Some of what he presented in his outline of poetic theory makes sound sense, like the development of writing from the poetical to the factual - from the irrational to the rational. He also presented a theory of the history of human sexual understanding, that the reason why priestesses and goddesses preponderate in the most ancient mythologies (something that even James Frazer was forced to address - even though he denied the existence of what he called a "gynocracy") is due to the simple fact that primitive man failed to connect the sex act with procreation. Women were believed to be the sole creators of life. The proof of this idea is the fact that human beings still have to be taught about sex - the connections have to be explained.
He wrote one of the greatest memoirs, Goodbye To All That, based on his experiences in the Great War in which he was wounded and presumed dead. He had the unique privilege of reading his own obituary in the London Times. But the trauma of trench warfare affected him deeply for several years, and probably had a great influence on his psychic development, of which the White Goddess was a large part. He perhaps only attained sanity through the otherwise inexplicable detours on which his thought were taken. As Randall Jarrell put it, we have reason to be thankful for the White Goddess if it inspired Graves to write such things as "To Juan at the Winter Solstice." "All that is finally important to Graves," Jarrell wrote, "is condensed in the one figure of the Mother-Mistress-Muse, she who creates, nourishes, seduces, destroys; she who saves us—or, as good as saving, destroys us—as long as we love her, write poems to her, submit to her without question, use all our professional, Regimental, masculine qualities in her service. Death is swallowed up in victory, said St. Paul; for Graves Life, Death, everything that exists is swallowed up in the White Goddess."
An extraordinary poem, "The Pier Glass," captures the qualities of his nightmarish life during his recovery. They called it shell shock; we now call it PTSD:
Lost manor where I walk continually
A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood.
Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers
And gliding steadfast down your corridors
I come by nightly custom to this room,
And even on sultry afternoons I come
Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.
Empty, unless for a huge bed of state
Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry
(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy
Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand
A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness
To summon me from attic glooms above
Service of elder ghosts; here at my left
A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side
Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.
Is here no life, nothing but the thin shadow
And blank foreboding, never a wainscote rat
Rasping a crust? Or at the window pane
No fly, no bluebottle, no starveling spider?
The windows frame a prospect of cold skies
Half-merged with sea, as at the first creation,
Abstract, confusing welter. Face about,
Peer rather in the glass once more, take note
Of self, the grey lips and long hair dishevelled,
Sleep-staring eyes. Ah, mirror, for Christ's love
Give me one token that there still abides
Remote, beyond this island mystery
So be it only this side Hope, somewhere,
In streams, on sun-warm mountain pasturage,
True life, natural breath; not this phantasma.
A rumour, scarcely yet to be reckoned sound,
But a pulse quicker or slower, then I know
My plea is granted; death prevails not yet.
For bees have swarmed behind in a close place
Pent up between this glass and the outer wall.
The combs are founded, the queen rules her court,
Bee-serjeants posted at the entrance chink
Are sampling each returning honey-cargo
With scrutinizing mouth and commentary,
Slow approbation, quick dissatisfaction.
Disquieting rhythm, that leads me home at last
From labyrinthine wandering. This new mood
Of judgment orders me my present duty,
To face again a problem strongly solved
In life gone by, but now again proposed
Out of due time for fresh deliberation.
Did not my answer please the Master's ear?
Yet, I'll stay obstinate. How went the question,
A paltry question set on the elements
Of love and the wronged lover's obligation?
Kill or forgive? Still does the bed ooze blood?
Let it drip down till every floor-plank rot!
Yet shall I answer, challenging the judgment:—
"Kill, strike the blow again, spite what shall come."
Kill, strike, again, again," the bees in chorus hum.
Subjected to near-constant stress from shelling, soldiers in the trenches often suffered an overtaxing of their adrenal glands, which sometimes led to catatonic states. Graves claimed that it took him several years after the war to catch up on all the sleep he had lost.
His emotional state led him into a labyrinth from which, perhaps, only his personal discovery of the White Goddess could secure his release. Following his Muse led to conflict and unhappiness in Graves's long life, as his long-suffering wives could attest. The ridiculous antics of Laura Riding, a pseudo-poet with whom Graves absconded to Majorca in the late 1920s, established an unfortunate pattern in his life. While Riding abused his devotion imperiously to establish her own credentials as a poet and a scholar, Graves remained productive as both a poet and an historical novelist until their breakup in 1940. His novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God were so popular that an expensive attempt was made to turn the former into a film starring Charles Laughton and directed by Josef von Sternberg. The injury if the leading lady Merle Oberon (who was married to the producer) in a road accident ended the production, the tantalizing promise of which was preserved in the documentary The Epic That Never Was.
Graves continued to write poetry well into his eighties when dementia ended his writing career. He wrote about jealousy and how it is so often misunderstood. The word is derived from "zealous," as in "the Lord God is a jealous God." In the most powerful poem to jealousy ever written, Shakespeare's Othello, Iago warns Othello:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on: that cuckold lives in bliss
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!
The play abounds in the greatest insights into jealousy, as when Othello, on the verge of murdering the sleeping Desdemona, admits that "this sorrow's heavenly;/It strikes where it doth love."
A poem from one of Graves's later collections, "Prometheus," approaches the subject from an original angle. The modern interpretation of jealousy is entirely negative, a symptom of the fear of being replaced. But more experienced cultures see it as a gauge of one's passion. If there is no jealousy, then the love simply isn't true. In his unique style, Graves enlists the Greek myth of Prometheus in his definition of jealousy. Condemned by the gods to be chained to a rock for eternity while a vulture feasts on his liver, Prometheus asks of the beast just one thing:
PROMETHEUS
Close bound in a familiar bed
All night I tossed, rolling my head;
Now dawn returns in vain, for still
The vulture squats on her warm hill.
I am in love as giants are
That dote upon the evening star,
And this lank bird is come to prove
The intractability of love.
Yet still, with greedy eye half shut,
Rend the raw liver from its gut:
Feed, jealousy, do not fly away--
If she who fetched you also stay.
Anyone who has felt such love - and such jealousy - knows the truth of those last two lines.
The problem with Graves's definition of true poetry was its narrowness - he dismissed Eliot, Auden, and Stevens as non-poets, and worked backwards in the history of English poetry, eliminating Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson and favored other, minor poets like Christopher Smart and John Clare. He would've disapproved of three of the poets I included on my list of favorites. Fortunately, I managed to get out from under the spell that Graves cast over me and embraced differing poetic practices. Graves still looms as an imposing poet, but despite his strict self-imposed codes of conduct. He remains one if the finest lyric poets of the 20th century.
No comments:
Post a Comment