Robert Graves: Man

“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

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".

Peace , Sun

“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)

Love , Pain , Girl , Time

“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)

Distant

“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.

War , Age

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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