Abstract: A comparison of the poetics of Robert Graves and Robert Frost. Both rejected free verse. Compulsively peripatetic, both perceived the working of creative imagination in terms of a readiness to undertake physical risks. Graves’s soldier-poet is a rock-climber whereas for Frost the poet is ‘a man of prowess, just like an athlete’. Exploring their shared views on the nature of poetry, the author shows how their poems often turn on the analogy between outer and inner weather and evoke a haunting landscape of primordial ‘desert spaces’ and ‘lost acres’.

Keywords: poetry, nature, inspiration, Robert Frost

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Poets have attempted variously to define the source or the guardian Spirit of their inspiration. Whether it is a goddess, an angel, a royal or aristocratic lady, or a woman next door, the persona has always been a Muse: Homer’s Aphrodite, Dante’s Beatrice, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Milton’s Heavenly Muse, Wordsworth’s Nature, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Yeats’s Maud Gonne, or Graves’s White Goddess.

The astuteness and pertinence of Robert Graves’s views on the nature of poetry, as these emerged from his poetry workshop, cannot be gainsaid, although he wrapped them in dense folklore, myth and mythology: indeed, the manner in which he has presented them may seem to some of his critics as being ‘pretentious’. His views on British and American poets, however, especially his contemporaries, would seem, even to his admires, as being somewhat idiosyncratic and even provocative.

Graves admired just four of his contemporary American poets: John Crowe Ransom, Laura Riding, E. E. Cummings, and Robert Frost. Of these, as it is well known, he had the closest, though the most turbulent personal and literary relationship with Laura Riding. Graves and Riding parted with bitterness and recrimination but the poems that Graves wrote when he was in love with and in awe of her are admittedly among his best. With Ransom, Cummings, and Frost, on the other hand, he maintained a stable, cordial friendship based on shared views on the craft of poetry, voiced through occasional personal contact and intermittent correspondence. This article attempts to focus on the confluence of their ideas on the nature of poetry and on human concerns common to Graves’s landscape of ‘lost acres’ and Frost’s ‘desert places’.

Graves and Frost first met by chance in 1914 in Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London. While there seems to be no published / available record of Frost’s views on their friendship, Graves’s comments, though brief, reveal an unswerving admiration for Frost. On his first ‘almost frighteningly successful tour’ of America in February 1957 – as Graves described it to Karl Gay – he saw Cummings, but missed Ransom and Frost.[1]

However, during his visit to London in May 1957 Frost, appreciative of Graves’s role in his poetic success in England, had wanted Graves to ‘be the first to see him (after the Embassy folk)’.[2] Graves, who happened to be staying in London at that time, ‘saw Robert Frost and talked for 2 hours’.[3] He found the American poet, his senior by twenty years, a ‘wonderful man’, and as congenial as he had expected him to be. Recalling this meeting after a lapse of forty-two years in ‘Sweeney among the Blackbirds’, Graves gave a more illuminating comment:

I was delighted to find so many of my own brash verdicts supported by his veteran judgement – but the conversation also rambled around the countryside, and trees, and different strains of apple. The curly maple and the hickory are the timbre of Frost’s poems; and his apples are the old-fashioned ‘sheep’s noses’ and ’sops-in-wine’. It meant a great deal to me: meeting a poet of the generation above mine for whom I could feel respect and deep affection, and with whom I could talk at ease about poetry and trees.[4]

Three years later on his third American tour, they had ‘a lovely time together’ when they met on 21 January 1960 at the ceremony at which Graves received the gold medal of the National Poetry Society of America.[5]

Graves regarded Frost as ‘the first American who could be honestly reckoned a master-poet by world standards’.[6] When asked, as Oxford Professor of Poetry, to recommend a Nobel Prize winner for 1963, Graves wrote to James Reeves (19 January, 1963): ‘All sorts of cracks occur to me, but I think I’ll just remind that Robert Frost is just alive.’[7] However, Frost died ten days afterwards on 29 January and Graves`s letter addressed to the Swedish Academy was never sent, though a draft of this letter does exist.[8]

In his critical writings and his lectures, Graves frequently singled out Frost as an exemplary poet. If Contemporary Techniques of Poetry (1925) hinted at Frost’s poetic lineage to Hardy, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) lauded Frost’s nature-poems as ‘perhaps the only unaffected ones of our period.’ In ‘The Perfect Modern Lyric’ (A Pamphlet against Anthologies, 1928), Graves attacked Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, but applauded Frost’s ornithological acumen: ‘No modern poet, it is safe to say, with the exception of Mr Edmund Blunden and Mr Robert Frost, can distinguish a linnet from any other small bird with a squeaky voice even in strong daylight’.[9] In The Crowning Privilege (1955) Graves declared that Frost, Cummings, Ransom, and Riding for writing ‘living poems in their time’,[10] whereas in ‘Legitimate Criticism of Poetry’ (5 Pens in Hand, 1958) he recommended Frost as a ‘true’ American master of experiment for adapting ‘his individual speech-rhythm and diction to agreed verse-forms – as Shakespeare did’ as in ‘The Mountain’ that haunted Graves even thirty-five years after he first read it in 1922 (Writings, p. 260). In his fifth Oxford Address on Poetry, Graves endorsed the ‘craftsmanship’ of Hardy and Frost as superior to the ‘technique’ of Eliot, Pound, and the later Yeats because ‘Technique ignores the factor of magic; whereas craftsmanship presupposes it’(pp. 239, 367-68). And in the ninth lecture, Graves attacked Quiller-Couch for excluding Frost and E. E. Cummings from the Oxford Book of English Verse.

In his Introduction to the British edition of Frost's In the Clearing,[11] Graves listed four qualities that made Frost a world master-poet. First, extending and adapting the ‘ancient European tradition’ to match the American climate and the American language. Secondly, Frost’s essentially religious attitude to poetry which means receiving ‘real poems unexpectedly […] in a so-called state of grace; which means a clear mind, a tense heart, and no worries about fame, money, or other people, but only the excitement of a unique revelation about to be given.’ Thirdly, Frost's rejection of the free verse and his commitment to what Frost famously termed as ‘the strain of rhythm upon metre’. And finally, Frost’s modern attitude to reality: ‘the companionship of moor, waters, hills and trees’ that Frost’s poetry offered served a deeper psychic purpose (as by implication in Graves’s own) and ‘should not be confused with escape’ (‘Introduction’).

The confluence in their non-conscious assumptions about the nature of poetry is significant. At a time when Pound declared the manifesto of modernism in English poetry as ‘To break the pentameter was the first heave’, Graves and Frost wrote syllabic verse, rhymed or unrhymed, within the deceptive frame of the iambic pentameter. Frost set store by ‘the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’[12] in articulating a modern sensibility like Graves who was one of the first to extol the ‘controlled irregularity’ of rhythm [metre] in The Waste Land, in preference to the ‘uncontrolled regularity’ of metre in In Memoriam (Common Asphodel, pp. 81-82.).

Early in his career, and especially after his war neurasthenia (PTSD), Graves was drawn to the ballads and to John Skelton for homemade models of ‘controlled irregularity’ to develop ‘a craggy individualistic personal meter’.[13] For example, in ‘Free Verse’,[14] Graves uses the Skeltonic to achieve a ‘happy-go-lucky civilian slouch […] with run and ripple and shake’ in contrast to ‘the more than Prussian stiffening it [English poetry] was given by the eighteenth-century drill-sergeants’. It is interesting to note that Frost struck a similar note when, while distinguishing verse from doggerel, he wrote to John Bartlett as early as 1913: ‘if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully [sic] breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre’.[15]

Creative Imagination and the Peripatetic Mode

For both poets the working of the creative imagination involves an eschewing of the straight line and is linked to the peripatetic mode and physical movement. For instance, Frost's ‘leaf-treading’ and Graves's ‘hilltop striding’ seem to work like a rhythmic counterpoint to the experience of a moment of crisis and of illumination. Both compare the poet’s engagement in the poetic process to undertaking physical risks: Graves’s poet is a rock-climber who can improvise an imaginary foothold in air. For Frost the poet is ‘a man of prowess, just like an athlete’,[16] and ‘in verse as in trapeze performance is all’.[17] Graves’s soldier-poet is ready to die with weapon in hand; and for Frost, too, the poet is a survivor and a good poem strikes us as if we have taken ‘an immortal wound’ that we will never get over. ‘I fight to be allowed to sit cross-legged on the old flint pile and flake a lump into an artifact.’ In an interview with C. Day Lewis ‘It takes a hero to make a poem.’[18]

Unlike the English Romantic poets whose general stance was that poetry is recollection of rapturous joy in tranquillity – although Coleridge’s poetics explicitly included states of dejection and Keats could experience melancholy as a handmaid of poetic inspiration – both Graves and Frost perceived distinct physical symptoms of momentary illness as a herald of the moment of poetic inspiration. For Frost, ‘It [the poem] begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a home-sickness, a love-sickness. It is never a thought to begin with’.[19] To Graves ‘It [the poetic trance] comes like the tense headache before a thunderstorm, which is followed by an uncontrollable violence of feeling, and the whole air is ionized.’[20] In ‘Symptoms of Love’ Graves reads like a catalogue of apparently psycho-pathological symptoms of love that may announce the onset of the poetic process.

Love is a universal migraine,

A bright stain on the vision

Blotting out reason.

[...]

Take courage, lover!

Could you endure such grief

At any hand but hers.

Frost, too, sees the poetic process in terms of a love metaphor. He concedes that while scholars, like poets, might make the same kind of imaginative jump in a fog towards solving their problem, unlike a scholar ‘A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair’.[21] According to Frost, ‘permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly’. There is ‘a barb to it and a toxin that we owned to at once’.[22] Frost’s metaphors for the poetic process combine the peripatetic, the athletic and the erotic impulses, as in his Preface to Collected Poems, 1939: ‘The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting’.[23]

Poet and Poem

There are, however, important differences in the ways the two poets work out the implications of such metaphors through the cadences of their poetry. For Graves, the dimensions of the relationship between the poet and the poem are given, as it were, in terms of a mythical man-woman relationship, in which ‘man does, and woman is’.[24] For Frost, however, the existentialist demands of the moment are too fascinating in themselves to need a mythical referential. There are poems like ‘The Silken Tent’ in which Frost evokes a woman’s presence in the language of a highly erotic dedication, but his attitude to women in general is variable and in poems such as ‘The Subverted Flower’ and ‘Home Burial’ it is recognisably ironic. In fact, despite or because of his overall tendency to refuse to take a final position, Frost’s poems frequently invoke, often obliquely, God’s presence; he once described himself as an Old Testament Christian. Frost’s theme is that of man’s existentialist reckoning with his loneliness in a world which is both beautiful and threatening. But he does not risk pitching its universal appeal in an overriding myth as Graves does. Thus, while Frost’s lyric poetry expressing his bafflement at ‘Nature within her inmost self divides | To trouble men with having to take sides’[25] appeals more directly to the modern mind, Graves’s evocation of similar tensions through the language of the White Goddess myth runs the risk of sounding like anachronistic romanticism or ‘pretentious amateurism’ in an extreme reaction, as F. R. Leavis once put it.[26]

The Ballad Muse

Nonetheless, there are further similarities and points of confluence. As I mentioned before, the resources of the ballad tradition imbue the rhythms, the nuances, and the tones of their lyric poems, and their imagery is almost always drawn from natural phenomena. Arguably, Graves draws more on the nuances of suspense, superstitions, and symbolism of the ballads, whereas Frost’s poems rely more on features such as the dramatic situation and the tone of irony.

As examples, one might cite their two early poems: Graves's ‘The Hills of May’ and Frost’s ‘Wind and Window Flower’. Long before Graves constructed or reconstructed the Goddess myth, hill walking seems to have been part of his search for what Yeats called ‘a mythology that marries one to rock and hill’. Two lines ‘I am a hill: where poets walk’ and ‘I am the blaze: on every hill’ from the Song of Amergin, which Graves quotes in his foreword to The White Goddess as a brief summary of his poetic myth, seem to have a special relevance for Graves. Graves’s poem turns upon a sensual and sexual relationship between body and hill. The poet identifies himself with the wind in amorous engagement with the ‘she’ who ‘walking with a virgin heart’ is ‘the green hills of May’ and, by symbolic extension, the Goddess of Spring. Like the White Goddess whom she anticipates in Graves’s mythic vision, she takes him as a lover, but is ‘too fine to stay’:

So she walked, the proud lady

So danced or ran,

So she loved with a whole heart,

Neglecting man.

In Graves's conception of the love relationship, it is the man who seeks integration in love, whereas the woman’s wholeness remains intact and unquestioned and her power is unpredictable and regardless. Graves captures the changing movement of the relationship: from the amorous playfulness in the first two stanzas to the doomed prophecy of ‘Fade, fail, innocent stars | On the green of May’ in the last stanza in a way as to extend the resources of the ballad form to elevate a familiar love story to the language of primordial symbolism.

Frost’s ‘Wind and Window Flower’ turns upon a similar love-relationship and, characteristically, the archetypal symbolism in Frost’s treatment of courtship and rejection has the familiarity of a next-door neighbour’s story, while dramatising the essential lack of communication between an awkward and inexperienced lover, the outdoor wind, and a domesticated woman used to ‘firelit’ smugness, the indoor flower. The ‘He’, ‘a winter wind’, notices the ‘she’, ‘a window flower’, through the pane when the frosty veil has dissolved at noon. Although he is ‘concerned’ with ‘ice, snow, dead weeds and unmated birds’, and knows ‘little of love’, he has the temerity to return in the evening, and sigh upon the sill and shake the sash in order to win the window flower for the flight.

But the flower leaned aside

And thought of naught to say,

And morning found the breeze

A hundred miles away.

Frost’s few poems of love turn on the ‘fragility of that relationship’.[27] However, even in poems that do not explicitly invoke a woman, and there are many of this kind, this sense of fragility is coupled in a Gravesian way with a sense of devotion to the mysterious power and enticing unpredictability of the relationship. In this sense at least, ‘Devotion’ seems to serve as Frost’s poetic manifesto, consistent with the epitaph, ‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world’, that the speaker proposes for himself in ‘The Lesson for Today’:

The heart can think of no devotion

Greater than being shore to the ocean –

Holding the curve of one position,

Counting an endless repetition.

There is an implicit eroticism in ‘Being shore to the ocean’ and ‘holding the curve of one position | Counting an endless repetition’. This is Frost’s version of the ‘one story and one story only – to use Graves’s words – of the poet’s dedication to the Muse that tells not of passive waiting but of life on edge of a survivor. ‘Holding the curve of one position’ in response to countless distractions is an act of unswerving love, as ‘the best of a poem is when you first make it, the curve that it takes’.

Crookedness of the Walking Stick

Frost's remark that ‘We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking-stick’ suggests a peripatetic poet, and no twentieth century English poet other than Graves perhaps, it seems to me, has assimilated so consistently the imagery of crookedness and the peripatetic mode into his poetic mythology. In ‘Flying Crooked’ Graves celebrates the butterfly as a prototype of the poet in so far as both eschew ‘the art of flying straight’ and exult in their ‘honest idiocy’ of ‘a just sense of how not to fly’. What the poet, like Frost’s oven bird, ‘says’ is ‘he knows in singing not to sing’.

Interestingly, the first poem that Frost published commercially (in 1894) was ‘My Butterfly’. Slightly archaic in style, the poem mourns the death of a butterfly. Although Frost rarely uses this manner after A Boy's Will, his manner of address in this poem is as unreserved in implying ‘an intimate and easy social relationship’ as Wordsworth’s does in his ‘To a Butterfly’.[28] However, it seems to me that even here Frost’s manner is characteristically deceptive, since the point of emphasis is not social intimacy with the butterfly as in the case of Wordsworth but unexpected discovery of an identity of interests. The poet’s first memory is of the butterfly’s ‘air dalliance’, ‘precipitate in love’ like a dedicated lover. However, what saves the poem from slipping into simple pathos is the poet’s other memory of being stunned by ‘the wild touch’ of the butterfly when it was unexpectedly flung full on his cheek by ‘that reckless zephyr’.

Serendipity as a mode of discovering creative and ‘brotherly speech’ is also evident in Frost’s ‘The Tuft of Flowers’. Rising early and finding the grass already fully mown and dewless, the poet feels alone and distraught. As the butterfly leads his gaze towards a tall tuft of flowers that the mower seems to have left intact, the flowers suddenly glow as ‘a leaping tongue of bloom’. They seem to be imbued with ‘sheer morning gladness at the brim’ that so impelled the mower as to have ‘spared’ or rather ‘bared’ the flowers beside the brook. The ‘bewildered’ butterfly and the lone poet together have lit upon ‘a message from the dawn’. That is the moment of confluence between the butterfly, the poet and the absent mower: ‘Butterfly and I lit upon as a poem, you know, too.’[29] ‘The Tuft of Flowers’ is a celebration of the poetic mode implicit in the butterfly’s lighting through its crooked flight, as in Graves’s ‘Flying Crooked’, upon the poem by lurching ‘here and here by guess | And God and hope and hopelessness’.

Moon and the Muse

The relationship between the poet and the poem is one of a steadfast devotion to the mysteries of the creative process and consequently to its innate capriciousness also. As I have said before, Frost does not mythologize either the Muse or the source of her capriciousness. However, ‘The Silken Tent’, inspired by Kay Morrison, his manager, mistress, and muse for the last twenty-five years of his life, comes closest to being Frost’s invocation of the Muse. Through imagery that is simultaneously sexual and spiritual, it invokes an unnamed mysterious and independent female presence who

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when a sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole. [30]

In Graves’s ‘A Love Story’, the furious full moon against ‘a winter sky ragged with red’ rekindles the poet’s boyhood horror when he ‘fetched the moon home, | With owls and snow, to nurse in my head’ but fell in love only to re-experience the boyhood scene after the new tenderly shining moon ‘warped in the weather, turned beldamish’. Frost’s ‘The Freedom of the Moon’ turns upon a similar thought. The speaker carries ‘the new moon tilted in the air’ as his beloved might ‘try a jewel in your hair’ until one evening when

I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,

The color run, all sorts of wonder follow. (p. 224)

Graves’s poem dwells on the speaker’s bruised encounter with Queen Famine. Frost, on the other hand, lingers with his treasured image of the moon – ‘I put it shining anywhere I please’ – and in the last line brings it to a syntactical but not epistemological closure: there is a frightening ripple of possibilities in the wallowing image, the running colour, and ‘all sorts of wonder [to] follow’.

Similarly, in ‘Moon Compasses’, a closure is suggested but withheld. In ‘the midnight haze’, the moon graciously encompasses the cone mountain in its callipers as ‘love will take between the hands a face’. Metaphorically, it is the poet who stands suffused by the light of the poem.

A masked moon had spread down compass rays

To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,

As if the final estimate was hers,

And as it measured in her callipers,

The mountain stood exalted in its place.

So love will take between the hands a face. (p. 273)

Another of Frost’s moon-inspired poems is ‘Going for Water’. The speaker and his/her companion, on finding the well beside their house dry on an autumn evening, decide to walk across the fields behind the house ‘to seek the brook if still it ran’. They run ‘as if to meet the moon’ and when they reach the wood:

Each laid on other a staying hand

To listen ere we dared to look,

And in the hush we joined to make

We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

A note as from a single place,

A slender tinkling fall that made

Now drops that floated on the pool

Like pearls, and now a silver blade.

We are never told if they really reach or find the brook except that in the hushed silence they hear the sound of a note as from ‘a slender tinkling fall’. This auditory sense merges into the closing strikingly visual image; it is unclear whether the pearl-like drops that float on the pool or converge into a silver blade are those of light or water, of the moon or of the brook. It is Frost’s genius that he often closes his poem on an inconclusive note thus leaving the unresolved implications or suggestions of wonder and terror to reverberate in our mind.

Graves’s ‘Turn of the Moon’ is a masterly evocation of the unpredictable and self-determined bountifulness of the Muse.

But if one night she brings us, as she turns,

Soft, steady, even, copious rain

That harms no leaf nor flower, but gently falls

Hour after hour, sinking to the tap roots,

And the sodden earth exhales at dawn

A long sigh scented with pure gratitude,

Such rain – the first rain of our lives, it seems,

Neither foretold, cajoled, nor counted on –

Is woman giving as she loves.

In his public address on the occasion of Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday in 1959, Lionel Trilling startled Frost as much as the audience by greeting him as ‘a terrifying poet’. On reflection, it turns out to be an appropriate description, and it seems to me that this phrase applies equally to Graves. Their poems often turn on an analogy between, to use Frost’s words, outer and inner weather, evoking a landscape of terror and fear, of Frost’s desert places and Graves’s rocky acres. Both frequently employ the imagery of snow and wind and trees to convey the paradoxical layering of terror with enchantment and vice versa.

In his essay on Frost, Joseph Brodsky makes a useful distinction between the terrifying and the tragic:

Tragedy [...] is always a fait accompli, whereas terror has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of his own negative potential – with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost’s forte, not the former.[31]

In the case of Graves, it is significant to note that after the war he did not want to be psychoanalysed because he located the source of his poetry in the same subconscious terrain as the source of his war-time terrors. Letting the terror remain, he believed, was essential for the creation of an authentic and intense poetic experience. In what Brodsky would probably describe as the Continental tradition, though, Graves recast this terror within the heroic-tragic mould of the second-fated. In fact, one could convincingly make out a case that the White Goddess mythology provides an archetypal frame for the poetic expression of sexual and existentialist terror. In the case of Frost, the terror is not occasioned by the unusual exigencies of war experience; on the contrary, a war seems to be going on within the little things of everyday life. There is an existentialist inability to make sense of life and its potential for negation. Everything seems to end in an unanswerable question. In a universe that seems ‘accidentally on purpose’, Frost stands by the instinctive wisdom of ‘Our best guide upward further to the light, | Passionate preference such as love at first sight’.[32]

To conclude this discussion of Frost and Graves, let us look closely at Graves’s ‘Lost Acres’ and ‘Mid-Winter Waking’ and Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ and ‘A Boundless Moment’.

‘Lost Acres’ begins with what appears to be a reminder that ‘These acres, [are] always again lost | By every new ordnance-survey’. They elude all expensive and painstaking attempts to navigate them and disdain ‘the tautest measuring-chain’; these acres are invisible and are perhaps to be found in ‘a plot of undiscovered ground’. Yet, although the poet seems to be familiar with them, it is not until the fifth stanza that he identifies them as ‘acres of the mind’. He does not know them, and yet he assures us, intuitively it seems, that we need not ‘plot’ them ‘With prehistoric fern and reed | And monsters such as heroes find’ because

Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,

Their trees behind the phantom fence,

But of a substance without words:

To walk there would be loss of sense.

These acres of mind – a plot of undiscovered and unmeasurable ground – seem to have ‘behind the phantom fence’ their own flowers, birds and trees or what we would call flowers, birds and trees. How is their substance without words? Perhaps in these acres there is no human language yet to identify and name its flora and fauna? Or is the poet suggesting the kind of union of the object and the language that we humans have created and have got so accustomed to that we cannot separate an object from its name?

In ‘Into My Own’, which opens Frost’s first volume A Boy’s Will, the poet wishes that ‘those dark trees’, which are ‘So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze’, could stretch away ‘unto the edge of doom’ so that he could ‘steal away’ into their ‘vastness’, ‘Fearless of ever finding open land | Or highway.’ The poet imagines that this secret assimilation into the life of trees will, paradoxically, make him more and not less of himself: ‘Only more sure of all I thought was true’.

In ‘Lost Acres’, on the other hand, Graves, after having led us to identify the lost spaces as acres of mind, strikes a note of warning in the last line: ‘To walk there would be loss of sense’. We may, if we wish, explore these acres of mind, but we do not know whether the loss of sense hinted at means the loss of common sense, conventional intelligence or of sense-perception itself? Further, since the poet has so persuasively walked us to this ‘fence’, can we really cross it since it is a phantom fence? Structurally, there is the strain of accent upon metre here, the way Graves lets the ‘f’ sound in ‘fern’, ‘find’, ‘phantom’ and ‘fence’ slip into the structure of assurance created by the variation on the ‘d’ sound in six of the eight rhymes, and four in successive lines: ‘assured’, ‘need’, ‘mind’, ‘reed’, ‘find’, ‘birds’ and ‘words’.

In Frost’s ‘Desert Places’, while walking past a field, the poet is caught in ‘snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast’. He does not feel part of this landscape; this snow is not his and he feels he is ‘too absent-spirited to count’, unlike ‘The woods [which ...] have it – it is theirs’. In the third stanza, the growing blankness and ‘whiteness of benighted snow’ assumes a gigantic presence of ‘loneliness [that] includes me unawares’. In a sense, to be included into a larger entity without an effort suggests a gesture of generous accommodation on the part of the woods. But it is also a daunting realisation that one has been included in, or by, a landscape ‘With no expression, nothing to express’. The last stanza takes this up and turns it into a more daunting thought, and paradoxically, a more homely assurance of being anchored in the here and now:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars – on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The woods which are almost smothered in ‘the whiteness of benighted snow’ seem to strike the poet as a starry sky with interstellar dark spaces; their lofty refulgence echoes Keats’s famous apostrophe to the star in which the poet acknowledges in the same breath its lack of human presence.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite.

The loneliness that the poet of ‘Desert Places’ has in him is more terrifying than the loneliness anywhere else: ‘To scare myself with my own desert places’. In this lies the only comfort that the poet can have, in being able to sustain ‘a momentary stay against confusion’.

The last stanza is analogous to the concluding lines of ‘Sick Love’ by Graves. While urging his love to ‘feel the sun and go in royal array, | A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway’, the poet moves to the interstellar spaces in a starry sky in the last lines where ‘delight in momentariness’ is a precarious lonely walk between two unknown points of darkness, a reminder that its refulgence is no harbinger or guarantee of comfort: ‘Walk between dark and dark – a shining space | With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.’

In Frost, memory of winter, directly or indirectly, plays a defining role even in poems about other seasons. For example, saddened by the prospect of the spring pools that ‘like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver’ will be sucked up ‘by roots to bring dark foliage on’, the poet beseeches the trees ‘to think twice’ before sweeping away ‘These flowery waters and these watery flowers | From snow that melted only yesterday.’[33] In Graves, too, Nature is not an inviting image of comfort or a Wordsworthian sublime; it ‘caricature[s] the human face’ and its ‘scribblings have no grace | Nor peace –’, and ‘all she has of mind | Is wind’. Even its benediction is experienced as a tremor, a cold touch of snow, and terror. These motifs are effectively brought together in Graves’s ‘Mid-winter Waking’ and Frost’s ‘A Boundless Moment’.

In ‘Mid-Winter Waking’ the unpredictability of a moment of revelation itself or what Graves calls ‘this season of royal tremulous possession’ in another poem ‘Ageless Reason’ is a source of mystery and terror:

Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,

I knew myself once more a poet

Guarded by timeless principalities

Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;

And presently dared open both my eyes.

O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,

Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;

And you, sudden warm airs that blow

Before the expected season of new blossom,

While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go –

Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,

I found her hand in mine laid closely

Who shall watch out the Spring with me.

We stared in silence all around us

But found no winter anywhere to see.

Compare this with Frost’s ‘A Boundless Moment’. In Graves’s poem, there is a visionary assurance in the way the speaker and his beloved experience a sense of union and separation through the language of seasons as though they are integral to their mystery and movement. In Frost’s ‘A Boundless Moment’ the experience of the mystery and movement leaves a hovering doubt about it all and even a sense of its ultimate insignificance: ‘A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves’. Graves divines the mystery and feels the tug of separation as an archetypal condition of life like the flux of the seasons. For Frost, the lingering doubt and the possibility of self-deception are like the clinging of a young tree to its last year’s leaves. For Graves, terror is assuredly a fact of poetic love as much as of life, the moon and the trees, and poetry is in the act of survival. For Frost, terror is in the condition of absent assurance: ‘There may be little of much beyond the grave, | But the strong are saying nothing until they see.’ Granting their differing premises, both are everlasting poets of rocky acres and desert places where the inner and outer weather, death and Muse are intertwined.

This is a version of a paper read at the Robert Graves Conference, State University of New York at Buffalo (20–22 June 2000). Originally published in Transcending Boundaries, ed Wolf Kindermann (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2007), pp. 205-24, it has been slightly revised and edited for publication in The Robert Graves Review as part of the ‘From the Archives’ series.

Devindra Kohli, formerly Professor of English at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India, has taught at several universities in Germany, including the Universities of Muenster and Duisburg-Essen.