Robert Graves

Robert Graves Poems

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,
...

Call it a good marriage -
For no one ever questioned
Her warmth, his masculinity,
Their interlocking views;
...

3.

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
...

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love's name,
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?
...

Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
...

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
...

The difference between you and her
(whom I to you did once prefer)
Is clear enough to settle:
She like a diamond shone, but you
...

Mother: Alice, dear, what ails you,
Dazed and white and shaken?
Has the chill night numbed you?
Is it fright you have taken?
...

The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all’s poetry with him.
...

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
...

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
...

When I’m killed, don’t think of me
Buried there in Cambrin Wood,
Nor as in Zion think of me
With the Intolerable Good.
...

Father is quite the greatest poet
    That ever lived anywhere.
You say you’re going to write great music—
    I chose that first: it’s unfair.
...

Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
...

15.

Allie, call the birds in,
The birds from the sky.
Allie calls, Allie sings,
Down they all fly.
...

This valley wood is pledged
To the set shape of things,
And reasonably hedged:
Here are no harpies fledged,
...

Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their hearts desire:
...

When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
...

“Is that the Three-and-Twentieth, Strabo mine,
Marching below, and we still gulping wine?”
From the sad magic of his fragrant cup
The red-faced old centurion started up,
...

Robert Graves Biography

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a suburb of London. Graves was known as a poet, lecturer and novelist. He was also known as a classicist and a mythographer. Perhaps his first known and revered poems were the poems Groves wrote behind the lines in World War One. He later became known as one of the most superb English language 'Love' poets. He then became recognised as one of the finest love poets writing in the English language. Members of the poetry, novel writing, historian, and classical scholarly community often feel indebted to the man and his works. Robert Graves was born into an interesting time in history. He actually saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession at the age of two or three. His family was quite patriotic, educated, strict and upper middle class.He saw his father as an authoritarian. He was not liked by his peers in school, nor did he care much for them. He attended British public school. He feared most of his Masters at the school. When he did seek out company, it was of the same sex and his relationships were clearly same sex in orientation. Although he had a scholarship secured in the classics at Oxford, he escaped his childhood and Father through leaving for the Great War. Graves married twice, once to Nancy Nicholson, and they had four children, and his second marriage to Beryl Pritchard brought forth four more children. Graves married Nancy Nicholson before the war. Graves' own poetry and prose is the best source for a description of his war experiences. It suffices to say that Graves never found what he was looking for leaving for war, but rather, terror and madness in the war. He was wounded, left for dead and pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and his commanding officer in a telegram to his parents but subsequently recovered to read the report of his own demise in The Times. He amazingly recovered and was given home service for the rest of the war.However, like many of his fellow soldiers who were disabled by war, he could not get over the guilt he had leaving the other soldiers to fight without him. Somehow, he insisted he be posted back to the front lines. The military surgeon threatened him with court marshall if he didn’t get off the front. Graves returned to England trained troops, while maintaining contact with his poet friends behind the lines. In this way he was able to save one friend from court martial after he published an antiwar manifesto. Though their relationship was initially happy and productive (Nancy and Robert worked on a children's book together), the stress of family life, little money and Robert's continual shell-shocked condition caused them troubles. Laura Ridding arriving on the scene finished off their marriage.Laura Riding and Robert Graves' relationship was immensely influential upon both of their lives and careers. After Riding's arrival in England, she began to exert an influence on more than just Graves' writing. Following a sequence of events so crazy that they seem more suitable to fiction than reality (including, for example, Laura Riding leaping from a third floor window and breaking her pelvic bone in three places), Graves abandoned his family and moved with Riding from England to Spain. The events of this period were so momentous that all three biographers that have covered his story, dedicate a large part of their studies to this couple.It's easy to vilify Laura Riding. Graves was but one victim of her controlling personality and her ambition. But then, Graves had his victims too. What cannot be questioned is the value of some of the work that they did together. Much of it remains important to both literary history as well as to scholarship. In 1943 Robert Graves received the news that his son, David, was missing in action. While he and Nancy held out hope that he would be found alive or that he might have been taken prisoner, later reports suggested otherwise. David, Robert and Nancy learned, had been shot while attempting to single-handedly take out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good.By 1946 as England and Europe began to survey its post-War state, Graves managed to secure transport for his family back to Majorca. Once safely back there, then other than annual trips to England, occasional visits to the continent and even rarer trips to America, the Graves' made Deya their home for good. After 1948 and the publication of The White Goddess, as Graves' fame and celebrity grew, Graves began a period of discovering muses who provided him with a flesh-and-blood manifestation of his poetic and mythic muse. Some of these relationships were short, others seemed largely innocent and more flirtatious than serious or deeply poetic; however, four were, without doubt, significant to Graves' life and, subsequently, to his work. Graves' first muse after Nancy Nicholson, Laura Riding and Beryl Graves, the first after he his White Goddess theories, was Judith Bledsoe. Judith was a naïve young girl who found in the older Graves something of a father figure Graves found in her the embodiment of the White Goddess.Graves had many celebrity friends including film stars like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman, fellow writers like T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Robert Graves ceased writing after his 80th birthday and his celebrity status slowly began to fade. However, where his own career stopped, the critical and academic industry was just beginning. He died in 1985 in Deja, a Majorcan village that he had moved to and lived in since 1929.)

The Best Poem Of Robert Graves

A Dead Boche

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,
Today 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.

Robert Graves Comments

peter gisla 24 January 2018

I am trying to locate a poem by Robert Graves entitled Real Women.....in search of meaning in a complex society. Please respond if you would to petergisla333@yahoo.com Thank You....Peter

5 12 Reply
Kuldeep Kumar Singh 02 December 2017

Chander pur bawliya.

5 11 Reply
anonomus 06 February 2018

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10 6 Reply
anonomus 06 February 2018

shake my heaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadddd

8 8 Reply
shak spear 16 March 2018

i lik shak spear cus he good very at london

10 5 Reply
PAOK the Great 23 November 2020

Bolches yarboclos Why " The clipped stater" is not here?

2 0 Reply
Undyne 05 April 2019

Hey Sans Im about to do the forknight dance. Check IT! yes

2 5 Reply
Riley Hitler 04 April 2019

i ear i i i yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

1 5 Reply
Sans From Undertale 04 April 2019

ehehehe looks like you're going to have a bad time

1 6 Reply
Peter Griffin 14 March 2019

hey hehehe where's my comment lois perhaps

6 5 Reply

Robert Graves Quotes

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

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