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Abstract: Robert Graves’s Ann at Highwood Hall (1964) has received remarkably little critical attention despite being the only one of his two collections of children’s poetry to be republished in book form. This essay argues that the collection deserves renewed attention not only for its metrical sophistication but also for its surprising vision of girls as imaginative makers rather than merely subjects of poetry. Through close readings of the title poem and ‘Caroline and Charles’, I show how Graves combines formal discipline with playful innovation, transforming abused children and nursery-rhyme figures into readers, weavers, performers, and poets. Ann at Highwood Hall ultimately reveals a more progressive and experimentally playful Graves than the collection’s traditional forms might initially suggest.

Keywords: Robert Graves, children’s poetry, poetics, prosody, girls

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The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature includes the entirety of Robert Graves’s 1960 masterwork, The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children.[1] Lissa Paul, one of the anthology’s editors and prime movers, wisely decided to include the collection, noting in her introduction that ‘Although Graves is central to any general history of twentieth-century literature, his writings for children have received little critical attention’¹. She continues, explaining that Graves

was one of a number of serious poets (including Ted Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Wilbur) writing for children in a short period during the early 1960s [to this list I’d add John Ciardi]. Though Hughes and Jarrell — both of whom acknowledged Graves’s influence on their work — became canonical in the field of poetry for children, the others, including Graves, did not.[2]

I’ve discussed The Penny Fiddle elsewhere,[3] as has Michael Joseph, who’s written much more (and much better) on Graves’s first, slender collection of children’s poetry and many of the poems therein.[4] However, Graves’s second collection of children’s poetry, Ann at Highwood Hall, published in England in 1964 and in the US in 1966, has received even less critical attention. This lack of attention makes some sense. For the longest time, neither book had a second edition, yet of those first editions, only Ann received a second and third impression. Stranger yet, the critically neglected Ann is the only one of the pair to be republished in book form: Seven Stories Press rereleasing it in 2017.[5]

Ann at Highwood Hall shares The Penny Fiddle’s subtitle, ‘Poems for Children’, and the poems within are equally suggestive of traditional children’s poetry common in the late Victorian and early to mid-twentieth century in terms of their form, subject, and idiom: they’re metred, rhymed, and often involve child characters. There’s something vaguely pastoral about them: they’re certainly not part of the oppositional ‘urchin verse’ category that became increasingly popular throughout the 1960s and into the 70s, poetry that, according to John Rowe Townsend, abandons ‘social or literary pretension[,]’ and depicts ‘family life in the raw, with its backchat, fury and muddle[,]’ a kind of poetry more likely to feature ‘disused railway lines, building sites and junkheaps’ than ‘woods and meadows’.[6] Still, we find in the poems a strain of bitter darkness that belies their sweet music. Graves largely avoids anapaests and sticks to iambic metres, and if there’s a touch of syrup to the poems, it comes along with bourbon and a splash of lemon juice.

Considering that a friend of mine (and a Gravesian of some note) jokingly suggested to me during a phone call that Ann at Highwood Hall may have been produced largely as an attempt to make a little extra cash given the popularity of children’s verse in the 1960s, it might be worth a look at Graves’s own feelings about the more cynical, careerist reasons folks write poetry. In ‘The Making and Marketing of Poetry’, published in his 1958 collection STEPS (Stories, Talks, Essays, Poems, Studies in History), which appeared just a few years before the publication of The Penny Fiddle (STEPS also features ‘Mike and Mandy’, a new poem that he would include in Ann at Highwood Hall, though slightly revised and retitled), Graves explains that ‘Poetry, as I understand it, is written from personal necessity, not for the market; it is made as an oyster makes pearls’.[7] He warns against certain kinds of poems he has ‘taught [himself] to treat with the greatest suspicion’, providing a quick, colourful list of the sort that will chill any practising poet (how many of these have you written in the last few months?):

The self-pitying ‘O poor me!’ sort. The dismal ‘Isn’t everything hell?’ sort. The exotic ‘Look! I have travelled abroad!’ sort. The musical but slight ‘Tinkle, Tinkle’ sort. The purely descriptive ‘Camera Study’ sort. The arch ‘Pa’s out and Ma’s out, let’s talk dirt!’ sort. The philosophical or moral ‘Blah! Blah! Blah!’ sort. The slick, rhetorical ‘Aren’t I smart?’ sort. The perversely difficult ‘For Highbrows Only!’ sort. And several more. I mention the commoner ones, into which numerous poems of my own have fitted, and have been discarded for that reason — though sometimes they get into print before I realize my mistake. (ibid)

None of the poems in Ann fall into any of these categories, although a tin-eared critic might suggest a few are of ‘the musical but slight “Tinkle, Tinkle” sort’. However, as I hope to show, such a suggestion would be a mistake. The poems in Ann are certainly traditional, but they’re not slight, and Graves would not want us to conflate traditionally prosodic children’s poems — even humorous ones — with the unserious. Furthermore, as we will see, Graves at his most traditional can be quite innovative.

In ‘Preface to a Reading of New Poems at the University of Michigan’, Graves stresses that ‘In the present confused state of literature, I probably rank as a traditionalist;’ however, he reminds us that he is not ‘one who opposes innovations in poetic technique’. He continues:

On the contrary, as co-author with Laura Riding of the first critical book published in England on modernist poetry — 1927, the year that T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land — I was considered extremely left-wing for explaining and approving of Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins (the first edition of whose poems was still in print after the lapse of several years) and for introducing the hitherto unknown Hart Crane, John Crowe Ransom and E. E. Cummings to the British public. I am a traditionalist only in so far [sic] as I believe that certain principles of poetry cannot be violated without poetry turning into something else. It is a matter of nomenclature. (pp. 236–37)

Graves and I disagree on this point. I’m rather catholic regarding what counts as poetry, but Graves here describes a modality of poetry we’re all familiar with: one of the most central of the central-case prototypes of written poetry. Even within that prototypical vein, the poems in Ann are both unusual and remarkable, and are certainly not typical of children’s poetry in Graves’s time or in ours.

While Graves wrote the collection during his long residence in Deià, the poems themselves conjure an English pastoral enclosure (Highwood Hall) as both rehearsal space for and fragile refuge from conflict. I argue that Graves’s imagined estate functions less as nostalgic retreat than as experimental ground, a topological figure that shapes the collection’s formal and thematic imagination: a site where metrical discipline is tested, where violence is stylised and deflected, and, importantly, where girls emerge not as passive recipients of tradition but as agile practitioners of it. In the attic at Highwood Hall, Ann ‘works […] by starlight at a loom | Invisible to most eyes’, the loom at once textile and textual — a figure for poiesis, for the craft of weaving metre, myth, and self into durable form (p. 12).

Ann at Highwood Hall begins with its title poem, a longish, narrative piece spanning twelve of the slim book’s thirty-nine pages. I can’t help but think this poem may be the reason the book exists. Carl Hahn’s comprehensive bibliography lists Ann as its first appearance in print, as do Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward’s editorial notes appended to The Complete Poems of Robert Graves, which reveal that ‘Ann at Highwood Hall’ was written ‘in a few days at a particularly distressing time in his personal life’, citing diary entries from February 1963, the year before Ann was published.[8] It is easy to imagine that the collection grew outward from this poem.

‘Ann at Highwood Hall’ tells the tale of its eponymous Ann, an abused child. The opening lines give a taste of the dark world she inhabits, as well as the language play that demands of the curious reader a second or third look:

Ann ran away from home, where she had been

The third-but-youngest child of seventeen;
Since her poor mother’s death that drunken man,
Ann’s father, had thrown cups and plates at Ann
And once — he saw her polishing the stairs —
Asked, who was she to give herself such airs? (p. 2)

‘Ann’ is a highly specific poem, funny but dark; light, but oppressive. Still, the lightness of the verse itself, and its rhyme, keep ‘Ann’ from being maudlin. ‘Ann’ rhymes tellingly with ‘man’, the perfect rhyme implying that she’s distinct from yet equal to men, an idea the poem develops throughout. Ann’s mother, having fled this vale of tears, leaves Ann, the third-youngest child of seventeen, to the tender mercies of her abusive father. Ann flees too, but only from her father, not from life:

Ann, dressed in rags and an old tattered shawl,
Marched resolutely off to Highwood Hall,
Making herself invisible (for she
Had learned this trick from harsh necessity). (p. 2)

There she meets the Hall’s foolish Duke and Duchess. She steals ‘past valets, footmen, pages, grooms, | White marble statues, chambermaids with brooms’ and ‘entered calmly’ the ‘Duke’s private room’, where she ‘chose a book, sat down | And began reading with a thoughtful frown’. When the Duchess finds Ann there, she assumes Ann is ‘His Grace the Duke’s latest discovery’, and orders the butler to find her some new clothes. The Duke assumes she’s the guest of the Duchess, and soon Ann is well dressed, well fed, and happily devouring the Duke’s books. Here’s how it ends:

But here her story

[…]

dims at last

With the Duke’s execution and a vast
Ruin engulfing all his relatives […]
Thieves plundered Highwood Hall. Yet Ann still lives:
A lovely lady in her attic room
Working, folk say, by starlight at a loom
Invisible to most eyes, but not all,
And well content with rags and tattered shawl. (p. 12)

Here we find traces of a folk-like poem telling the origins of an unheard folktale. Indeed, the spondee ‘folks say’ clearly marks the folkloric nature of Ann’s tale. Furthermore, Graves evokes the metrics of conventional anapaestic children’s poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via the brace of anapaests at the beginning of ‘With the Duke’s execution and a vast’. This pair of anapaests is followed by an extra unaccented syllable and a final, concluding anapaest, disturbing the fairly regular iambic feel of the rest of the poem while gesturing towards, without committing entirely to, the conventional anapaestic children’s poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[9]

By the poem’s end, Ann transforms into a kind of Arachnean ghost haunting the attic, spinning cobwebs, and yet our girl is plainly in a much better place than she began. Yes, she’s now the topic of tales woven by others, yet Ann is also ‘invisible to most eyes, but not all’, an evocation of poetry and poetic meaning (poetry’s invisible to most people – so much so it may as well not exist – and just as many are blind to the meanings we make of it). That is, she’s not only the subject of tales (again, ‘folks say’), she has also become a writer (this bit is crucial) who weaves her own poems up in her attic, the starlit loom a metaphor for poetic creation. Her art is no longer merely the subject of the poem but its culminating image. Of course, that ‘invisible to most eyes’ might also refer to the loom, which can be seen only by some, perhaps those, like her, with a poetic imagination, those capable of reinventing their lives. The latter reading recalls ‘The Penny Fiddle’, a poem that tells of a cheap fiddle whose painted strings produce music only at the hands of ‘a gypsy girl’, the speaker blind to the instrument’s value until a girl somehow coaxes music from it.[10] We have other intertexts as well: at the end, there is a taste of the final line of Graves’s ‘The Face in the Mirror’ (‘To court the queen in her high silk pavilion’ is the line I’m thinking of).[11] In ‘A Different Look for “The Face in the Mirror,”’ Michael Joseph argues convincingly that ‘Graves’s primary meaning’ of ‘to court’ is: ‘to show oneself desirous of, to seek to win or attract, to affect (a thing).’[12] He continues, ‘In view of the poem’s preoccupation with display, the notion of showing oneself or revealing an otherwise hidden aspect or aspiration’ is key to the poem, ‘to court’ an idiomatic phrase ‘signify[ing] ambition for lofty advantage’.[13] That sense is the most relevant to ‘Ann’. However, instead of a queen in her lofty pavilion, in ‘Ann’ we have a vagabond artist (a confidence artist, in more ways than one) up in the high attic of a despoiled Highwood Hall; and instead of the final line of a poem about a man, we have a ‘lovely’ poet at the end of a poem with her name in the title.

These final lines also bring to mind ‘The Pier-Glass’ (as revised for the 1938 Collected Poems), in which ‘a ghost’ treads ‘continually’ in some ‘Lost manor’, a spectre wearing ‘woman’s flesh and blood’, one who peers into ‘A sullen pier-glass, cracked from side to side’, while at a nearby ‘window pane’ the absence of bugs becomes a ghostly presence:

Is there no life, nothing but the thin shadow
And blank foreboding, never a wainscot rat
Rasping a crust? […]
No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider?[14]

The starveling spider, daughter of Arachne, poor little wastrel, does not join our hopeful ghost, desiring as she does ‘true life, natural breath; not this phantasma’; in ‘The Pier-Glass’, the spider’s absence may be a presence, but in ‘Ann’ it exists, albeit metaphorically. Our starveling, spider-like poet / ghost in her ‘rags and tattered shawl’ works her loom by starlight, ‘invisible to most eyes, but not all’. Ann inhabits a poem that begins with an abused girl fleeing her drunken father and concludes with the execution of a duke, the ruination of aristocrats, and the pillaging of Highwood, its abandoned halls animated only by Ann, a rag-wearing, spectral Lady of Shalott weaving contentedly. It’s an uncommon poem in a collection of uncommon poems, made by a poet with a master’s grasp of his tools and written for an audience he clearly respects: young people with poetic casts of mind.

The collection contains six other poems. The next, ‘St Valentine’s Day’, is a short, three-stanza nursery rhyme. The third is a wild, extended joke originally published in somewhat different form as ‘Diplomatic Relations’ in Mock Beggar Hall (1924),[15] here called ‘George II and the Chinese Emperor’. One Amazon reviewer, who ‘had bought […] copies of this book intending to donate them to a primary school’s new library’, found he could not ‘in all good conscience do so’ because, as he writes, ‘Times have changed and the sort of language used relating to Chinese people’ is unacceptable.[16] Here are the lines in question, concerning the bad penmanship and poor writing style of King George II, who has written a ‘threatening note’ to the ‘Chinese Emperor’, who later responds in kind. The negative assessment of the lines comes from the UK’s ‘Foreign Minister’: ‘Why, even a Chinaman might laugh to read | This blotted, badly penned, Teutonic screed.’ (p. 21)

The poem charmingly critiques the ruling class of both realms, the unfashionable ‘Chinaman’ met in kind by language describing the doltish king’s ‘Teutonic screed’. Peace is kept not by the rulers, but by working-class folk who revise and translate both letters before they’re received, defusing the problems. The people of both empires just want peace.

‘George II and the Chinese Emperor’ is followed by another nursery rhyme, ‘I Have a Little Cough, Sir’, concerning the inevitability of death (first published, in slightly different form, in the 1927 collection The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes).[17] I’ll pass over the next two poems, both in the folk-poetry style Graves so adored, without much comment, other than to say that one is adapted from verses accompanying a wedding gift in 1920 (to Ben Nicholson and Rosa Winifred Roberts, both painters),[18] and the other is a translation from a Spanish text (‘Joseph and Jesus’). (pp. 34–35)

Here I’ll turn to the collection’s concluding poem, ‘Caroline and Charles’, the renamed and revised version of ‘Mike and Mandy’, mentioned earlier. Graves was clearly fond of it at the time, as he also included it in the 1962 spoken-word album Contemporary English Literature.[19] ‘Mike and Mandy’ was named after a pair of childhood playmates of Graves’s youngest son Tomás and, again, first appeared in STEPS, p. 255. Both versions give the girl the first and last word, but the new title’s rhythm echoes the poem’s structure: the title starts and ends on an accent, as the poem starts and ends with the words of the delightful Caroline, stressing her importance.[20] In ‘Legitimate Criticism of Poetry’ (surprise, surprise, also in STEPS), Graves insists:

Everyone can make what experiments he pleases, but poetry is necessarily linked with metrical forms designed to create in the listener, or reader, a hypersensitive awareness of the meaning. Personal rhythmic variations can be, and should be, made on the metrical norm […]. Verse forms are elastic and can be subjected to great stress under poetic emotions, but they have their breaking point. When broken, and called ‘free verse’, there is no metrical norm left to make variations on. (p. 83)

‘Caroline and Charles’ exemplifies Graves’s metrical innovation, the revisions inspired not by adherence to ‘metrical norm’, but by poetical fine tuning. The first line of ‘Mike and Mandy’: ‘O, I’d like to be a Rug’ (trochee, trochee, trochee, and an extra accent) becomes in ‘Caroline and Charles’: ‘O, I’d like to be a Rag Rug’ (trochee, trochee, trochee, spondee).

Changing ‘Rug’ to ‘Rag Rug’ immediately recalls Ann, ‘well content with rags and tattered shawl’, as well as the gypsy girl from ‘The Penny Fiddle’. The specificity of ‘Rag Rug’ reminds readers of the collection’s recurring imagery of poverty and asks them to reflect on its relation to poetry. As Graves puts it in The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry (1955), ‘There’s no money in poetry, [but] there’s no poetry in money, either.’[21]

In effect, ‘Caroline and Charles’ dramatizes play (a fact emphasised by Graves marking each speaker’s name, as in a script), rendering play as poetic creation. Caroline’s first round is sweet and unpretentious:

O, I’d like to be a Rag Rug
Basking by the fireside
Of a farmhouse parlour. (p. 36)

Yet Charles’s turn immediately transforms the game into unwelcome flirtatious combat:

If you were a Rag Rug,
I’d like to be a Birch Broom
And brush you hard all over. (ibid)

Caroline responds in kind, defending herself, first by metamorphosing into a ‘Kitchen Maid’ who tosses Charles ‘in a corner’. The seven-stanza poem continues in this fashion, Charles raising the stakes each round, until at last Charles becomes a Bailiff who arrests Caroline (now a Farmer’s Wife), seizing her ‘by the shoulder’. Caroline wins the game by transforming into a Rag Rug, her first form:

To slide and trip you up
And make you knock your head
On a corner of the faggot box
And kill you stone dead. (p. 39)

The penultimate line is peculiar, its anapaestic feel — common in English children’s poetry — broken by the tribrach at its centre: ‘ner of the’. The reader must skitter across those three unstressed syllables, creating a sudden, uncontrolled acceleration that mimics the physical sensation of tripping and falling headfirst toward the box, the final, fatal ‘knock’ summoned by the last line’s catalexis. Caroline aggressively drops the expected accented syllable in the final foot: ‘And kill’ (iamb) ‘you stone’ (iamb) ‘dead’ (catalectic spondee).[22] By truncating the metre, the line hits a sudden, jarring wall. The missing syllable forces an abrupt, heavy pause — and I read the final foot as a catalectic spondee (rather than, say, a catalectic trochee) because a final spondee there at the end of the poem’s last line would perfectly echo the final spondee of the poem’s first line: ‘Rag Rug’. Even so, with that last, catalectic foot, Graves still manages to punctuate the poem with rhythmic symmetry: ‘Rag Rug’ and ‘stone dead’. (It’s a superbly structured poem.) This metrical ‘knock’ emphasises the finality of death — the rhythm literally stops short. Our young poet ends the game triumphantly, just as she poetically (and, I should stress, playfully) ends the life of Charles, the initial aggressor.

The book, like ‘Caroline and Charles’, begins and ends with a poem focusing on a girl, each girl a model not of poetic inspiration, but of the poet herself. Ann is a confidence artist who leaves the site of masculine violence and crafts a space in which she can practise her art; Caroline, meanwhile, is a quick-witted formalist who meets Charles’s escalating transformations with imaginative agility, metrical precision, and an evident pleasure in the game itself. Her poetic play clearly conforms to Graves’s metrical sensibility articulated in STEPS: she experiments as she pleases, understanding that ‘Verse forms are elastic and can be subjected to great stress’ (STEPS, p. 83). If Charles repeatedly attempts to assert control, turning play into capture, flirtation into arrest, Caroline never relinquishes her voice, her inventiveness, or her metrical authority.

Taken together, Ann at Highwood Hall is a quietly radical text. The girls of Ann at Highwood Hall are not merely objects of poetic attention but participants in imaginative creation. In this respect they anticipate a recurring, if underappreciated, tendency in Graves’s work: his willingness to imagine women as makers of literature itself. We see this tendency in the gypsy girl in The Penny Fiddle’s title poem, certainly, but also in Graves’s prose (Homer’s Daughter, for instance, published in 1955).[23] In Ann at Highwood Hall, Graves suggests that poetry is not a solemn inheritance handed down from fathers to sons, but a form of play — elastic, competitive, improvisatory — and girls are at least as fully equipped to participate in that play as boys. For all his insistence on tradition and metrical discipline, Graves here offers a collection that is unexpectedly progressive, not only in its technical refinements but in its ideological commitments. Ann at Highwood Hall gives its readers, young and old, a collection of poetry that does not encourage obedience to form, but delight in it; not submission to authority, but the confidence to test, bend, and answer it in kind.

Acknowledgements: A shorter version of this paper was given at the Seventeenth International Robert Graves Conference in Mallorca, Spain, where the Graves family, especially Lucia Graves, offered key insights regarding Robert Graves’s decision to change the title of ‘Mike and Mandy’ to ‘Caroline and Charles’. Those insights have been incorporated into this essay.

Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University, where he is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In addition to co-editing Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (Routledge, 2016) and All of a Kind: Remembering June Cummins (Cats in the Basement, 2020), Thomas has published numerous essays, poems, and two books, Poetry’s Playground (Wayne State UP, 2007) and Strong Measures (Make Now, 2007). In recent years, Thomas has been exploring British literature, publishing a handful of essays on both Robert Graves and J.R.R. Tolkien; in 2026 he guest edited a special issue of The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on Tolkien and children’s literature.