Robert Graves
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
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.
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.
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.
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 —
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 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
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