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Over the Brazier — Key Ideas to Explore
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Project Gutenberg
2014
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World War, 1914-1918 -- Poetry; English poetry -- 20th century
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Words
6,795
Reading time
30 min
Text sections
2
The source record for Over the Brazier — Key Ideas to Explore measures this digital text at 6,795 words, 30 min estimated reading time, and 2 detected text sections.
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Project Gutenberg record #47144
Robert Graves's early poems, written between ages 14 and 20, juxtapose nursery whimsy with trench warfare, using irregular meter, star-talk personifications, and abrupt shifts between childhood memory and combat trauma.
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The thought of it chills my bones to the marrow, And the frost so cruel to-night! And the frost so cruel to-night!"
"How is your trade, Aquarius, This frosty night?" "Complaints is many and various And my feet are cold," says Aquarius, "There's Venus objects to Dolphin-scales, And Mars to Crab-spawn found in my pails, And the pump has frozen to-night, And the pump has frozen to-night."
THE DYING KNIGHT AND THE FAUNS
Through the dreams of yesternight My blood brother great in fight I saw lying, slowly dying Where the weary woods were sighing With the rustle of the birches, With the quiver of the larches.... Woodland fauns with hairy haunches Grin in wonder through the branches Woodland fauns that know no fear. Wondering, they wander near Munching mushrooms red as coral, Bunches, too, of rue and sorrel; Wonder at his radiant fairness, At his dinted, shattered harness, With uncouth and bestial sounds, Knowing nought of war or wounds: But the crimson life-blood oozes And make roses of the daisies, Persian carpets of the mosses-- Softly now his spirit passes As the bee forsakes the lily, As the berry leaves the holly; But the fauns still think him living, And with bay leaves they are weaving Crowns to deck him. Well they may! He was worthy of the Bay.
On the rough mountain wind That blows so free Rides a little storm-sprite Whose name is Willaree.
The fleecy cloudlets are not his, No shepherd is he, For he drives the shaggy thunderclouds Over land and sea.
His home is on the mountain-top Where I love to be, Amid grey rocks and brambles And the red rowan-tree.
He whistles down the chimney, He whistles to me, And I send greeting back to him Whistling cheerily.
The great elms are battling, Waves are on the sea, Loud roars the mountain-wind-- God rest you, Willaree!
THE FACE OF THE HEAVENS
Little winds in a hurry, Great winds over the sky, Clouds sleek or furry, Storms that rage and die,
The whole cycle of weather From calm to hurricane Of four gales wroth together, Thunder, lightning, rain,
The burning sun, snowing, Hailstones pattering down, Blue skies and red skies showing, Skies with a black frown,
By these signs and wonders You may tell God's mood: He shines, rains, thunders, But all His works are good.
Oh, now has faded from the West A sunset red as wine, And beast and bird are hushed to rest When the jolly yellow moon doth shine.
Come comrades, roam we round the mead Where couch the sleeping kine; The breath of night blows soft indeed, And the jolly yellow moon doth shine.
And step we slowly, friend with friend, Let arm with arm entwine. And voice with voice together blend, For the jolly yellow moon doth shine.
Whether we loudly sing or soft, The tune goes wondrous fine; Our chorus sure will float aloft Where the jolly yellow moon doth shine.
("_Life is a very awful thing! You young fellows are too busy being jolly to realize the folly of your lives._"
--_A Charterhouse Sermon_)
In Chapel often when I bawl The hymns, to show I'm musical, With bright eye and cheery voice Bidding Christian folk rejoice, Shame be it said, I've not a thought Of the One Being whom I ought To worship: with unwitting roar Other godheads I adore. I celebrate the Gods of Mirth And Love and Youth and Springing Earth, Bacchus, beautiful, divine, Gulping down his heady wine, Dear Pan piping in his hollow, Fiery-headed King Apollo And rugged Atlas all aloof Holding up the purple roof. I have often felt and sung, "It's a good thing to be young: Though the preacher says it's folly, Is it foolish to be jolly?" I have often prayed in fear, "Let me never grow austere; Let me never think, I pray, Too much about Judgment Day; Never, never feel in Spring, 'Life's a very awful thing!'" Then I realize and start And curse my arrogant young heart, Bind it over to confess Its horrible ungodliness, Set myself penances, and sigh That I was born in sin, and try To find the whole world vanity.
Gloomy and bare the organ-loft, Bent-backed and blind the organist. From rafters looming shadowy, From the pipes' tuneful company, Drifted together drowsily, Innumerable, formless, dim, The ghosts of long-dead melodies, Of anthems, stately, thunderous, Of Kyries shrill and tremulous: In melancholy drowsy-sweet They huddled there in harmony, Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.
Robert Graves's Over the Brazier (1916, revised 1920) opens with a foreword noting the poems were written between ages fourteen and twenty, while the author served in France. The collection's diction and structure oscillate between nursery-rhyme cadences and the jarring syntax of trench experience. In 'The Poet in the Nursery,' a young speaker steals a 'thin pretty book' from an ancient poet, its 'metre twisting like a chain of daisies'—a self-conscious image of poetic apprenticeship. Yet the same volume contains 'It's a Queer Time,' where the line 'It's hard to know if you're alive or dead' introduces a voice that slips from battle into hallucinated childhood scenes. This tension between crafted whimsy and raw reportage defines the collection's authorial choices.
Irregular Meter and Shifting Rhythms
Graves frequently abandons regular meter for lines that mimic mental or physical dislocation. In 'Star-Talk,' the Pleiades speak in a sing-song trimeter ('See us cuddle and hug'), while Orion's reply stretches into a pentameter catalogue. The effect is a deliberate unevenness, as if the speaker cannot sustain a steady beat. In 'It's a Queer Time,' the opening couplet ('It's hard to know if you're alive or dead / When steel and fire go roaring through your head') uses a near-perfect iambic pentameter, but subsequent lines fracture: 'You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain / And find ... you're digging tunnels through the hay.' The ellipsis and dash create a rhythmic stumble, mirroring the soldier's disorientation. Graves's metrical choices thus become a structural device for conveying trauma.
Personified Constellations and Domestic Collapse
'Star-Talk' personifies the Gemini, Pleiades, and Orion as shivering, wine-loving creatures who 'huddle together like birds in a storm.' This whimsical astronomy contrasts sharply with the war poems' domestic imagery. In 'It's a Queer Time,' the speaker imagines Elsie, who 'died ten years ago,' tripping 'gaily down the trench' with a 'Hanky to nose—that lyddite makes a stench.' The nursery detail (pinafore, hanky) collides with chemical warfare. Similarly, 'Over the Brazier' records a pre-war fantasy of a cottage 'full of books, / Pictures and brass and cosy nooks,' only to undercut it: 'this silly / Mad War has now wrecked both.' Graves uses the same intimate register for stars and soldiers, suggesting that war has made all safe spaces equally fragile.
Dialogue as a Window into Dissociation
Graves employs direct address and fragmented dialogue to depict soldiers' psychological states. In 'Star-Talk,' the poet calls out to the constellations, and they answer in colloquial speech: 'It's no good trying to go to sleep.' This conversational tone recurs in 'It's a Queer Time,' where the speaker's internal monologue breaks into second-person address: 'You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!"' The sudden shift from 'I' to 'you' distances the speaker from his own actions, a hallmark of dissociation. In 'Over the Brazier,' Willy and Mac speak in quoted dialogue, each proposing a postwar idyll—Canada, a coral isle—while the speaker's own cottage plan is left hanging. The poem ends without resolution, the dialogue unresolved, mirroring the uncertainty of survival.
The Foreword as a Clue to Authorial Revision
Graves's 1920 foreword reveals that the poems were first printed while he was 'serving in France' with 'no leisure for getting the final proofs altogether as I wanted them.' He notes 'several alterations in the text, including the suppression of two small poems.' This admission of hasty publication and later correction is itself a textual feature: the poems bear marks of youthful experimentation (the 'funny muddling mazes' of 'The Poet in the Nursery') alongside mature revisions. The foreword does not specify which poems were cut, but the surviving text shows a poet aware of his craft's unevenness. Readers should note that the collection spans ages fourteen to twenty, and the voice shifts accordingly—from the apprentice who 'gloated' over rhymes to the soldier who writes 'It's a queer time.'
Graves's early work rewards attention to its deliberate roughness: the metrical stumbles, the sudden shifts from star-talk to shell-shock, the dialogue that trails off into silence. These are not flaws but authorial choices that register the difficulty of writing poetry in wartime. The collection's brevity (under 7,000 words) invites rereading, especially of the less anthologized poems like 'Star-Talk' and 'Over the Brazier,' where the nursery and the trench meet.
I keep coming back to how Graves could slip from a nursery rhyme into the mud of the trenches without blinking. There’s a particular ache in that, one that lingers across Over the Brazier and finds an echo in A Spring Harvest — A Closer Reading. It’s like remembering a song you hummed as a child, only to realize you’re older now, and the tune has changed.
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