Alfred Percival Graves

Alfred Percival Graves Poems

Alfred Percival Graves Biography

Alfred Perceval Graves (22 July 1846 - 27 December 1931), was an Irish poet, songwriter, and school inspector (HMI). His first marriage to Jane Cooper, eldest daughter of James Cooper of Cooper Hill, Co. Limerick, resulted in five children: the journalist Philip Graves, Mary, Richard, Alfred, and Susan. After the death of Jane, he married Amy von Ranke, daughter of Heinrich von Ranke, and produced another five children: Clarissa, Rosaleen, the poet and scholar Robert Graves, the journalist Charles Patrick Graves, and John. He was born in Dublin on 22 July 1846, the son of The Rt. Rev Charles Graves, bishop of Limerick, by his wife Selina, the daughter of John Cheyne (1777–1836), the Physician-General to the Forces in Ireland. Alfred was educated in England at Windermere College, and Trinity College, Dublin. His paternal grandmother Helena was a Perceval, and the granddaughter of the Earl of Egmont. His grandfather, John Crosbie Graves, was a first cousin of 'Ireland's most celebrated surgeon', Robert James Graves. In 1869 he entered the Civil Service as clerk in the Home Office, where he remained until he became an inspector of schools in 1874 . He was a contributor of prose and verse to the Spectator, The Athenaeum, John Bull, and Punch magazine. He took a leading part in the revival of Irish letters. He was for several years president of the Irish Literary Society, and was the author of the famous ballad of Father O'Flynn and many other songs and ballads. In collaboration with Charles Stanford he published Songs of Old Ireland (1882), Irish Songs and Ballads (1893), the airs of which are taken from the Petrie MSS.; the airs of his Irish Folk-Songs (1897) were arranged by Charles Wood, with whom he also collaborated on Songs of Erin (1901). He published an autobiography, To Return to All That in 1930, as a response to his son Robert's Goodbye to All That.)

The Best Poem Of Alfred Percival Graves

Brothers In Arms

When behind her violated border,
With unflinching bayonet and gun,
Belgium, in heroic battle order,
Met the savage onset of the Hun;
When o'er league on league of peaceful tillage,
Under screaming showers of shot and shell,
Into open town, defenceless village,
He let loose his shameless hounds of Hell;
When Liège, henceforth a name immortal!
Perished fighting at his cannons' mouth,
When he seized Namur, and through her portal,
Drunk with fury, still went surging south;
When with murderous rapine still unsated,
Sworn to bend them to his bloody yoke,
On the French and British Arms belated
Wave on wave his braggart legions broke;
When, outmarched before him, into distance,
Frank and Briton steadfastly withdrew,
Though he could not pierce our proud resistance,
Break our firm-linked, friendly phalanx through;


Then our country, roused to righteous reason
By the battle-thunder at her gate,
Flung abroad no foolish cry of treason
At the Rulers of her arms and State --
Pardoned those whose eyes were proven blinder
Than was Wisdom to the approach of war --
Put her unpreparedness behind her,
Only bade us look, henceforth, before.


Therefore, every cry of party faction
Into patriot silence fell away;
Britain summoned all her sons to action --
Suffering Britain -- could we but obey?


Then the adamantine cable stretching,
Python-like across the ocean floor,
Aid on aid from her far children fetching,
Bade her heart with hope beat high once more;
Till the friends and foes whose fine derision
Long had flouted her Imperial dream,
Stood at gaze to mark the stately vision
Rise incarnate o'er the ocean stream;
Marvelling, while above the pine-fringed waters,
While above the palm-set Austral earth
At their Mother's call, her mighty daughters,
Sprang, as Pallas sprang, full-armed to birth;
While, O proudest Page in all the story
Of Imperial India's book of life!
One by one each Princely Feudatory
In our service arms him for the strife.
Our retreat is stayed, and Frank and Briton,
Reinforced, leap forth to the attack --
Now the smiter hip and thigh is smitten;
In defeat we roll him roughly back.
Now again in anger dour he rallies,
And again assaults us flank and front;
While his dead and ours o'er hills and valleys
Mix amid the dreadful battle brunt.
Up the slopes his batteries are crowning,
Foot by foot we dig our trenches in;
Rise and charge and seize his cannon frowning,
Though we fall in swaths one gun to win.
Trusting surely that how oft soever
Back and forth War's crimson waves may flow,
On our faithful, chivalrous endeavor
Victory's full-orbed sun at last shall glow.

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