As you can see, my mini-anthology actually has a title, modelled on that of Alice Oswald’s 2014 thematic selection of Ted Hughes’s work.[1] Looking at the nature and function of animals in a poet’s work is an enriching task, and a surprisingly good pathway into modern poetry. Given that out of Robert Graves’s 2002 known poems (the figure is Dunstan’s), only about thirty are focussed on animals, it might at first seem that I am, shall we say, barking up the wrong tree. Nevertheless, emboldened by Fran Brearton’s paper on cats at the 2026 conference, I persist. And because even thirty poems are too many for the rules set by the Review, I shall whittle my choice down to just seven.

On what criteria? Beyond simply sharing seven poems which I consider worth knowing, I would like the chosen poems to be seen somehow (a great Gravesian word, somehow) as not unrepresentative of Graves’s work as a whole. Seeking a compromise between the pedantic and the idiosyncratic, I shall resort to a wedding charm: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Graves, I think, would have approved of the method, if not the result.

Here then is my selection, followed by some brief notes on the reasons for my choice, and a few concluding remarks. The numbers in parentheses refer to the relevant page in Collected Poems in One Volume.[2]

Faun (p. 40)

Allie (p. 74)

One Hard Look (p. 67)

Love Without Hope (p. 227)

The Christmas Robin (p. 347)

Frightened Men (p. 395)

The Toads (p. 751)

Some notes on the selection

Faun

This qualifies as ‘something old’ since it is from an early collection, Fairies and Fusiliers (1917). The choice reflects Graves’s lifelong interest in the ambivalent power of mythology. Fauns have the upper body of a human and the horns, ears and legs of a goat. They are strange, awkward creatures, half-god, half-man when associated with Pan, half-man, half-beast when related to satyrs. I chose this poem rather than the earlier and better-known ‘The Dying Knight and the Fauns’ (p. 5) because its praise for a careless, leaping god-king is also part of Graves’s ars poetica, a lighter, younger version of ‘The Ape God’ (p. 731).

Fauns also represent the very early modernist streak that runs through Graves’s poetry, especially the emerging Edwardian recognition and fear of man’s sexual nature, evident, for example, in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ and Virginia Woolf’s ironic masterpiece ‘A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus’. On the European continent, Stephen Mallarme’s ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ (1876) lays claim to being one of the founding texts of Modernism, the more so in that it inspired the symphonic poem of Debussy (1894) and the Nijinsky ballet (1912).

Allie

This poem from Country Sentiment (1920) is my choice for ‘something blue’. Both Michael Joseph’s essay ‘’Allie’ and the Lost War’[3] and Jay Ansill’s haunting musical setting of the poem have brought out its sombre undertones. This is the poem in which for once the fauna — the clucking bantam hen, the grunting Berkshire sow, the miller’s thumb — are particularized, and so it qualifies for Marianne Moore’s definition of modern poetry as ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’.

One Hard Look

I chose this poem, also from Country Sentiment, [4]because the gnats and the mice representing the way small vexations stand in for greater griefs is so typical of Graves’s metonymical mind. Also, because it was the poem George Steiner, in his admirable essay ‘The Genius of Robert Graves’ (1960), singled out as a good example of Graves’s early work.[5] It is Steiner who relays Graves’s description of the sea seen from his work-window as ‘a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way’.

Love Without Hope

This poem, from Welchman’s Hose (1925) corresponds to one aspect of ‘something borrowed’, for it owes some delightful debts.[6] To Shakespeare’s Sonnet 69:

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate.

But this quatrain is also indebted to Coleridge’s ‘Work without Hope’, to Hardy’s ‘The Bird-Catcher’s Boy’ and to the traditional Irish song, ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’, sung so memorably by Kate Winslet in the film Iris. Birds are often a metonymy for poems: ‘What we find in them we would hope for our work — that sense of soaring otherness,’ says Simon Armitage in The Poetry of Birds.

The Christmas Robin

This is ‘something new’ in that in the original poem as published in Focus (1935) the robin is merely ‘wide-legged’. It does not become ‘murderous’ until Collected Poems, 1938;[7] this is surely a case of context is all. The original Focus poem is quoted in John Woodrow Presley’s essay ‘Focus: An Extended Biographical Description’ in Gravesiana 2.3–4 (Summer 2001).

Frightened Men

This poem, from Work in Hand (1942) is ‘something new’ and ‘something old’ at once. The title belies Graves’s description of the poem in a diary entry for 10 February 1939: ‘Finished in two drafts a poem I started last night about Cats.’ In fact, it is a poem about both cats and frightened men at the same time. It harks back to what Graves said in his first extended theoretical work On English Poetry (1922):[8]

[The reader] will remember for example that in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig; in ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams.

When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. ‘You quite make me giddy,’ said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result is poetry — or nonsense.

The Toads

My final choice is a light-hearted one, representative of Graves’s often-expressed opinions of critics like ourselves, in the form of one of the ‘satires or grotesques’ that he wrote for wits. These are not real toads of course, but perhaps a backward glance to The Wind in the Willows (1908) or a forward one to Philip Larkin’s ‘Toad’.

Concluding thoughts

What do Graves’s animals tell us about how he saw the sentient natural world? Can that help us better understand his poetics? The subject is too vast and fascinating one, and this is not the place for them to be developed, but one main observation can be made. Clearly, Graves was not a naturalist; here is no Alice Oswald, no Sean Borodale. Animals for Graves are of metaphysical interest, as the flea was for John Donne.

Or as animals appeared to Aesop. Unlike Ted Hughes, Graves never, to my knowledge, wrote a poem about a fox and yet in the foreword to The White Goddess he identified himself with one of Aesop’s favourite animals:

Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contact with urban civilisation, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine […] Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest that you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds — as Don Quixote did after his failure to come to terms with the modern world—in remote unmechanized farms? No, my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine.[9]

(A sudden vision of Robert Graves as the star of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox steals upon me….)

My selection included a faun, birds, beasts and fish, small gnats and mice, larks, a ‘murderous robin’, cats and toads but inevitably others left out. At the very least, we would need to add a caterpillar, a cabbage-white butterfly, a bear, a lion and a lion-pelt, a short-sighted owl, a bird of paradise and … well, I forget the rest.

HG is an Honorary Professor of Commonwealth Studies, who taught at the universities of Lyon and of Toulouse. Her research is focussed on the many, and often surprising, connections to be made between poetry and politics. As well as having written many peer-reviewed articles and edited a number of multi-author volumes, she is the author of The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). She is currently co-organizing an international conference in Paris on the theme of Indian Poetry and the Representation of Justice

NOTES