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by Robert Graves

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Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,
The track aches only when the rain reminds.
The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,
The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.
The blinded man sees with his ears and hands
As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Their war was fought these twenty years ago
And now assumes the nature-look of time,
As when the morning traveler turns and views
His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.

3

What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
That sagged ominously upon the earth
Even when the season was the airiest May.
Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out
Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.
Natural infirmities were out of mode,
For Death was young again; patron alone
Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.

4

Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight
At life's discovered transitoriness,
Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.
Never was such antiqueness of romance,
Such tasty honey oozing from the heart.
And old importances came swimming back -
Wine, meat, log-fired, a roof over the head,
A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call.
Even there was a use again for God -
A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire,
In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.

5

War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world has still kept head in air,
Protesting logic or protesting love,
Until the unendurable moment struck -
The inward scream, the duty to run mad.


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6

And we recall the merry ways of guns -
Nibbling the walls of factory and church
Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees
Like a child, dandelions with a switch.
Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill,
Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall:
A sight to be recalled in elder days
When learnedly the future we devote
To yet more boastful visions of despair.

Posted by RG on March 17, 2008
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Maegan on paragraph 6:

I found the imagery about the toy guns and the tin soldiers to be very poingnant. It makes you think of all the young men that died in WWI. They probably played with those toys when they were younger and we taught to think that going to war would be a glorious experience.

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March 19, 2008 8:37 am
Randi on whole page :

It was interesting to me that the author was recalling the war twenty years after it’s pass. Graves seems very aware of the direction that war was heading. It was as though he was warning everyone that things could get out of hand rather quickly. He seems to be bothered by the fact that so many soldiers are just going about their business, and forgetting the war that had been fought all too soon. For him, moving on after the war was a much more difficult task. The premature fate-spasm paints a very vivid picture of the things taking place during WWI. Graves seems agitated by the fickleness of man and unsettled by everyones ability to just move on.

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March 19, 2008 10:10 pm
Kassidy on whole page :

Well since this was the poem that Danielle and I chose I don’t really have anything extra to add to what we said in our presentation. To me the fact that Graves wrote this poem 20 years later with such intensity of words it really shows how traumatizing war can be for people. I think the part in stanza 4 about God and the things that the soldiers were lacking that they needed for survival and how there was a need for God again but only so that they could vent their rage at someone is extremely memorable when you read this poem.

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March 20, 2008 8:40 pm
William on paragraph 6:

I wonder if the stuff about children is meant to forbode future wars. While it’s saying that the people who served in WWI were just children, I think it could also be read as the children of today will become the solders of tomorrow. Like Maegan said, they played with those toys when they were younger, but kids are still playing with those same toys, glorifying war and becoming indoctinated with this romantic view of battle that would change with first hand experience.

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March 21, 2008 12:48 am
Danielle on whole page :

so, I have missed several of these on the forum. I really like this poem. Maybe it is because Kassidy and I did our presentation on it. I will say that by doing a presentation on it and having to “know” the poem, I feel that I really learned about this one. It has stuck with me. Especially the part where it talks about war being like a game that children play (where they are felling groves of trees). And the part where it talks about “premature mate spasms”. That gives me chills every time I read that line. eeeek.

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April 13, 2008 8:15 pm

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