Robert Graves Poems
The Cruel Moon
The cruel Moon hangs out of
reach
Up above the shadowy beech.
Her face is stupid, but her eye
Is small and sharp and very
sly.
Nurse says that the Moon can
drive you mad?
No, that’s a silly story, lad!
Though she be angry, though she
would
Destroy all England if she
could
Yet think, what damage can she do
Hanging there so far from you?
Don’t heed what frightened
nurses say:
Moons hang much too far away.
I’d love to be a fairy’s child
Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart’s desire:
Jingle pockets full of gold,
Marry when they’re seven years old.
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep;
All have houses, each his own,
Built of brick or granite stone;
They live on cherries, they run wild―
I’d love to be a fairy’s child.
A
Pinch of Salt
When a
dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
Dreams are like a bird that mocks,
Flirting the feathers of his tail.
When you seize at the salt-box,
Over the hedge you'll see him sail.
Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff:
They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.
Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself, and turn away.
Mask your hunger; let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;
But when he nestles in your hand at last,
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.
Flying
Crooked
The butterfly, the cabbage
white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Henry
and Mary
Henry was a worthy king,
Mary was his queen,
He gave to her a
snowdrop
Upon a stalk of green.
Then all for his
kindness
And all for his care
She gave him a new-laid
egg
In the garden there.
Love, can you sing?
I cannot sing.
Or story-tell?
Not one I know.
Then let us play at
queen and king,
As down the garden walks
we go.
One
Hard Look (Fragment)
Small gnats that fly
In hot July
And lodge in sleeping ears,
Can rouse therein
A trumpet’s din
With Day of Judgement fears.
Small mice at night
Can wake more fright
Than lions at midday;
A straw will crack
The camel’s back –
There is no easier way.
The
Ballad of Nursery Rhyme (fragment)
Strawberries that in gardens grow
Are plump and juicy and fine
But sweeter far as wise men know
Spring from the woodland vine
No need for bowl or silver spoon,
Sugar or spice or cream,
Has the wild berry picked in June
By the trickling stream
The
Cool Web
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.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
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.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
On
Portents
If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.
The
White Goddess
All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean -
In scorn of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.
It was a virtue not to stay,
To go our headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.
The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate with green the Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
But we are gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.”
Frightened
Men
We were not ever of their feline race,
Never had hidden claws so sharp as
theirs
In any half-remembered incarnation;
Have only the least knowledge of their
minds
Through a grace on their part in
thinking aloud;
And we remain mouse-quiet when they
begin
Suddenly in their unpredictable way
To weave an allegory of their lives,
Making each point by walking round it –
Then off again, as interest is warmed.
What have they said? Or unsaid? What?
We understood the general drift only.
They are punctilious as implacable,
Most neighbourly to those who love them
least.
A shout will scare them. When they
spring, they seize.
The worst is when they hide from us and
change
To something altogether other:
We meet them at the doors, as who
returns
After a one-hour-seeming century
To a house not his own.
Dew-drop
and diamond
The
difference between you and her
(whom I to you did once prefer)
Is clear enough to settle:
She like a diamond shone, but you
Shine like an early drop of dew
Poised on a red rose petal.
The dew-drop carries in its eye
Mountain and forest, sea and sky,
With every change of weather;
Contrariwise, a diamond splits
The prospect into idle bits
That none can piece together.
Symptoms
of Love
Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares –
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers,
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?
The Title of Poet (fragment)
Poets are guardians
Of a shadowy island
With granges and forests
Warmed by the Moon.