3. Graves in the Romantic tradition

a. A new world order

First of all, it should be noted that the poetry of Robert Graves was spawned in response to an event of cataclysmic proportions: the First World War. The old world was no more and a new one had to be constructed, with new values and better ones. This was precisely also the situation at the beginning of what we now call the Romantic period. The light of the French Revolution was heralded as the force that would sweep away the darkness associated with the Ancien Regime. For Graves, of course, that Ancien Regime was one of patriarchy, and the First World War had been its Waterloo.
The new system he then eventually came up with was his precious matriarchal brainchild: the myth of the White Goddess. For Graves, this was much more than a fictional poetical construct. He actually lived its reality, by leaving the war-torn modern world behind for a more 'natural' existence on the countryside of Mallorca, by submitting himself to the guidance of feminist and fellow-poet Laura Riding, by rejecting Christianity... He was a very headstrong character, so when his theories found no breeding ground in the rest of society, his beliefs didn't waver one bit. He was the priest as well as the disciple of his own religion, the shepherd and the flock all in one.

b. The visionary poet

Graves' views of how the world should look like in the present were supposedly influenced by his knowledge about a Golden Age in the past. Murphy had already drawn our attention to Graves' 'analeptic method', which he believed was granting him visions of ancient times. He would hereby try to reach a trance-like state, preferably under the influence of some kind of drug, and then he would see "that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before [him] down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, [he] might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden". (Perkins 673) This technique was not something Graves could take credit for, however. Romantics before him had already refered to something of the kind. The citation above, for example, I have borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's 'Ligeia'.
With Coleridge, we find something similar as well. The opium-engendered visions he claimed to have had when reading a passage from Purchas's Pilgrimage inspired him to write 'Kubla Khan - Or, A Vision in a Dream. A fragment':

In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. (Abrams 346-47)

This could be interpreted as an early example of what Graves would later call the analeptic method. The difference between him and Coleridge, however, is that Coleridge never made any claims as to the historical value of his visions. For him, they were just that: visions. Graves on the other hand saw them as the recovery of forgotten events. Whether he genuinely believed this to be true is very hard to discern, but in any case, that was the theory he came out with. And actually, for the sake of my argument, it doesn't really matter if he believed it or not. The point I want to stress here is that both theories are manifestations of a typically Romantic rationale: the predominance given to the human mind and the Imagination. This is something we can also clearly see in the following passage from Blake's 'Jerusalem':

I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings! (Blake 152)

The fact that the human Imagination was capable of getting into contact with the sublime forces behind reality can also be traced back to Graves' treatment of nature. In The White Goddess, he claims to have laid bare the secret language of poetry, which would have been nothing more than the language of nature. In excruciating detail, he describes ancient Irish and Welsh alphabets that supposedly had their origins in the names of specific trees and the natural course of the seasons. For Graves, the antiquity of these linguistic systems assured their affinity with the divine origins of poetry. Grant already mentioned that Graves regretted the fact that there were no more secrets lying at the heart of contemporary poetry. This inevitably resulted in a worldview devoid of the Divine. Symptomatic of this grim vision are two poems from the 1965 edition of Collected Poems. In a first one, 'Children of Darkness', we get a very Wordworthian lament of the loss of divine power at the moment of birth into this world:

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? (Graves 1965, 46)

The second one, 'The Cool Web', expresses the impossibility to express the Kantian 'ding an sich' in a crippled system such as human language:

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility. (Graves 1965, 47)

c. Reversed gender relations

Although Mellor's theory, as described above, certainly holds true for much of Romantic writing and indeed, for a significant part of Western literature, I'll try to argue that there is also a strain of Romanticism that goes against this kind of logic. Or maybe I should correct that. The logic stays the same, only the elements at both ends of the gendered power relation are reversed.
The sublime is reinterpreted as a female force which, at the same time, doesn't lose its predominance in the realm of the beautiful. This means man no longer has any control over the female stronghold of Beauty, since it has armed itself with the very power that formerly secured male supremacy. Instead, he now becomes subjected to a force that may or may not act agreeable to his will, invoking both fear and pleasure. It is just this 'mysterium fascinosum et tremens' that underlies man's experience of nature. He is fearful of the destructive force of Mother Nature, but paradoxically, he also rejoices in his awareness of her ravishing beauty.
Graves argues that originally all natural religions functioned as an expression of this experience, and must therefore have been matriarchal ones. His The White Goddess "is designed to prove that one single conception of the use or function of poetry and one single myth or cult were anciently current in the Western world." (Parise 262-63) I may have already touched upon certain elements of this sacred story, but in order to paint a better picture of what we're dealing with here, I will next give a brief account of its contents.

The myth of the White Goddess is also known as the 'fertility myth' or the 'Osiris story'. Its protagonists are the sacred king and his queen, or rather, the queen and her sacred king, for kingship was won only as a result of a marriage to the queen. In a complete reversal of the gender relations within patriarchal society, man is here seen as an 'insignificant other', as a mere shadow of the woman. His importance, then, only becomes obvious at the moments of his life when his faith is most closely connected with that of the female. These key moments can be spelled out as birth, love and death. These are also the three aspects of the Triple Muse or Triple Goddess, who - according to Graves - was once the supreme deity of Western Europe.
The first aspect is not difficult to understand. The link was made between women's ability to procreate and nature's ability to create new life in the spring. The Great Goddess presiding over nature was seen as the giver of life. Thus, man owed his very existence to a female deity. This is also reflected in the king's social dependence on his queen. She, in fact, is the earthly representative of this Great Goddess.
The next meaningful experience in the king's life is the consummation of his love for the queen. This sort of constitutes the high point of his 'reign'. It's all downhill from there, though. At the midsummer solstice, he has to be sacrificed to the Goddess in her third manifestation, namely that of death. Afterwards, he has to be replaced by his tanist or successor. Traditionally, his enemy and rival for the love of the queen is his twin or other self.

Not so much as an account of historical events, this story has to be interpreted as a mythification of the course of the natural year. The reincarnation of the old king in the new one is symbolic for the vegetation dying in the winter to be resurrected again in the spring. This continuity of life is reflected in the steady cycles of the moon, which is one of the main symbols of the White Goddess. That very name is even derived from the colouring of the moon. As Graves attests in his source book:

I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her principal colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-trinity, but when Suidas the Byzantine records that Io was a cow that changed her colour from white to rose and then to black he means that the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination. (Graves 1967, 70)

Graves enumerates a number of mythical stories which he believes are the expression of this ancient tale of death and resurrection: the stories of Osiris and Set, Castor and Pollux, Cain and Abel, John the Baptist and Jesus...

According to Graves, it was this sacred story that was originally lying at the heart of poetry. True poets were to be judged by the vividness of their account of this myth and their dedication to the Triple Muse. Graves himself gave it his best shot in the poem 'In dedication' I took from his 1967 edition of The White Goddess.

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean -
In scorn of which I sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom I desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.

It was a virtue not to stay,
To go my headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.

Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
But I am gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
I forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
(Graves 1967, 5)

The poem opens with an antithesis between Christianity and goddess worship. There seems to be a mutual sense of contempt between the two. The "saints" in the first line represent Christianity and they are said to despise the goddess. The "I" of the third line is in his turn scornful of these saints. This is a reflection of the historically difficult relationship between the Church and feminine claims to divinity. Graves turns this logic around and gives absolute authority to the feminine principle. It is just this absoluteness, claimed by both parties, that is the cause of their irreconcilability. Graves might have been influenced by feminist ideals, but in his reaction to male predominance he seems to have slightly overreached himself. We actually swing from one extreme into another. If we can identify Graves with the lyrical "I" of the poem, he seems to be very clear about his allegiances. He takes position against "all saints" and "all sober men ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean". The latter are the poets Graves dismisses because they have supposedly forsaken the ancient and sacred theme of poetry. Apollo is traditionally the god of poetry, but Graves refuses to acknowledge him as such. Instead he writes poetry in celebration of the muse and Mother Goddess. Parise points out that the "golden mean" of the second line of the first stanza may "suggest a lack of daring, something decidedly non-heroic." (Parise 358) It could also be a reference to the fact that Apollo is the god of light and of the sun. The white goddess, in contrast, is a lunar deity.
Graves considers the society he is living in to be degenerate and he blames this on the patriarchal system. The heroic thing to do would then be to free himself from this failing society. In the poem, this escape receives both a temporal and a spatial dimension. It is said that he goes "beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers". This refers to classical mythology and the legend of the seven youths of Ephesus, who hid in a cave from their pagan prosecutors and slept there for 187 years, awakening to find, to their amazement, that the world had become Christian while they slept. To go beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers can thus be interpreted as travelling back in time to a pre-Christian era. But this flight away from modern society can also be situated in the present. Then it becomes a journey from civilisation to nature, to "distant regions likeliest to hold her". These places represent nature in its purest form, where it is still untouched by the perverting hand of man. As society is left behind, "the track" - which still bears the mark of human presence - begins to fade and the traveller finds himself "at the volcano's head" or "among pack ice". These extreme places show nature in her most beautiful but at the same time in her most dangerous form. In this respect, they are representations par excellence of the white goddess. The 'mysterium fascinosum et tremens' that inspires her being is here clearly present. The same tension between pleasure and fear also informs the last stanza. In the first three lines we get an ecstatic account of the joys of nature ("green sap of Spring", "celebrate") contrasting with the atmosphere evoked in the remaining lines after the 'volta' in "But I am gifted". Here there's a sense of threat, a certain awareness of danger ("rawest of seasons", "cruelty and past betrayal"). The suggestion then seems to be that in the face of these overwhelming forces of nature man is in danger of being obliterated. His quest must inevitably result in death.

In his search for the goddess, Graves doesn't expect to receive a mighty vision of divinity while wandering through some virgin forests, though. He makes it very clear that he doesn't actually believe in the existence of gods or goddesses, but solely in the mind of man:

In scientific terms, no god at all can be proved to exist, but only beliefs in gods, and the effects of such beliefs on worshippers. (Graves 1967, 490)

The imaginary nature of the goddess is stressed by - literally - relating her to "the mirage and echo". They stand for illusion, for something that is neither seen nor heard. Nevertheless, according to Graves, she is part of the individual and collective memory. This latter element becomes more obvious in Graves' gradual changes to the poem. When it first appeared in the 1948 maiden publication of The White Goddess, it was considerably shorter than the one printed above. This is how it looked like in that edition:

Your broad high brow is whiter than any leper's,
Your eyes are flax-flower blue, blood red your lips,
Your hair curls honey-coloured to white hips

All saints revile you, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean,
Yet for me rises even in November
(Rawest of months) so cruelly new a vision,
Cerridwen, of your beatific love
I forget violence and long betrayal
Careless of where the next bright bolt may fall

Three years later, when it appeared in Poems and satires, the poem had already expanded to its 1967 form, the only difference being that in this 1951 edition the "I" that would persist throughout its appearances in The White Goddess had changed into a universal "we". And indeed, the general nature of the changes was one of generalization. Too specific phrases were replaced by vaguer ones. "Months" became "seasons" and the name "Cerridwen" - the Welsh equivalent of the white goddess - was omitted altogether.
Although positive and negative aspects of the goddess were still placed next to each other, the alterations slightly tipped the scales in favour of her life-giving qualities. The "blood-red" of her lips changed into "rowan-berry", which has a far more positive connotation. In The White Goddess, Graves points out that the quicken, rowan or mountain ash was considered to be "the tree of life". (Graves 1967, 167) Another major change, which drew attention to the goddess's more appealing characteristics, was the insertion of the lines celebrating "the Mountain Mother". As Rooksby puts it, "the three new lines help turn the stanza into a hymn of praise for the Goddess as the principle of fertility." (Rooksby 56) The more personal and despairing quality we found in the earlier version Graves thus replaced by the general heroic quest presented in the later one. In doing so, he obviously tried to sell his work to the world and the general public.

Now that I've given a brief analysis of the poem 'In Dedication', I will try to assess the gender implications of its construct. The image of the female is here no longer that of the helpless victim of the Romantic Imagination. Her physical beauty remains unaffected though. She is still modelled - it seems - after Botticelli's Venus:

Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.

But whereas in many Romantic poems this Beauty invoked a sense of male superiority, it now becomes the source of fear and humility; this as a result of Beauty's marriage with the Sublime. In a complete reversal of the traditional roles, man is now victimized. He doesn't have the power to kill Beauty anymore, but Beauty has the power to kill him. This dual relationship is most obvious in Graves' description of the whiteness of her skin. Traditionally, the colour white can express purity and beauty as well as disease and death. In poems written in this 'feministic' strain of Romanticism, the combination pleasure-fear is thus an essential element.

Graves claimed that this kind of poetry, written in the service of the white goddess, had existed since the dawn of mankind. After years of going underground under the reign of Christianity, it supposedly found its way back to the surface through the Romantics. "Graves [was] convinced that his studies [had] shown that the imagery of the authentic Romantics was drawn, either consciously or unconsciously, from the cult of the Goddess and that the magic their poems exert largely depends on an intimacy with her mysteries...." (Keane 90) If this was all indeed so, we should be able to find examples of this throughout English literature and especially in the Romantic period.

A first possible candidate is 'The Song of Solomon', which is an integral part of the Bible. The King James Bible in particular was very influential for the development of English literature. The following excerpt I considered to be a more than fitting description of the female with an invocation of both fear and pleasure:

Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.
Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me; thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead. (Song of Solomon:6,4-5)

Her splendour is compared to that of the majestic cities of Tirzah and Jerusalem, both of which were at one time the home of kings and the crown-jewel of kingdoms. But then her beauty is also a terrible beauty. Like "an army with banners", she stands for death and destruction, an image again sharply contrasted by the loveliness of her physical appearance in the following lines. Gilead is a barren stony wasteland east of the river Jordan, so the above comparison praises her for being an image of life in the wilderness, of light in the darkness. Importantly, the 'mysterium fascinosum et tremens' is clearly present in this description of female beauty.

As could be suspected from its title, Chaucer's poem 'Merciless Beauty' is another good example of this. The theme - a lover's complaint to a cruel mistress - was a very common one in courtly love lyrics throughout the Middle Ages. In this particular poem, we even get an explicit link between her beauty and his death:

Upon my trouthe, I saye to you faithfully,
That ye been of my lif and deeth the queene,
For with my deeth the trouthe shal be seene.
Youre yën two wol slee me sodeinly:
I may the beauty of them not sustene,
So woundeth it thurghout myn herte keene. (Abrams, 196)

Graves himself, in The White Goddess, had written an entire chapter on 'the single poetic theme', in which he conjured up several authors from the past whom he considered to be kindred spirits in this respect. And these were not small names either: Shakespeare, Skelton, Donne, Swift, Hopkins, Keats and Coleridge. I will not discuss all of them in great detail because, obviously, my interests lie with the Romantics at the end of this list. Graves claimed John Keats worshipped the white goddess as 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. The title of this 1819 ballad contains, in its subtle play with language, already a double indication of the possible correctness of this supposition. Again we see the fear-pleasure relation returning in the contrast between "belle dame" and "sans merci". Moreover, a beldame is not only a 'beautiful woman' in French but also an 'old hag' in archaic English. As Graves puts it, "the case of La Belle Dame sans Merci calls for detailed consideration in the light of the Theme." (Graves 1967, 427)

O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight at arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A fairy's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
I love thee true.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream'd - Ah! Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill's side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death pale were they all;
They cried - 'La belle dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
(Abrams 787-88)

In stanza 4 of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', a next possible victim supporting Mellor's theory is presented to us. The Lady of the poem is made to look like the prototype of Romantic Beauty. When it is said that "her eyes were wild", the implication would be that these have to be tamed. Presenting himself to carry out this task, then, is the knight of the poem. In stanza 8, he will try to "shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four." There has been a lot of speculation about the significance of this phrase. Keats himself wrote the following comment about it, but critics hardly ever knew what to make of it.

Why four kisses - you will say - why four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse - she would have fain said 'score' without hurting the rhyme - but we must temper the Imagination as the Critics say with Judgement. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes might have fair play: and to speak truly I think two a piece quite sufficient - Suppose I had said seven; there would have been three and a half a piece - a very awkward affair. (Bate 480)

I think it may have something to do with this masculine desire - exposed by Mellor - to speak with ultimate moral as well as intellectual authority. In his action the knight tries to establish his authority both in the realm of feeling (kisses) and rationality (four). A poem in the strain of masculine Romanticism would have stopped here. This time, however, the woman is given time to react in the continuation of the poem. Obviously, the knight's seizure of power has failed because, although he tried to shut her eyes, he is now being lulled to sleep. This model of action-reaction is stressed furthermore by the repetition of the syntactical pattern:

And there I shut her wild wild eyes
And there she lulled me asleep

The Lady in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' fights back. The male Imagination, responsible for the attempt to assimilate the female into the male, is eliminated. On the cold hill side, the knight dreamed the latest dream he ever dreamed. His action backfired and now he is the one looking dead and pale. Once again, instead of having destroyed Beauty, Beauty has destroyed him. This could be the reason why he has the traditional symbols of beauty (the lily and the rose) fading in his outward appearance. In this sense, "La Belle Dame" would be 'sans merci' in that she doesn't show the compassion of her female literary predecessors who let themselves be killed off by the male Imagination.

Graves mentions several possible sources for this poem by Keats, the most important of which is undoubtedly the medieval 'Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer'. It tells the tale of Thomas meeting with a beautiful lady whom he thinks to be the Queen of Heaven, but who identifies herself as "the queen of fair Elfland. She takes him upon her milk-white steed, for he must serve her for seven years. For forty days and nights they ride through blood while Thomas sees neither sun nor moon. Forbidden to touch the fruit of this strange country lest he suffer the plagues of hell, Thomas eats the loaf and drinks the claret that the elf-queen has brought. At length they rest before a hill, and the elf-queen, placing his head on her knee, shows him three wonders: the roads to wickedness, to righteousness and to fair Elfland. It is the last of these that they are to follow, and for seven years True Thomas on earth was never seen". (Wasserman 68)
Keats, according to Graves, must have had an intuitive knowledge that the sources he used were based on the same ancient myth, that of the white goddess. In any case, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' certainly bears the mark of that specific strain of Romanticism which reverses the traditional gender relations.

The second Romantic Graves calls upon is Coleridge. He credited him with having written the most faithful description of the white goddess as existed at that time. In part three of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' we read:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold. (Abrams 335)

Again we recognize the 'mysterium fascinosum et tremens' in this short passage. The first two lines give an account of physical beauty; in the redness of her lips and especially, in the poetic goldenness of her hair. This is countered by the last two lines, where she is presented as a nightmarish apparition that causes man to become frozen with fear.
This strange woman sails towards the Mariner's ship aboard a ghost ship that seems to move without any wind in her sails, the silhouette of which moves in between him and the setting sun. If we accept Graves' hypothesis, then, it might explain a few mysterious circumstances surrounding this account. As a representation of the lunar deity, she establishes her authority by blocking out the image of the dying sun. And indeed, the moon seems to play an important role in the remainder of the poem. After the strange encounter, the Mariner and his crew stand petrified aboard their ship "Till clomb above the eastern bar / The hornèd Moon, with one bright star / Within the nether tip." The footnote of The Norton Anthology explains that this was traditionally seen as "an omen of impending evil". (Abrams 336) Immediately following this description, "one after one, by the star-dogged Moon", the Mariner's men fall lifeless to the deck. This confirms the promise of evil, invoked by the image of the rising moon. As Graves contended in The White Goddess, the Old Moon represented the black goddess of death and divination.

Even Blake seems to have written about this 'single poetic theme'. The following lines from 'To the Muses' look almost 'Gravesian':

How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few! (Abrams 25)

In fact, in his mytho-poetic approach to literature, Blake has more than a few things in common with Graves. Critical theory has it that every poet must destroy a brilliant predecessor in order to establish his own authority. In the case of Robert Graves, that 'mythical' forerunner most definitely seems to have been William Blake. Although there's no mention of Blake in the course of The White Goddess, the work is undeniably suffused with his spirit.

Just like Graves, Blake was fiercely opposed to the industrial way of life emanating from the patriarchal system. This mode of thinking can be picked up, for example, throughout his long poem 'Jerusalem'. Man is negatively associated with modern industry, symbolized by the "furnace of beryll". Woman's "golden Loom", on the other hand, calls to mind the more traditional working methods and is endowed with a far more positive connotation.

The Male is a Furnace of beryll; the Female is a golden Loom; / I behold them and their rushing fires overwhelm my Soul, / In Londons darkness; and my tears fall day and night, / Upon the Emanations of Albions Sons! the Daughters of Albion / Names anciently rememberd, but now contemn'd as fictions! / Although in every bosom they controll our Vegetative powers. (Blake, 136)

Here the "daughters of Albion" represent the feminine principle, which is essentially vitalistic and still closely connected with the natural instincts. Under the yoke of modernization and christianity, however, mankind has drifted away from these origins. Laws and regulations were made to curb man's feelings and desires. In this respect, Blake laments the neglect of the Imagination, which he considers to be the prime source of all artful expression.

Every Emanative joy forbidden as a Crime: / And the Emanations buried alive in the earth with pomp of religion: / Inspiration deny'd; Genius forbidden by laws of punishment: / I saw terrified; I took the sighs & tears, & bitter groans: (Blake, 142)

Blake also speaks of a time when this feminine principle was still predominant. In certain passages from 'Jerusalem', as well as in many of his other works, we recognize the 'mysterium fascinosum et tremens' characteristic of the coupling of female beauty and sublime power. Once again, we seem to have stumbled upon the same age-old story.

Why trembles [sic] the Warriors limbs when he beholds thy beauty / Spotted with Victims blood: by the fires of thy secret tabernacle / And thy ark & holy place: at thy frowns: at thy dire revenge / Smitten as Uzzah of old: his armour is softend; his spear / And sword faint in his hand, from Albion across Great Tartary / O beautiful Daughter of Albion: cruelty is thy delight / O Virgin of terrible eyes, who dwellest by Valleys of springs / Beneath the Mountains of Lebanon (Blake, 243)

Although these lines seem to form a link between the poetics of Graves and Blake, I have to admit that things aren't so straightforward. Compared to Graves, Blake didn't have quite as strong views on the supposed superiority of a matriarchal society. He acknowledged the presence of both masculine and feminine powers governing the mind of man. The very fact that this division exists Blake interpreted as a falling away from unity. In fact, this was his metaphorical interpretation of the Fall. The original "all-inclusive Universal Man" (Abrams 20) he imagined as some kind of androgynous creature. In the imperfect world we're now living in, then, the Sexes are engaged in a neverending battle that swings from one extreme into the other. One moment the feminine principle is predominant, another moment the masculine. This struggle is part of their very nature. Blake's poem 'The Mental Traveller' is very symptomatic in this respect. It represents the eternal cycle of mutually assured destruction by the Sexes.

The first event in the poem is a happy one: a baby boy is born. But this initial bliss is then immediately countered by "the Woman Old, Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold." (Abrams, 67) His hand and feet get pierced and iron thorns are bound around his head. This description of male suffering clearly echoes the biblical story of the Crucifixion. The woman then "cuts his heart out at his side, … And she grows young as he grows old." (Abrams, 67) Vampire-like she seems to prey upon his life's energy. This process of exploitation continues "Till he becomes a bleeding youth And she becomes a Virgin bright". (Abrams, 68) This marks the first turning point of the poem. The male, who has grown older but also stronger, can now free himself from his shackles and exact his revenge upon the female. It is this dynamic of revenge that controls the action throughout 'The Mental Traveller'. He now uses his superior position to domesticate the female by making her "his dwelling place". (Abrams, 68) She remains in this state until the eleventh stanza, where she will have the chance to turn things around once again:

His grief is their eternal joy,
They make the roofs & walls to ring,
Till from the fire on the hearth
A little female Babe does spring. (Abrams, 68)

She is reborn from the hearth, the very symbol of domesticity. "The female, who had seemingly been eliminated, thus reveals herself as a principle that can not be destroyed. She cannot be repressed. She must return." (Smith) And when she does, she is stronger than before, "all of solid fire And gems & gold, that none his hand Dares stretch to touch her Baby form Or wrap her in his swaddling-band." (Abrams 68) This time, she doesn't seem to use her power against the male but manages to break free from the poem's cycle of revenge. The old man, on the other hand, remains stuck in the old state of competition. He can't cope with the woman being active and making her own move towards "the Man she loves". (Abrams, 68) In his view, the woman has to be a passive object, so he wanders around "Untill he can a Maiden win." (Abrams, 68) This headstrong insistence upon male predominance causes him to lose the potentially blissful union with the female:

The Cottage fades before his sight,
The Garden & its lovely Charms. (Abrams, 68)

The same thing we had also seen happening in Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. The knight's vision of bliss was ultimately scattered by his own mortal flaws. In the continuation of the poem the process of male ageing and female rejuvenation is reversed and at the end, we're back at the same point we started out from. We've made full circle when once again a baby boy is coupled with "a Woman Old".

And none can touch that frowning form
Except it be a Woman Old;
She nails him down upon the Rock,
And all is done as I have told. (Abrams, 70)

This last line stresses the repetitive nature of the poem. Once again the same struggle between the Sexes will commence and the same story will unfold. Blake's story and Graves' story, then, may differ in degrees of fanaticism, but their core is essentially the same. For Blake, the predominance of the feminine principle is a possibility of nature. For Graves, it's a necessity of life.

In his treatment of gender, Graves thus certainly picked up on an existing current in Romanticism. In his poetry, not Prometheus (the champion of the male Imagination) but Andromeda will be unbound. Or better yet, she will break free of her own account:

Content in you,
Andromeda serene,
Mistress of air and ocean
And every fiery dragon,
Chained to no cliff,
Asking no rescue of me. (Graves 1965, 142)

In classical mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, the king and queen of Ethiopia. The beautiful Cassiopeia claimed to be prettier than the Nereids, the 50 daughters of Poseidon. The latter was furious about this and sent a sea monster to prey upon the country. Only Andromeda's sacrifice could appease the beast's bloodthirst and deliver the land from evil, so she was chained to a rock by the seaside. Traditionally, she would then be rescued by Perseus, a son of Zeus. With Graves, however, it is the woman herself who breaks loose from her shackles. No longer will she be dependent on the male hero for her salvation.

4. Conclusion

I hope my argument has shown that Robert Graves' view on the world and on poetry was in fact highly indebted to that of the English Romantics. His treatment of concepts like the Imagination and gender more than suggests this. With Keats, Coleridge and Blake, I've taken three of the major poets of the Romantic period and linked them up with Graves' project. Especially Blake seems to have been a kindred spirit in the use of both poetics and mythology. Graves stated that "to write poems for other than poets is wasteful." (Abrams 2214) This kind of attitude, then, was also clearly apparent in Blake: "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care." (Abrams 19-20)

But all boastfulness aside, I believe Graves should be considered a poet of great significance. With one leg in the nineteenth and the other in the twentieth century, Graves stands tall as an heir of Romanticism and a defender of the faith he so arduously practised.