“What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
That sagged ominously upon the earth.”
"Recalling War," lines 11–13, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems
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Robert Graves 117
English poet and novelist 1895–1985Related quotes
“In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 12
“And Poverty, an unsightly plague that leads men to crime; Error, with staggering gait, and Discord that delights to confound sea with sky.”
Et deforme malum ac sceleri proclivis Egestas
Errorque infido gressu, et Discordia gaudens
permiscere fretum caelo.
Book XIII, lines 585–587
Punica
“War rages, horrid war
Even in our bones; our double nature sounds
With armèd discord.”
Fervent bella horrida, fervent
ossibus inclusa fremit et discordibus armis
non simplex natura hominis.
Fervent bella horrida, fervent
ossibus inclusa fremit et discordibus armis
non simplex natura hominis.
Psychomachia, line 902; translation from C. S. Lewis The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, [1936] 1975) p. 72.
Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)
Context: The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...' There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!
"The Power of Symbols in Our Politics of Digust" https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/power-of-symbols-politics-of-disgust/ (28 December 2018), National Review
2010s, 2018