's half-remembered Arcanum" (Graves, Selected Poems xvi). I reconsider the Arcanum as an amalgam of hidden signifiers of war mingled with or on the underside of those of childhood and suggest that the poem's long-obscured intent was to reflect on the losses of war privately. This solemn, averted reflection echoes the ironic commemoration of the dead in Charles Hamilton Sorley's last sonnet but contrasts markedly with public "remembrance," whose falsifying spirit the poem pointedly rejects.

As Kersnowski notes, in poems that touch on childhood, some of which Graves reissued for children, one can see images as well as ideas about war and childhood mingling in clear sight. In "A Child's Nightmare," a terrifying figure repeating the word "cat," remembered from "long nursery nights," functions as a symbol of the repressed horror of imminent death in battle, and, surely as well, as a metonym of poetic inspiration. In "Alice," according to Adam Roberts, Graves is looking back on one of his "favourite childhood books and finding everything it had meant to him turned contrariwise by the trauma of conflict." In "Babylon," the mingling is less overt, mainly contextual. "Babylon" appeared in 1916 in Goliath and David, a small booklet of poems dedicated to David Thomas, a fellow soldier whose death deeply affected both Graves and Sassoon. Richard Perceval Graves writes that Thomas's death hit Graves harder than any he had yet experienced at the front (Graves, The Assault Heroic 144). Explicitly about the loss of childhood, "Babylon" references the War both implicitly, that is, "Wisdom made a breach and battered / Babylon to bits (lines 17–18), and in concert with other poems in the volume, for example with the title poem, "Goliath and David," which retells the biblical confrontation between...