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Graves and Graves By KARL MILLER can miss the nose on his face, 'crookedly no more miss Graves's verse than you ou ca ken nose—low tackling caused it.' He has not Wed us to miss it. He spells out that and every r feature of his face in one of the new poems his latest colle9tion,* and the same inventory taken thirty years ago in oodbye to All hat. 'I broke it at Charterhouse playing Rugger Jth Soccer players.' All this is very like Graves, d nice. His life and works arc with us almost thordughly mapped out and on parade. S whole collection takes after the natural, nable, forthcoming quality of each individual Even when his verse was least appreciated remained solidly on the map. 'Jowls, prominent; 5, large.' One aspect of his career as a writer which is par- larly hard to miss is the relation he sees be- eon his other books and his books of poetry. verse, done for love and for the Muse, is in t earnest; the rest is his daily bread, shoring Up in Majorca. Crafty and distinguished, his els and his mythology are in the end exactly hat he says. And though he wrote revealingly on try at the outset of his career, a fair part What he has written on or around the sub- Since then has turned out to be, incontestably very boring. Mysteriously so, too. The main pression left by The Crowning Privilege, t which now been reissued as a Pelican and half of ell was delivered as.lecttires at Cambridge, is 8ome second Graves, or of someone putting on act, indulging in a peculiar make-believe. The ctness of his verse is guyed incomprehensibly this sly 'grey-headed backwoodsman,' as he himself, who begs leave to utter his alarming arks to the hidebound and excitable under- duate hoi polio!. The title refers to his view ,lhe 'Anglo-Irish' poetic tradition according to ntch poets owe allegiance only to the private rces of their inspiration—their White Goddess od should have no truck with any audience 4er than their friends or those who are fit to their friends, and no truck with any form of Zhitc approval. One minute this view seems erelY a fancy way of making points that most °Plc would be prepared, softly, to accept. The 1,4 minute it seems pure 'vaudeville,' to borrow 61°,111 bis own armoury, in which a flat, incurious, 'I.!' fashioned romantic notion of what constitutes ,;le poetry is used to assess the different ways Which the English poets of the past 600 years gone about their job. One after another they iiapse like dolls before accusations of plagiarism. 11,118ing and venality. There are one or two sound Vacky strokes and the set-piece on the early Ylan Thomas is entertaining enough.

I do not mean that he aimed deliberately off- target, as the later Yeats did. Thomas seems to have decided that there was no need to aim at all, si) long as the explosion sounded loud enough. 1 he fumes of cordite would drift across the target and a confederate in the butts would signal

after bull.

CO

1.1.FCTED POEMS 1959. By Robert Graves. „sse11,15s 111: -C;1OWNING Pawn EGO, By Robert Graves. 'Lan Books, 44.)

Elsewhere the line from Majorca goes very faint (you can't say much to an audience if you think of them as gaping eavesdroppers), and he is absurd or indiscriminate or odd. Metaphysical poetry is a brief phase in which Euphuistic wit lapsed 'one degree farther into nonsense.' If he had been one degree less nonsensical himself, he might haVe made his Cambridge audience sit up, and I doubt whether he even did that.

There is Graves and Graves, therefore, and, on poetry, the second one badly needs an alias. None of this matters, of course, except that the divisions between his various activities may be deeper than he supposes. His poetry is the biggest and truest of the landmarks. And certain clues about his poetry can in fact be picked up from his written opinions. Despite his rage, the leads he gives on false reputations in modern verse are very seldom dud : on the Cantos, for instance, he strikes me as completely and encouragingly right. Arid despite his 'crowning privilege,' he can't help showing in his prose that he belongs himself to a line (no confederacy) of plain, more or less colloquial modern poets, including those he likes like Frost and those like the later Yeats whom he derides. Far more than readers were inclined to recognise ten or twenty years ago the poetic vitality of the time has been vested in the 'conservatism' of these writers; and though Graves may be too hot to notice it, they are now increasingly read and valued. There were poets who actually wrote the sense which critics argued for in poetry, 'penetrat- ing, often heart-rending sense,' in Graves's phrase —and Graves himself is one. These aims and re- lationships can be got from the essays if you look. In his poetry they are crystal clear.

He has kept about five poems a year since he started writing. His first collected volume appeared in 1926 and this is his fourth. A long run, in the midst of many events in English poetry. He has verse that takes from Housman and lends to Dylan Thomas.

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is, How hot the scent is of the summer rose,

How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky. How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

To read his poems through, however, is to be aware acutely of the one man writing, of the effects of a single character and devotion. The same face ages in good order in the mirror, no breaks or liftings. Not that there aren't important shifts of feeling too: the tendency has been, per- haps, to fix a firmer relation between the kind of sense he admires and the world of folklore and fantasy to which he has continued to respond.

This is how he came to say goodbye to the rather arch and pretty romantic manner of the early poetry, to Housman and whoever. And this has also meant a special separation between his verse and particular elements in his prose. There is a later poem in which Zeus curses the winds that bother him in words 'too man-like for Olympic use.' A 'scholiast' then explains that

. • . the snake-tailed Chthonian winds Were answerable to Fate alone, not Zeus. Here, 'placed' or parodied in his verse, is the sort of aside which figures continually in his mytho-

logical prose. His poetry becomes the place where make-believe is known for what it is—`the moon, grand, not fanciful with clouds.' And it almost seems as if the cleaner his verse becomes and the more 'man-like' his subject-matter, the higher the slag of make-believe piles up in his prose. He sees clearer as a poet, and his prose or part of it seems like a fee or safeguard for the sense he makes in verse. He has found an environment for himself there which is delicately poised, plain and apparently agnostic, and which is studied in his excellent poem, 'End of Play.'

We tell no lies now, at last cannot be The rogues we were . . .

It is not a matter of snubbing the lions and unicorns which he loved to cry up, or of going cold. He keeps his sense of old beliefs and of the continuing realities mediated by savage and heraldic forms ('yet , love survives); and he quali- fies it very tenderly to suit his new domestic themes,

The move to terseness and shrewdness is reflected admirably in a cycle of seven love poems which can be observed in the present collection, spread out over the years. The poems are con- nected only casually but they have a common weight and candour and they share a number of characteristic ideas. They are about the passionate discovery of love, the oaths that may be sworn and what happens to such oaths, the business in love of giving gifts, telling lies and 'stealing' from the other person, the temporary coldness that can come in love and the disastrous coldness that can come in marriage. The cycle might be said to open with 'Full Moon.'

The moon, attained to her full height,

Stood beaming like the sun.

The poem is about an assignation that goes wrong —it puts out glorious language, with many echoes like the Coleridgean `bergs of glinting ice,' to coax up his freezing climax. It is unabashed and wonderful romantic pastiche. The moon is that sort of moon. Very fanciful.

If the face of his verse has changed little, how- ever, the phases of his moon have changed con- siderably, A very different moon shines, or doesn't, in a later poem where at another unhappy assignation, 'under a moon perhaps,' an 'honest housewife' refuses her lover with a lie for which she and her marriage are seen to suffer. The insight is dispassionate and tough, and it is matched in a more recent poem, 'Call It a Good Marriage': the later verse has a great interest in lies, and a great knowledge of them. Other poems in the sequence pair off in the same way, the insights growing clearer and harder to take. Lovers exchange the knowledge of death 'in its true rank and order' in one poem, and exchange becomes theft in another. 'The Oath' adds a word of affectionate detachment on the nature of oaths as it's revealed in 'Never Such Love.'

He has created a poetry of hunches 'checked by common sense,' a man-like and domestic form. And now, surely, his hunches are better than ever. Sometimes he may seem to be hugging his declared interests too • tight, to be refusing certain risks; flecks of the old engaging romantic style still fall here and there on the new poems; and some of the funny ones are slighter, less 'penetrating,' than they might be. But this latest collection makes it more then ever obvious that if Graves is a minor poet he is minor only in a way which calls to mind a line of poets who are closer to us than many of the major ones. Now that there are fewer of the tastes and experiments that have clouded

the reception of his verse in the past, the landmark he presents is formidable. Whether he likes it or not, he is in for a long weather of clear days. Those who have missed him before will find him impossible to avoid.