The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons

CHAPTER 5: THE LOVER

C H A P T E R 5 THE LOVER A Valentine The hunter to the husbandman Pays tribute since our love began, And to love-loyalty dedicates The phantom kills he meditates. Let me embrace, embracing you, Beauty of other shape and hue, Odd glinting graces of which none Shone more than candle to your sun, Your well-kissed hand was beckoning me In unfamiliar imagery— Smile your forgiveness; each bright ghost Dives in love’s glory and is lost, Yielding your comprehensive pride A homage, even to suicide. Whipperginny Robert Graves’s loves and love life have preoccupied his biographers often to the exclusion of his poems—the reason we all have for writing about his love life. The bare bones of this fabled love life are: the twig was bent by an overbearing mother; in a single-sex public school he fell in love (a sexless love, he claimed) with a younger boy who later proved to be homosexual ; in the army he remained a virgin although surrounded by license; he married a woman as naive as himself, and they had four children; then all was changed, utterly changed, by the arrival of Laura Riding, who dominated him; when she married, he did as well. Later muses in the form of young women provided a medium for his worship of the White Goddess , whom he implied he discovered while writing The Golden Fleece in 1943. 100 This is all true except that Laura Riding did not create the love-ridden poet, and the muses were more numerous than the four claimed by his biographers. His experience of the Goddess at least as early as 1924 is of greater significance than either Riding or the number of muses spinning in the head of the poet. What is clear from Graves’s earliest love poems is that, being a bit of a prig, he was dominated by a desire he could only accept if it were cloaked in obsessions other than the physically erotic. As ‘‘Oh, and Oh,’’ an early poem from Over the Brazier shows, Graves was likely to swoon at the thought of his beloved but was made very uncomfortable by mundane and unavoidable comparisons as he looked at hoi polloi, who ‘‘Craw and kiss and cuddle’’ in open doorways. He found the love of louts and sluts to be ‘‘loathsome,’’ an ‘‘unbelievable ugliness’’ (16). Almost ten years later, in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot would echo Graves’s revulsion with the sexual life of hoi polloi, but he wasn’t a soldier risking his life daily. In ‘‘Oh, and Oh,’’ Graves strikes out at his opponents with a quite bourgeois vengeance . Graves quite openly referred to himself as bourgeois in letters to March and Sassoon, and in a letter to Sassoon on 13 January 1919, Graves wrote jovially of the fate of the bourgeoisie: But I think that despite Lloyd George, Clemenceau & the Capitalists we can save Western Europe from so deep an operation and at any rate have the bourgeoises alive: being a bourgeois myself I want to remain alive. (bcnypl) To think of Graves with the advantage of knowing about his whole life and writing does not lead inevitably to call him ‘‘bourgeois.’’ But he was of his time and class: easily offended, well-schooled, and well-drilled in a Victorian morality, and from a family that would have been considered culturally bourgeois at the time. Politically, he would have distanced himself from any leftist attitude and would have welcomed their disapproval of the bourgeoisie, a disapproval based on Marx’s view of the ideology of capitalists as antithetical to that of the proletariat. Graves never significantly changed his politics. Though well placed in literary circles, his father was a civil servant; though financially stable, his parents clearly were not landed gentry. In his poems he held to his English identity and to his class. Though Graves wrote explicitly of the erotic in his poetry, as did his early idol Rupert Brooke, he did not break completely from his bourgeois manner. Graves’s loss of virginity informed his poetry with details and resonances that appeared neither in his correspondence nor in his convert h e l o v e r 101 sations—as much as we know of the latter seems to reflect his prudishness . But the poems are alive with sexuality. To accept Graves’s assertion that he...