Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

Christ of His gentleness / Thirsting and hungering

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

For the first time in a few years, Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday this year, and what are we supposed to read as Today’s Poem here on February 14? Any poem fit for Valentine’s Day feels frivolous for Ash Wednesday; any poem suited for Ash Wednesday seems a grim choice for Valentine’s. Most Wednesdays, here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we present some comic or light verse, but that would be worse still: “Mock love or mock God” is not a happy choice.

In the end, we settled on an ashen 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 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 best-known nonfiction, 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 novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

Robert Graves in uniform (Wikimedia Commons)

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 those mythopoeic elements of Jesus.

His 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 becomes 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, with its hints of the stresses of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse: “CHRÌST of His GÈNtleness / THÌRSTing and HÙNgering, / WÀLKED in the WÌlderness.” And with that stress pattern established, we know how to hear such lines as “GRÈAT rats on LÈATHer wings / ÀND poor blind BRÒken things.”

The poem pictures Christ preaching to the vilest and lowest of 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 begins 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.

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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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