When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
ROBERT GRAVESWhen a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
ROBERT GRAVESHe found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
ROBERT GRAVESThe function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
ROBERT GRAVESBefore an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
ROBERT GRAVESShe told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
ROBERT GRAVESNever 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 GRAVESI 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 horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.
ROBERT GRAVESEntrance 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 GRAVESAs you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever.
ROBERT GRAVESThough philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
ROBERT GRAVESAbout this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.
ROBERT GRAVESTake your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave ‘s narrowness, though not its peace.
ROBERT GRAVESYou mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
ROBERT GRAVESNine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
ROBERT GRAVESFor words of rapture groping, they”Never such love,” swore “ever before was!”
ROBERT GRAVESNo honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
ROBERT GRAVES