The appearance of Robert Graves' Poems About War is a welcome publication for all readers of his work. As his son William points out in the brief introduction to this volume of fifty-four poems, five of which have never been published before, "all of the poems were suppressed when the war and its effects on him had passed." Therefore, this volume is a welcome opportunity to sample and examine Graves' early poeuy without having to delve into dark library archives to discover forgotten volumes such as Goliath and pavid and Countrv Sentiment. In EELIS.AhQuLY.Æ, we have spread before us the poetic chronicle of the development of the nineteen year old Carthusian poet as he responds to the buffeting assault on his senses by the realities of the Great War. As might be expected, the quality of the poems presented is largely uneven, but while one may smile at the banality of thought and commonplace images in poems such as 'On Finding Myself a Soldier" (13), where Graves compares his youth with a rosebud and his war experience as open bloom, its "Twelve flamy petals ringed around/ A heart more red than blood," one can applaud Graves' poetic impulse straining to convert the powerful impressions into the fabric of poetry. And it is awareness of this impulse that makes Poems About War readable as something more than just a curiosity. Furthermore, the poems offer the reader a developmental glimpse at the changes in the poet as he confronts the dichotomy between the grimness of the trench world and that imagined vision engendered by the conservative public school consciousness and Edwardian upper-middle class values so aptly described in R.P. Graves' The Assault Heroic.

The collection is, among other things, a record of Graves' loss of faith in traditional values. In "Big Words" (21), belief in God is reduced to a mere psychological crutch in which the soldier hopes to dispel his fear of annihilation. Graves confirms this in his excellent preface to Collected Poems of 1938, where he admits that the primary impulse behind his early war poetry was a "frank fear of

physical death." Indeed, these early poems were, in many ways, an escape from a realistic confrontation with the slaughter around him and an attempt to alembicate the

repulsiveness of life at the Front into traditional images of childhood or of Georgian poetry. In the second poem of the collection, "The Shadow of Death" (14), for example, Graves offers the nursery image of a bad fairy stealing the boy poet out of the cradle and transforming him into a soldier before he has sung his song to humanity. In "Limbo," a poem rather harshly criticized by critics in the past for its dependence on Georgian platitudes and banal nature images, Graves contrasts life in the trenches with the comparatively bucolic lifestyle behind the lines. The poem, despite its admitted weaknesses, manages to capture the sense of relief and return to life that a combat soldier must have felt upon leaving that half-life "Of bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries/ And the ever-watching sniper: where the reek/ Of death offends the living" to enter "... the sunny cornland where/ Babies like tickling, and where tall white horses/ Draw the plough leisurely in quiet courses." The remaining poems in the first two sections of the volume all demonstrate Graves' need to escape the reality of the War's carnage and chronicle his attempts at alchemizing these horrors into lumps of gold.

In the Fairies and Fusiliers section (written largely while Graves was convalescing amid Queen Victoria's serene, wooded walks at Quarr) Graves' poetic vision has bifurcated into either serious war meditations or romantic idealizations and fancies that have their roots firmly entrenched in Georgian experimentation. Simply, one might say that Graves wrote either for content or for style, but never for both. In "Dead Cow Farm" (37), he struggles with the concern that would haunt him throughout the twenties: where was the poet to find his inspiration when the War had his innocence and childlike vision? Here Graves writes a poem based on the myth that an Elemental Cow "Began to lick cold stones and mud:/ And so was

Adam born, and Eve." This highly poetic act of divine creation is contrasted with Graves' mad world where chaos reigns. In the trenches is an abundance of "primeval mud, cold stones and rain," but the completeness of the war's destruction C'Here flesh decays and blood drips red") has murdered any hope of ever again finding creative inspiration. The repetition of the judgment and the heaviness of the final line sound the death knell for poetic epiphany.

The selection of poems from Counv-y Sentiment disproves Graves' remarks in the Preface to Whipperginnv that these poems were written with "the desire to escape from a painful war neurosis into an Arcadia of amatory fancy." The full psychological implications of the war were only beginning to impinge on the unconscious of the optimistic retired soldier, and "Haunted" (54) is a vivid example of the guilt Graves was to feel for surviving the war intact. While the poem is strictly personal in tone, the message is more general in its intent. The ghosts of the dead soldiers are given free rein in the realm of darkness where they have been sentenced to be forgotten; clearly, they are ordered to "leave the noonday's warm sunshine/ To living lads for mirth and wine." But the dead no longer obey the commands of the living, and they "grin" out even in the morning sunshine. The guilt of the living is emphasized in the shame of their enjoying the sun and the sensual elements of life denied their fallen comrades. The poem anticipates the frightening neuroses drat were to haunt Graves throughout the decade before the publication Of Q.QQ.dhx.g•

The remaining poems, including the well anthologized, Sassoonesque "SergeantMajor Money" (66) and the five previously unpublished poems, round out the portrait of the young Welch Fusilier. What does become apparent in reading these poems is that they are a necessary coda to the strident and pugnacious voice behind Goodbye

TQ All That They allow the reader to tread the intellectual and emotional path with the sensitive young soldier and to observe his fear, sorrow, disillusionment, and eventual breakdown under the pressures of the Great War. Poems About War is a necessary supplement to the understanding of Graves the poet and Graves the man.

Patrick J .M. Quinn

The University of Maryland

European Division

"NOT ABOUT HEROES"

(On a performance, at Taunton, of Stephen MacDonald's Play)

Between lunch and tea, ices and the anticipated patisserie two earnest young men too young to have worn khaki in earnest walk and talk, talk and recite, enact Owen and Sassoon

Sassoon and Owen ... We murm ur knowing cliches about what they saw, made others see, though poems stop no wars.

It all ends in heavy darkness, blank out on the crouching Owen whose split brave life sucks light from the bleak, lingering Sassoon, Outside, a blue-wash January sky; a tense mother plucks at her son flinging crumbs to ducks on the River Tone.