Robert von Ranke Graves

As Jesus and his followers
    Upon a Sabbath morn
Were walking by a wheat field
    They plucked the ears of corn.

They plucked it, they rubbed it,
    They blew the husks away,
Which grieved the pious pharisees
    Upon the Sabbath day.

And Jesus said, "A riddle
    Answer if you can,
Was man made for the Sabbath
    Or Sabbath made for man?"

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.

Under this loop of honeysuckle,
A creeping, coloured caterpillar,
I gnaw the fresh green hawthorn spray,
I nibble it leaf by leaf away.

Down beneath grow dandelions,
Daisies, old-man's-looking-glasses;
Rooks flap croaking across the lane.
I eat and swallow and eat again.

Here come raindrops helter-skelter;
I munch and nibble unregarding:
Hawthorn leaves are juicy and firm.
I'll mind my business: I'm a good worm.

When I'm old, tired, melancholy,
I'll build a leaf-green mausoleum
Close by, here on this lovely spray,
And die and dream the ages away.

Some say worms win resurrection,
With white wings beating flitter-flutter,
But wings or a sound sleep, why should I care?
Either way I'll miss my share.

Under this loo...

Here in turn succeed and rule
Carter, smith, and village fool,
Then again the place is known
As tavern, shop, and Sunday-school;
Now somehow it's come to me
To light the fire and hold the key,
Here in Heaven to reign alone.

All the walls are white with lime,
Big blue periwinkles climb
And kiss the crumbling window-sill;
Snug inside I sit and rhyme,
Planning, poem, book, or fable,
At my darling beech-wood table
Fresh with bluebells from the hill.

Through the window I can see
Rooks above the cherry-tree,
Sparrows in the violet bed,
Bramble-bush and bumble-bee,
And old red bracken smoulders still
Among boulders on the hill,
Far too bright to seem quite dead.

But old Death, who can't forget,
Waits his time and watche...

The cruel Moon hangs out of reach
Up above the shadowy beech.
Her face is stupid, but her eye
Is small and sharp and very sly.
Nurse says the Moon can drive you mad?
No, that's a silly story, lad!
Though she be angry, though she would
Destroy all England if she could,
Yet think, what damage can she do
Hanging there so far from you?
Don't heed what frightened nurses say:
Moons hang much too far away.

        Mother

What's in that cupboard, Mary?

        Mary

Which cupboard, mother dear?

        Mother

The cupboard of red mahogany
    With handles shining clear.

        Mary

That cupboard, dearest mother,
    With shining crystal handles?
There's nought inside but rags and jags
    And yellow tallow candles.

        Mother

What's in that cupboard, Mary?

        Mary

Which cupboard, mother mine?

        Mother

That cupboard stands in your sunny chamber,
    The silver corners shine.

        Mary

There's nothing there inside, mother,
    But wool and thread and flax,
And bits of faded silk and velvet,
    And candles of white wax.
...

He fell in victory's fierce pursuit,
    Holed through and through with shot,
A sabre sweep had hacked him deep
    Twixt neck and shoulderknot....

The potman cannot well recall,
    The ostler never knew,
Whether his day was Malplaquet,
    The Boyne or Waterloo.

But there he hangs for tavern sign,
    With foolish bold regard
For cock and hen and loitering men
    And wagons down the yard.

Raised high above the hayseed world
    He smokes his painted pipe,
And now surveys the orchard ways,
    The damsons clustering ripe.

He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,
    Where country neighbours lie,
Their brief renown set lowly down;
    His name assaults the sky.

He grips the tankard of brown ale
    Tha...

Now I begin to know at last,
These nights when I sit down to rhyme,
The form and measure of that vast
God we call Poetry, he who stoops
And leaps me through his paper hoops
A little higher every time.

Tempts me to think I'll grow a proper
Singing cricket or grass-hopper
Making prodigious jumps in air
While shaken crowds about me stare
Aghast, and I sing, growing bolder
To fly up on my master's shoulder
Rustling the thick strands of his hair.

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.

At you he roars, or he will coo,
He shouts and screams when hell is hot,
...

Why do you break upon this old, cool peace,
This painted peace of ours,
With harsh dress hissing like a flock of geese,
With garish flowers?
Why do you churn smooth waters rough again,
Selfish old skin-and-bone?
Leave us to quiet dreaming and slow pain,
Leave us alone.

The bugler sent a call of high romance,
"Lights out! Lights out!" to the deserted square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
"God, if it's this for me next time in France ...
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the other broken ones
Lying so stiff and still under the sky,
Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die."

Near Martinpuisch that night of hell
Two men were struck by the same shell,
Together tumbling in one heap
Senseless and limp like slaughtered sheep.

One was a pale eighteen-year-old,
Girlish and thin and not too bold,
Pressed for the war ten years too soon,
The shame and pity of his platoon.

The other came from far-off lands
With bristling chin and whiskered hands,
He had known death and hell before
In Mexico and Ecuador.

Yet in his death this cut-throat wild
Groaned "Mother!    Mother!" like a child,
While that poor innocent in man's clothes
Died cursing God with brutal oaths.

Old Sergeant Smith, kindest of men,
Wrote out two copies there and then
Of his accustomed funeral speech
To cheer the womenfolk of each.

You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father's hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?
Boys, from the first time you prod
And thrust with spears of curtain-rod,
From the first time you tear and slash
Your long-bows from the garden ash,
Or fit your shaft with a blue jay feather,
Binding the split tops together,
From that same hour by fate you're bound
As champions of this stony ground,
Loyal and true in everything,
To serve your Army and your King,
Prepared to starve and sweat and die
Under some fierce foreign sky,
If only to keep safe those joys
That belong to British boys,
To keep young Prussians from the soft
Scented...

Across the room my silent love I throw,
    Where you sit sewing in bed by candlelight,
        Your young stern profile and industrious fingers
Displayed against the blind in a shadow-show,
    To Dinda's grave delight.

The needle dips and pokes, the cheerful thread
    Runs after, follow-my-leader down the seam:
        The patchwork pieces cry for joy together,
O soon to sit as a crown on Dinda's head,
    Fulfilment of their dream.

Snippets and odd ends folded by, forgotten,
    With camphor on a top shelf, hard to find,
        Now wake to this most happy resurrection,
To Dinda playing toss with a reel of cotton
    And staring at the blind.

Dinda in sing-song stretching out one hand
    Calls for the playthings; mother does not hear:

When I was not quite five years old
    I first saw the blue picture book,
And Fraulein Spitzenburger told
Stories that sent me hot and cold;
    I loathed it, yet I had to look:
    It was a German book.

I smiled at first, for she'd begun
    With a back-garden broad and green,
And rabbits nibbling there:    page one
Turned; and the gardener fired his gun
    From the low hedge:    he lay unseen
    Behind:    oh, it was mean!

They're hurt, they can't escape, and so
    He stuffs them head-down in a sack,
Not quite dead, wriggling in a row,
And Fraulein laughed, "Ho, ho!    Ho, ho!"
    And gave my middle a hard smack,
    I wish that I'd hit back.

Then when I cried she laughed again;
    On the next page was a dead boy
M...

Lost manor where I walk continually
A ghost, while yet in woman's flesh and blood;
Up your broad stairs mounting with outspread fingers
And gliding steadfast down your corridors
I come by nightly custom to this room,
And even on sultry afternoons I come
Drawn by a thread of time-sunk memory.

Empty, unless for a huge bed of state
Shrouded with rusty curtains drooped awry
(A puppet theatre where malignant fancy
Peoples the wings with fear). At my right hand
A ravelled bell-pull hangs in readiness
To summon me from attic glooms above
Service of elder ghosts; here at my left
A sullen pier-glass cracked from side to side
Scorns to present the face as do new mirrors
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.<...

The youngest poet down the shelves was fumbling
In a dim library, just behind the chair
From which the ancient poet was mum-mumbling
A song about some Lovers at a Fair,
Pulling his long white beard and gently grumbling
That rhymes were beastly things and never there.

And as I groped, the whole time I was thinking
About the tragic poem I'd been writing,...
An old man's life of beer and whisky drinking,
His years of kidnapping and wicked fighting;
And how at last, into a fever sinking,
Remorsefully he died, his bedclothes biting.

But suddenly I saw the bright green cover
Of a thin pretty book right down below;
I snatched it up and turned the pages over,
To find it full of poetry, and so
Put it down my neck with quick hands like a lover,
And turn...

Can I find True-Love a gift
    In this dark hour to restore her,
When body's vessel breaks adrift,
    When hope and beauty fade before her?
But in this plight I cannot think
    Of song or music, that would grieve her,
Or toys or meat or snow-cooled drink;
    Not this way can her sadness leave her.
    She lies and frets in childish fever,
All I can do is but to cry
"Sleep, sleep, True-Love and lullaby!"

Lullaby, and sleep again.
    Two bright eyes through the window stare,
A nose is flattened on the pane
    And infant fingers fumble there.
"Not yet, not yet, you lovely thing,
    But count and come nine weeks from now,
When winter's tail has lost the sting,
    When buds come striking through the bough,
    Then here's True-Love will...

Near Clapham village, where fields began,
Saint Edward met a beggar man.
It was Christmas morning, the church bells tolled,
The old man trembled for the fierce cold.

Saint Edward cried, "It is monstrous sin
A beggar to lie in rags so thin!
An old grey-beard and the frost so keen:
I shall give him my fur-lined gaberdine."

He stripped off his gaberdine of scarlet
And wrapped it round the aged varlet,
Who clutched at the folds with a muttered curse,
Quaking and chattering seven times worse.

Said Edward, "Sir, it would seem you freeze
Most bitter at your extremities.
Here are gloves and shoes and stockings also,
That warm upon your way you may go."

The man took stocking and shoe and glove,
Blaspheming Christ our Saviour's love,
Ye...

My familiar ghost again
Comes to see what he can see,
Critic, son of Conscious Brain,
Spying on our privacy.

Slam the window, bolt the door,
Yet he'll enter in and stay;
In tomorrow's book he'll score
Indiscretions of today.

Whispered love and muttered fears,
How their echoes fly about!
None escape his watchful ears,
Every sigh might be a shout.

No kind words nor angry cries
Turn away this grim spoilsport;
No fine lady's pleading eyes,
Neither love, nor hate, nor ... port.

Critics wears no smile of fun,
Speaks no word of blame nor praise,
Counts our kisses one by one,
Notes each gesture, every phrase.

My familiar ghost again
Stands or squats where suits him best;
Critic, son of Conscious Brain,
L...