Robert Graves: among the best poetry in English literature

• Call It a Good Marriage
• Call it a good marriage — 
• For no one ever questioned 
• Her warmth, his masculinity, 
• Their interlocking views; 
• Except one stray graphologist 
• Who frowned in speculation 
• At her h’s and her s’s, 
• His p’s and w’s.

• Though few would still subscribe
• To the monogamic axiom 
• That strife below the hip-bones 
• Need not estrange the heart, 
• Call it a good marriage: 
• More drew those two together, 
• Despite a lack of children, 
• Than pulled them apart.

• Call it a good marriage: 
• They never fought in public,
• They acted circumspectly 
• And faced the world with pride; 
• Thus the hazards of their love-bed 
• Were none of our damned business — 
• Till as jurymen we sat on

• Two deaths by suicide.

• The Naked and the Nude
• For me, the naked and the nude 
• (By lexicographers construed 
• As synonyms that should express 
• The same deficiency of dress 
• Or shelter) stand as wide apart 
• As love from lies, or truth from art.

• Lovers without reproach will gaze 
• On bodies naked and ablaze; 
• The Hippocratic eye will see
• In nakedness, anatomy; 
• And naked shines the Goddess when 
• She mounts her lion among men.

• The nude are bold, the nude are sly 
• To hold each treasonable eye. 
• While draping by a showman’s trick 
• Their dishabille in rhetoric, 
• They grin a mock-religious grin 
• Of scorn at those of naked skin.

• Dead Cow Farm
• An ancient saga tells us how 
• In the beginning the First Cow 
• (For nothing living yet had birth 
• But Elemental Cow on earth) 
• Began to lick cold stones and mud: 
• Under her warm tongue flesh and blood 
• Blossomed, a miracle to believe: 
• And so was Adam born, and Eve. 
• Here now is chaos once again, 
• Primeval mud, cold stones and rain.
• Here flesh decays and blood drips red, 
• And the Cow’s dead, the old Cow’s dead.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a British poet, novelist and classicist best known for his two novels about the unlikely yet unexpectedly efficient fourth Roman Emperor, I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel, Claudius the God (1985). While his most lasting accomplishment may be these novels, his poetry has also been ranked among the best produced in English literature. In a celebrated scandal of the time, Graves formed a manage-trois with his then-wife, artist Nancy Nicholson, and American poet Laura Riding, before the situation took its toll on the marriage and Graves moved to America with Riding. Graves also produced a number of translations, including critically and popularly acclaimed renditions of Suetonius’s “scandalogue,” The Twelve Caesars, and the ancient Roman novel, The Golden Ass, by Apuleius.