Abstract: The article looks at critical responses to ‘Love Without Hope’, using Mozart’s Magic Flute to weigh up the arguments for and against reading the poem in the light of Graves’s White Goddess; explores its illustration history, starting with the William Nicholson sketch which introduced Graves to the idea of a fowler in love; and considers how class difference in the poem relates to the social history of the skylark, from the nineteenth century songbird trade to the battlefield larks of the Western Front. The article is bookended by poems which span the period covered by the argument: a reimagined Regency version of ‘Love Without Hope’ and a memorial to the soldier poets of the Somme.

Keywords: ‘Love Without Hope’; the White Goddess; The Magic Flute; illustrations; the songbird trade; World War One.

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A Hatful of Larks

that love-lorn Papageno

the young bird-catcher

sweeps off his tall hat

to the Squire’s equestrian daughter

instead of just touching the brim

an impulsive gesture

which costs him in an instant

a whole day’s labour

and causes a sudden explosion

of upwardly spiralling

larks which she rides through

hardly noticing

her mind on her flageolet

with its tricky cross-fingering

and the tune she is trying to teach

her caged bullfinch to sing

what was once called courtly love

in an earlier century

is love without hope now

though the larks fly free

while the stable lad grooms

the guano from the pony

the boy with his empty hat

will go home hungry

Reimagining Robert Graves’s ‘Love Without Hope’

The starting point, both for my own poem and for this accompanying article, was Neil Corcoran’s detailed and insightful close reading of ‘Love Without Hope’ in the chapter on ‘Robert Graves and Modern Poetry’ in his recent book, Negotiations: Poems in their Contexts.[1] Although rightly described by Patrick Keane as ‘“minor” poetry only in length’,[2] ‘Love Without Hope’ has seldom been accorded this kind of serious critical attention. Given its self-contained brevity, it has been only too easy for critics simply to quote it in its entirety, leaving it to make its own case; written, as it was, in 1925, just at the point when the tectonic plates of Graves’s life were about shift with the imminent arrival of Laura Riding, critics have tended to see it in terms either of what preceded or what followed it. Randall Jarrell, though praising its beauty, includes it among the last of the ‘early poems that disappear as soon as Graves can afford to leave “what I may call the folk-song period of my life,” the time when “country sentiment,” childlike romance, were a refuge from “my shellshocked condition.”’[3] D. N. G. Carter, by contrast, sees it as ‘a perfect Edwardian motto to an emblem of the poet’s worship of the Goddess’:

It will become the poet’s ‘privilege and fate’ thus to record the Goddess’s triumphant progress, singing her praises in spite of his own pain. Nor is it ‘to consider too curiously’ to consider Graves’s late poems as so many ‘larks’ set free.[4]

While Corcoran is doubtless right to suggest that ‘Graves himself may well have been happy to have had these lines glossed with the final stanza of ‘The White Goddess’, in which song-birds in Spring are recalled celebrating ‘the mountain Mother’,[5] he also points out that as readers we are free not to follow suit. There is little that overtly suggests the hidden presence of the Goddess in the thirty-five pellucid words that make up the poem,

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher

Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,

So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly

Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Yet, it is easy to see why Graves might have sensed a connection between this early poem and the ‘sudden over-whelming obsession’[6] which was to possess him nineteen years later. That most famous of all young bird-catchers in love, Mozart’s Papageno in The Magic Flute, is a character in an opera featuring a monstrous mother figure with dark magical powers, ruling over the mysterious night world, who tries to bind an impressionable young man to her service, though Tamino is won over in the end by the Apollonian wisdom of Sarastro.

However, the problem with Carter’s reading of the poem as an allegory about ‘the poet’s worship of the Goddess’ is not simply that a country Squire’s presumably unmarried daughter (though we might perhaps see her as Pamina) shares none of the roles or attributes of ‘the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess … mother, bride and layer-out’.[7] Once we have also translated the poem’s protagonist into ‘Graves the bird-catcher’,[8] and persuaded ourselves that it is not ‘to consider too curiously’ to see the larks of 1925 as representing poems such as ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’ (1944) and ‘The White Goddess’ (1951), we will find that there is nothing left of the original vivid little scene, which Graves himself called a ’Motto to a Picture’,[9] except for a hat. Hold onto the hat, because it will lead us back to the genesis of the poem, which did in fact begin with a picture, the first of a series of illustrations which have accompanied its publishing history.

Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward, in the notes to their edition of Graves’s Complete Poems, tell us that:

In a letter to Graves in May 1921, William Nicholson suggested ‘The Bird-catcher in Love’ as the subject for a rhyme which he thought would be ‘just the thing’ for Nancy to illustrate: ‘One Spring time, a certain Birdcatcher wishing to attract the attention of a beautiful Lady with whom he had fallen in love, concealed several larks in his hat, in order that when he made his bow to her the birds should fly away.’[10]

Nicholson accompanied this suggestion with a sketch which he later worked up into a finished pen and wash drawing,[11] one of the illustrations for his own projected children’s book, The Fowler in Love, which was sadly never published. The comic little scene is lively and full of swirling movement. The fowler, bald and plump and middle-aged, is bowing like an unsuccessful showman to the lady, whose dress, with its trailing train, seems to have been piped from whipped cream. She is trying to fend him off with her parasol, while her small dog, at the end of its leash, rushes at him fiercely, and the disregarded larks stream diagonally skyward from the hat in his outstretched left hand.

Although Nicholson’s suggested theme was to lead to Graves’s very different interpretation, his sketch of the fowler was clearly not the picture to which ‘Love Without Hope’ is a motto. Instead, and surprisingly, when the poem was first published it was illustrated by a striking Paul Nash wood engraving,[12] the stylized head of a young woman, seen in profile, in a modernist version of a quattrocento Florentine portrait convention. If this is the Squire’s daughter, she is keeping her own counsel. Her face is sad and withdrawn, and the brim of a hat like a shining helmet conceals her eyes.

Nash’s engraving may well have influenced Geoffrey Grigson’s choice of a fifteenth century Florentine portrait of a lady to illustrate a section of his anthology for young readers, The Cherry Tree,[13] which opens with ‘Love Without Hope’:

Then the Grief of Love; for which the image I have chosen is not, for example, the moon by itself in the sky … but the proud cold girl in a head-dress, with jewels around her neck.[14]

Graves’s poem, which I immediately knew off by heart without having to memorize it, and the lovely profile of the young woman in the jewelled head-dress, which I took to be the authentic face of grief proudly concealed, have lain side by side in my mind since I was given The Cherry Tree as a Christmas present at the age of thirteen. It was only on returning to the anthology when researching this article that I realized that Grigson saw the proud cold girl not as an embodiment of grief but as the cause of it, a charge which by implication he extends to the Squire’s daughter.

Patrick Keane shares this view, seeing the poem as ‘a typically Gravesian celebration of doomed love’, with the Squire’s daughter as a ‘disdainful aristocrat,’ who offers a foretaste of ‘the imperious female later to be worshipped as the Triple Goddess’ as she haughtily rides by ‘her subservient worshipper’.[15] Yet there is nothing in the poem to suggest that the Squire’s daughter is arrogantly demanding a tribute of larks from a humble suppliant whose love for her is doomed by her pride, and Graves would never have mistaken a daughter of the landed gentry for an aristocrat, disdainful or otherwise. He was educated at Charterhouse with the sons of country squires, and served with them as a junior officer in France. Corcoran, by contrast, sees ‘Love Without Hope’ as

a poem about oppositions of English social rank – ‘bird-catcher’ and ‘Squire’ – and of English patriarchal authority: ‘the Squire’s own daughter’, where the adjective makes her his owned daughter too, his possession, and the ‘young bird-catcher’; ‘young’, and so doubly without rights in this kingdom of the mature.’[16]

Tessa Boase, in Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds, shows us the extent of the social gulf between real-life bird-catchers and those who unhesitatingly considered themselves their betters:

Bird catchers were ‘rough-looking’ men, the ‘idle loafers’ you would ‘instinctively avoid on country lanes and commons’, wrote Mrs Lemon. They set to work with their ‘miserable little decoys’: the linnets with bleeding legs, the yellowhammer with a broken back. Using nets and lines they caught birds by the hundred, wringing the necks of females, ‘the cocks thrust into cages or boxes’ and despatched by rail to some ‘foul’ Paradise Court or Petticoat Lane seller, to be bought by other members of the working class.[17]

It is worth pointing out that Grigson’s supposedly cold proud girl (if she is what she seems, and not a ‘Victorian pretender’)[18] was probably also an ‘owned daughter’, like Mozart’s Pamina, whose all-powerful mother claims the right to give away her heart. ‘In Renaissance “display culture” oligarchic women were signs of an exchange between lineages’,[19] and fifteenth century Florentine profile portraits show young girls decked out in their fathers’ or husbands’ wealth on the eve of arranged marriages, their averted gaze signifying unblemished virtue in refusing to meet a male viewer’s eye. The pensive averted gaze of Nash’s Squire’s daughter suggests that, unlike Keane’s ‘disdainful aristocrat’, she is not aware that she figures in the fantasy life of the rough-looking boy she passes in the lane. Indeed, the class difference that Corcoran spells out forbids that she should be. Like the ‘expensive delicate ship’ in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’,[20] she has somewhere to get to and rides calmly on. The singing larks which express the bird-catcher’s love are meaningful only to him and the delighted reader.

Although the poem hinges on class difference, it does not simply offer us a glimpse of social history. Graves’s ‘as when’ tells us that the bird-catcher’s encounter with the Squire’s daughter, like Shelley’s ‘desire of the moth for the star’,[21] is an analogy for the common experience of loving without hope. It is not surprising, then, that critics, even when they do not equate them with Graves’s later poems, see the larks themselves as a ‘halo’ made from ‘live and longing gold’,[22] utterly divorced from the reality of the nineteenth century songbird trade, and unthinkingly assume the reason the bird-catcher keeps birds in his hat to be the fairy-tale one: because the story demands it. Unlike Nicholson’s fowler, he cannot have put them there to attract the attention of a love object met by chance and hopelessly above him. However, Corcoran’s final point brings the larks too into the remit of social history. When the love-struck boy doffs his hat, ‘the sweeping gesture reveals him as a bird-catcher, a poacher, a criminal; and this will almost certainly have consequences for him.’[23] Curiously, this suggestion of a practical reason why the catcher might conceal his catch raises problems about the date of Graves’s apparently timeless little scene, and will require us to consider one final illustration as not entirely trustworthy evidence to the contrary.

For Victorians of every social class, caged wild birds were part of the furnishings of the home, although this did not necessarily mean they were unaware of the cruelty involved. Mrs Jane Loudon, in her 1851 book on the care of domestic pets, tells her middle-class readers:

Various kinds of LARKS are kept in cages; though it appears very cruel to confine birds which, in a state of nature, delight in soaring as high as they possibly can, before they begin to sing. The SKYLARK, in a state of nature, never sings on the ground, and even in a cage, the poor bird generally attempts to rise as far as the wires will permit him, before he begins to sing.[24]

She then goes on to explain exactly how to look after these unfortunate captives, which should be ‘kept in a large cage, and … supplied with a turf of fresh grass three times a week.’ Needless to say, the dwellers in city slums, who cherished the pet birds which brought the sounds of the countryside to their crowded streets, had no access to fresh turf and could not afford spacious aviaries. Dealers assured them, ‘It’s kinder to give ‘em small cages; they’d beat themselves to death in bigger ones.’[25]

Although game birds had always been the exclusive property of the landowners who bred and shot them, songbirds only began to be legally protected, at least during the breeding season, by the Wild Birds Preservation Act of 1872, leading to complaints that ‘the swells … aint satisfied with nobblin’ the game birds. No: they must keep poor men from ‘avin’ singin’ birds, and other poor men from makin’ their livin’ by ketchin’ on ‘em.’[26] Skylarks, which were seen by farmers as a pest, were not among the species covered by the act. However, ‘the skylark trade aroused high passions in Victorian England, and saving the skylark became an early and totemic campaign of the Society for the Protection of Birds, founded in Didsbury in 1891, and granted a Royal Charter in 1904.’[27]

The male birds sing most sweetly, so they were the ones which ended up in cages, while vast numbers of larks of both sexes met a different fate. If a director of The Magic Flute were to answer the fairy-tale question of what use the nocturnal Queen of the Night makes of Papageno’s captured songbirds by revealing that she eats them, a present-day audience would think this barbaric, and might even complain that the theatre of cruelty had gone too far. But as John Lewis-Stempel tells us:

The eating of larks in Britain reached its apogee in the Victorian century, when the lark became a culinary vogue among the rich, while still being consumed in appreciable numbers by the middle and lower classes. The Victorian lark was roasted, baked, put in a pie, entombed in aspic, turned into mauviettes en surprise aux truffes in St James’s clubs […] By the 1890s as many as 40,000 skylarks were sold in London markets per day.[28]

Lewis-Stempel even gives us recipes for larks in aspic and lark pudding. This latter dish was sampled in 1891, under the misleading name of beefsteak pudding, at London’s Cheshire Cheese inn by the American journalist Sarah Morton, the first woman in its 200-year history to do so:

There is my big dinner plate piled high with – what on earth! Birds – yes, tiny bits of birds – skylarks, kidneys, strips of beef just smothered in pastry, like sea-foam, and dark brown gravy, steaming with fragrance, as seasoning.[29]

Despite the fact that by the end of the century the Society for the Protection of Birds was actively campaigning against the songbird trade, and itinerant bird-catchers like the boy in Graves’s poem had indeed started to fear prosecution, the Cheshire Cheese inn went on serving lark and beefsteak pudding until the eve of the Second World War.

While Corcoran’s implied late Victorian date is not contradicted by anything in the poem, and Graves himself might not originally have felt the need to pin down an incident which could have happened at any time during the previous couple of centuries, his decision to revive The Penny Fiddle, ‘the book which, when he was young and poor, he had tried to sell as a children’s book of nursery rhymes to keep the creditors at bay’,[30] in collaboration with the well-known illustrator Edward Ardizzone meant that a historical period for the characters’ costumes had to be established. Graves described the whole collection as ‘mostly romantic 1820-ish pieces, with more salt than honey in them’,[31] and told Ardizzone ‘The atmosphere with few exceptions (such as “The Lift Boy”) is 1820 – 1850-ish, but please yourself about costume. If you find any of them unillustratable cut them out.’[32] The Penny Fiddle was published in 1960, a year after Grigson’s anthology, and ‘some 20,000 copies were sold’.[33]

Ardizzone settled for the earlier of Graves’s dates, and his illustration for ‘Love Without Hope’ shows the Squire’s daughter sitting side-saddle on a little white horse, wearing a modest riding habit and a cap with a feather, while the bird-catcher’s neat coat and knee breeches make him seem like her social equal. The image has all of Ardizzone’s customary sweetness, but there is no chemistry between the pair. She is looking away at the growing flock of birds, which are fluttering upwards, making no attempt to sing around her head, and he is gazing into the hat from which he appears to be conjuring them. It is a charming illustration, all honey and no salt, but quite devoid of the grief of love, and it cannot really be taken as establishing a fixed date for the encounter in the poem.

In my own poem, I have chosen to contrast Corcoran’s late Victorian setting with a Regency one, and to shift the focus from the bird-catcher himself by reimagining the little episode from the point of view of all its participants. This has forced me to cast a cold eye on Graves’s exaltation of larks by considering how they would really react to being suddenly released from a dark, confined space. Larks sing at a height of between fifty and one hundred metres, not at little more than the height of a girl on horseback. Shakespeare tells us they sing ‘at heaven’s gate’,[34] while that experienced bird-watcher John Clare describes a singing lark as ‘a dust spot in the sunny skies’.[35] And, of course, birds sing to establish their territory or to attract a mate, not from delight at being set free from a hat. Yet this realism melts away when we return to the original poem, which creates its own Mozartian space for the lark music to fill.

Setting the scene in the Regency period enables my Squire’s daughter to take part in a forgotten aspect of the songbird trade by playing the flageolet to a bullfinch. While young ladies of marriageable age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were encouraged to play keyboard instruments, enabling them to show off their musical talents while maintaining the straight back and averted gaze which, as in a quattrocento Florentine profile portrait, still signalled virtue to potential suitors, they were warned against playing instruments ‘which are really unbecoming to the Fair Sex; as the Flute, Violin and Hautboy; the last of which is too Manlike and would look indecent in a Woman’s mouth’.[36] However, though larger wind instruments were seen as unacceptably phallic, an exception was made for the little flageolet, and its even smaller version the bird flageolet, which was used to turn caged songbirds into living musical boxes by repeatedly playing them tunes such as those collected in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, first published in 1717. Stanley Godman, who edited a twentieth century version, tells us that

the popularity of teaching birds is also indicated by the publication in 1714 of a quite separate treatise (without tunes) entitled The Bird Fancyer’s Delight: or choice observations and directions concerning the feeding, breeding and teaching of all sorts of singing birds, which ran through many editions of which the last appeared as late as 1830.[37]

Many different species of bird could be trained in this way, though it is unclear with what success, but the bullfinch was regarded as an especially apt pupil. However, my Squire’s daughter is struggling with her own progress on an instrument which was marketed as especially easy for an amateur to play. Rehearsing in her mind the technical challenges of the little piece from The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, she entirely fails to notice the boy with his hatful of larks.

The sad failure of my bird-catcher’s romantic gesture highlights the fact that in Graves’s poem the grief of love is mingled with a kind of heart-stopping dolce stil novo joy. Although the Squire’s daughter will never return his feelings, Graves’s bird-catcher, who stands for all those who love without hope, has witnessed an apotheosis which reminds Corcoran of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Red Cherubims. In my version of the poem, only the larks – the cock birds which would have gone to the bird dealer’s cage and the hen birds which would have ended up in the cooking pot – are given a happy ending. The boy, in every sense, goes home hungry.

Whether we think of it as being set at the beginning or the end of the nineteenth century, or even in the timeless ‘green land of wonder’ which Graves associates with Mozart’s music in ‘The Corner Knot’,[38] ‘Love Without Hope’ seems to belong to a more innocent past. There may indeed have been a self-protective reason why the Graves of 1925, still living with the long-term effects of shell shock, might have wanted to limit the pain and loss connected with the song of the skylark to a bitter-sweet evocation of unrequited love. With the outbreak of war, that much exploited bird had been redefined as a symbol of pastoral England, most famously by Ralph Vaughan Williams, though his decision to join up at the age of 42 meant that The Lark Ascending, composed in the summer of 1914, was not performed until 1920. More importantly for serving soldiers, the song of the skylark was, in Lewis-Stempel’s words, ‘the musical background to the war on the Western Front,’[39] where ‘the bird even stayed put on day one of the Somme … the bloodiest day in British military history, with its 58,000 British casualties’. [40]

Though poets of all ranks wrote about those battlefield larks, it was young officers of Graves’s own class who were ironically nearest to ‘heaven’s gate’ as they did so. Graves tells us, in an essay written fifty years after the end of the war, that ‘a soldier who had the honour to serve’ in one of the better divisions ‘could count on no more than three months’ trench service before being wounded and killed; a junior officer, on a mere six weeks.’[41] His description in the same essay of the changes brought about by the war to the lives of the landed classes firmly places the poem in a pre-war rural world, in which the unbridgeable social gulf between bird-catcher and Squire’s daughter was accepted as a fact of nature.

Rationing, for the first time in history: unbuttered muffins, wedding cakes without sugar. Golf links commandeered as drill grounds. Country houses turned into hospitals. Servant girls deserting ducal kitchens for the munitions factory. Class distinctions disappearing, as when wounded officers promoted from the ranks fell in love with aristocratic V. A. D. nurses. [42]

If this impending social change might seem to suggest a Lawrentian narrative arc, the poem itself refutes it. Since love without hope has no future, the single moment of the poem is safe from the onward march of history, just as the unimprisoned larks defy ornithology as they crown the beloved’s head with song.

Having started this article with a glimpse of a Regency period Squire’s daughter, I should like to end it with a memorial to the Squires’ sons who, a century later, fought alongside Graves on the Somme and, unlike him, never came home.

Envoi

over the Western Front the skylarks singing

despite the shell bursts

were captured in verse by doomed young officers

whose patriot fathers

dined in their London clubs before the war

on lark and beefsteak pudding

remember those birds and boys

next time you listen to The Lark Ascending

Acknowledgements: Neil Corcoran’s engaging book initiated this project; Michael Joseph has been an enthusiastically supportive editor; Marilynn Olson has given me invaluable help with the bird-catcher illustrations; and Donald Kerr and Amanda Hilliam have kindly and promptly responded to my research queries. I am very grateful to them all.

Judith Woolf is in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, Heslington. Her main academic research areas are twentieth century Italian-Jewish writers, especially Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg; life-writing, especially in relation to the Holocaust; and narrative patterns in European literature. She is a translator from both Italian and Old Icelandic, and her work as a poet includes libretti, music theatre and verse translations.