BOOKS

The Well-Turned Poet

By THOM GUNN THERE is no doubt that Robert Graves is one of the most respected and influential of living English poets. The very political unconcern and the care about neatness of structure that worked against his reputation in the Thirties make him Popular today, and his lack of obscurity and per- versity has caused him to be a more enduring model than Empson, with whom he became a Poet to `discoVer' for the generation of the Fifties. I suspect that in spite of the relative neglect, his kind of accentual verse has probably had far more influence in England than that of Hopkins (it is certainly more workable), even though it has been an underground and un- acknowledged influence.

The present selection* is not a great deal shorter than the last edition of his collected Poems, and it also includes the best from the short collections he has published in the last few years. It is customary to say that there is no progression apparent in Graves's work, and that a poem written by him in, say, 1920, could well have been written in 1950, or vice versa. I doubt if this is so : the earlier poems are distinctly more trivial, often more childish, and the short book he published in 1953 contained several that were written with a kind of ungrotesque passion that he had not achieved before then.

One hears a lot about the conversational tone in modern poetry, and, of course, the idea that Poetry should be like conversation originated with Pound and Eliot. Graves, however, has been developing a very different kind of conversa- tional poetic style over the last forty years—a style less tied to speculative melancholy than Eliot's, though at the same time a good deal less serious. It is both robust and full of an extreme, rather boyish charm. When Graves turns it to dramatic uses he is often unsuccessful—in 'The Presence,' for example, it is merely flat. But in his most typical poems, dealing with the infringe- ment of the grotesque or the unpredictable upon the ordinary, it succeeds magnificently, its success depending partly on an unusually subtle use of feminine endings. The style derives from that of light verse, and most of Graves's work is, I suppose, light verse. Great poetry after all has to deal with an im- portant subject in a direct manner, and in a large number of his poems Graves is not even trying to do this. There runs through the whole of his Poetry a respect that is almost an obsession for the small neat accomplishment : the neatness is technically gratifying, but somehow with Oyes it seems to have often prevented him from taking subjects too untidy or too big for such a style.

* ROBERT GRAVES: POEMS SELECTED BY HIMSELF.

(The Penguin Poets, Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) Sometimes we get a poem of the hourglass type, where the situation of the beginning is cun- ningly reversed at the end, or sometimes a poem reminding us of minor seventeenth-century writ- ing, like 'Prometheus' or the very funny. 'Down, Wanton, Down.' There are some poems that are merely rather pleasant nursery rhymes (`Allie'), or ballads or anecdotes, a lot of which-1 805,' for example—are only mildly interesting exercises. (I regret the absence of 'The Coronation Murder,' though, which Mr. Graves really ought to bring back, in its second form, to his collections.) He seems to believe not only that a short story, however trivial, is enough for the subject of a poem, but that the recording of a perception or an emotion—often unusual enough—will do just as well. 'Take your delight in momentariness' could be the epigraph for many of his poems. In 'Lost Love,' Across two counties he can hear

And catch your words before you speak.

The woodlouse or the maggot's weak Clamour rings in his sad ear, And noise so slight it would surpass Credence—drinking sound of grass, Worm talk, clashing jaws of moth Chumbling holes in cloth; The groan of ants who undertake Gigantic loads for honour's sake (Their sinews creak, their breath comes thin). . . .

This is very agreeable writing, but the only cause of the unusual state of receptiveness is apparently that the man in the poem is 'seeking lost love,' though we have no way of knowing whose love or what the circumstances of the love. Some of Graves's most interesting passages are about similar states of more or less grotesque percep- tiveness: the weakness is that the poems in which they occur do not usually attempt any sort of evaluation of these states. 'The Pier-Glass' is rather better than Tennyson's 'Mariana,' to which it bears a strong resemblance, but it does not go much farther, merely remaining a picture of a situation which in itself is extremely particular but in its causes is too general for its importance to be grasped. 'The Castle,' also, which is a rather fine nightmare poem, is even more general in its application : the state described in it is not, after all, common, and we must be able to know what it arises from to evaluate such extreme emotion and thus to know how seriously we can take it and the poem.

There is another sort of minor poem in Graves, in which he merely slips, with a display of thought, around the edge of a more important situation. 'Theseus and Ariadne,' for example, is both efficient and original, and obviously suc- ceeds in what it sets out to do, but at the end of it I find myself asking, as at the end of an unfunny story, 'And so?' It is completely different from a poem like 'The Cuirassiers of the Frontier,' which is not at all evasive in its purpose, choosing the centre rather than the borders of its subject. In this fine poem there is a contrast first between the eunuch atmosphere of Rome itself and that of the distant camps on the frontiers of the Roman Empire guarded by 'Goths, Vandals, Huns, Isaurian mountaineers/ Made Roman by our Roman sacrament,' and then between the values of 'Peter's Church' and those of the soldiers.

The Christ bade Holy Peter sheathe his sword, Being outnumbered by the Temple guard.

And this was prudence, the cause not yet lost While Peter might persuade the crowd to rescue. Peter renegued, breaking his sacrament.

With us the penalty is death by stoning, Not to be made a bishop.

The contrast is developed systematically and logically but nowhere ploddingly, the tone is completely controlled, the irony is never crude. The whole poem is devoted to a definition of a kind of positive, leading forward to the last two lines : We, not the City, are the Empire's soul : A rotten tree lives only in its rind.

These lines contain a generalisation arising from the particular situation ihat has been explored— just the opposite process to that in 'The Pier- Glass,' where we were given a particular situa- tion arising from general causes which were not explained.

There is a handful of .similarly powerful poems by Graves—not so many, I think, as are popularly supposed, but enough to make him a very important poet. Among them I would place two relatively recent love poems, `The Mark' and `The Straw,' and also 'The White Goddess.' In none of these is there a suspicion of the boyish Graves or of the Graves of well-turned eccen- tricities. They are serious and coherent poems, exploiting their subjects intelligently and to the full.