"The Boy out of Church".
Country Sentiment (1920)
Context: I do not love the Sabbath,
The soapsuds and the starch,
The troops of solemn people
Who to Salvation march.
I take my book, I take my stick
On the Sabbath day,
In woody nooks and valleys
I hide myself away.
To ponder there in quiet
God's Universal Plan,
Resolved that church and Sabbath
Were never made for man.
Robert Graves: Doing
Robert Graves was English poet and novelist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Robert Graves:
234
quotes
0
likes
Robert Graves
book
I, Claudius
Source: I, Claudius (1934), Ch. 5.
Context: My tutor I have already mentioned, Marcus Porcius Cato who was, in his own estimation at least, a living embodiment of that ancient Roman virtue which his ancestors had one after the other shown. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about. He boasted particularly of Cato the Censor, who of all characters in Roman history is to me perhaps the most hateful, as having persistently championed the cause of "ancient virtue" and made it identical in the popular mind with churlishness, pedantry and harshness.
Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch.4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English"
Context: The chief trouble with the official style is that it spreads far beyond the formal contexts to which it is suited. Most civil servants, having learned to write in this way, cannot throw off the habit. The obscurity of their public announcements largely accounts for the disrepute into which Departmental activities have fallen: for the public naturally supposes that Departments are as muddled and stodgy as their announcements.
The habit of obscurity is partly caused by a settled disinclination among public servants to give a definite refusal even where assent is out of the question; or to convey a vigorous rebuke even where, in private correspondence, any person with self-respect would feel bound to do so. The mood is conveyed by a polite and emasculated style — polite because, when writing to a member of the public, the public servant is, in theory at least, addressing one of his collective employers; emasculated because, as a cog in the Government machine, he must make his phrases look as mechanical as possible by stripping them of all personal feeling and opinion.
Country Sentiment (1920)
Context: 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.
"Brittle Bones".
"The Case for Xanthippe" in The Crane Bag (1969).
General sources
"To Juan at the Winter Solstice," lines 37–42, from Poems 1938-1945 (1946).
Poems
"To Lucasta on Going to the War — For the Fourth Time"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
"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.
“Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.”
"The Persian Version," lines 1–2, from Poems 1938-1945: Satires and Grotesques (1946).
Poems