Long E in Greek

By T.E. Kalem

POEMS 1968-1970 by Robert Graves. 90 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Cyril Connolly said of Hemingway that he "saturated his books with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love, and with the remorse which is the shadow of that sun." The same might be said of the poetry of Robert Graves, especially in his latest work, Poems 1968-1970.

Like Hemingway, Graves was wounded in World War I, and, psychically at least, suffered the death of the verities that had existed prior to 1914. Like Hemingway, Graves is a romantic and a stoic who believes that one way or another love ends badly. While no single image or object can encompass the trajectory of Graves' thoughts on love, there is a Spanish drink that comes close to it. It is called the sol y sombra (sun and shadow). It comes in two layers. The top half is brandy--masculine, dry, bracing; the bottom half is anisette --sweet, insinuative, treacherous.

With Graves, love, like an army day, begins with reveille and ends with taps. Only wisdom and patience relieve the passion and the pain. Yet, this poet would insist, love is the disease most worth having, for its opposite is the doleful serenity of death-in-life.

Pondering the mystery of love, Graves never fears to ask an outright question. One poem is called "What Is Love?":

Is it a reattainment of our centre, A core of trustful innocence come home to? . . .Is it primeval vision That stars our course with oracles of danger And looks to death for timely intervention?

Another performs a lover's autopsy:

The death of love comes from reiteration: A single line sung over and over again-- No prelude and no end . . . Though love's foolish reluctance to survive Springs always from the same mechanical fault: The needle jumps its groove.

At 75, Graves has lived through six of the seven ages of man, and his mind ranges over them all, most poignantly perhaps in dated but resonant lines that recall the roistering celebrants of "Armistice Day: 1918," and then closes:

But the boys who were killed in the trenches, Who fought with no rage and no rant, We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud Low down with the worm and the ant.

When Graves is playful, and he sometimes is, he is as cheerful and civilized as Auden. Some alphabetical intrali-gual fun in a poem called "H" produces as its last word the best word to sum up the quality that permeates this book:

H may be N for those who speak Russian, although long E in Greek; And cockneys, like the French, agree That H is neither N nor E Nor Hate's harsh aspirate, but meek And mute as in Humanity.

. T.E. Kalem

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