A Renascence

By Robert Graves 1895–1985 Robert Graves

White flabbiness goes brown and lean,

Dumpling arms are now brass bars,

They’ve learnt to suffer and live clean,

And to think below the stars.

They’ve steeled a tender, girlish heart,

Tempered it with a man’s pride,

Learning to play the butcher’s part

Though the woman screams inside—

Learning to leap the parapet,

Face the open rush, and then

To stab with the stark bayonet,

Side by side with fighting men.

On Achi Baba’s rock their bones

Whiten, and on Flanders’ plain,

But of their travailings and groans

Poetry is born again.

Biography

Robert Graves often stirred controversy in his endeavors as a poet, novelist, critic, mythographer, translator, and editor. Stephen Spender in the New York Times Book Review characterized Graves as a free thinker: "All of his life Graves has been indifferent to fashion, and the great and deserved reputation he has is based on his individuality as a poet who is both intensely idiosyncratic and unlike any other contemporary poet . . .

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