A PARABLE FOR WRITERS
51
These lines are unspectacular in their distinction, and the second
line with its two "thats" is awkward in construction, yet the poem is
of a kind that improves after several rereadings; it is the kind of
anti-poetic poetry that Dean Swift wrote, of deliberately reflective,
roughened texture with its Latin heritage of a seventeenth century–
not eighteenth century-neo-classicism. The poem probably dates the
beginning of Graves's later style; in any case, it became the standard
of his revisions of earlier as well as the writing of later poems in his
Collected Poems
(1914-1947).
No poet of the past fifty years, including Yeats, has edited his
poems with a steadier hand or to greater advantage than Robert
Graves; the
Collected Poems
restore "Children of Darkness" to a
position of well-deserved prominence :
We spurred our parents to the kiss,
Though doubtfully they shrank from this–
Day had no courage to pursue
W hat lusty dark alone could do:
T hen were we joined from their caress
In heat of midnight, one from two.
This night-seed knew no discontent:
In certitude our changings went.
Though there were veils about his face ,
With foret hought, even in that pent place,
Down toward the light his way we bent
To kingdoms of more ample space .
Is Day prime error, that regret
For Darkness roars unstifled yet?
That in this freedom, by faith won,
Only acts of doubt are done?
That unveiled eyes with tears are wet–
We loathe to gaze upon the sun?
This is another turn on Sophocles' warning, "Not to be born is
best and living is second best," but in the poem it is Graves's half–
Celtic, half-Romanesque way of saying so; and as for the wit con–
tained within the poem, one can find its likeness only in that scarcely
read seventeenth-century poet, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. I
