Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

Revisiting an early Robert Graves poem for Ash Wednesday

Francisco de Zurbarán, Agnus Dei, c. 1637 (Wikimedia Commons)

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In the Wilderness

by Robert Graves

Christ of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering,
Walked in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk
That listened wondering.
He heard the bitterns call
From ruined palace-wall,
Answered them brotherly.
He held communion
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,
With monstrous barbéd slings,
With eager dragon-eyes;
Great rats on leather wings
And poor blind broken things,
Foul in their miseries.
And ever with Him went,
Of all His wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs — poor innocent —
Bleeding foot, burning throat,
The guileless old scapegoat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behind Him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.
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(For Ash Wednesday, here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’re revisiting a strange — in both its images and it forced meter — Lenten poem from Robert Graves.)

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Among the poems one really doesn’t expect, there’s this: a poem about Christ’s forty days in the wilderness by Robert Graves (1895–1985). Graves was young when he published the poem in his second collection, the 1918 Fairies and Fusiliers. He’d been through the war, become friends with the poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), and published his own war verses. (In 1985, a memorial was placed in Westminster Abbey for the poets of the First World War. The long-lived Graves was the only one left to attend.)

He had yet to write his memoir of the war, Good-Bye to All That (1929) or his strange book about poetry’s beginning in worship of a divine mother figure, The White Goddess (1948). His best-selling historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

In 1918, for that matter, Graves had yet to make a public point of his loss of faith. By 1948, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Graves would insist in The White Goddess that “Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.” In Today’s Poem, “In the Wilderness,” however, Graves emphasized not the personality but exactly those mythopoeic elements of Jesus. (He would later call it his “last Christian-minded poem.”)

His fantastical account of that mythopoesis is aided enormously — turned nearly into an incantation prayer — by the rhymed two-stress lines of the poem and its forced dactyls. The meter quickly turns artificial, standing outside the natural words to become the kind of musical chant we know from nursery rhymes and counting games. The first lines teach us how to read the poem’s dimeter, thickened with some alliteration:

CHRÌST of His GÈN-tle-ness
THÌRST-ing and HÙN-ger-ing,
WÀLKED in the WÌL-der-ness.

And with that stress pattern established, we know how to hear such lines as “GRÈAT rats on LÈATH-er wings” or “ÀND poor blind BRÒK-en things.” Not only is this pushing against the natural meter, but any standard English prosody might read these as trimeter lines, with the third beat on the final syllable to ensure the rhyme.

One of the things the young Graves is seeking, however, is a modern English version of the old Welsh englyn verse, a poetry with strict syllable count in its lines, unconcerned with whether a natural stress came on the rhyming syllable. I read it aloud in a highly forced two-stress dactylic meter, though also with a hint of stress on several of the stronger last syllables. (Early on, Graves tried “A Pot of White Heather,” an interesting if unsuccessful poem that made a strict attempt at writing English verse in one of the englyn forms. It began: “Thou, a poor woman’s fairing, white heather, / Witherest from the ending / Of summer’s bliss to the sting / Of winter’s grey beginning.”)

“In the Wilderness” pictures Christ preaching in the desert to the vilest and lowest of mythological creatures — “Ànswered them bròtherly,” while “Bàsilisk, còckatrice, / Flòcked to his hòmilies.” He comforts the hidden: “Ànd poor blind bròken things, / Fòul in their mìseries.”

Through it all, forty days in the wilderness (the biblical foundation of Lent, which opens today with Ash Wednesday), Christ is trailed by a scapegoat. The creature who was to bear the price of our sins instead follows — “Sùre guard behìnd Him kept, / Tèars like a lòver wept” — the one who will take the scapegoat’s place and die for us.

Robert Graves in uniform (Wikimedia Commons)

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