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    Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme)

    Page 64
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      Magical grief that no honour could vex.

      Was it ever granted earlier true lovers –

      Whether equally bruised need not concern us –

      To anticipate such hand-in-hand conformity?

      If so, how were they named? And was their glory

      Fixed by an oath you never dared deny me?

      FAST BOUND TOGETHER

      Fast bound together by the impossible,

      The everlasting, the contempt for change,

      We meet seldom, we kiss seldom, seldom converse,

      Sharing no pillow in no dark bed,

      Knowing ourselves twin poets, man with woman,

      A millennial coincidence past all argument,

      All laughter and all wonder.

      £ s. d.

      When Libra, Solidus, Denarius

      Ruled our metallic currency,

      They satisfied and steadied us: –

      Pounds, shillings, pence, all honest British money.

      True, the gold libra weighed twelve ounces once.

      The solidus, gold equally,

      Worth twenty-five denarii –

      Money that did not burn,

      Money which in its turn…

      ‘What happened to the solidus?’ you ask me.

      Reduced at last to an unsilvered shilling

      Of twelve denarii – ‘pence’, or bronze money –

      It faded pitifully into the blue…

      As for the libra, having done with gold,

      It languished among paper promises

      Based on hopes, lies and shrewd financial guesses.

      But mourn for the French sou, as is most proper:

      Three hundred ounces, once, all of pure copper.

      THREE WORDS ONLY

      Tears from our eyes

      Start out suddenly

      Until wiped away

      By the gentle whisper

      Of three words only.

      And how should we stifle

      Grief and jealousy

      That would jerk us apart

      Were it not for an oracle

      Of three words only?

      Three words only,

      Full seven years waiting

      With prolonged cruelty

      Night by night endured

      For three words only.

      Sweetheart, I love you

      Here in the world’s eye

      And always shall do

      With a perfect faith

      In three words only.

      Let us boast ourselves

      Still to be poets

      Whose power and whose faith

      Hang at this tall altar

      Of three words only

      TRUE MAGIC

      Love, there have necessarily been others

      When we are forced apart

      Into far-off continents and islands

      Either to sleep alone with an aching heart

      Or admit casual lovers…

      Is the choice murderous? Seven years have passed

      Yet each remains the other’s perfect love

      And must continue suffering to the last…

      Can continence claim virtue in preserving

      An oath hurtful and gruelling?

      Patience! No firm alternative can be found

      To absolute love; we therefore plead for none

      And are poets, thriving all hours upon true magic

      Distilled from poetry – such love being sacred

      And its breach wholly beyond absolution.

      THE TOWER OF LOVE

      What demon lurked among those olive-trees,

      Blackening your name, questioning my faith,

      Raising sudden great flaws of desperate wind,

      Making a liar of me?

      Confess: was it the demon Jealousy?

      Has there been any gift in these eight years

      That ever you refused when gently asked?

      Or that I ever chose to refuse you –

      For fear of loving you too dearly –

      However much I had failed to demand?

      Forgive, and teach me to forgive myself.

      This much we know: lifting our faith above

      All argument and idle contradiction,

      We have won eternity of togetherness

      Here in this tall tower blessed for us alone.

      THE LOVE LETTER

      It came at last, a letter of true love,

      Not asking for an answer,

      Being itself the answer

      To such perversities of absence

      As day by day distress us –

      Spring, summer, autumn, winter –

      With due unhappiness and unease.

      What may I say? What must I not say?

      Ours is an evil age, afflicting us

      With acts of unexampled cruelty

      Even in this fast circle of friends,

      Offering no choice between disease and death –

      With love balanced above profound deeps…

      Yet here is your love letter.

      Why must we never sleep in the same bed

      Nor view each other naked

      Though our hearts and minds require it

      In proof of honest love?

      Can it be because poetic magic

      Must mount beyond all sensual choosing

      To a hidden future and forgotten past?

      SONG: SEVEN FRESH YEARS

      Two full generations

      Had parted our births

      Yet still I could love you

      Beyond all concealment,

      All fear, all reproach,

      Until seven fresh years

      Ruling distance and time

      Had established our truth.

      Love brooded undimmed

      For a threatening new age,

      So we travelled together

      Through torment and error

      Beyond jealousy’s eras

      Of midnight and dawn,

      Until seven fresh years

      Ruling distance and time

      Had established our truth.

      AS A LESS THAN ROBBER

      You can scarcely grant me now

      What was already granted

      In bland self-deprivation

      Only to other debtors

      To whom you owed nothing.

      And had I cause for complaint

      After my honest absence

      That for seven long years

      I never dared insist

      That you should keep faith?

      Now in reward for waiting,

      Being still a mere nobody,

      Let me plead without reproach

      As a less than robber

      That I am owed nothing.

      SINGLENESS IN LOVE

      And the magic law long governing our lives

      As poets, how should it be rightly phrased?

      Not as injunction, not as interdiction,

      But as true power of singleness in love

      (The self-same power guarding the fifth dimension

      In which we live and move

      Perfect in time gone by and time foreknown)

      Our endless glory to be bound in love,

      Nor ever lost by cheating circumstance.

      LOVE CHARMS

      How closely these long years have bound us

      Stands proved by constant imminence of death –

      On land, on water, and in the sky –

      As by our love-charms worn on the same finger

      Against a broken neck or sudden drowning –

      Should we debate them?

      To have done with quarrels and misunderstandings

      Seems of small import even though emphasizing

      The impossibility of a fatal breach.

      And yet how strange such charms may seem, how wanton,

      And forced on us by what? Not by the present

      Nor the past either, nor the random future:

      Here we lie caught in love’s close net of truth.

      AT THE GATE

      Where are poems? Why do I now write none?

    &nb
    sp; This can mean no lack of pens, nor lack of love,

      But need perhaps of an increased magic –

      Where have my ancient powers suddenly gone?

      Tonight I caught a glimpse of her at the gate

      Grappling a monster never found before,

      And jerking back its head. Had I come too late?

      Her eyes blazed fire and I could look no more.

      What could she hold against me? Never yet

      Had I lied to her or thwarted her desire,

      Rejecting prayers that I could never forget,

      Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire.

      THE MOON’S TEAR

      Each time it happened recklessly:

      No poet’s magic could release her

      From those feckless unfathomable demands

      Of anger and imprudence,

      Those pleas of cruelly injured innocence.

      Why should he keep so strange a woman

      Close at his elbow fitfully observing

      The end of a world that was?

      Must he fetch a moon’s black tear to tame her

      For ever and a day?

      SONG: FROM OTHERWHERE OR NOWHERE

      Should unknown messengers appear

      From otherwhere or nowhere,

      Treat them with courtesy,

      Listen most carefully,

      Never presume to argue.

      Though the sense be unintelligible,

      Accept it as true.

      Otherwhere is a lonely past,

      Nowhere a far future

      To which love must have access

      In time of loneliness.

      Listen most carefully:

      Though the sense be unintelligible,

      Accept it as true.

      A distant flower-garden,

      A forgotten forest,

      Islands on a lake

      Teeming with salmon,

      Its waters dark blue –

      Though the sense be unintelligible,

      Accept it as true.

      NAME

      Caught by the lure of marriage,

      Casting yourself in prospect

      As perfect wife and mother

      Through endless years of joy,

      Be warned by one who loves you

      Never to name your first-born

      Until you know the father

      And: is it girl or boy?

      Nine months in mortal darkness

      Let it debate the future,

      Reviewing its inheritance

      Through three-score generations,

      From both sides of the family,

      A most exacting game;

      Then, just before delivery,

      Prepare for a soft whisper

      As it reveals its name.

      TWO DISCIPLINES

      Fierce bodily control, constant routine,

      Precision and a closely smothered rage

      Alike at ballet-school and the manège:

      These harden muscles, these bolster the heart

      For glorious records of achievement

      To glow in public memory apart.

      Which disciplines (ballet and horsemanship)

      Have proved no less reciprocally exclusive –

      Note their strange differences in gait and carriage –

      Than permissivity and Christian marriage

      THE UGLY SECRET

      Grow angry, sweetheart, if you must, with me

      Rather than with yourself. This honest shoulder

      Will surely shrug your heaviest blow away,

      So you can sleep the sounder.

      As for the ugly secret gnawing at you

      Which you still hide for fear of hurting me,

      Here is my blank pledge of forgiveness –

      Nor need you ever name the enemy,

      Nor need I ever guess.

      THREE YEARS WAITING

      Have we now not spent three years waiting

      For these preposterous longings to make sense –

      Mine and what I divine to be your secret

      Since gently you tighten your lips on its conclusion

      Though never registering a copyright?

      Since these are poems in their first making,

      Let us refrain from secret consideration

      Of their bewildered presence.

      What is a poem

      Unless a shot in the night with a blind arrow

      From a well-magicked bowstring?

      From Collected Poems 1975

      (1975)

      THE CRYSTAL

      Incalculably old,

      True gift from true king –

      Crystal with streaks of gold

      For mounting in a ring –

      Be sure this gem bespeaks

      A sunrise love-making:

      To kiss, to have, to hold.

      A CHARM FOR SOUND SLEEPING

      A charm for sound sleeping,

      A charm against nightmares,

      A charm against death –

      Without rhyme, without music,

      Yet short of deceit?

      How to master such magic,

      How acquire such deep knowledge,

      How secure such full power?

      Would you shrink from her answer?

      Would you dare face defeat?

      For to work out of time,

      To endure out of space,

      To live within her truth –

      That alone is full triumph

      And honour complete.

      THE NEW ETERNITY

      We still remain we;

      The how and where now being stationary

      Need not henceforth concern us;

      Nor this new eternity

      Of love prove dangerous

      Even though it still may seem

      Posted and hidden past all dream.

      HISTORY OF THE FALL

      But did not Adam, Eve’s appointed playmate,

      Honour her as his goddess and his guide,

      Finding her ten times hardier than himself:

      Resistant to more sickness and worse weather?

      Did he not try his muscles in Eve’s service –

      Fell trees, shoulder vast boulders, run long errands?

      Hers was a pure age, until humankind

      Ate flesh like the wild beasts. Fruits, roots, and herbs

      Had been their diet before world-wide drought

      Forced famine on them: before witless Adam

      Disobeyed orders, tossing sacred apples

      From Eve’s green tree, driving and butchering deer,

      Teaching his sons to eat as now he ate.

      Eve forced the family from their chosen Eden…

      And Cain killed Abel, battening on the corpse.

      ELSEWHERE

      Either we lodge diurnally here together

      Both in heart and in mind,

      Or awhile you lodge elsewhere –

      And where, dear heart, is Elsewhere?

      Elsewhere may be your casual breach of promise –

      Unpunishable since unbound by oath –

      Yet still awhile Elsewhere.

      As a veteran I must never break my step,

      As a poet I must never break my word,

      Lest one day I should suddenly cease to love you

      And remain unloved elsewhere.

      Gome, call on me tonight –

      Not marching, love, but walking.

      WHAT CAN WE NOT ASK?

      What can we not ask you?

      Being a woman

      You still alert the world and, still being men,

      We never dare gainsay you, nor yet venture

      To descend the mountain when your bells chime

      The midday feast and nature gives assent.

      Whatever hours they strike, you are found true

      To your lovely self and to yourself only:

      Silent yet still uncontradictable.

      Did we ever see you stumble, taking thought?

      What rights have men in such divinity,

      Widely though they may move within its shade,


      Abstaining still from prayers?

      TWO CRUCIAL GENERATIONS

      Two crucial generations parted them,

      Though neither chargeable as an offence –

      Nor could she dare dismiss an honest lover

      For no worse crime than mere senility,

      Nor could he dare to blame her, being himself

      Capable of a passionate end to love

      Should she show signs of mocking at old age?

      Then why debate the near impossible

      Even in fitful bouts of honest rage?

      TO COME OF AGE

      At last we could keep quiet, each on his own,

      Signalling silently though memorably

      His news or latest unnews.

      When younger we had spent those wintry evenings

      In shoutings and wild laughter –

      We dared not come of age.

      Unless obsessed by love none of us changed.

      How could we change? Has true love ever changed?

      Not in our day, but only in another’s.

      Tell me, my heart of hearts, I still beseech you:

      When dare we reasonably come of age?

      SEPTEMBER LANDSCAPE

      Olive-green, sky-blue, gravel-brown,

      With a floor of tumbled locusts,

      And along the country lane

      Isabel dances dressed in red

      Erect, thinking aloud,

      Framed against sudden cloud

      And its bold promise of much-needed rain.

      CRUCIBLES OF LOVE

      From where do poems come?

      From workshops of the mind,

      As do destructive armaments,

      Philosophic calculations,

      Schemes for man’s betterment?

      Or are poems born simply

      From crucibles of love?

      May not you and I together

      Engrossed with each other

      Assess their longevity?

      For who else can judge merits

      Or define demerits –

      This remains a task for lovers

      Held fast in love together

      And for no others.

      WOMAN POET AND MAN POET

      Woman poet and man poet

      Fell in love each with the other.

      It was unsafe for either

      To count on sunny weather,

     


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