A Grave Matter

There can’t be much doubt about the huge influence exerted by Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” over at least two generations of poets. Not so much now, I should think, in these days when everything is being done to reduce the Great Goddess to a little pile of rubble that no-one does more than occasionally trip over, but I believe Graves’ book is still being put out in secret enclaves, so it must at least be making money for someone.

I belong to one of those generations so influenced (cf Transformations – 24 Poems), and while I’m somewhat more dubious than I used to be of the book’s value as a “grammar of poetic myth”, that whole notion remains a source of excitement and, indeed, pride of a sort – the notion that the pre-civilised calling and function of the poet-as-shaman has not been entirely forgotten – that function being, shall we say, to “bend reality” in order to make it clearer. One of the main sources of delight for me is, still, the slating – ever more vicious as time went on – that the book received by the critics, and particularly the scholarship – oh and of course the newest “wave” of feminism, or whatever it gets called now. Go Bobby, I still breathe to myself – someone has to maintain the bulwark against the dark tides of rationalism and good sense and historicism. I suppose Rudolf Steiner had a similar vibe in his lectures and writings, though I suppose some of his stuff is so outrageous that the critics wouldn’t even bother to stop and slate it; at least Graves’ prose has the appearance – often specious – of scholarship. For some reason what I read of his poetry never quite grabbed me, unlike that of his erstwhile partner Laura Riding, who I suppose must have also been an inspiration to Sylvia Plath, among others, and I think was a very exciting poet. Graves’ prose, on the other hand, I did find pretty exciting – apart from The White Goddess, there was King Jesus, Count Belisarius, Seven Days in New Crete, and I guess I should add I, Claudius (or should that be I, Derek?), though I never actually read it.

What has this to do with a big scary red mask like the emoji? Well I guess at the heart of Graves’ book  there is a myth which has facets of myths like Orpheus, or Osiris, or Lemminkainen, in which the hero makes a descent into the other world – dies, if you like, though you could argue that his “death to the world” indicates rather a kind of madness, and in the case of Orpheus this unhinged state is precisely the ground from which his magically-charged song arises. Orpheus finishes up losing his Eurydice and then being torn to pieces by the wild women of Dionysus, though his disembodied head continues, crucially, to sing and I think gets taken into the possession of the Muses, which must have given them extra cachet. I suppose you should add Dionysus himself to this list, not to mention Jesus, though the Jesus myth has a moral element largely lacking in the others – but the prophetic utterances of the dead/not-dead hero are in all cases the core element. The name of Tammuz should also be added, he probably being the grand-daddy of the bunch and, like Orpheus, Tammuz’ destruction is linked to a sexual entanglement, though in his case with his mother. Tammuz exemplified the link between sex, fertility and agriculture – all of this stemming for us moderns from the insights first provided in Frazer’s Golden Bough, though I dare say that would all tend to be frowned upon a bit in our more enlightened times. But the elements of sexual love, madness, or death, are what Graves binds together into the myth of the Triple Goddess, or White Goddess if you don’t mind the colour implications (I think it was Peter Redgrove who set out to right the balance with his book about the Black Goddess): the destruction of, let’s say, the poet’s mind comes about due to his rejection by his lover, mistress, goddess – mother, whatever – but that destruction creates the fertile ground from which his poetry arises. I seem to remember Graves being a bit more cagey about the inspirational centre for female poets, though he still insisted it lay in the Feminine, rather than, say, in a Jung-ish invention like the Animus.

The poet’s rejection by his “goddess” is, not unexpectedly, also often linked to her bestowing her favours onto a rival, so that opens up a whole world of jealousy and rage and ritual killings and plain old-fashioned murder. It looks as though, at least in his younger years, Graves attempted to realise some of this maelstrom of emotions and behaviour in his own domestic arrangements, with pretty disastrous results, including Riding nearly getting herself killed, while an older and more settled Graves wasn’t averse to involvement with the occasional teenage “Muse” (it might all seem a bit creepy to modern ears, but remember these were the Good Old Days, which led up to the ‘Sixties, when of course everything was Allowed).

So I guess the Red Mask goes to this whole undertow of murder and mayhem involved in love relationships. Of course, from the perspective of old age you wonder, Jesus what was all that fuss about? – but I guess that may not stem from the wisdom of age so much as simply because “the hey-day in the blood is tame…, and waits upon the judgement”, as Hamlet reminded his mother when chiding her for her sexual skittishness. Be that as it may, I can think of three of my poems which specifically involve the Red Mask, whose meaning I was never entirely sure about, though sometimes when I see myself in a photo I do still wonder (as in what’s that red blob in the corner? – Oh, it’s me)…. I don’t think I was necessarily thinking of a “devil mask”, Japanese or otherwise, like in the illustrated emoji, but I think it would probably be something fairly savage. Two of the three poems are in this bunch of 30 “love-poems”, or love-ish poems, one is in this group (Poems – ninth ten) and one in the next (Poems – tenth ten). The first of them was posted a while back (Poems/Sixth Ten) and is “Holding the Red Mask”, which (as I may possibly have mentioned previously) turned out to be my life’s one spot of poetic stardom, because it won one of the little prizes in the 1984 National Poetry Competition, thanks, I believe, to the Jamaican guy whose name I can never remember. The competition was run in collaboration with BBC Radio 3, and, if there was time after the Great Ones had talked about their winning poems, some of us small fry got to read our efforts out in front of a real BBC microphone, with all the team of professionals fussing and clucking around in the background, just as if we were real poets; but as it happened, not only was time left for me, but me reading my poem was what played the programme out, for which I feel tremendously privileged and lucky and honoured and humbled (you get the hang of that Radio 3 lingo after you’ve listened  to a few of its programmes). It all made for great publicity, at the party afterwards I even got asked by one of the presiding bods, the poetry editor of some big publisher, if I would send him a batch of my poems with a view to publication, which I did and – well, I guess I’m still waiting to hear what he thought about them, apart from some terse note from his secretary about the inadvisability of sending “unsolicited work” (I didn’t like to suggest the guy might have had a bit too much to drink)…. Where was I? Oh right, nothing actually relevant to this post, but I do like to squeeze every ounce of drama out of my Mask Moment.

The title “Working on the Red Mask” sounds as if it came after “Holding the Red Mask” – presumably because I was still trying to work out the significance of the red mask – but as far as I remember it was written in the spring before the stardom poem was written, so I can only suppose I must have re-titled it at a later date. Anyway it’s this one:

7. Working on a Red Mask

Anne, I’ve killed and buried you
Killed you and tumbled you into the ground
Smoothed your white belly one last time
Listened to the silence
And buried you and smeared your blood
Over my hands and face
Over you put a heavy stone:
Now only I know the place you’re in.

The others think they see and hear you
They speak with you and
Your lovers make promises
But only with me they’d find
The warmth of your fine hands
Your skin like cream and honey
The musk of your breath
Or the deep night in your grey eyes.

I promise myself nothing from Easter Morning
Even with the daffodils
Making a golden fanfare and
The curlews making blue arcs of sound
Not until your blood, Anne
Has dried into my skin
Making my face a brown mask
Like the clay you’re buried in….

The other “a bit unhinged” poem in this pair comes from a good deal later – 1996 at a guess.

8. Not Seen.

Chance into the woods these days, and the grass
Would hurt your eyes, brilliant, aching, like spears.
I went up yesterday, with that old ass
Forgiveness prodding me for easy tears,
But the trees laughed, grass burned: the year will pass,
The thing remain, just like the other years.

So, if you do go, go as if for me
And take a message that I’m still alive
Somewhere in myself; and, as you look, see.
So queen views summer from within the hive
In her daughters’ dances; and the big free
World outside brooks only one thought: survive –

But tell the barbed grass, gently with your eyes:
If I come through, they’re my sole witnesses.