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Robert Graves Quotes
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Robert von Ranke Graves was a British poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology. Graves produced more than 140 works in his lifetime. His poems, his translations and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life—including his role in World War I—Good-Bye to All That, and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print.He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius; King Jesus; The Golden Fleece; and Count Belisarius. He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Wikipedia  

✵ 24. July 1895 – 7. December 1985
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Robert Graves Quotes

“With a fork drive Nature out,
She will ever yet return;
Hedge the flowerbed all about,
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
She will ever yet return.”

Robert Graves

"Marigolds".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Nature

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

Robert Graves

"Babylon"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Truth , Spring

“War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air.”

Robert Graves

"Recalling War," lines 31–34, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

War , World , Faith , Art

“Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to this starry rise and starry fall.”

Robert Graves

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice" from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems

Fate , Water

“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.
And there's one thing that I know well,
I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!”

Robert Graves

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

Hell , Thinking

“A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.”

Robert Graves

The Paris Review, "Writers at Work: 4th series," interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969).
General sources

World , Perfection

“Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 17.

Feeling , Home , Training

“The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: "Write something new:
We've read this poem — that one too,
And twelve more like 'em yesterday?"”

Robert Graves

"To An Ungentle Critic"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Men , Pain , Feeling , Reading

“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?”

Robert Graves

"Down, Wanton, Down!," lines 1-4, from Poems 1930-1933 (1933).
Poems

Love , Beauty

“Kill if you must, but never hate:
Man is but grass and hate is blight,
The sun will scorch you soon or late,
Die wholesome then, since you must fight.”

Robert Graves

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

Hate , Grass , Sun , Fight

“By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns,” this is taken to mean: “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.””

Robert Graves book King Jesus

Source: King Jesus (1946), Ch. 21.

Women , World , Family , Law

“England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 21.

War , Understanding , Madness

“His eyes are quickened so with grief,
He can watch a grass or leaf
Every instant grow; he can
Clearly through a flint wall see,
Or watch the startled spirit flee
From the throat of a dead man.”

Robert Graves

"Lost Love," lines 1-6, from Treasure Box (1919).
Poems

Grass , Dead

“At the end of my first term's work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: "I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 27.

Understanding , Appearance

“Let Cupid smile and the fiend must flee;
Hey and hither, my lad.”

Robert Graves

"Love and Black Magic"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Smile

“And what of home — how goes it, boys,
While we die here in stench and noise?”

Robert Graves

"Country At War"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Home , Boy

“Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy.”

Robert Graves

Introduction Poems about Love (1969).
General sources

Love , Women , Men , World

“Trench stinks of shallow buried dead
Where Tom stands at the periscope,
Tired out. After nine months he’s shed
All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.”

Robert Graves

"Through the Periscope" (1915) [first published in 1988]
Poems

Hate , Fear , Faith , Hope

“Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed… I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.26 On being at home in Harlech in 1919. During the First World War, the mental effects of war on the fighting men were called shell shock or neurasthenia — or dismissed altogether as cowardice. Graves describes very clearly symptoms of what would now be seen as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

People , Travel , Sleep , Time

“Nancy and I were married in January 1918 at St. James's Church, Piccadilly, she being just eighteen, and I twenty-two. George Mallory acted as the best man. Nancy had read the marriage-service for the first time that morning, and been so disgusted that she all but refused to go through with the wedding, though I had arranged for the ceremony to be modified and reduced to the shortest possible form. Another caricature scene to look back on: myself striding up the red carpet, wearing field-boots, spurs and sword; Nancy meeting me in a blue-check silk wedding-dress, utterly furious; packed benches on either side of the church, full of relatives; aunts using handkerchiefs; the choir boys out of tune; Nancy savagely muttering the responses, myself shouting them in a parade-ground voice.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 25.

Marriage , Boy , Wedding , Time

“Immeasurable at every hour:
He first taught lovers how to kiss,
He brings down sunshine after shower,
Thunder and hate are his also,
He is YES and he is NO.”

Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Hate , Lovers , Kiss

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

Robert Graves

Reply to questionnaire, "The Cost of Letters" in Horizon (September 1946).
General sources

“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,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.”

Robert Graves

"A Pinch of Salt".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Love , Pain , Dreams , Hurt

“Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.”

Robert Graves

"The Devil’s Advice to Story-tellers," lines 19–22, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

Motivation , Reading , Despair

“What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
That sagged ominously upon the earth.”

Robert Graves

"Recalling War," lines 11–13, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

War

“Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.”

Robert Graves

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 3: "Where Is Good English to Be Found?"

Art , Intelligence , Knowledge , Patience

“Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me had grumbled: "Christ, as if one bloody push wasn't enough to worry about at a time!"”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch. 17.

Time , Christ , Fight

“Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?”

Robert Graves

"Symptoms of Love" from More Poems (1961).
Poems

Pain , Lovers , Courage

“I got shot in the guts at the Beaumont-Hamel show. It hurt like hell, let me tell you. They took me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying, but a company-sergeant major had got it in the head, and he was busy dying, too; and he did die. Well, as soon as ever the sergeant-major died, they took out that long gut… and they put it into me, grafted it on somehow. Wonderful chaps, these medicos! … Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an abstemious man. The lining of the new gut is much better than my old one; so I'm celebrating it. I only wish I'd borrowed his kidneys, too.”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.21.

Hell , Business , Hurt

“Christ of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering,
Walked in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk
That listened wondering.”

Robert Graves

"In the Wilderness," lines 1-6, from Over the Brazier (1916), Part I: Poems Written Mostly at Charterhouse 1910-1914.
Poems

Hunger , Christ

“There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine guns and the Germans' at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition-belt one could rap out the rhythm of the familiar prostitutes' call: "MEET me DOWN in PICC-a-DILL-y", to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: "YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!"”

Robert Graves

Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.16.

“Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,
The track aches only when the rain reminds.
The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,
The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.
The blinded man sees with his ears and hands
As much or more than once with both his eyes.”

Robert Graves

"Recalling War," lines 1–6, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

Forgetting

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery.”

Robert Graves book The Greek Myths

Volume 1, Introduction
The Greek Myths (1955)

God , Children , Pleasure , Lovers

“Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”

Robert Graves

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

Night

“Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys
Are here discreetly blent;
Admire, you ladies, read, you boys,
My Country Sentiment.”

Robert Graves

"A First Review"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Hate , Reading , Country , Boy

“I am an old man
With my bones very brittle,
Though I am a poor old man
Worth very little,
Yet I suck at my long pipe
At peace in the sun,
I do not fret nor much regret
That my work is done.”

Robert Graves

"Brittle Bones"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Sun , Peace

“He is older than the seas,
Older than the plains and hills,
And older than the light that spills
From the sun's hot wheel on these.
He wakes the gale that tears your trees,
He sings to you from window sills.”

Robert Graves

"The God Called Poetry"
Country Sentiment (1920)

Singing , Tree , Light , Sun

“Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage
Once more with pomp and greed and rage;
Courtly ministers will stop
At home and fight to the last drop;
By the million men will die
In some new horrible agony...”

Robert Graves

"The Next War"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Fight , Home , Men , Rage

“Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself and turn away.
Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;
But when he nestles in your hand at last,
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.”

Robert Graves

"A Pinch of Salt"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Hunger , Dreams

“Robin, and Red Riding Hood
Take together to the wood,
And Sir Galahad lies hid
In a cave with Captain Kidd.
None of all the magic hosts,
None remain but a few ghosts
Of timorous heart, to linger on
Weeping for lost Babylon.”

Robert Graves

"Babylon"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Heart

“Wisdom made him old and wary
Banishing the Lords of Faery.
Wisdom made a breach and battered
Babylon to bits: she scattered
To the hedges and ditches
All our nursery gnomes and witches.”

Robert Graves

"Babylon"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Wisdom

“But we are gifted, even in November,
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.”

Robert Graves book The White Goddess

"The White Goddess," lines 18–22, from Poems and Satires (1951)
Poems

Betrayal , Past , Forgetting , Season

“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser guards belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.”

Robert Graves

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice" from Poems 1938-1945 (1946)
Poems

Learning

“His wiles were witty and his fame far known,
Every king's daughter sought him for her own,
Yet he was nothing to be won or lost.
All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed
He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone.”

Robert Graves

"Ulysses" from Poems 1930-1933 (1933)
Poems

Fraud , Love , Daughters , Making love

“To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done
With woman whether gowned as wife or whore,
Penelope and Circe seemed as one:
She like a whore made his lewd fancies run,
And wifely she a hero to him bore.”

Robert Graves

"Ulysses" from Poems 1930-1933 (1933)
Poems

Whore

“If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of a man who desrves them.”

Robert Graves

Robert Graves Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved July 7, 2022.
General sources

Despair , Girl , Women