Abstract: Michael Kirkham’s readings of Robert Graves’s late love poetry identify a ‘discipline of leaving unsaid’ as a defining quality of his mature style, yet the poetic origin of this discipline remains largely unexamined. This paper argues that the Orphic cycle in Man Does, Woman Is (1964) — comprising ‘Food of the Dead’, ‘Eurydice’, and ‘A Last Poem’ — functions as the laboratory where Graves first crafts this ‘grammar of silence’. It is here that the doctrinal transition from the White Goddess to the Black Goddess, later theorised in the essay ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ (1965), is fully dramatised in verse. Read through Charles Segal’s structural model of the Orpheus myth, which identifies Art, Love, and Death as its three fundamental axes, the cycle reveals a coherent initiatory progression: each poem enacts a different mode of silence, as each serves as a prerequisite for the next. ‘Food of the Dead’ establishes the Muse’s withdrawal as cyclical and purposeful. ‘Eurydice’ stages the agonised confrontation with the Black Goddess’s silence at its most oppressive. ‘A Last Poem’ ends with the shared, wordless understanding that characterises the mature silence Kirkham observes in later poems. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that the Orphic cycle is not merely an instance of Graves’s grammar of silence, but the very site of its stylistic and mythological origin.

Keywords: Robert Graves, Black Goddess, Orpheus, grammar of silence, love, death, art

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Introduction

George Steiner regarded Robert Graves with exceptional reverence. In a celebrated passage, Steiner described him as ‘the finest and most prolific man of letters now writing in English’,[1] a poet whose physical and intellectual presence was, for him, unmistakable. The tribute is notable not only for its generosity but for its source. Among critics, Steiner is the thinker who most rigorously identified silence as a primary mode of poetic statement. In Language and Silence (1970), he defines silence as a condition in which language deliberately ceases not as defeat but as the outermost gesture of meaning. As a matter of fact, ‘the poet enters into silence’ at the frontier of what speech can contain.[2] Steiner’s formulation provides the ideal entry point into Graves’s poetics, naming what Graves’s poetry enacts with singular precision: a silence that is not merely absence but communication, not failure but discipline.

Michael Kirkham, whose readings of the late love poetry remain foundational, observed that Graves ‘carried to its limit the discipline of leaving unsaid what is not absolutely necessary to say’[3] and described certain poems as achieving ‘a perfection of reciprocal understanding that can be greeted only with silence’ (Kirkham, p. 257). These acute observations pave the way for a broader understanding of the functions and the origin of this silence. How did Graves develop this grammar of silence? Where, in his poetry, was this mastery first fully achieved?

The answer, I suggest, lies in the mythic figure who most completely embodies the threshold of speech. As Steiner aptly remarked, ‘the fortunes of Orpheus, as we follow them in Pindar and Ovid, in Spenser, Rilke, and Cocteau, are almost synonymous with the nature and functions of poetry.’[4] Accordingly, this paper investigates Graves’s reappropriation of the Orphic cycle in Man Does, Woman Is (1964), which includes ‘Food of the Dead’, ‘Eurydice’, and ‘A Last Poem’[5]. Far from being mere instances of the silence Kirkham observes in the mature work, these three poems constitute the very laboratory in which that silence is forged. However, their significance emerges only through a close examination of their prose counterpart: Graves’s essay ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’, published the following year in Mammon and the Black Goddess (1965), explicitly develops his reinterpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. More importantly, the essay theorises the transition from the White Goddess to the Black Goddess, whose communication appears non-verbal, obscure, and based on silence. Therefore, the Orphic cycle represents the poetic enactment of this transition. This is the dimension in which Graves learns to inhabit the silence of the Black Goddess rather than merely to suffer it.

Charles Segal’s structural model of the Orpheus myth provides the necessary map for this analysis. Segal identifies Art, Love, and Death as the three axes whose tensions constitute the myth’s fundamental meaning.[6] Graves’s poems relocate this triangle, making it the map of the poet’s initiatory journey through the Black Goddess’s silence. Each poem in the cycle occupies a specific position, and each enacts a distinct mode of silence. Reading them in sequence reveals not only what the grammar of silence is in Graves’s poetry, but how it came to be.

Two Silences, one Gap: The Discipline of the Unsaid

With remarkable precision, Kirkham’s readings of Graves’s late poetry identify silence in the love lyrics as something sacred and generative. It emerges as a positive communicative force rather than a mere absence of speech. These poems collectively show a poet moving toward a silence of total intimation and achieving ‘a perfection of reciprocal understanding between the amorous partners that can be greeted only with silence’ (Kirkham, p. 257). 

Moreover, Graves’s poetry shows a second, seemingly opposite facet of silence, the silence of death. Among others, in ‘Leaving the Rest Unsaid’ (1938), Graves rebels against ‘graveyard indices’ and ‘testamentary appendices’ that would make his work a finished, static text. He asserts instead an unending creative journey that ends with ‘a careless comma’. Similarly, in ‘To Evoke Posterity’ (1938), ‘being cast in bronze for a city square’ is described as the worst possible fate, a petrification of living art into a ‘proverbial’ monument that bores schoolchildren. These poems emphasise how Graves consistently represents the silence of death not as a peaceful end to be accepted but as a form of artistic obliteration to be resisted. The resistance is instinctively Orphic, mirroring the defiance of the severed head that continues to sing despite the finality of the grave. Kirkham’s reading of ‘Leaving the Rest Unsaid’ links the silence of death directly to love. He observes that Graves’s refusal to let ‘tearful music mar | The decent mystery of [his] progress’ represents a revaluation of ‘male pride’ within the man-woman relationship (p. 230). The poet’s defiance is the unyielding response to the lover’s cruel fate of being destroyed by the woman he loves.

This connection reveals that the silence of death and the silence of the Muse are not two separate voids, but two manifestations of a single challenge. The threatening silence of mortality and the sacred silence of lovers appear as an irreducible duality, yet they are bound together by the mythic presence of the Muse. By adopting the mask of Orpheus, Graves confronts this eroticised death–silence. The Orphic laboratory becomes the site where the voice of the poet must confront the absolute, destructive silence of the Black Goddess and transforms it from an oppressive wound into a disciplined, initiatory grammar of the Unsaid.

Graves’s ‘New Orpheus’

The theoretical context for this argument is Graves’s essay ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ published the year after Man Does, Woman Is.[7]

In Graves’s reading, Orpheus and Eurydice stand for the conflicting poles of his own verse: POET–MUSE. Graves’s self-identification with Orpheus represents the defining gesture of his mature poetics. In The White Goddess, Orpheus is identified as the poet par excellence whose gifts derive not from personal skill but from his unconditional service to the Muse (p. 95).[8] Similarly, in The Golden Fleece, Graves had already assigned the lyric voice to Orpheus himself across several poems.[9] The early adoption of the mythic mask progressively deepens until, in Man Does, Woman Is, it becomes the vehicle for the most intimate self-examination of his creative vocation. Indeed, Elena Theodorakopoulos emphasises that ‘in The White Goddess, Orpheus is not mentioned in connection with Eurydice [...] but he is mentioned as a ‘victim’ of the White Goddess’,[10] underscoring that Graves’s exploration centres primarily on the poet and his relationship with the Goddess rather than on Eurydice herself. In the Orphic cycle, Graves moves beyond victimhood: across three poems, his Orpheus learns to master it.

Moreover, Eurydice is not his wife, but the source of his inspiration: she acts as a manifestation of the Triple Muse, ‘a woman in her divine character: the poet’s enchantress, the only theme of his song’ (White Goddess, p. 379). Graves challenges the common narrative that she died from a serpent bite, suggesting metaphorically instead that she ‘chose to couple with a serpent as her ancestress Eurynome’ (Intimations, p. 159). In doing so, Graves fulfils what Segal defines as the myth’s most profound function: the attempt to see human life in a ‘twofold perspective’, simultaneously as a part of nature and as a unique expression of ‘emotional and intellectual consciousness’ (Segal, p. 193). In the Orphic cycle, this twofold perspective is dramatised through the tension between the necessity of silence (Death) and the spiritual necessity of song (Art). Graves’s ‘New Orpheus’ does not simply suffer loss, for he uses the ‘expressive power of art’ (Segal, p. 193) to bridge the gap between his mortal vulnerability and the eternal, silent presence of the Black Goddess.

More importantly, by reading Eurydice’s departure as the Black Goddess’s deliberate choice to inhabit silence, Graves transforms the Death axis from an external catastrophe into an internal, doctrinal necessity. Death, in the classical myth, is what takes Eurydice. Conversely, in Graves’s version, she chooses the silence of the Black Goddess, which is a deeper form of presence.

Read through Segal’s triangle, the three poems trace a coherent initiatory arc. ‘Food of the Dead’ intervenes on the Love–Death axis: it establishes the terms of the Muse’s withdrawal, rewriting it as the Black Goddess’s purposeful descent rather than a tragic accident. ‘Eurydice’ moves to the Art–Death axis, staging the full crisis of the confrontation with that silence. In this moment the poet must choose between surrender and the act of resistance that constitutes authentic art. ‘A Last Poem’ shows the Art–Love axis, where the crisis is resolved not by the elimination of silence but by its transformation: the shared, wordless understanding between poet and Goddess is the grammar of silence in its most complete form. The silence of the Black Goddess, which began as a wound, ends as a medium. This is what Kirkham observes in the mature poems, without knowing, or needing to say, where it came from.

‘Food of the Dead’: The Silence of Purposeful Withdrawal

‘Food of the Dead’ establishes the condition of the entire cycle: the Muse’s silence is not imposed from outside but chosen from within. The poem operates on the Love–Death axis of Segal’s triangle, and its central achievement is the rewriting of Eurydice’s departure from tragic accident to purposeful act.

Blush as you stroke the curves — chin, lips and brow —

Of your scarred face, Prince Orpheus: for she has called it

Beautiful, nor would she stoop to flattery.

Yet are you patient still, when again she has eaten

Food of the dead, seven red pomegranate seeds,

And once more warmed the serpent at her thighs

For a new progress through new wards of hell?[11]

Significantly, the infernal setting is never named. The poem establishes the Underworld as the location of the encounter entirely through implication: the ‘seven red pomegranate seeds’ carry the full weight of the mythological context they invoke without ever announcing it. Binding the eater to the realm of the dead, the significance of the ritual food is implied rather than explained. This is to say that some truths are communicated most completely through what is left unspoken. The fusion of Eurydice with Persephone, as Theodorakopoulos notes, has no basis in classical accounts (Theodorakopoulos, p. 763). Graves’s deliberate innovation relates Eurydice’s departure to a purposeful, cyclical withdrawal that defines the Black Goddess herself.

The structure of the poem enacts this rewriting formally. Its syntax is organised around the word ‘again’ (‘when again she has eaten’ and ‘once more’): Eurydice’s return to the Underworld is marked as a repeatable act, not a singular catastrophe. The cyclicity is the first lesson of the grammar of silence, for the Muse’s withdrawal is the structural condition of the man-woman relationship. Her silence stands as an instance of the Black Goddess’s deeper, non-verbal communication. The withdrawal forces the poet to abandon exhausted expressive forms and confront the silence itself. Consequently, pain and loss become the instruments of poetic purification.

The final line of the poem (the question ‘for a new progress through new wards of hell?’) frames the recognition as a patient, if difficult, acceptance. Orpheus does not protest, showing an endurance that is already a form of mastery. The Black Goddess’s silence makes it necessary. The poem’s achievement is to establish the terms on which the rest of the cycle will proceed.

‘Eurydice’: The Silence of Confrontation

If ‘Food of the Dead’ establishes the Black Goddess’s silence in terms of patient acceptance, ‘Eurydice’ redefines such acceptance in a more radical way. The poem moves to the Art–Death axis of Segal’s triangle and stages the full crisis of the confrontation. At this stage, the silence of the Black Goddess is experienced as an active oppression. Within that experience, the poet must find the act of resistance that constitutes the source of his authentic art.

‘I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed’—

Once I utter the curse, how can she rest:

No longer able, weeping, to placate me

With renewed auguries of celestial beauty?

Speak, fly in her amber ring; speak, horse of gold!

What gift did I ever grudge her, or help withhold?

In a mirror I watch blood trickling down the wall —

Is it mine? Yet still I stand here, proud and tall.

Look where she shines, with a borrowed blaze of light

Among the cowardly, faceless, lost, unright,

Clasping a naked imp to either breast —

Am I not oppressed, oppressed, three times oppressed?

She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank,

Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank,

Crept home, accepted solace, but then again

Flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain.

My own dear heart, dare you so war on me

As to strangle love in a mad perversity?

Is ours a fate can ever be forsworn

Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn?[12]

‘Eurydice’ is a prime example of Graves’s strategic use of omission: the title is the only direct reference to the myth. The central conflict between the poet and his woman is made clear through the repeated refrain. The opening anaphora (‘I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed’) establishes the poem’s argument immediately and viscerally. Echoing Graves’s observations that ‘Arabs, when downtrodden, robbed or cheated, often refrain from curses’ (‘Intimations’ p. 160), its threefold insistence is not mere rhetoric: it is a formal enactment of the anguish of speaking into a void that refuses to answer. The more urgently the poet cries out, the more completely the Muse’s silence is felt as an active force rather than a passive absence. This is the Black Goddess’s silence at its most devastating. The purposeful withdrawal of ‘Food of the Dead’ becomes an oppressive refusal that threatens to sever the bond between poet and Muse altogether.

The images of the Muse’s degradation (‘She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank, | Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank’) render this experience with an unsparing physicality. The harsh fricatives and sibilants mime the texture of betrayal and corruption, making the reader feel the Muse’s silence as something almost somatic. The Black Goddess’s silence here is opaque and seemingly malicious. She has ‘flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain’. Her silence does not merely withhold her presence but actively and effectively prevents the poet’s access to creative truth. The poem’s apostrophe achieves resolution by transforming this endurance into poetic mastery. ‘My own dear heart, dare you so war on me | As to strangle love in a mad perversity?’ recalls the idea of the lover at war with the beloved but inverts its logic entirely. Graves’s Orpheus fights a war he knows he must lose. The combination of intimate address (‘my own dear heart’) with military vocabulary (‘war on me’ ‘strangle’) enacts the spiritual subjugation in which voluntary surrender is the only form of faithfulness. The mad perversity of the Muse is not irrational: it is the logic of the Black Goddess, whose silence must prevail if the poem is to be worth singing.

The poem’s final image (‘Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn?’) manifests the act of resistance that is the Art–Death axis’s answer to the Black Goddess’s silence. The severed but still-singing head of Orpheus is the image of art asserting itself from the very site of physical destruction. The voice of the poet formally resembles death, silence, decapitation, the end of speech, while refusing its communicative consequences. Graves’s Orpheus does not answer, but he asks, and the question itself constitutes an act of resistance. The Black Goddess’s silence has not been overcome. Yet, it has been met with a voice that will not stop, even after death. The question is left open because the final answer belongs to the next poem.

‘A Last Poem’: The Silence of Completion

‘A Last Poem’ resolves the cycle on the Art–Love axis. The suspended question of ‘Eurydice’ finds the conditions under which the question becomes unnecessary. Where ‘Food of the Dead’ established the Black Goddess’s silence as purposeful withdrawal and ‘Eurydice’ staged the agonised confrontation with that silence at its most oppressive, ‘A Last Poem’ dramatises the mode of silence that Kirkham observes in the mature love poetry: a shared, wordless understanding between poet and Goddess that is not the failure of speech but its completion.

A last poem, and a very last, and yet another –

O, when can I give over?

Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails

And my breath fails and I shake with fever,

Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak5

Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal?

Shall I never hear her whisper softly:

‘But this is truth written by you only,

And for me only; therefore, love, have done’?[13]

The opening lines are at once a continuation and a transformation of the Orphic image that closed ‘Eurydice’. ‘A last poem, and a very last, and yet another’ echoes the singing severed head of the poet who cannot stop, even when he wishes to. Yet, the register has shifted from the anguish of the Art–Death fight to the weariness of a poet who has proved his point and simply wants to rest. The compulsion to write is rendered with uncomfortable physicality: ‘Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails | And my breath fails and I shake with fever.’ The martyrdom represents the necessary condition of the poet’s reunion with the Muse. The ‘Castle Crystal’ and the ‘many-coloured cloak’ are the esoteric iconography of the White Goddess’s realm, the destination of the initiatory journey that Mnemosyne makes accessible. Their presence here signals that the poet has completed the passage through the Black Goddess’s silence and arrived at the point where the two aspects of the Goddess can be held simultaneously. The eternal song represents the mnemic act of remembrance that bridges the gap between the living poet and the divine Muse. It is because Memory is the medium of the song that the song can finally, legitimately, be done.

The Muse’s final whisper (‘But this is truth written by you only, | And for me only; therefore, love, have done’) brings the cycle to its resolution. What it enacts is precisely the condition that ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ implies as the highest achievement of the poet’s vocation: a shared understanding so complete that articulation becomes unnecessary and reductive. ‘Written by you only, | And for me only’ does not describe the content of this understanding, but it withholds the content by asserting its absolute exclusivity. Kirkham identifies this silence in ‘Under the Olives’ and ‘The Black Goddess’ as the point at which the bond between poet and Goddess is so complete that language can only gesture toward it and then fall quiet.

The reversal of the Muse’s position between ‘Eurydice’ and this poem is the cycle’s final argument. In ‘Eurydice’, she was the source of oppression, the Black Goddess at her most destructive. Here, the Muse is the one who grants permission to be silent, who attests the value of the work and releases the poet from his vow. This reversal illustrates a recurring motif in Graves’s thought, namely the necessary tension between complementary opposites: the Black Goddess’s silence is simultaneously the most devastating trial the poet encounters and the most profound form of communion he achieves. The cycle has moved from silence as wound to silence as grammar, from the thing the poet suffers to the thing he masters.

The Grammar and Its Legacy in the Late Poetry

The significance of the Orphic cycle as a poetic laboratory becomes fully legible when it is read against the poems that Kirkham analyses as exemplary instances of the mature silence. In ‘Under the Olives’ (1961), the critic observes that the shared silence of the lovers (‘we both fell silent’) is not a pause in communication but its fullest form, stripping language to its barest essentials (the discipline of ‘leaving the rest unsaid’) (Kirkham, p. 244). These considerations are further explored in ‘The Unnamed Spell’ (1962): here, the withheld name of the ritual is read as the enactment of the poem’s own argument: ‘Secret of secrets disclosed only | To who already share it’. This silence can only be inhabited, never spoken (p. 251). Finally, in ‘The Black Goddess’ (1964), this discipline culminates in a perfect communion that Kirkham describes as ‘a perfection of reciprocal understanding between the lovers that [...] can be greeted only with silence, a silence denoting thought beyond the scope of words’ (p. 257).

What is common to all three of these poems, and what Kirkham’s readings identify with precision, is a silence that is the highest form of speech. It exemplifies the shared, wordless understanding between poet and Muse that exceeds what language can contain. This is exactly the silence that ‘A Last Poem’ arrives at as the resolution of the Orphic cycle’s initiatory journey. While the grammar has been mastered, the later poems deploy it. The Orphic cycle is not simply one instance among many of Graves’s engagement with silence, but the site of its first full conquest.

This reading also clarifies the relationship between the White Goddess and the Black Goddess in Graves’s late poetics. The White Goddess’s silence is the silence that the Orphic cycle begins with, in ‘Food of the Dead’, and that proves insufficient. It is the Black Goddess’s silence (non-verbal, absolute, predicated on a shared understanding that precedes speech) that the cycle moves toward and that the mature love poems inhabit.

Conclusions

This analysis has argued that the Orphic cycle of Man Does, Woman Is is the poetic laboratory in which Graves’s grammar of silence is first fully achieved. Read through Segal’s structural model of the Orpheus myth and against the doctrinal context of ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’, the three poems reveal a coherent initiatory progression. Each enacts a qualitatively distinct mode of the Black Goddess’s silence, and each makes the next possible.

The contribution of this reading to Graves scholarship is twofold. It fills a gap in the critical account of the grammar of silence that Kirkham identifies in the mature poetry, exploring not only what that grammar is, but where it was first won, and why. To this end, the transition from the White Goddess to the Black Goddess required, above all, the conquest of a silence that words alone could not articulate. It further repositions the function of the Orphic cycle within Graves’s œuvre: the classical myth thus represents the privileged locus in which this poetics of silence achieves its definitive form.

The silence Graves masters in ‘A Last Poem’ is not the silence of defeat or exhaustion, but the silence of the Black Goddess, the deepest, most demanding, and most generative form of communication his poetry ever achieved.

Adriana Marinelli holds a PhD in Linguistic, Terminological and Intercultural Studies from Parthenope University of Naples. Her doctoral research investigates the influence of classical antiquity on the construction of Robert Graves’s identity. In 2022 she received a fellowship from G. d’Annunzio University (Chieti-Pescara) to conduct her research on Robert Graves and Ovid. She has co-launched a series of online pop-up seminars about Robert Graves with Michael Joseph, editor of The Robert Graves Review.