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CHAPTER 4: THE LOVER IN THE NURSERY
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C H A P T E R 4 THE LOVER IN THE NURSERY Children of Darkness We spurred our parents to the kiss Though doubtfully 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 knew no discontent, In certitude his changings went; Though there were veils about his face, With forethought, even to 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) In Whipperginny, Graves observed that ‘‘much trench poetry’’ was written by men not ‘‘poetically inclined,’’ often by officers to address the con- flict between their unexpressed love for the men they commanded and the also repressed fear of ‘‘the horrible death that threatened them all’’ (37– 38). For Graves, such conflict and suppression was the same as that of boys who suddenly become aware of sex yet have scant opportunity to experience it and limited ability to express its power. Here, Graves strongly expressed the ties between the trauma of battle and of sex. 79 Although World War I did not serve to make Graves ‘‘poetically inclined ’’ and was not his muse, his observation does succinctly categorize the poetry he published in Over the Brazier. It also indicates why Graves’s war poetry lacks the immediacy and power of his later poetry and 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 . He accepted the Victorian world of his parents so well imagined by Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll, the scientist who respected the proprieties of his society yet turned into what he denied himself to consider. Robert Graves 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 accommodated 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 the Victorian poets who had tamed the Romantics’ awe, Nature was predictably 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’’ as light faded in the west before a ‘‘sunset red as wine’’ (ob 10). Here, Graves’s diction is the watered-down Romanticism a schoolboy would have inherited from the Victorians. The reason Edward Marsh and the Georgians came to exist is clear in these schoolboy verses. English poetry was bankrupt. Yet never would Graves, or the Georgians, completely abandon the circumscribed reality of the privileged classes: the public school and the university commons under an English sky, and often the regimental mess. In A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928), Graves did not address such concerns, probably because they are indelible parts of his poetic. Instead, he characterized Georgianism by traits, most of which were clearly evident in his own poetry written during the war: ‘‘Nature and love and leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other uncontroversial subjects ’’ (119). Take away the hauntings and the war, and much of Graves’s poetry of the twenties fits this paradigm. In retrospect, the Georgian world is for us as Graves saw it: a retreat from the mechanized hell of World War I and its progeny, the inhumanity of a mass-produced culture: t h e e a r ly p o e t ry of r o b e rt g r av e s 80 [54.208.238.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:01 GMT) War-poetry was Georgianism’s second-wind, for the contrast...