Landscape symbolism in the poetry of

Robert Graves

Dr. T. VISWANATHA RAO

Andhra University P. G. Courses, Kakinada

Robert Graves employs, among other things, landscape symbolism as a part of his complex poetic medium. This symbolism, however, is probably the product of a continental feature. Graves might have followed the example not only of German writers like Rilke, French writers like Paul Verlaine, but also of Spanish writers like Migual de Unamuno. In his Castilla, Unamuo “establishes a relationship between the landscape and man”. ¹

in you I feel myself raised up to heaven

I breathe here on your desolate waste lands

air from high mountains. ²

Yet another poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez, makes use of landscapes and gardens as “extensions of his mind”, ³ while Rilke associates landscape with the Soul. In Rilke’s Book of Hours “nature and landscape account for almost the whole gamut of metaphysical symbolization”.⁴ The vastness of his experience finds its physical equivalent in the vastness of the open spaces which he so effectively brought into his poetry:

It was in the endless steppes of Russia, on

the heath of Worpswede which had been

wasted from the weary waste, in the open spaces

around cathedrals, and in the sight of the

billowing sea at Duino and Viareggio

that Rilke felt the impact of fall and spring

storms most powerfully. Their openness at

both ends gave him a glorious sensation of

breadth and spiritual nobility. ⁵

Graves does no less. He clothes “Earth in a silken dress” (The finding of love) and makes “the skies wonder” and the streams sing as in Rocky Acres. In Advocates trees are given memory and affection. Rocky Acres may be cited as the best example of Grave’s employment of landscape symbolism. In the words of Douglas Day, “The rugged landscape around Harlech, with the Knobby grotesquely shapen Rhinog range rising in the distance relates directly to the poet’s state of mind. It is a craggy but ideal haven for a man who has done with war, but who rejects the softness of peace”.⁶ Keeping in mind Graves’s Irish descent, one may even surmise that he has also in mind the wild, untamable and rugged Irish moors. Many such attempts may be made to identify the scene of the poem, but one may remark that the poet may be referring to no particular landscape in question. The fact that he employs the landscape as a symbol of his mental condition suggests that it may be a geographically unidentifiable locale. It may also be said that the Rocky Acres seems not merely the place, in and around Harlech where Graves lived, but, figuratively speaking, England in general which was under a trauma experienced by the horrors of the war:

Tenderness and pity the land will deny,

where life is but nourished from water and rock

a hardy adventure, full of fear and shock. ⁷

The fear and shock referred to the war with all its attendant evils which Graves criticises so seriously, elsewhere in The Country Sentiment. In a poem there, entitled Retrospect: The Jests of the Clock, the wretched plight of the soldiers is portrayed in heartrending terms:

When sentries froze and muttered; when beyond the wire

Blank shadows crawled and tumbled, shocking, tricking the sight,

When impotent hatred of Life stifled desire,

O lagging watch! O hope-forsaken hours. ⁸

In Country at War, landscape is evoked to portray the contemptuous indifference of nature and time to the ghastly course of war. Soldiers may fight and soldiers may die, but seasons Come and go in unceasing rhythm. The processes of nature record no halt:

In words that fledge the hill-shoulder

Leaves shoot and open, fall and moulder,

And shoot again .... ......

.... .... ...women reap,

Autumn winds ruffle brook and pond,

Flutter the hedge and fly beyond.

So the first things of nature run,

And stand not still for anyone,

Contemptuous of the distant cry

wherewith you harrow earth and sky. ⁹

While the soldiers die in a distant land for the benefit of the country, unconcerned children play at home, women do not eschew their wonted routine, nor does nature stop its inexorable march.

Along with the Rocky Acres, credit may be given to An English Wood for being one of the couple of poems in which the landscape symbolism of Graves reaches its height. In An English Wood, the forest stands for a land divested of disagreeable influences and a mind shorn of evil propensities. Harpies which are associated with despair, and Gryphons which symbolize conventional religion, are conspicuous by their absence, in the wood. Graves seems to have Dante in mind when he speaks of the Harpies and the Griffins. In Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil enter a deep jungle. In this wood, a number of Harpies produce a deafening noise, in order to trouble the Souls of those that commit suicide:

There the foul Harpies nest and are at home,

Wide-winged like birds and lady faced are there,

with feathered belly broad and claws of steel;

And there they sit and shriek on the strange trees. ¹⁰

As for the Griffins in Dante, they draw the chariot of the church. Graves’s disapproval of conventional religion, which makes itself manifest elsewhere also, appears here as well. The English wood is a land unhampered by the shackles of traditional faith, a mind untroubled by established ecclesiastical canons. But the limitations of peace in the English wood are subtly hinted. Kirkham sees in the poem, “an oblique criticism of the entrenched complacency of the English social order, which this small, neat English wood (in part) symbolizes”. ¹¹

Graves’s use of landscape symbolism is thus appealing, varied and functional.

Notes

¹ Eddy Eleanor L. Turnbull, Ten Centuries of Spanish Poetry: An Anthology in English Verse with original Texts from the XI Century to the Generation of 1898 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. p. 377.)

² Ibid., p. 377.

³ Gerald Brenan. The Literature of the Spanish People from Roman Times to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press. p. 393.)

⁴ W. L. Graff. Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 164.)

⁵ Ibid., p. 164.

⁶ Douglas Day. Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert Graves. The University of North Carolina Press. p. 25.

⁷ Robert Graves, Country Sentiment (London: Martin Secker, p. 28.)

⁸ Ibid., p. 72.

⁹ Ibid., p. 72.

¹⁰ Sayers, Dorothy L., trans., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, The Florentine–Cantica I–Hell (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. p. 849.)

¹¹ M. C. Kirkham. “Incertitude and the Whit Goddess”, Essays in Criticism, XVI. p. 60.

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