The Wildness of Graves

...Each of Juan's women is an aspect of the ancient Triple Goddess...

...asks the poet, who claims to have deciphered the ancient tree-alphabets, or secret languages, the Irish and Welsh bards used to invoke the Muse...

...We have grown so accustomed to difficult writing that we become nonplussed by Graves' plainness...

...But Graves is a survivor who periodically kills off his own past, and has included none of this poetry in the present volume...

...On Poetry THE WILDNESS OF GRAVES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The function of poetry is the religious invocation of the Muse"—or so Robert Graves insists in that quirky manual of poetics, The White Goddess...

...His lack of complexity has often made him an unpopular subject for critics, who are left with nothing to do but admire or disagree...

...and the sacred grove to the saw-mill...

...This sort of pastoral is not fashionable these days, except when combined with that freedom of form and association employed by Gary Snyder...

...Nowadays' is a civilization in which the prize emblems of poetry are dishonored...

...out of them springs the inspiration for poetry and passion, to be shaped by formal mastery...

...Graves has never cared to be modish—his theme is timeless...

...Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly, The owl hoots from the elder, Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup: Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward...

...That is so silly it would be worthy of Yeats himself at his most wrongheaded...

...The dry tone of this middle period was only a preparation for that reawakening of feeling when "Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,/I knew myself once more a poet/Guarded by timeless principalities/Against the worm of death...

...This may be Graves' "one story," yet we listen: not because it is replete with archaic allusion, but because, in Kierkegaard's phrase, "it arouses one against existence...

...His didactic "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" recasts the legendary libertine as a seeker of Woman in her three-fold role of Mother/Lover/Destroyer...

...In which the Moon is despised as a burned out satellite of the Earth and Woman reckoned as 'auxiliary State personnel.' In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet...

...but he lacked Lindsay's simple courage...

...The tight discipline he exercises on poetic imagination is best illustrated by his "Dance of Words": To make them move, you should start from lightning And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance, Or so-called chance for its bright emergence Once lightning interpenetrates the dance...

...Call me, if you like, the fox that has lost his brush," Graves has declared of his prolonged separation from literary society...

...and "It's a Queer Time" ("One moment you'll be crouching at your gun/Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun;/The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast?No time to think—leave all—and off you go . . ./To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow") with his doomed generation: Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg...

...The finely attuned ear for speech displayed in his breadwinning novels can alchemize into pure lyric verse, unalloyed by prose or rhetoric...

...He has lost nothing...

...even if we do not know that the elder is a tree of doom in folklore, associated with the Cross, the number 13 and the lunar month ending the year...

...instead, like a fox he lives by his wits—conducting surprise attacks on scholarly territory, beating the best-selling novelists at their own game, thumbing his nose at poetic contemporaries...

...Still, it cannot be denied that the difficulties perplexing all except the strongest modern poets have not touched his work...

...In our century, however, poets have been driven to take extreme stands in their fight for survival against a desiccated language and a bankrupt mythology...

...Nevertheless, the old fox has triumphed on his own terms...

...To recover from wartime trauma, he stopped being intuitive and started analyzing his nightmares: There's a cool web of language winds us in Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility...

...The Romantic cannot even accept help from his fellows in this battle without running the risk of compromising his own individuality: What Harold Bloom has termed "the anxiety of influence" demands that whatever victories the poet achieves be his alone...

...These lines will move us even if we do not fully understand Juan's relation to Jesus, Mithra and the sun at the shortest day...

...Readers of New Collected Poems will find little evidence of Graves' beginnings as a Georgian nature poet...

...Grant them their own traditional steps and postures But see they dance it out again and again Until only lightning is left to puzzle over?The choreography plain, and the theme plain...

...he is the chosen lover, King of the Sacred Grove, who impregnates, is sacrificed or killed by a sacred animal (the boar who gored Adonis), then is reborn at the winter solstice to repeat the sequence as dying year god...

...The log groans and confesses: There is one story and one story only...

...An outrageous statement, surely, particularly since Graves really appears to believe in his Goddess...

...From the age of 15 through his 81st birthday last July, he has written good poetry that has relentlessly gotten better...

...even if we do not recognize the quotation from Job, or the pre-Christmas mummery of Yule rites...

...New Collected Poems is the testimony of a truth-telling poet...

...He considers "poetic logic" a superior process, trusts the intuition of his "little finger" for scholarly discoveries inaccessible to anyone else, and denigrates a philosophical tradition in poetry from Milton ("Without love a man cannot be a poet in the final sense") to Yeats ("What he would have most liked to do was what his American contemporary, Vachel Lindsay, had done—to hawk his own ballads about the countryside...

...He has insisted to the 20th century that we must not forget poetry's origin as incantation, or that its rites wed nature and intellect in a harmony which, temporarily at least, transcends our spiritual bankruptcy...

...In the best tradition of English poetry, Robert Graves is at home with the wildness of nature...

...ox, salmon and boar to the cannery...

...raves is not a philosopher...

...racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring...

...Only Graves among modern poets, though, seems to believe that such are the rewards for faithful service to Art...

...On a deeper level, Juan is a man—the poet, in fact?caught up in the cycle of sexual love where fulfillment is followed by despondency, and where one woman after another will draw him into the same pattern...

...As in the past, he begins with a polished production of his schooldays, "In The Wilderness," but here concludes with "The Green Woods of Unrest," written at 79...

...Its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites...

...When one girl hesitates to take a frog-turned-prince back to her father's castle, he demands, "Is magic of love less powerful at your Court/Than at this green well-head...

...The latest accumulation of his work, New Collected Poems (Doubleday, 422 pp., $10.00), has almost tripled in size from its predecessors, the result of an outstandingly fruitful old age...

...The answer may well be Yes...

...The poem is built around seasonal vignettes that are as sharply evocative in their details as a medieval illuminated calendar: "Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues...

...Ultimately he must continue to "Dwell on her grac-iousness, dwell on her smiling," because that justifies everything, with "nothing promised that is not performed...

...Or is it of the . . . silver beauty" of the Virgin, who "in her left hand bears a leafy quince;/When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,/How may the King hold back?/Royally then he barters life for love...

...Passion is also a gift of the Goddess, and she is "The Lady of the Wild Things, haunting wooded hill-tops...

...For many years I associated the ingenuous author of "I Wonder What It Feels Like to Be Drowned...

...His poetic progress has been from fairy tale through dream to visions of the Goddess incarnate in many women...

...He celebrates the wild places of our nature, beyond the conscious eye...

...And the proof has been that the voice of Robert Graves is uniquely distinguishable for a lyric clarity and wisdom about love...

...The desires we are inclined to regard as an unbridled and compulsive part of our nature are here exalted as the source of creativity...

...In his poems, too, the lovers must lose themselves like babes in the wood...

...For Graves, the artist's autonomy is won through exile from civilization—hence his claim that all true poets are "forced out into the wilderness" and his decision to spend much of his own life secluded in a rustic village in Majorca...

...Since then, his conviction has not faltered...

...In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus tent...