Notes
Anthology/ies
Introduction
In April, we asked members of the Robert Graves Society to choose poems by Graves they would like to see included in an anthology. The anthology selections were intended to to be read against Gregory Leadbetter’s article, ‘Which Flowers to Choose: Robert Graves and the Dilemmas of Anthologising’ (based on his plenary talk at the 2024 Oxford conference). To ease the pressure of adjudicating among Graves’s entire body of poetry for the paradigmatic, Norton-esque anthology centered in the article, in which quality, notability, stature, and popularity are the chief selection criteria, we suggested that one might consider different sorts of anthologies with different criteria, for example an anthology of unjustly overlooked poems, or poems about poetry, poems representing a poet’s entire career, poems representative of a poet’s diverse or contrasting practices (an anthology in which one could pair Graves’s Modernist and Traditional tendencies, or illustrate his idea of left-handed and right-handed poetry), or poems that influenced later poets, containing intertexts from earlier poems or represented in intertexts in later poems. We encouraged readers to annotate their choices in a paragraph of two and suggested that selections would ideally fall between five and eight poems (a limitation we later regretted).
While we received fewer responses that we might have hoped, the responses we did receive were richer, more varied, and more individualized than we anticipated. While some readers observed the recommended eight-poem limit, several submitted many more poems. For them, the hypothetical anthology morphed into a short selection of Graves’s essential poems. Why not? One respondent submitted a brief essay, included here. Inspired by the enthusiasm and resourcefulness of the responses, the editor submitted an entry as well.
The following material is arranged as follows: the alphabetical list of selected titles precedes the individual annotated lists. The numbers beside some (sixteen) titles represent how many times those titles were selected. The order of anthologies loosely describes a movement from anthologies based on a larger body of work to those based on a smaller body of work. In the order of their appearance, the contributors of these lists are John Leonard, Judith Woolf, William Graves, Paul O’Prey, Anne Marsh Penton, Dunstan Ward, Adriana Marinelli, and Michael Joseph.
To readers who were overcome by the effort to keep their selections down to eight poems, and therefore held back, our apologies. Perhaps we will repeat this exercise again. And to those included here, our thanks.
Alphabetical Listing of Selected Poems
1805
Allie
Babylon
The Bough of Nonsense
Careers
Child’s Nightmare, A
Christmas Robin, The
Clipped Stater, The
Cool Web, The 2
Counting the Beats 3
Cuirassiers of the Frontier, The 2
Dead Boche, A
Dedication of three hats, A
Departure
Despite and Still 2
Devil’s Advice to Storytellers, The
Diotima Dead
Down, Wanton, Down 2
End of Play
Escape
Eurydice
Face in the Mirror, The 2
Fallen Tower of Siloam, The
Finding of Love, The
Flying Crooked 2
Fusilier, The (For Peter)
Ghost from Arakan, A
Goliath and David
Hide and Seek
Hotel Bed at Lugano
Idyll of Old Age, An
In Broken Images
In the Lion House
It Was All Very Tidy 2
Lady Visitor in the Pauper Ward
Language of the Seasons 2
Last Day of Leave 2
Last Post, The
Legs, The
Like Snow 2
Lilac Frock, The
Lollocks 2
Love Story, A
Love Without Hope
Magic Picture, The
Mid-Winter Waking 2
Nature's Lineaments
Never Such Love
No More Ghosts
Not Dead 2
On Portents 2
Olive Yard, The
Persian Version, The 2
Pier-Glass, The [the revised version]
Pinch of Salt, A
Pressure Gauge, The
Pure Death
Pygmalion to Galatea
Recalling War
Return of the Goddess, The
Rocky Acres
She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep 2
Sick Love 2
Straw, The
Symptoms of Love 3
Terraced Valley, The
Troll’s Nosegay, The
This What-I-Mean
Through Nightmare 2
Time
To Bring the Dead to Life
To Juan at the Winter Solstice
To Lucia at Birth
To Walk on Hills
Two Fusiliers
Ulysses 2
Under the Olives
Warning to Children 5
¡Welcome to the Caves of Àrta!
Welsh Incident 3
White Goddess, The
Different Aspects of Graves’s Poetry
–– John Leonard
In choosing these eight poems I am choosing poems that reflect different aspects of Graves’ poetic works, but also the eight poems of his that appeal to me most.
‘Warning to Children’ and ‘The Cool Web’: in these two poems of the 30s Graves anticipates so much of the existentially alienated poetry of the next generations. Firstly, the terrifying chaos of reality, and secondly a sober report of the distance between language and reality, which, by the repetitions within it returns on language, as we have to.
‘On Portents’: the classic Gravesian Muse poem.
‘To Bring the Dead to Life’: Graves’s wry commentary on his analeptic method for writing historical fiction.
‘Through Nightmare’: a tenderly beautiful love poem, Graves at his best.
‘The Persian Version’: most commentary assumes that Graves is simply pillorying official war communiqués, but is he not also questioning ‘the Greek theatrical tradition’ we have unconsciously absorbed?
‘The Return of the Goddess’ [NB must have the reading ‘red-wattled crane’, as being ornithologically accurate]. When this was first written it was a prophecy, in the decades of ecological destruction since then it has become a description of reality.
‘The Olive Yard’, a beautiful poem of everyday love-magic.
‘Warning to Children’
‘The Cool Web’
‘On Portents’
‘To Bring the Dead to Life’
‘Through Nightmare’
‘The Persian Version’
‘The Return of the Goddess’
‘The Olive Yard’
Poems Carried in My Head
–– Judith Woolf
The anthology in which I would include my chosen Robert Graves poems would be based on the one I carry around in my head, and which, like Lord Wavell’s ‘Other Men’s Flowers’, consists of the poems I remember, either wholly or in part. I learnt some of these poems in childhood, and I prize all of them for what Michael Longley described as Graves’s mastery of ‘the singing line’ and his connoisseur’s knowledge of ‘riddles, spells and nursery rhyme.’ Not all of these poems are major ones, although the first four on the list indubitably are, but even the arguably minor ones have the trick of sticking in the memory. So my list balances the ‘naughty wives’ letting lollocks lick their ‘honey-sticky fingers’ with Graves’s phallic repurposing of the Fool’s eels from ‘King Lear’, and includes Nelson, who ‘made the whole Fleet love him, damn his eyes!’ along with Anna Maria, the unknown Swiss maiden, ‘Child of the children of that fox who never | Ate the sour grapes: her teeth not set on edge’, while the final two poems are so delightful in their oddity that they could have been written by nobody else.
fame is ephemeral stuff
as Graves once wryly reflected
the bubble reputation
can burst on the printed page
so the daunting hundred year challenge
for every much praised poet
is to leave just a handful of poems
which have not yet been forgotten
while the ultimate thousand year goal
is a single anonymous fragment
like the song of the monks of Ely
as Canute the King rowed by
In a world already being taken over by new and robotic voices, Graves’s verbal earworms belong among the crucial fragments which, like the song of the monks at Ely, will preserve the singing line.
‘1805’
‘Down, Wanton, Down!’
‘Flying Crooked’
‘Hotel Bed at Lugano’
‘Lollocks’
‘Love Without Hope’
‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’
‘Sick Love’
‘The Straw’
‘Symptoms of Love’
‘Warning to Children’
‘Welsh Incident’
Notes on Robert Graves’s Dislike of ‘Anthologies’
–– William Graves
The term ‘anthology’ does not sit comfortably with Robert Graves and his poetry: it generally applies (as defined by the OED) to a third-party compilation of selected works by various authors. Robert wrote the essay A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1927) with Laura Riding and then republished the main article in his The Common Asphodel in 1947. My son Philip and I are presently collating and transcribing extant letters written by Robert, and presently have posted the text of over 4,200 of his letters on robertgravesletters.org. Below are extracts from some in which Robert gives his thoughts and ideas regarding the publication of poetry in anthologies.
RG to Jonathan (Cape), 1930,
As for Harrison Smith and his Armagedon! I don’t want fees now; I want him to realise swiftly that I am not a aspirant to inclusion in the world’s best literature (and Armagedon was a God awful book at that); that I very much resent his using the stuff without asking my permission, or offering to pay, or notifying me , or sending me a copy of the book; that I would not have given my consent; and that unless he writes a personal letter withdrawing what he said about my ‘sincerity’ I shall try to forget that he is in partnership with you, and never offer him another book. What does he think I am? A bookfellow?
If he doesn’t understand this explain that in England publishers of standing don’t take for granted that they can do what they like with their author’s books; and that English authors are unaccustomed to being treated like this. Also that I have a particular dislike for anthologies.
Despite his ‘dislike’ for anthologies, there are two significant groups of ‘anthologised’ poems by Graves published in the 1930s. One group is in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), ed. by Michael Roberts, with some twelve poems (and accompanied by nine poems by Riding) in which presumably the couple had a say in the choices. Indeed the editor in the introductory note thanks those poets who have helped him. The other group is in The Modern Poet, an Anthology (1938) ed. by Gwendolen Murphy in which both Riding and Graves are represented with more poems (six each) than other represented poets and are thanked by the editor in the acknowledgements. It seems that they did not regard as ‘anthologised’ the poems they chose themselves.
Even in his rare third-party publications with other poets, Robert preferred ‘contributing’ groups of poems, and having a say in the order they were placed.
RG to John Lehman (New Writing and Daylight), November 1942
What I feel is that I don’t mind contributing several poems, but I don’t want to contribute one. A single poem tends to lose its taste and smell if mixed up with poems of other peoples and general literary matter, but several make a book within a book.
It is better that the poems should not be split up I don’t mind the Grotesques put elsewhere than first, if they are kept together.
Perhaps last and the Satires and Grotesques will be more accurate. The rest of the arrangement is intended as a variation of metres, keeping rhymed and unrhymed in alternation as far as possible.
Indeed, the ‘book within a book’ idea is proposed in the joint book of poems in of Work in Hand, also 1942. It is prefaced with:
‘These three small books are published under a single cover for economy and friendship: Signed Alan Hodge, Norman Cameron, Robert Graves.’
In later years, Robert published his poems as and when he wrote them in magazines like The New Yorker and The Spectator (probably to retain the copyright in the U.S.A., and England). Then when a series of poems was completed, he often published them in book form. Finally, once in about a decade (1926, 1938, 1947, 1957, 1965 and 1975) he published a corpus of poems as Collected Poems (a de facto personal anthology), eliminating those he felt did not fully satisfy him. In his volumes of ‘Collected’, poems are chronologically grouped as per their book apparition. Any new, or indeed, any previously collected poem, which he now felt at fault, was suppressed.
RG to Martin Seymour Smith, Feb 2, 1946;
I forget if I told you in my last letter, I have managed to shorten my Poems 1914-38 by sixteen poems and most of the introduction, to an average of 5 poems or a bit over a year and most of the introduction. And I’ve done a lot of revision and curtailing.
However:
To Martin Seymour-Smith, 18 Jan 1948,
In the course of one’s life real poems (not ones eventually discarded) seldom come as often as once every year, if at all.
Thus each volume of Robert Graves’s Collected Poems contains his selection of his previous Collected poems with an update with the more recent ones. Hence subsequent editions were not much thicker than the previous Collected. His forward to his Collected Poems 1959 is prefaced by his poem ‘To Calliope’ the last stanza of which reads:
No: nothing reads so fresh as I first thought,
Or as you could wish –
Yet must I, when far worse is eagerly bought,
Cry stinking fish?
In the foreword of which he states: ‘I can promise that no silver spoons have been thrown out with the refuse. ‘Only in Collected Poems 1975, when his memory was failing, are no previous poems discarded; and most of the new included. Only once did he publish a selection of his poems, Poems Selected by Himself (1957). A final letter extract with a thought on copyright and suppressed poems:
RG to John Lehman Jan, 1955
No, I’m afraid I have no worthy companion piece to Penthesileia, and my agent has signed another agreement with New Yorker giving them the option of any new poems I write: and they keep them for a year before they publish, and insist on first serial world rights.
As for suppressed poems of mine; the ruling isn’t rigid especially for my juvenilia, when anthologists are supplying a juvenile audience. But if responsible adult-anthologists choose poems that I have suppressed because of technical flaws, it seems unfortunate that they don’t see, like me, what’s wrong with them. However, every case on its own merits, and I’m interested to see which this is.
I am just finishing a Penguin translation of Lucan’s Civil Wars which has been most interesting as giving me a real sense of the foundations of modern bad poetry: which are securely placed in the Latin view* of poetry as a branch of rhetoric, not a vehicle of truth.
*I except Catullios who was a Celtiberian and Horace who wrote for Punch, and a few others.
Curiously Philip and I produced something close to an anthology of Robert’s poems when redesigning the Robert Graves website and of which Robert would doubtless have found fault. For I asked Dunstan Ward, co-editor with Beryl Graves of Robert’s The Complete Poems, and D. G. N. Carter, author of the brilliant Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement, each to prepare a list of their fifty-two favourite poems. These were to have uploaded online on the landing page of the Robert Graves Society Website (robertgraves.org) to appear randomly one a week. Thus the poems Nick Carter and Dunstan both agreed upon appear twice as often as those on which they differed. I attach the list of the poems on which Dunstan and Nick coincided. How many moving and memorable ones are missing!
The following are the twenty-six coincident titles from the fifty-two best poems chosen by D .N. G. Carter and Dunstan Ward.
‘Christmas Robin, The’
‘Cool Web, The’
‘Counting the Beats’
‘Cuirassiers of the Frontier, The’
‘Despite and Still’
‘End of Play’
‘Face in the Mirror. The’
‘Fallen Tower of Siloam, The’
‘In Broken Images’
‘It Was All Very Tidy’
‘Last Day of Leave (1916), The’
‘Lollocks’
‘MidWinter Waking’
‘Nature’s Lineaments’
‘Never Such Love’
‘On Portents’
‘Pure Death’
‘Recalling War’
‘Rocky Acres’
‘Sick Love’
‘Symptoms of Love’
‘Terraced Valley, The’
‘Time’
‘To Walk on Hills’
‘Ulysses’
‘Warning to Children’
Poetry for Pleasure
–– Paul O'Prey
My choice was of course expressed in my edition of Robert’s Selected Poems (Penguin 1986), published the year after Robert died. Earlier this week I organised a reading of his poems here in Hove and put together a list of twenty-two poems I thought would read aloud well, and I attach that for interest. Robert himself said that the most a poet could hope for was to have twenty poems that would survive and become part of the tradition. I’ve whittled that down to twenty-two.
‘Counting the Beats’
‘Despite and Still’
‘Flying Crooked’
‘It Was All Very Tidy’
‘Language of the Seasons’
‘Last Day of Leave’
‘The Legs’
‘Like Snow’
‘A Love Story’
‘Mid-Winter Waking’
‘No More Ghosts’
‘Not Dead’
‘She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep’
‘Symptoms of Love’
‘Through Nightmare’
‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’
‘To Lucia at Birth’
‘Two Fusiliers’
‘Under the Olives’
‘Warning to Children’
‘Welsh Incident’
‘The White Goddess’
Goliath and David
–– Anne Marsh Penton
As a descendant of David Cuthbert Thomas (1895–1916), I can’t help but be biased in my choice for inclusion in any anthology of Robert Graves’s verse. The small collection Goliath and David was Graves’s second, published in collaboration between him and his other war-time companion, Siegfried Sassoon. It was written after David’s death at the Western Front in 1916, with his life, his origins and his friendship with Robert hinted at throughout the poems, and the title poem posthumously dedicated to David himself. Crucially, David Thomas was also there near the beginning of Graves’s adult life and in the early stages of his development as a poet and writer.
Goliath and David is a joy to read, and runs as a testament to the three Royal Welch Fusiliers officers’ WW1 friendship. In spirit they enter poem after poem, inextricably together, as hinted at in the introductory piece, ‘The Bough of Nonsense - an Idyll’. Sadly, though, the companionship between Graves and Sassoon was to unravel some years later, starting with a bitter and complicated falling-out between the two poets arising from Graves’s 1929 memoir Good-Bye to All That, in which Sassoon perceived hurtful inaccuracies, and which undoubtedly caused both of them a certain amount of unaddressed sorrow for much of their subsequent lives (there was a distant reconciliation in the 1950s). Thus, Goliath and David could be said to be in effect a double memorial, and not least because the final poem, ‘Not Dead’, concisely evoking the dead comrade’s fair hair, his voice, his childhood games and his house in the woods, was to be the one that David’s mother, Ethelinda Thomas, would later read to her grandchildren to remind them of their late uncle.
Selections (Goliath and David, Graves, R.V., Chiswick Press, 1916/17)
‘The Bough of Nonsense’
‘Goliath and David’
‘A Pinch of Salt’
‘Babylon’
‘Careers’
‘The Lady Visitor in the Pauper Ward’
‘The Last Post’
‘A Dead Boche’
‘Escape’
‘Not Dead’
Eight Hidden Poems
–– Dunstan Ward
Robert Graves chose not to publish these eight poems. I have taken them from the sixty-nine ‘Unpublished and Posthumously Published Poems’ that Beryl Graves and I selected for our Complete Poems edition.
Two came close to appearing in Work in Hand (1942): Graves removed ‘Diotima Dead’ when the printers wanted cuts, and ‘In the Lion House’ after he read through the book and decided it was ‘out of key’. The rest remained in manuscript and/or typescript. He did not destroy them, like some others; he just left them hidden away. They are thus my suggestions for an imagined anthology of ‘Hidden Poems’.
These poems might be regarded as subversive, in stance, feeling, their take on relationships. Yet surely all of Graves’s poetry is subversive. This is one of its strengths.
‘The Fusilier – (For Peter)’
‘This What-I-Mean’
‘Diotima Dead’
‘In the Lion House’
‘A Ghost from Arakan’
‘The Lilac Frock’
‘Departure’
‘The Pressure Gauge’
Robert Graves and the Classical Echo: Poems of Myth and History.An Enduring Resonance
–– Adriana Marinelli
While Robert Graves is widely celebrated for his classical prose works, his poetic treatment of classical antiquity has received less focused attention, although his poetry is significantly indebted to classical models. From brief allusions to the reworking of classical motifs, to translations, imitations and parody, Graves’s poetry invaluably contributes to Classical Reception in English. Not only does Greek and Roman heritage serve as source material but it provides a means to scrutinise human experiences and (re)construct the profound meaning of poetry itself. The proposed selection draws from various periods of Graves’s output, spanning his early war-influenced works to later, more deeply embedded mythological explorations. To illustrate Graves’s unique approach to classical antiquity, this anthology presents a preliminary selection of poems reflecting both his historical and mythological classical connections. I am modelling this imagined anthology on Classical Literature and its Reception: An Anthology ed. by Robert DeMaria Jr and Robert D. Brown. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Historical/War Contexts:
‘A Dedication of Three Hats’ (Poems 1914-1926)
‘The Persian Version’ (Satires and Grotesques, Poems 1938-1945
‘The Clipped Stater’ (Welchman’s Hose, 1925)
‘The Cuirassiers of the Frontier’ (Collected Poems 1938)
Mythological (Re)Interpretations:
‘An Idyll of Old Age’ (Whipperginny, 1923)
‘Pygmalion to Galatea’ (Recent Poems 1925-1926)
‘Ulysses’ (Poems 1933)
‘Eurydice’ (Man Does, Woman is 1964)
Seven Types of Repetition
–– Michael Joseph
I’ve chosen to select poems for an anthology demonstrating ambiguity in English poetry, keyed to A. E. Stallings’s Oxford Lecture: ‘Repetition is a Form of Change: An Oblique Strategy in Poetry’.
1. Repeating Images:
‘Warning to Children’ repeats abstract images (‘ Blocks of slate enclosing dappled | Red and green’) to create a world of the mind, in which rational or vertical thought leads nowhere but instead recursively reproduces meaningless chains like junk DNA ad infinitum. While the poem warns against seeking rationalistic knowledge, it seems to doubt its warning will be ineffective. Part of the fun here is that while the poem dissembles as an ironic warning or the conventional hedonistic invitation masquerading as a warning, it’s something else, modeling the strange loops it is describing.
2. Repeating tropes
Three poems illustrate the use of repeating tropes: ‘The Magical Picture,’ ‘Welsh Incident,’ and ‘Allie’.
In ‘The Magical Picture’, the idea of the self gazing into a mirror (which implies the poem serves as a mirror upon which the reader’s interpretations constitute an image of the self) argues the futility of looking for knowledge empirically. ‘Welsh Incident’ comically repeats the trope of the tedious, pragmatic, historical self, interrogating the creative, imaginative self. ‘Allie’ weaves together two repeating tropes: the trope of a final calling or culling, suggesting a rite of passage or a terminal experience; and a camouflaged trope of wounding or dismemberment secreted in the imagery: dog without a tail, a miller’s thumb, twisted eels, a grunting sow, even perhaps ‘red breast’ and ‘black lambs.’
3. Word Level Repetition
To illustrate refrain, I’ve chosen ‘A Child’s Nightmare,’ which five times repeats the line ‘Saying for ever, ‘Cat! … Cat! … Cat!…’. However, each repetition incorporates a slight variation, which illustrates the counter to Stallings’s notion of repetition as a form of change; here the changes are superficial and meaningless. The nightmare shifts slightly but remains fundamentally and intractably static.
To illustrate epistrophe, or the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a line, I’ve chosen ‘The Portrait’, which repeats the phrase ‘other women’ three times, insistently deprecating the ‘others’ as contemptible as a kind of trap that springs shut on the would-be lover who is then challenged, apparently by the photograph, to say how he might deserve to consider himself distinctive and virtuous.
‘A Child’s Nightmare’ also exemplifies another instance of word-level repetition, epizeuxis (palilogy), the immediate repetition of the same word. However, ‘Eurydice’, with its opening line (adapted from the Arabic) ‘I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed’, is also a good example.
4. Sound-Based Repetition
Assonance, consonances and alliteration: ‘The Finding of Love’ is one of the most beautiful poems in the oeuvre, weaving together sounds that echo each other creating a choral cloud-like effect.
5. Metrical Repetition
I am nominating three poems, two well-represented in the anthologies, and one ignored. ‘Counting the Beats’, ‘Like Snow’, and ‘Hide and Seek’.
‘Counting the Beats’ provides the trisyllabic metrical foot, the amphimacer, ‘You and I’, and then builds on it in successive lines, often in the refrain ‘counting the beats,’ a choriamb (or an amphimacer with an extra unstressed interior syllable), and its additionally elaborated phrase, ‘counting the slow heart beats’, which adds two additional pulses to the choriamb, as if musically echoing the choriamb's final stress.
The fundamental pattern is a line of poetry bracketed by a strong beat at front and end. It is impressed so clearly in the reader’s mind, one hears it even when it is absent, in lines such as ‘Yet the huge storm ….’ or comically hiding within iambs in ‘Not there but here’ or inverted as in ‘He whispers.’ The repetition asserts the permanence of the doomed lovers, if only in the disembodied sound pattern of the poem, a metrical transcendental Paradise.
‘Like Snow’ does something similar, albeit more simply: introducing a molossus in the distich and then playing with it in successive lines (reconstituting it in line four and partially in line six, in the anaphoric oxymoron ‘like snow, warm ….’). My interpretation of this enigmatic poem is that the molossus is kerygmatic or a sign for Karl Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a manifestation of the sacred. Once revealed it remains present and accessible but camouflaged within the profane or mundane: the quieter trimetric lines that follow. The manifestation for Graves is the inspiration for poetry, the ineffable truth, articulated in terms of the tripartite Goddess, invoked metrically. I think the interpretation is supported if we look at the poem alongside the third stanza of ‘My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land’ by Andrew Lang (best known in its setting by Edward Elgar). I don’t know that Graves read Lang or heard Elgar, but it seems possible:
And oft, that month, we watch’d the moon
Wax great and white o’er wood and lawn,
And wane, with waning of the June,
Till, like a brand for battle drawn,
She fell, and flamed in a wild dawn.
‘Hide and Seek,’ a late children’s poem (1972) probably written with some awareness of one’s cognitive decline, offers metrical repetition in lines of iambic trimeter, e. g. ‘My legs feel rather weak’ and in distiches such as, ‘The trees are tall.’ This rudimentary figure signifies the comfortable quotidian, which is then set off against more complex metrical permutations or exotic feet the poem ultimately visualizes as monsters, e. g. ‘but monsters’ (amphibrach) ‘shrieking from” (amphimacer); ‘Mad mon | sters of | no kind’ (spondee | pyrrhic | spondee). The child finding themself alone in the liminal forest in a game of hide and seek is a metaphor for the young reader finding themself in a poem or a body of poetic texts of profound metrical irregularity – the sort of ‘inside outside game’ Graves plays in the picture book, The Big Green Book (1962). But just as he complicates the children’s poem ‘Allie’ with impressions of the War, it’s possible that he may be complicating this poem with impressions of his own worrisome memory loss and its consequential linguistic and psychological problems, and perhaps even a trace (the forest) of an eviscerating wartime flashback.
6. Formal Repetitions
Graves’s sonnet ‘The Troll’s Nosegay’ is an obvious choice to illustrate the repetition of an established poetic form. To illustrate his use of the rhymed stanza, the less obvious choice would be the playful ‘Welcome to the Caves of Àrta!’in which a mismanaged translation (a harbinger of A.I.) is reproduced in parodically awkward rhyming.
7. Intertextual Repetitions (Intertext, allusions, quotation, pastiche, parody, self-allusion)
As an example of an intertext, I’ll choose ‘The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers’, with its borrowing from John Gay’s. Fable XVIII, ‘The Painter Who Pleased Nobody and Everybody’ (1727): ‘Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, | Keep probability – in view.’
For parody, ‘¡Welcome to the Caves of Arta!’ would do, but why not ‘Down, Wanton, Down,’ a comical piece of self-criticism tarted up as a parody of bawdy Elizabethan ballads. Parodying Elizabethan earthiness, Graves parodies himself (parodying the Elizabethans … creating an infinite regress). Thus, he presents a technical and conceptual argument for his suitability as a poet in a poem mocking his suitability as a poet – another strange loop: a kind of anti-repetition.
Finally, to illustrate self-allusion, I offer a pair of poems ‘The Pier-Glass’ (the revised version) and the poem alluding to it, ‘The Face in the Mirror’. Allusion occurs on the level of imagery (the battered, suffering figure gazing into a mirror), and theme (the choice between or the vexed relationship of, art and nature). Part of the meaning and who knows even the purpose for writing the later poem lies I suspect in Graves’s slight change of understanding. Moving from ‘The Pier-Glass’ (and ‘The Magical Picture’), ‘The Face in the Mirror’ demonstrates Graves’s mature embrace of ambiguity and paradox. Where the priest in ‘The Magical Picture’ imagines he sees the aspect of a saint in the broken mirror, Graves sees an aspect of the Goddess. Where the earlier poems signal skepticism and self-denial, the latter poem signifies ‘heedless’ acceptance and affirmation.
‘Allie’
‘A Child’s Nightmare’
‘Counting the Beats’
‘The Devil’s Advice to StoryTellers’
‘Down, Wanton, Down!’
‘The Face in the Mirror’
‘The Finding of Love’
‘Hide and Seek’
‘Like Snow’
‘The Magical Picture’
‘The Pier-Glass (the revised version)’
‘The Troll’s Nosegay’
‘Warning to Children’
‘¡Welcome to the Caves of Àrta!’
‘Welsh Incident’