Songs of a Bent-Nosed Jove

COLLECTED POEMS (358 pp.)--Robert Graves--Doubleday ($5.95).

"Prose has been my livelihood," writes Robert Graves in The White Goddess, "but I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different nature of poetry." The author's wish is clear: to be judged for his poetry, not for the 70 or so books of excellent autobiography, historical fiction, criticism, classical scholarship and translations from several languages that he has written in the past 40 years. Using A. E. Housman's litmus for a true poem ("Does it make the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving?"), many readers will be moved to heed the author's plea and consider him first of all a poet.

Every few years, Robert Graves, the bent-nosed Jove of Majorca, lovingly revises the canon of his verse. The present edition retains most of the poems from the 1955 and earlier collections, adds some 50 new ones, and omits ten others that to the author "seemed to go dead." The reader can approve both the deletions and the additions, and note with some astonishment that while this 66-year-old poet has written of the body's defeats in a new short poem called Surgical Ward: Men, he has also added a sheaf of excellent love lyrics. Among the best is The Sharp Ridge, which balances passion and precision in a way that recalls Shakespeare's Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds:

Since now I dare not ask

Any gift from you, or gentle task,

Or lover's promise--nor yet refuse

Whatever I can give and you dare choose--

Have pity on us both: choose well

On this sharp ridge dividing death from hell.

Century's Echo. The new poems do not alter the shape of Graves's work, but the appearance of the new collection may help speed the change in critical attitude toward the poet. It is not likely that Graves will ever be ranked with Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden and Thomas--poets whom he once declared, with ringing wrongheadedness, to be unworthy of their idolaters. By current critical consensus, his title to the position just below these five is firm, but "below" is not really the word; it is "apart."

Graves, by choice, is out of the main poetic current of his age. He has none of Yeats's wild, keening lyricism or his mystical obscurity, nor can he approach Eliot's dry resignation, his religious vision or his private yet colloquial idiom that is a true echo of the century. But he can give both these masters a run for their lovely money, and he can sometimes outdistance them in the moods of love and childhood or in evocations of the classic past. He cannot match Pound in the sheer demonic influence of his imagination, or Thomas in his song, or Auden in his topicality--in fact, a comparison will often make Auden sound like the journalist and Graves like the artist. Graves could not have written The Waste Land or The Age of Anxiety, two poems the public eagerly seized as symbols or at least slogans of the times. He is, in fact, out of his times, a reactionary poet--clear, courtly, precise, varied in tone, passionate but restrained, using poetry as both a special ceremony and a daily occurrence. Ironically, to a great many of Britain's younger poets, among them Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, D. J. Enright and Elizabeth Jennings --sometimes collectively known as "The Movement"--Graves's old-fashioned vir tues seem highly contemporary. Writes British Critic Walter Allen: "It is as though the world has caught up with Graves so that, mysteriously, he even appears as one of the young."

Majestic Darkness. Most of his poems are personal--neither jeweled cenotaph nor mantic dispatches from a muse, but gifts of self. One reflects, while reading them (dropping a mental footnote to the chalkier conundrums of Pound and Eliot), how lightly the weight of their author's erudition bears down. Graves can write with warm wit, in Friday Night, of a meeting between Jove and Love:

. . . Next day he rested, and she rested too.

The busy little lie between them flew: "If this is not perfection," Love would

sigh,

"Perfection is a great, black, thumping lie . . ."

Endearments, kisses, grunts, and whispered oaths;

But were her thoughts on breakfast, or on clothes?

Or, lightly and without condescension, he can spin a whimsy for children, as in Brother:

It's odd enough to be alive with others, But odder still to have sisters and brothers:

To make one of a characteristic litter--

The sisters puzzled and vexed, the brothers vexed and bitter

That this one wears, though flattened by abuse,

The family nose for individual use. Yet his verse can darken majestically, as in The Cuirassiers of the Frontier, his remarkable evocation of the last years of the Roman Empire. It is a verse rough with contempt:

Goths, Vandals, Huns, Isaurian mountaineers,

Made Roman by our Roman sacrament, We can know little (as we care little) Of the Metropolis: her candled churches, Her white-gowned pederastic senators. . .

The middle stanzas shrug at the new Christian godliness, and the last lines speak eloquently a creed of fatalism:

That we continue watchful on the rampart

Concerns no priest. A gaping silken dragon,

Puffed by the wind, suffices us for God. We, not the City, are the Empire's soul:

A rotten tree lives only in its rind.

Hand-Made Quality. Graves, like most writers, would profit if prevented by law from talking about his work. He has said, truthfully but with ill-seeming defensiveness: "The obstinate habit I have formed of refusing to adopt a synthetic period style, or join any literary racket, has given my poems what would be called a 'handmade, individual craftsmanship quality.' " This is the sneer of a writer who feels that he has received less than his due, and the same poorly disguised pain is visible in his dedication of Collected Poems, To Calliope:

. . . No: nothing reads so fresh as I first thought,

Or as you could wish--

Yet must I, when jar worse is eagerly bought,

Cry stinking fish?

Graves need not cry any such thing; his fish are newly netted, gold and silver, rare as any in the sea.

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