By Robert Graves
Are you shaken, are you stirred
By a whisper of love,
Spellbound to a word
Does Time cease to move,
Till her calm grey eye
Expands to a sky
And the clouds of her hair
Like storms go by?
Then the lips that you have kissed
Turn to frost and fire,
And a white-steaming mist
Obscures desire:
So back to their birth
Fade water, air, earth,
And the First Power moves
Over void and dearth.
Is that Love? no, but Death,
A passion, a shout,
The deep in-breath,
The breath roaring out,
And once that is flown,
You must lie alone,
Without hope, without life,
Poor flesh, sad bone.
Poet Bio
Robert Graves was an English poet, scholar/translator, writer of antiquity specializing in Classical Greece and Rome, and novelist. A rebel socially, as well as artistically, Graves left his wife and four children in 1929 to live in Majorca with Laura Riding, an American poet. After his break with Riding, Graves, inspired by studies of matriarchal societies and goddess cults, formulated his own personal mythology of the White Goddess which would affect all of his future work.
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Of Tribulation, these are They,
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— Emily Dickinson
Pained, permanent
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quartz crusts
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a mouth
all teeth
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“Uncomfortably beautiful”
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spikes
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winning offices
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rock
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iron maidens