ROBERT GRAVES 'S POEM - SICK LOVE

 

On the 25 th day of the Blog chatter’s #WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.

 

Poet: Robert Graves

Poem:   SICK LOVE

  

   O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,

Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:

Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,
Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.

Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.

 

  Robert Graves was a British writer who enlisted in August 1914. He fought at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and was wounded at the Somme in 1916. He published his first volumes of poems during the war, and his bestselling war memoir, Goodbye to All That, in 1929.  He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about experience of front-line conflict. He is also famous for his successful biography Lawrence and the Arabs.

Robert Graves wrote poetry that challenged unthinking attitudes to the war, but he also appeared to use his poetry to protect himself from being overwhelmed by war, in writing about situations and images that were emblematic of peace. Most of the poems he wrote in 1917 were not about the horrors of trench life, but about childhood innocence and the English countryside.