Abstract: This paper suggests that the figure of the White Goddess selected the precise geotemporal location of a devastated World War II Mametz Wood in order to choose Robert Graves as poetic conveyor of themes both Druidic and deadly, as he himself acted as a mnemonic of other goddess-inhabited groves – in particular Dante’s and that this act of revelation could only take place in relation to the rite of passage of the Holy Fool, present in Tarocchi illustrations and inexorably linked to the poet, the vagabonder and the troubadour in search of Hollywood goddesses both black and white.

Keywords: Mnemonics, Mametz Wood, The White Goddess, Dante, Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, tarot, the Holy Fool, The Divine Comedy

___

Twilit Graves

We’ll begin at twilight – the time at which Hitler purportedly chose to give his speeches – and we are foolishly going to enter the realms of three memorial woods, one of which was shattered into a monstrous reality for a young and militant Robert Graves, who witnessed the aftermath of ferocious woodland violence. A twilight will enable us to counterpoise daylight and night: sunlight and moonlight and so stand on the hinge of awareness between the necessarily Apollonian and Artemisian: we will hold both in our hands like a mismatched pair of gloves and feel our way through a tripartite arborical imagery. So far so good. Perhaps we could call this 'a loitering dream' following a fourteenth-century, etymological scent trail of the phrase ‘to muse’.

Now, I have called these: memorial woods or groves, and it is because I want to infer that we will encounter Graves’s White Goddess in mnemonic imprints, or flashes. I am referring to the Classical art of memory here, or mnemotechnics, where a rhetor would imagine a place and stud it with imagines agentes, images which have agency, to catalyse the memory of key moments in a performed speech. These images drove memory out of the thickets, forcing the recollection of important points in the delivery of the speech, by vividly attaching themselves to key themes or ideas, words or concepts. To make strong impressions, they were often beautiful, often bloody. If, for example, I had wanted to recall the opening to this talk, I might have positioned a wolf (Hitler), balancing a sun and moon in his hands and standing on a tombstone (the headstone symbolising: Robert Graves). So you can see that these were hugely visual devices, these imagines agentes, and that they sometimes created visible puns.

Our three memorial woods, then, are: Dante’s gloomy forest, a wood of half-sleep, of waking dream, situated on the opening page of Canto I; a holly wood of damaged and discarded goddesses; and Mametz Wood, a locus of violent language-making: a 1916 nemeton. We will cross these woods as the gloaming deepens, stalking sights and signs of the goddess as mnemonic imprints.

And So Did My Spirit, Still a Fugitive

Firstly, we are going on a swift recce into the arborescent hinterland of Robert Graves’s figure of the White Goddess in relation to Dante’s memorial forest and so are going to take it as read the assertion that if lost at night in a forest, an individual will inevitably wander in a circle. This is because human anatomy is always imperfectly balanced: one side of the body will lead more strongly, will be weighted more heavily. Possible added bewilderments abound in a Celtic context, specifically in the traditional Highland Gaelic phenomenon of an dà shealladh or second sight, where the possibility of meeting oneself in the form of a co-walker or co-choisiche, when roaming such a landscape was considered a very real risk. It is tempting to consider the poetic definition of self-awareness, or self-reflection, as framed by this act of approaching an apparent stranger who takes the form of a forgotten and premonitory mnemonic impression – only to find that, having come full circle, the memory trace (some might say spirit, or ghost) of oneself looms up, imperceptibly limping in the dark. Tracking Robert Graves’s arboreal terrain requires good poetic night-vision, if not a sense of the lie of the land, and I say good poetic night-vision because the nocturnal acumen required for entering the entangling environment of The White Goddess woods had not only better be alert and sharpened, but instinctual and wise – ready to meet the shape of oneself in the dusk. Otherwise, perhaps only a fool would enter.

In his instructional 1958 book, Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass, navigator Harold Gatty discusses the perceptual hazards awaiting the traveller negotiating new landscapes. He writes:

It is extraordinary how the novice forgets colours. I would go almost so far as to say that most people have a black and white mind. […] The average person is much more sensitive to shape than to colour. They are more inclined to note a misshapen rock, or a twisted tree trunk, than a tree of a distinctive colour. Often the beginner in natural navigation fails to see his journey in reverse, as he must do if he is successfully to retrace his steps. I would advise him to practice sketch maps and sketches of the relative positions of landmarks seen from time to time ‘over his shoulder' on the outward journey. I call this exploring with one eye on the return journey: ‘maintaining the thread’.[1]

Perhaps the reverse thread that links our literary copse-to-copse is this first wood as poetic environment, tenanted by the black and white goddesses, to be encountered by the solitary writer and the solitary reader: foreboding woods, which are symptomatically indicative of such lostness as Gatty describes. Though if, for example, bewildered by Dante’s memorial forest that opens Canto I of the Inferno, the reader can simultaneously tag along with his poet. This is the reader's privilege – only fools travel alone, it seems – and Dante is already alarmed when waking dream thought-walks him into those perilous woods, entirely abandoned. He recounts:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was, that savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fear. […] I cannot clearly say how I had entered the wood; I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path.[2]

He is about to confront the mnemonic bestial devices of the leopard, the lion and the wolf – recollecting encounters with pride, cravenness and lust – and these creatures will arouse pure terror in Dante, whose abject fear moves the kindly Virgil: an older and wiser poet-self, if not quite a co-walker to Alighieri, then at least of the same tribe of Romano-Italian scribes. ‘The beast that is the cause of your outcry allows no man to pass along her track,' the poet-guide explains, 'but blocks him even to the point of death’ (ibid, p. 61, ll. 94–6).

However, if we can imagine a sage Graves also night-walking this particular textual forest, perhaps smoking pensively in a wide-brimmed black hat, then we would know that he might instead welcome the flash through the thicket of the leopard, the air-shuddering lion, and the tang of she-wolf, as recollected signs or premonitions of the presence of the White Goddess, for it is she, as he explains in his 1965 essay ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’, who feeds on corpse flesh and couples with wild animals, just as Virgil explains to Dante that the she-wolf ‘mates with many living souls’ (ibid, p. 61, l. 100).

The White Goddess is volatile, dangerous, and her dance is one prior to the metrical enforcements of Apollo and his coterie, it is one of bladed lightning: an acute flash that penetrates Dante’s own gloomy, mnemonic forest. ‘Poetry is a way of thought’ – observes Graves, ‘non-intellectual, anti-decorative thought at that – rather than an art.[…] Poets who serve the Muse wait for the inspired lightning flash of two or three words that initiate composition and dictate the rhythmic norm of their verse.’[3]

These are volatile, but measured, ignition points, it seems – and ones that risk lightning-struck awareness with incendiary results: the hanging tree struck by lightning. Graves compounds his electrical charge in a poem titled ‘Dance of Words’ he inserts into the essay:

To make them move, you should start from lightning

And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance

Or so-called chance, for its bright emergence

Once lightning interpenetrates the dance.[4]

This ludic situation is an altogether different undertaking to the emotional weather-forecasting of Dante’s half-waking experience, replete with the shadowy forms of a medieval bestiary. Yet, they too act as a counter-summons to his own inevitable muse, Beatrice, a thing of loveliness whom Graves would surely position as Hestia, or Vesta: ‘beautiful, tender, true, patient, practical, dependable’, he says, ‘she will guide a battered barque to port’. And who more battered a barque than Dante, a vessel dragged down to the underworld as Christ the poet, as Osiris, as Orpheus – indeed, perhaps as Persephone herself? (Mammon, p. 149).

Yet even before he encounters this triumvirate of wild beasts, Dante has an enormous and early moment of self-reflection:

And just as he who, with exhausted breath, having escaped from sea to shore, turns back to watch the dangerous waters he has quit, so did my spirit, still a fugitive, turn back to look intently at the pass that never has let any man survive. (Dante, p. 3, ll. 22-27)

You might say that this stanza, which occurs only eight stanzas, or stopping places, into the wood, sets the conditions of the undertaking: it is as if Dante now recognises that he has seen himself within the auspices of the wood – that he is lost, and not the path – and that his ‘spirit, still a fugitive’, still an escapee from everyday awareness, turns to survey the landscape and almost seems to turn full circle, turns ‘back to watch the dangerous quarters he has quit’, as if coming to terms with himself. We have a hint of the Gaelic co-walker here in this arboreal thanatography, a hint of the man terrified of being at large in the forest who has become lost in a very natural and human way – through a lack of maps and charts, but most importantly, through the very hinging of his own anatomy, or rather his unhinging, his somatic mis-alignment which could be enhanced by a loss of nerve or instinct: something predicative of shell-shock, perhaps. So Dante is inherently unprepared, because already inherently unbalanced – a freshly enhanced imbalance, made rawer because extracted from dream, and this makes him vulnerable to circumnavigation: he is still lost within acute self-reflection. Now, memory comes: lithe, and sleek, and spotted, in the first of the mnemo-technics, as a leopard recalling lust, followed by the allegorised pride of the lion (the plurality suggesting a swelling here, a group of lions), and finally the greed, or avarice of the she-wolf: all three described by Dorothy L. Sayers in her introduction to the Inferno as associative sin in the stages of human development – the leopard of youth, the lion of middle-age, the wolf of agedness. ‘The Beasts. These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age’.[5]

And these are determined symbols of degeneration. Sayers notes: ‘In a play using symbolic imagery, the dramatist might bring in the figure of [...] Hitler, wearing his ordinary clothes and simply talking like [...] Hitler, and everyone would understand that this personage was meant for the image of Tyranny’ (p. 13).

With Graves observing, in our imaginal forest, could these three symbolic creatures catalyse aspects of his own White Goddess with her lust out of wedlock, her greed for the poet’s attention and her leonine significance as the sign of the poet, as described in ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’? ‘Ishtar, Queen of Babylon, was the original Virgin of the Zodiac, who appears on steles, naked and riding a lion, the poet’s zodiacal sign’ (Mammon, p. 155). These lines electrify his thought in the poem, ‘Lion Lover’:

Nor would I now exchange this lion heart

For a less furious other,

Though by the moon possessed

I gnaw at dry bones in a lost lair

And, when clouds cover her, roar my despair. (p. 155)

The lion and the wolf emerge elsewhere in his essay as formidable reductions of human love, when sullied or rejected by the muse. In ‘Inkidoo and the Queen of Babel’, Graves transposes verses from Gilgamesh into seventeenth-century ballad form; his lion is betrayed as poet: '

When I was a lion of tawny fell,

You stroked my mane and you combed it well,

But pitfalls seven you dug for me

That from one or other I might not flee. (p. 148)

And now comes the wolf as shepherd mis-fallen:

When I was a shepherd that for your sake

the bread of love at my hearth would bake

a ravening wolf did you make of me

To be thrust from home by my brothers three. (p. 149)

The lupine materialises again when Graves confesses:

Only during the past three years have I ventured to dramatise, truthfully and factually, the vicissitudes of a poet’s dealings with the White Goddess, the Muse, the perpetual Other Woman. Whatever may be said against her, she at least gives him an honest warning of what to expect. (p. 151)

If in Dante’s shoes, he seemingly can expect sheer terror. Graves’s poem on the subject includes wolfwoman Lyceia, keeper and teacher of the wolfish circle that surrounds her in the forest. There is no sign of the leopard in his essay and why should there be? Dante’s theological vices follow a different set of correspondences which could be falsely attributed to the White Goddess as manifestations of her baseness. Here she comes, in the subtle glamour of Robert Graves’s signature poem, ‘The White Goddess’:

It was a virtue not to stay,

To go our headstrong and heroic way

Seeking her out at the volcano’s head,

Among pack ice, or where the track had faded

Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:

Whose broad high brow was white as any leper’s.[6]

This description arguably reflects the face of the alchemical White Queen, the mercurial and lunar female half of the reconciled duo, the solar Red King and lunar White Queen, who together represent the feminine and masculine combined. Contra to Dante’s path ‘which does not stray’, Graves’s track fades away, beyond time, beyond the recollection of the sleeper. Dante finds his goddess a rough assimilation of formidable parts and something to flee from; whereas Graves actively hunts down his muse, pushing through the rough undergrowth of thought and the thickets of perceptual awareness.

But what can we make of the lithe leopard, assuming Graves is still with us, tracking through the Dantesque copse? Could it be that the creatures are reversed or muddled and that if we rearrange them, we find the three female charged presences? Might the leonine be the blazing aurora, dawn-like personification of Beatrice – Dante’s safe goddess and Graves’s vision of Vesta? Might the leopard’s spots denote the White and Black Goddesses combined? Might the wolf be the ravening White Goddess?

If the leopard is a creature of camouflage, then perhaps its spots denote self-disguise, or perhaps the spots are themselves hidden as in the pelt of the panther, a creature which would correspond more fittingly to the Black Goddess of wisdom and whose presence in the medieval bestiary is of an animal with sweet breath and a sweet roar and a tendency to sleep for three days at a time, a panther dormancy oddly reminiscent of the descent of Christ the poet into the nefarious underworld. We might speculate that the wolf is then the White Goddess and the lion, a premonition of the luciferous and glowing Vesta, both appearing as snatches of half-dreamt recollection in the dim memorial woods of Dante’s vision. At any rate, by a presumption of Graves’s reckoning, if these figures can be hermeneutically morphed into glimpsed premonitions of the goddesses, Dante becomes thoroughly unnerved and turns to himself as both older and wiser, but deceased, in the mimetic figure of a male poet benefactor: Virgil. In so doing, Dante perhaps really only produces a deflection or reflection of himself: a co-walker in the form of a kindly shade, musing in memory’s garden.

Black and Blue Goddesses in the Garden of Love

Other invocations of the goddesses still abound in the flash-lit garden of Hollywood promiscuity where outlier Beat Poet and sometime lion roarer in the San Francisco Zoo, Michael McClure, plunges into the monochromatism of eros. In his obscure 1963 City Lights publication Meat Science Essays,[7] he dwells lingeringly on the presence of Jayne Mansfield, his lamb of blackness, akin to the blackness of Poe, Artaud and Thoreau. He attests to her singular beauty: ‘Jayne Mansfield draws by the black mystery of her physical presence.[…] Darkness is upon Jayne Mansfield’s face and her arms and fingers.’ Blackness, for McClure, is irradiating love:

Some humans attract our imaginations because of a darkness they glow outwards, and we long for it.[…] The secret and mystery of Jayne Mansfield is apparent to the puritanic – the blackness is obvious. She wears the black fur of her body and is crowned with whiteness. (p. 99)

It is tempting to align McClure’s poetic logic with a manifestation of the Black Goddess in Mansfield, leaving just a trace of the purged White Goddess in her crown, or aureole, but McClure’s doyenne still blossoms eros: ‘to love Jayne Mansfield would be to find the supernormal in yourself,’ (p. 101), he declares and now presents a full trio of goddesses to the reader: ‘Jayne Mansfield you are THE BLACK. Jean Harlow you are La Plus Blanche – the most white. Marilyn Monroe is the mammal’ (ibid, p. 100). Seemingly, Harlow is also his White Goddess through her intimations of violence: ‘the sight of Jean Harlow, womanly and striding, makes gentle concussions that become immortal statuaries in the memory’ (p. 102). Yet, McClure explains that neither Mansfield nor Harlow would ever injure a lover, and suddenly his coterie of goddess-actresses seem melded and disarmed, standing in a forest of cameras who require them to be all things from all angles: Thanatos, Eros, Sofia. As for Monroe, well Monroe, he states, is neither black nor white: she’s rosy. This roseate Monroe presents a despoiled aurora, a bleached mane of approachable tenderness, the dawn of deliciousness as extrapolated by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, who scribes:

She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex.[…] She was not the dark contract of those passionate brunette depths that speak of blood, vows taken for life, and the furies of vengeance if you are untrue to the depth of passion, no, Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her. [8]

Here is Monroe positioned most closely to the safe, domestic love Graves describes as antithetical to the ravaging presence of the White Goddess, one instead apparent in the matrimonially-inclined Vesta, and perhaps Dante’s Beatrice.

More cinematic tracts bewilder in text: J. G. Ballard's Crash (published in 1973, the same year as Mailer's Marilyn)[9] frames Elizabeth Taylor as a collapsed car crash fatality whose bleeding body can be read as a modern augur for a corroded culture, much like the augury performed in Druidic ceremony from the body language of a freshly sacrificed human victim, described by Graves in The White Goddess: ‘the scene of the killing of Dryas shows an oak-tree and priests taking omens under it, in Druidic fashion, from the way that a man falls when he dies.’ (White Goddess, p. 436). Ballard’s depraved protagonist, Vaughn, is ‘obsessed by many wounds and impacts [...] by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite […] her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion’ (Ballard, p. 8). (This fantasy of her death surely alludes to Leda and the Swan. The Goddess – black, white or otherwise, always is hinted at, or betrayed by a bestial manifestation and at times morphs into a wild creature herself.

Of course, this is all provoked by Hollywood. In a depth-charge of irony, know that the holly tree is the protector against lightning: that those flashes of inspiration Graves hunted down are symbolically banished by the holly wood, replaced by tumescent bulbs of journalistic lenses. This a dumbed, benumbed, and succumbed Hollywood whose viscerally damaged muses perform the arch-mnemonic by being both beautiful and covered in blood. The ambivalence of McClure’s vision of Harlow as giving ‘concussions that become immortal statuaries in the memory’ (McLure, p. 102), half-enhances her performance of the muse: a violent muse of violent musings, both given and received. Here, the scalp lock of Mansfield, both wig and flesh, lies mangled post car-crash in the road: recalled inspiration for Ballard’s murderous scenarios. And so, wolfish and wearing leopard-skin, the leonine goddess of the silver screen pads through a thicket of camera-flashed lightning and disappears into a forest of reporters, never to be seen again. Hers is the black and blue goddess-body used up, burnt out, trashed, suicided – consumed by the very thing she is positioned to inspire and not the Gravesian vision of the exquisite, but dangerous, visitor who will eventually mangle the poet himself. The goddess can transform but not be destroyed, for she has magic in her hair, and some women possess this too, this magic, Graves acknowledges, whether the lightning-ignited silver-white hair of the muse, or the black flame of wisdom perceived finally in the rose-coloured promise of a goddess of love.

The Wood of Holy Fools

But why should Robert Graves wander into Dante’s memorial wood at all? His own corpse-copses of The White Goddess bloom with Druidic, symbolic lettering, auguries determined by the falling body language of sacrificial lettering. The monochromatic dualism of his Black and White Goddesses tempts comparisons with the diurnal and nocturnal compositional techniques of the Druidic bards, who used dream cells and incubation chambers for solar and lunar composition. This ancient Celtic technique formally used by the Bardic schools of Britain was to compose whilst lying down in a darkened cell for the duration of a day and then record mnemonically the lines created, the following night. Composition was conducted in darkness, deploying memory alone to commit the lines to inscription. [10]

Might it be that between memorising and documenting, a bewildered bard would emerge into the dusk for a moment to gather himself, to keenly exist between day and night? Might he need the mortified experience of arboreal musing: to dreamily loiter in the body language of the muse? Or – closer – might the right conditions need to be met in order for the muse, the dream, to loiter within him? Where was the moon and when did the flash come?

Lunar tenacity and trench composition attended Graves when a young man, fighting on the Western Front, and he composed a great deal of poetry at this time when around him soldiers went down like felled trees and at times he only slept a few hours a week, surviving on hard liquor to keep his nerves in check: ‘I kept myself awake and alive by drinking about a bottle of whisky a day.’[11] The moon on the front had already penetrated his deepest fears, almost as if its milk had entered his veins when nearest death and it is tempting to consider this a first – and seminal – encounter with the White Goddess: Richard Perceval Graves writes that

towards the end of August in 1915 […] came Robert’s most dangerous and unsettling night patrol. He had volunteered to locate a German working-party who had been heard the previous night in No Man’s Land; but when the sun went down, the moon [wrote Robert] “shone so bright and full it dazzled the eyes,” and his mission seemed almost suicidal.[12]

Graves described in a letter home: ‘the dangerous, clear light of an evil-looking moon’ and wrote the poem: I Hate the Moon which included the vociferous lines: ‘But I hate the Moon and its horrible stony stare, | And I know one day it’ll do me some dreadful thing’ (Poems, p. 17).

The dreadful thing was yet to come, and it came in the form of Mametz Wood. If trench warfare had been a memorial field of mud, as if Dante’s wood had been subsumed into another circle of hell, Mametz Wood seemed the raised forest of suicides. Nearly unhinged by nervous strain twice during his time on the front, Graves – how aptly named – now appeared to die at least twice, by obituary and correspondence, to his family. Richard Perceval Graves writes: ‘death among one's family […] is a safe enough prophecy in war-time.’ How prophetic that Graves recalled in a letter: ‘running downhill through a cemetery on the edge of a shattered wood’ on Thursday 20th July 1916 (p. 153). This was High Wood, the northerly companion to Mametz Wood – both woodland sites intrinsic to the Battle of the Somme.

Mametz Wood had been used as a hunting preserve of roughly a square mile with mixed deciduous trees and exceptionally dense undergrowth but had been left untended from 1914. Now, the hunting would be of men and the woods, for Graves, a personally liminal place. He had been bivouacking on the edge of the corpse-filled woods whose every tree over the course of the offensive was gradually destroyed. Bodies of dead horses and mules decomposed in the undergrowth, and the mist was thick with fumes from shells whose explosions pitted the ground. Emlyn Davies, who had joined the 17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers, later wrote ‘[g]ory scenes met our gaze. Mangled corpses in khaki and in field-grey; dismembered bodies, severed heads and limbs; lumps of torn flesh half way up the tree trunks.’ [13]

This dire situation arguably presented something of a reprisal of prior contexts, Alexander Porteous observes, ‘Many of the smaller woods [...] in Germany are considered to have been holy groves where in ancient times sacrifices were made under certain trees, and in which the bards were inspired to prophesy.’[14]

In this context it is interesting to note Graves’s later summation of the conditions and instinct behind his vivid research which he describes as

My answer to the riddle, namely that the letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-nonsensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and The Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of describing a struggle between two rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain for control of the national learning.[15]

Could this impetus have been subliminally forged by Graves as a young soldier himself, on the fringe of Mametz Wood in which two 1916 Germano-Celtic tribes became morbidly embattled in part over control of international power, knowledge and superiority? If so, it seems that Graves had already performed for himself The Battle of the Trees and nearly perished in so doing. He was a grove sacrifice that had returned to life again.

Holy Fools of the Forest

And so Graves had become something of a coffin-rider, much like the Arabic fool Nasr-el-Din, who apparently rose from his tomb and was seen ‘mounted horseback on his coffin’ according to Enid Welsford in her book The Fool.[16] The troubadour, the jester, the poet, the holy fool was also connected to the wodewose, the wild man of the wood, whose image is depicted on an early tarot card of the fool in the late 1400s’ Visconti-Sforza deck. In this light, both Dante and Graves can be seen as holy fools at large, vagabonding across dangerous landscapes: landscapes forested by memory and filled with peril. Here, another circuitous route opens up with the linking of figures from Dante with the early Tarocchi cards – Dante’s imagery purportedly borrowed for the Major Arcana, as argued by William Marston Seabury in a rare 1949 pamphlet titled: The Tarot Cards and Dante's Divine Comedy:

If the cards of the Major Arcana of the tarot pack were arranged according to the same chronology adopted by Dante a true and completely intelligible interpretation of the cards will follow, from which the same story told in the Comedy of Dante may be derived from the cards themselves.[17]

Seabury positions the Fool as Card 0, first in his system and outside the Inferno text, suggesting this might be the figure of Dante at large in the wood.

Like Dante, and perhaps because of Dante, Graves as poet found himself roaming his own foolish wood – foolish because war-filled, foolish because not a pre-prescribed holy wood and yet one which heightened visions through endurance, through violence. One which was a wood stamped with the visceral mnemonics of dismembered young men. Graves perhaps felt he should have been one of them. Instead, he underwent symbolic death. Now, truly a liminal being, a holy fool pronounced dead and seemingly brought back to life, Graves was open to the Muse in a way he never had been.

In the Irish tradition, such foolishness is defined by Welsford as visionary:

For the historian of the fool, the old Irish fili or poet – that peculiar amalgam of wizard, entertainer and antiquarian – is a figure of particular interest, because not only are there resemblances between him and the Teutonic thul and Arabic shair but also there is suggestive evidence for a real connection between him and the court-jester. [...] The Irish poet, however, was more than a [jester and] learned antiquarian, he was a man possessed of supernatural gifts which enabled him to tell the future.’ In ancient Ireland, she continues, 'the supernatural character of the poet was manifested not only by the potency of his curses, but also by his gift of prophecy and clairvoyance. The word fili is connected with the Welsh gweled, ‘to see’ and originally meant a ‘seer’.[18]

The Blood-lit Grove

The body language of trees apparently embraces a plethora of flickering images: bold, bloodied, beautiful. Graves has frequently been accused of making up The White Goddess, and some have said she is none other than Graves, himself. [19] Graves has famously denied the accusation and yet surely there is an element in the idea that the White Goddess is indeed an aspect of his own poetic make-up. Graves would scoff at this bold conjecture, but might the lightning-flash of the White Goddess have summoned the fugitive spirit of his co-walking self as defined by second sight, an dà shealladh? That Dante’s fugitive spirit who looked back to assess the situation, came to replace his existing spirit and that Robert Graves slipped into a liminal place between solar life and lunar death which enabled his future vision?

Perhaps the flashes come, by lightning, by moonlight, to irradiate and illuminate the poet-self and perhaps in those flashes is revealed the quick of the poet’s true nature.

I suspect the White Goddess accompanied him, shielding him in her light, on that dangerous night patrol to No Man’s Land, and I suspect she then visited him in Wood, as he pelted past the graveyard – his sign, his namesake – and brought him to heel, to make him a walker between sun and moon, between the Apollonian and Artemisian. And I suspect, perhaps, that he was spirited by the White Goddess in those twilight woods of recapitulated sacrifice and that his own body language – one which we still have yet to fully understand – is spoken in a memorial and sacrificial tongue of the embattled forest.

Kirsten Norrie is a poet published by Bloodaxe Books under her matrilineal name MacGillivray. In 2024-25 she was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. www.kirstennorrie.com