Robert Graves

Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and — if he is lucky enough — know the love of an honest woman.

— Robert Graves

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

— Robert Graves

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

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

Trench stinks of shallow buried dead All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.

— Robert Graves

When the immense drugged universe explodes

— Robert Graves

Christ of His gentleness That listened wondering.

— Robert Graves

His eyes are quickened so with grief, From the throat of a dead man.

— Robert Graves

There’s a cool web of language winds us in, In brininess and volubility.

— Robert Graves

As you are woman, so be lovely: So be mine, as I yours for ever.

— Robert Graves

Take your delight in momentariness, With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.

— Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think Tempts you to untie the string.

— Robert Graves

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame Your angry head and stand at gaze?

— Robert Graves

To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done And wifely she a hero to him bore.

— Robert Graves

They multiplied into the Sirens' throng, He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.

— Robert Graves

One, two and many: flesh had made him blind, Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.

— Robert Graves

His wiles were witty and his fame far known, He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone.

— Robert Graves

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Will make the whole read human and exact.

— Robert Graves

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, As much or more than once with both his eyes.

— Robert Graves

What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags That sagged ominously upon the earth.

— Robert Graves

War was return of earth to ugly earth, By which the world had still kept head in air.

— Robert Graves

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

— Robert Graves

There is one story and one story only Such common stories as they stray into.

— Robert Graves

Water to water, ark again to ark, Both to this starry rise and starry fall.

— Robert Graves

She in left hand bears a leafy quince; Royally then he barters life for love.

— Robert Graves

Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup: There is one story and one story only.

— Robert Graves

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling, But nothing promised that is not performed.

— Robert Graves

All saints revile her, and all sober men Sister of the mirage and echo.

— Robert Graves

But we are gifted, even in November, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

— Robert Graves

Love is a universal migraine. Blotting out reason.

— Robert Graves

Take courage, lover! At any hand but hers?

— Robert Graves

The holiest, cruellest pains I feel, And twelve more like 'em yesterday"?

— Robert Graves

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

— Robert Graves

It doesn't matter what's the cause, When we're to do the fighting!

— Robert Graves

The child alone a poet is: And all's poetry with him.

— Robert Graves

Wisdom made him old and wary All our nursery gnomes and witches.

— Robert Graves

Robin, and Red Riding Hood Weeping for lost Babylon.

— Robert Graves

When a dream is born in you You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

— Robert Graves

Poet, never chase the dream. Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

— Robert Graves

Through the window I can see Waits and watches by the door.

— Robert Graves

When I'm killed, don't think of me I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!

— Robert Graves

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, In these verses that you've read.

— Robert Graves

Children born of fairy stock Always get their heart's desire...

— Robert Graves

Every fairy child may keep I'd love to be a Fairy's child.

— Robert Graves

Another War soon gets begun, Will win and justify this War.

— Robert Graves

Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage In some new horrible agony...

— Robert Graves

With a fork drive Nature out, She will ever yet return.

— Robert Graves

New beginnings and new shoots Love must ever yet return.

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

I do not love the Sabbath, Were never made for man.

— Robert Graves

Now I begin to know at last, A little higher every time.

— Robert Graves

He is older than the seas, He sings to you from window sills.

— Robert Graves

Riding on the shell and shot. And where you seek him, he is not.

— Robert Graves

Immeasurable at every hour: He is YES and he is NO.

— Robert Graves

Then speaking from his double head A poet you shall be, my son."

— Robert Graves

Lovers to-day and for all time But does to you as you to him.

— Robert Graves

Then all you lovers have good heed He will not pardon nor forget.

— Robert Graves

Down on his knees he sinks, the stiff-necked King, He roars in his anger, he scratches, he looks not up.

— Robert Graves

I am an old man That my work is done.

— Robert Graves

If I were a young man I'd love her again.

— Robert Graves

If I were a young man And sin once again.

— Robert Graves

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

— Robert Graves

Kill if you must, but never hate: Die wholesome then, since you must fight.

— Robert Graves

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot Strike with no madness when you strike.

— Robert Graves

Love, Fear and Hate and Childish Toys My Country Sentiment.

— Robert Graves

Hate and Fear are not wanted here, But the flyleaf and the covers.

— Robert Graves

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

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

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

Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

— Robert Graves

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

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

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

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

In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune–La Bassée road; the men would be singing... These daydreams persisted like an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after Loos.

— Robert Graves

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

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

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

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

What we now call 'finance' is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.

— Robert Graves

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

— Robert Graves