50
PARTISAN REVIEW
to quote scenes from remarkable Welsh legends and to make no less
remarkable adaptations from Welsh verses into English of his own.
She has been his mentor, guide and critic, and has served him
in
the latest revisions of his poems-and what more can any poet ask
of any lady (short of more earthly services ) than this?
III
Between the early poems of Robert Graves and the recent
Poems
&
Satires
(1951 ) there has been a span of years- perhaps a
decade-during which Graves formed a "literary partnership" with
Laura Riding, and the first results of that partnership, valuable as
they now seem to be, "cramped," as the saying goes, "his style." He
slashed at his facilities, his felicities, and in 1931 published
in
a hand–
somely printed book:
Devilishly disturbed
By this unready pen:
For every word I write
I scratch out nine or ten,
And each surviving word
R esentfully I make
Sweat for those nine or ten
I cancelled for its sake.
The poem was, of course, lamentably imperfect; and yet its
gesture of being candid, of being self-explanatory, was as forthright
and soldierly as any passage from Graves's adapted confessions of
Sergeant Lamb.
It
had the crabbed air of almost telling the reader
not to read it. It was literally an example of the poet "talking to him–
self." In the same book a far better poem made its arrival, one that
was a commentary "On Portents":
If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at
Eeing tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.
