Robert von Ranke Graves was born in London on 24 July 1895, the eldest son and third of the five children of Alfred Perceval Graves, an inspector of schools, and his second wife, ‘Amy’, daughter of Heinrich von Ranke, a doctor. The family tree had Anglo-Irish, Danish, English, German, and Scottish roots, and had already borne literary fruit. The boy’s maternal great-uncle was the distinguished German historian, Leopold von Ranke, and an eighteenth-century ancestor, Richard Graves, had written The Spiritual Quixote, a novel famous in its day.
Robert Graves was educated at various preparatory schools and Charterhouse, to which he went on a scholarship in 1907. He held his own there, in a community that valued athletic above intellectual prowess, by learning to box and winning both welter-weight and middle-weight cups (with, it must be said, a bottle of cherry brandy to inspire him) in the school competition. An independent-minded young man with a combative streak (that would prove useful in a turbulent career), he left Charterhouse in 1914 with a Classical scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford. Having by then spent fourteen of his nineteen years studying Latin and Greek, he found depressing the thought of spending another three years doing the same, but was spared that fate by the outbreak of war.
Graves was staying at that time in his family’s holiday-house in north Wales and, a week later, reported to the nearest depot that could accept him for training as an officer. Commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he was posted to France in May 1915 and late that autumn was surprised to see, lying on a messroom table, The Essays of Lionel Johnson (a poet of the 1890s). He looked surreptitiously at the flyleaf and saw written there the name of Siegfried Sassoon (see p. 62 et seq.), whom he shortly discovered to be, like himself, a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. So began a friendship that Graves would later celebrate in his poem, ‘Two Fusiliers’:
By wire and wood and stake we’re bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun’s glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.
Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.
The last line may allude to the most traumatic and formative experience of Graves’s years in the army.
Almost three weeks after the opening of the Battle of the Somme (see p. 65), the Royal Welch (now reduced to some 400 fighting men) were entrenched in the churchyard of the village of Bazentin, waiting to support the Scottish regiments then attacking the notorious High Wood, when the Germans began to shell their position. The barrage was so heavy that the Royal Welch were ordered to move back fifty yards ‘in a rush’. As Graves began to run, there was a jarring explosion behind him.
Letter from Graves to his friend Hartmann, October 1914
One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up, near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation. The wound over the eye was made by a little chip of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin cemetery head-stones. (Later, I had it cut out, but a smaller piece has since risen to the surface under my right eyebrow, where I keep it for a souvenir.) This, and a finger-wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me. But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder-blade and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple.
He was stretchered to a dressing-station where, late that night, his Colonel came to see the wounded and was told that Graves was dead. His parents were informed and an obituary appeared in The Times, which was subsequently obliged to publish a correction: ‘Officer previously reported died of wounds, now reported wounded. Graves, Captain R., Royal Welch Fusiliers.’ The revenant used this as an epigraph to a poem written on 6 August, ‘Escape’, which begins:
. . . But I was dead, an hour or more.
I woke when I’d already passed the door
That Cerberus guards, half-way along the road
To Lethe, as an old Greek signpost showed.
British reserves digging in, Mametz Wood, July 1916
Like many another public-schoolboy, Graves had lost the Christian faith of his parents at school, and this poem shows the mythology of his classical education entering his imagination to fill the void. He saw himself descending to the underworld in the footsteps of Orpheus (pagan saint of poets), Homer, Virgil, Dante, and returning privileged with vision. Certainly, the vision of the ‘war poems’ in his second book Goliath and David (late 1916) is more sharply focused than that of his first, Over the Brazier (May 1916), but rather too many are written under the influence of Sassoon. The title-poem of Goliath and David, for example, attempts to shock its readers with a reversal of their biblically informed expectations such as is achieved by Sassoon’s ‘Christ and the Soldier’ (see p.66) or Owen’s revision of the story of Abraham and Isaac, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.’ Unlike these two poems, Graves’s ‘Goliath and David’ fails to shock. It signals its reversal in the transposed names of its title and in the lame couplet ending the first stanza:
But . . . the historian of that fight
Had not the heart to tell it right.
Letter to Graves’s mother telling her of his death
When he comes ‘to tell it right’ himself, his account has none of the economy, linguistic density, and syntactic variety he would achieve in his later poems:
Royal Welch Fusiliers relieved from the trenches, Somme, July 1916
‘Goliath and David’ also lacks the anger and bitterness that propel the poems of Owen and Sassoon. This is surprising, since the David of Graves’s poem was a close friend, as his epigraph indicates: ‘(For Lieut. David Thomas, 1st Batt. Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed at Fricourt, March 1916).’ We know from other sources that he – like Sassoon (p. 63) – was greatly distressed by Thomas’s death, but why this and his other early war poems show so little evidence of indignation is difficult to explain. Happy childhood holidays with relatives in Germany had left him with affection rather than hatred for their country, and his confused feelings about ‘the enemy’ were compounded by a certain emotional immaturity it would take him some years to overcome. Neither ‘the enemy’ nor his own emotions appear in perhaps the most successful of his wartime poems, ‘Sergeant-Major Money’ (1917):
It wasn’t our battalion, but we lay alongside it,
So the story is as true as the telling is frank.
They hadn’t one Line-officer left, after Arras,
Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.
‘B’ Company Commander was fresh from the Depôt,
An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud;
So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,
And that’s where the swaddies began to sweat blood.
His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty
That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits;
But discipline’s maintained, and back in rest-billets
The Colonel congratulates ‘B’ company on their kits.
The subalterns went easy, as was only natural
With a terror like Money driving the machine,
Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,
Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.
Well, we couldn’t blame the officers, they relied on Money;
We couldn’t blame the pitboys, their courage was grand;
Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving
In a New (bloody) Army he couldn’t understand.
The confident swing of this, the relaxed use of slang, and the surprise ending show the continuing influence of Sassoon but, at the same time, anticipate the cool, classical voice of the mature Graves heard in his poem of the Second World War, ‘The Persian Version’:
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer’s expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.
Graves’s 1917 application for a wound gratuity
By the time that poem was written in the 1940s, Graves had become a great survivor – of a Great War and its neurasthenic aftermath, an unhappy marriage, an accusation of attempted murder, divorce and emotional trauma that would have prostrated a less resilient man. Much of this he recounted in his autobiographical Goodbye to All That (1929), which would prove probably his most notable – certainly his most memorable – contribution to the literature of the First World War.
Leaving England in the year it was published, Graves spent most of the half century that remained to him in Majorca with his second wife and family. In the preface to his Poems 1938–45 (1948), he announced: ‘I write poems for poets, and satires or grotesques for wits. For people in general I write prose, and am content that they should be unaware that I do anything else.’ ‘People in general’ did indeed know him mainly as a writer of historical novels, notably I, Claudius (1934), Claudius the Great (1934), Count Belisarius (1938), Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth (1940), King Jesus (1946), and Homer’s Daughter (1955). He was a good classical and biblical scholar, if an eccentric one, and his interest in classical and biblical myth was closely related to his theory of poetry and poetic inspiration. This he expounded in The White Goddess (1948), a wide-ranging study of mythology that stands in something of the same relation to his poetry as A Vision does to Yeats’s. They had other things in common: both were great love poets and, as literary critics, took pleasure in challenging academic orthodoxy.
In December 1985, Graves descended to the underworld from which he had escaped almost seventy years before.
(In memory of Captain A L Samson, 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed near Cuinchy, Sept 15th 1915)
We found the little captain at the head;
His men lay well aligned.
We touched his hand – stone cold – and he was dead,
And they, all dead behind,
Had never reached their goal, but they died well;
They charged in line, and in the same line fell.
The well-known rosy colours of his face
Were almost lost in grey.
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case,
For others’ sake that day
He’d smothered all rebellious groans: in death
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.
For those who live uprightly and die true
Heaven has no bars or locks,
And serves all taste . . . or what’s for him to do
Up there, but hunt the fox?
Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide
For one who rode straight and in hunting died.
So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came,
Why, it must find one now:
If any shirk and doubt they know the game,
There’s one to teach them how:
And the whole host of Seraphim complete
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet.
1916
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
‘War’s Hell!’ and if you doubt the same,
To-day I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.
1916
(For Lieut. David Thomas, 1st Batt. Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed at Fricourt, March 1916)
‘If I am Jesse’s son,’ said he,
‘Where must that tall Goliath be?’
For once an earlier David took
Smooth pebbles from the brook:
Out between the lines he went
To that one-sided tournament,
A shepherd boy who stood out fine
And young to fight a Philistine
Clad all in brazen mail. He swears
That he’s killed lions, he’s killed bears,
And those that scorn the God of Zion
Shall perish so like bear or lion.
But . . . the historian of that fight
Had not the heart to tell it right.
Striding within javelin range,
Goliath marvels at this strange
Goodly-faced boy so proud of strength.
David’s clear eye measures the length;
With hand thrust back, he cramps one knee,
Poises a moment thoughtfully,
And hurls with a long vengeful swing.
The pebble, humming from the sling
Like a wild bee, flies a sure line
For the forehead of the Philistine;
Then . . . but there comes a brazen clink,
And quicker than a man can think
Goliath’s shield parries each cast,
Clang! clang! And clang! was David’s last.
Scorn blazes in the Giant’s eye,
Towering unhurt six cubits high.
Says foolish David, ‘Curse your shield!
And curse my sling! But I’ll not yield.’
He takes his staff of Mamre oak,
A knotted shepherd-staff that’s broke
The skull of many a wolf and fox
Come filching lambs from Jesse’s flocks.
Loud laughs Goliath, and that laugh
Can scatter chariots like blown chaff
To rout; but David, calm and brave,
Holds his ground, for God will save.
Steel crosses wood, a flash, and oh!
Shame for beauty’s overthrow!
(God’s eyes are dim, His ears are shut),
One cruel backhand sabre-cut –
‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries,
Throws blindly forward, chokes . . . and dies.
Steel-helmeted and grey and grim
Goliath straddles over him.
1916
Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,
The track aches only when the rain reminds.
The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,
The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.
The blinded man sees with his ears and hands
As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Their war was fought these twenty years ago
And now assumes the nature-look of time,
As when the morning traveller turns and views
His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.
What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
That sagged ominously upon the earth
Even when the season was the airiest May.
Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out
Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.
Natural infirmities were out of mode,
For Death was young again: patron alone
Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.
Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight
At life’s discovered transitoriness,
Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.
Never was such antiqueness of romance,
Such tasty honey oozing from the heart.
And old importances came swimming back –
Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head,
A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call.
Even there was a use again for God –
A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire,
In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.
War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air,
Protesting logic or protesting love,
Until the unendurable moment struck –
The inward scream, the duty to run mad.
And we recall the merry ways of guns –
Nibbling the walls of factory and church
Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees
Like a child, dandelions with a switch.
Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill,
Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall:
A sight to be recalled in elder days
When learnedly the future we devote
To yet more boastful visions of despair.
1938
My stutter, my cough, my unfinished sentences,
Denote an inveterate physical reluctance
To use the metaphysical idiom.
Forgive me: what I am saying is, perhaps this:-
Your accepted universe, by Jove’s naked hand
Or Esmun’s, or Odomankoma’s, or Marduk’s –
Choose which name jibes – formed scientifically
From whatever there was before Time was,
And begging the question of perfect consequence,
May satisfy the general run of men
(If ‘run’ be an apt term for patent paralytics)
That blueprints destine all they suffer here,
But does not satisfy certain few else.
Fortune enrolled me among the second-fated
Who have read their own obituaries in The Times,
Have heard ‘Where, death, thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?’
Intoned with unction over their still clay,
Have seen two parallel red-ink lines drawn
Under their manic-depressive bank accounts,
And are therefore strictly forbidden to walk in grave-yards
Lest they scandalize the sexton and his bride.
We, to be plain with you, taking advantage
Of a brief demise, visited first the Pit,
A library of shades, completed characters;
And next the silver-bright Hyperborean queendom,
Basking under the sceptre of Guess Whom?
Where pure souls matrilineally foregather.
We were then shot through by merciful lunar shafts
Until hearts tingled, heads sang, and praises flowed;
And learned to scorn your factitious universe
Ruled by the death which we had flouted;
Acknowledging only that from the Dove’s egg hatched
Before aught was, but wind – unpredictable
As our second birth would be, or our second love:
A moon-warmed world of discontinuance.
1958
