TOP110-DES107
This Old Poem #110:
Robert Graves’ In The Wilderness
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 10/14/05
Robert Graves, like Thomas Hardy & DH Lawrence, was really a prosist masquing as a poet. His ‘poetry’ is formulaic & formal. At least in poetry, RG is about as off-the-rack a poet as 1 can imagine for the early 20th Century. He’s best known as author of historical novels (I, Claudius and Claudius the God), & a Great War poet- along with Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, & Edward Thomas. Where WO was dynamic, SS impudent, & ET Classical, RG was merely flat & pedestrian.
The online bio:
Robert Graves was born July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, near London. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was a Gaelic scholar and minor Irish poet. His mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves, was a relation of Leopold von Ranke, one of the founding fathers of modern historical studies. One of ten children, Robert was greatly influenced by his mother's puritanical beliefs and his father's love of Celtic poetry and myth. As a young man, he was more interested in boxing and mountain climbing than studying, although poetry later sustained him through a turbulent adolescence. In 1913 Graves won a scholarship to continue his studies at St. John's College, Oxford, but in August 1914 he enlisted as a junior officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He fought in the Battle of Loos and was injured in the Somme offensive in 1916. While convalescing, he published his first collection of poetry, Over the Brazier. By 1917, though still an active serviceman, Graves had published three volumes. In 1918, he spent a year in the trenches, where he was again severely wounded.
In January 1918, at the age of twenty-two, he married eighteen-year-old Nancy Nicholson, with whom he was to have four children. Traumatized by the war, he went to Oxford with his wife and took a position at St. John's College. In 1927, Graves and his first wife separated permanently, and in 1929 he published Goodbye to All That, an autobiography that announced his psychological accommodation with the residual horror of his war experiences. Shortly afterward, he departed to Majorca with Laura Riding.
After World War II, Graves returned to Majorca, where he lived with Hodge and continued to write. By the 1950's, Graves had won an enormous international reputation as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. In 1962, W. H. Auden went as far as to assert that Graves was England's "greatest living poet." In 1968 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. During his lifetime he published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he reworked his Collected Poems repeatedly during his career), fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford. In the 1970s his productivity fell off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.
Here’s the last quatrain from his formal poem The Leveller (as in Death):
“He died a hero’s death: and we
His comrades of ‘A’ Company
Deeply regret his death: we shall
All deeply miss so true a pal.”
The whole poem is basically a banal lamentation. Over & again RG shows he’s wholly unoriginal. His use of mythos is particularly egregious in the titular poem on Jesus Christ:
In The
Wilderness
Christ of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering
Walked in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk
That listened wondering.
He heard the bitterns call
From the ruined palace-wall,
Answered them brotherly.
He held communion
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,
With monstrous barbed slings,
With eager dragon-eyes;
Great rats on leather wings,
And poor blind broken things,
Foul in their miseries.
And ever with Him went,
Of all His wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs--poor innocent--
Bleeding foot, burning throat,
The guileless old scape-goat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behing Him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.
Can 1 even make it through this cliché-ridden, & dull rehash of Sunday School tripe? I mean, even the title is ridiculously trite. Gee, wonder what the lesson plan for today’s gonna be? Unfortunately RG doesn’t even attempt to add a thing to the mythos- not parallax it, not complex it, nor even try to reduce it to its elemental nature. This is a mythos begging out for reinterpretation yet RG does, well, nothing.
In The
Wilderness
Christ of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering
Walked
in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk
That listened wondering.
He heard the bitterns call
From
the ruined palace-wall,
Answered them brotherly.
He held communion
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,
With monstrous barbed slings,
With eager dragon-eyes;
Great rats on leather wings,
And
poor blind broken things,
Foul in their miseries.
And ever with Him went,
Of all His wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs--poor innocent--
Bleeding foot, burning throat,
The guileless old scape-goat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behing Him kept,
Tears
like a lover wept.
Perhaps I’m wearying after over 100 TOPs, but there’s really not much that can be done to rehab a poem like this, nor much of RG’s ouevre. In a sense he’s the UK’s answer to Eugene Field, but with better connections so his poetic reputation doesn’t suffer as much.
I’ve merely struck through the 4 worst lines. I could do more, but given the rime scheme I’d have to try to rework this poem too much into a modern, Schneiderian poem, which would violate the tenets of the TOP series. Instead, I’ll merely leave this poem’s revision incomplete. After all, seeing as RG doesn’t care enough of the mythos to add anything to it why should I add anymore to his work? Say goodnight, sweet Claudius.
Final Score: (1-100):
Robert Graves’ In
The Wilderness: 40
TOP’s
In The Wilderness: IC
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