The White Goddess, and Apollo's Golden Mean

 

Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:47:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: ......@westerncanon.com
Subject: Lecture Hall Message 18

Dated : April 25, 1999 at 13:47:09
Subject: Re: The White Goddess

>I am a junior at Malone College in Canton, OH and I am taking
>Modern British Writers. For our final project, the professor has
>asked us to analyze a poet and his works. My friend and I are going
>to do a type of interview situation, where he is Graves and I am
>the interviewer. We want to focus specifically on "The White Goddess"
>and "Succubus." If anybody has any information or comments on either
>of these poems, please share them with me. Also, share what types of
>questions you might ask Graves about these particular poems.

Nicole,

You have given yourselves a very tall order by focussing on two important poems by Graves, the first of which is of central importance to the second part of his life. I can however give you a number of pointers about "The White Goddess" which might help you to narrow down your target.

Another of Graves important poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice", begins with the lines:

There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling

From the mid-forties onwards, much of Graves' prose and poetry was shaped by this belief. Interestingly there is a passage in "The Shout", a short story written in 1924, which prefigures this approach:

"My story is true", he said, "every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is 'true'", I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore true".

Graves' stated opinions about the White Goddess, which resulted in the poem and the book of the same name, should be looked at the same way. Both Graves' prose and poetry attempt to retell his understanding of a truth by recasting detail and character. The specific reference is (according to Graves) always the same, but the incidentals change and the details blur and intertwine. The poem "The Clipped Stater" for example, can be read in terms of its references to Alexander, which are explicit, or to the phenomenon of the Incarnation of Christ, or even to the transformation of T. E. Lawrence into "Aircraftsman Shaw". In fact it should be read in terms of (at least) all three: if there is "one story and one story only", the real focus of Graves' interest is beyond the incidental details of the poem, and the blurring and braiding of detail allows us to look at the real subject, as it were, slantwise.

The first two lines of "The White Goddess" [the version in "Selected Poems", ed. Paul O'Prey, 1986] express Graves' view that his subject is one uncomfortable to the reasoning mind: and thus a subject which the dominant forces in European civilization over at least the past two and a half thousand years have tried to reject ("All Saints revile her"). Very quickly however (line 3) the poem is about a voyage in search of the Goddess: this is particularly interesting as Graves' views on ancient matriarchy surfaced first in "The Golden Fleece" [pub 1944] (US: "Hercules, My Shipmate" [pub 1945]), and Graves' was working on his translation of the story of the voyage of the Argo immediately before writing his monumental study: "The White Goddess" (to which a version of the poem is prefaced "in dedication"). The sailors sail to find her "in scorn" of those "ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean". This might be read as a re-interpretation of the real mission of the Argo, or a metaphor of Graves' own studies, or more broadly as a characterization of any attempt to escape from (as Graves believed) the rigid, plodding patterns of Cartesian thought sanctioned as "valid" by our civilization (the version prefaced to "The White Goddess" speaks in the first person).

The second stanza continues the speaker's identification with the crew of the ship:

It was a virtue not to stay/To go our headstrong and heroic way

The following three lines describe the extremes to which they are prepared to go to find the elusive Goddess. Paradoxically she is then given a precise physical description, clear enough to pick her out of a crowd. That it might not be wholly healthy to actually encounter her is suggested by the striking description of her brow as: "white as any leper's".

In the third stanza it is clear that there have been (and will be) good times for the Goddess, when all recognise her and the universality of her significance:

The green sap of spring in the young wood astir/Will celebrate the Mountain Mother

However the crew of the ship are gifted to recognise, "even in November", her "nakedly worn magnificence". Thus the ability to discern the Goddess in her elusiveness is given more importance by Graves than her mere celebration. Here Graves alludes to the different qualities required of devotees of the Goddess in secular (i.e., modern) times, to those qualities required in times when her reality is taken for granted.

The penultimate line reveals that the sailors have undertaken the voyage, not in ignorance, but in full knowledge of the dangers: since they have experienced "cruelty and past betrayal". They have met her before, in one form or another. They are also, like those in love:

Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

"Bolts" are of course more commonly associated in Greek Mythology with Zeus, king of the gods. But Graves regarded Zeus as a usurper, and believed that real power belonged to the Goddess (See for example "The Greek Myths" 9.7: Zeus and Metis, where Graves quotes Jane Harrison who described the story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions').

Graves more and more came to regard the White Goddess as the real source of inspiration for poets, so that he began to view poetry written for any other reason as fakery. In his study "The White Goddess" he describes her in similar terms to those used in the poem:

...a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. ... I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess... The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living... [TWG: Ch. One, "Poets and Gleemen"]

Hence it is that Graves' concept of the White Goddess is entwined with the craft of poetry: poetry is an invocation of the Goddess, and to write "true poetry" the poet has to love someone in whom the Goddess temporarily manifests. Graves' book on the White Goddess has to be read therefore as a braid, made up of a historical reconstruction of poetic grammar, as well as his personal experience of the Goddess in his association with Laura Riding, and possibly also his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves.

The Graves Interview:

You are going to have to do a lot of research to do this properly! You can find most of what you need in three books: Robert Graves "The White Goddess" for Graves own account of his ideas; Richard Perceval Graves: "Robert Graves and the White Goddess 1940-1985" [pub 1995]; and "Robert Graves: The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940" [pub 1990]: these last two volumes give the relevant details about Graves' collaboration with Laura Riding, and his later muse poetry. Other information about Graves' picture of ancient matriarchy can be found in his novel "King Jesus" [pub 1946] and "Seven Days in New Crete" [pub 1949] (US "Watch the North Wind Rise"). Some useful critical remarks about the thesis of "The White Goddess" can be found in Martin Seymour-Smith's "Robert Graves: His Life and Work" [1982; expanded edition pub 1995]

It might be worth asking "Graves" to expand on the method of thinking he associates with the Goddess, which he opposes to "the God Apollo's golden mean": Graves says quite a bit about this (that poetic thought is not really viable in a scientific and rational civilization) in various parts of "The White Goddess". He also wrote an interesting preface in 1976 to John Biram's book "Teknosis", in which he seriously criticises modern industrial civilization (may be hard to find this book). And/or you might ask "Graves" to describe the background to the writing of the poem "The White Goddess", showing the different elements in both his writing and his personal life which he weaves together to make a successful artistic whole. You might also ask "Graves" to compare and contrast some related poetry (such as"Juan at the Winter Solstice"; "The White Goddess" and "The Succubus").