Robert Graves: Trending quotes

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“Lovers to-day and for all time
Preserve the meaning of my rhyme:
Love is not kindly nor yet grim
But does to you as you to him.”

Robert Graves

"Advice To Lovers"
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Riding on the shell and shot.
He smites you down, he succours you,
And where you seek him, he is not.”

Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.”

Robert Graves

"The Cool Web," lines 9–12, from Poems 1914-1926 (1927).
Poems

“One, two and many: flesh had made him blind,
Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,
Flesh set one purpose only in the mind —
Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find
Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.”

Robert Graves

"Ulysses," lines 16–20, from Poems 1930-1933 (1933).
Poems

“Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls', avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. "Was it very caliginous in the metropolis?""Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated," Lawrence replied gravely.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 28.

“Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.”

Robert Graves

"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).
General sources

“New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.”

Robert Graves

"Marigolds".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“They multiplied into the Sirens' throng,
Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast
Hand and foot helpless to the vessel's mast,
Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song
He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.”

Robert Graves

Poems

“So when I'm killed, don't wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You'll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you've read.”

Robert Graves

"When I'm Killed"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark — a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”

Robert Graves

"Sick Love," lines 10–12, from Poems 1929.
Poems

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Robert Graves

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

“I protested: "But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn't there?"
"The Royal Welch don't recognize it socially," he answered.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.14

“Now I begin to know at last,
These nights when I sit down to rhyme,
The form and measure of that vast
God we call Poetry, he who stoops
And leaps me through his paper hoops
A little higher every time.”

Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Hate and Fear are not wanted here,
Nor Toys nor Country Lovers,
Everything they took from my new poem book
But the flyleaf and the covers.”

Robert Graves

"A First Review"
Country Sentiment (1920)

“Hate is a fear, and fear is rot
That cankers root and fruit alike,
Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not,
Strike with no madness when you strike.”

Robert Graves

"Hate Not, Fear Not".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.”

Robert Graves book The Golden Fleece

The Golden Fleece (1944), Invocation.
General sources

“If I were a young man
And young was my Lily,
A smart girl, a bold young man,
Both of us silly.
And though from time before I knew
She'd stab me with pain,
Though well I knew she'd not be true,
I'd love her again.”

Robert Graves

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“It doesn't matter what's the cause,
What wrong they say we're righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we're to do the fighting!”

Robert Graves

"To Lucasta on Going to the War — For the Fourth Time"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

“If I were a young man
With my bones full of marrow,
Oh, if I were a bold young man
Straight as an arrow,
I'd store up no virtue
For Heaven's distant plain,
I'd live at ease as I did please
And sin once again.”

Robert Graves

"Brittle Bones".
Country Sentiment (1920)

“James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: "Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?" "That's the safety catch. Didn't you do a musketry-course at the depôt?" "No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn't have no safety-catch." I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. "In Egypt in 1882," he said. "Weren't you in the South African War?"”

Robert Graves

"I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir... My real age is sixty-three."
Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.12.