Books: Secrets of the Muse

THE WHITE GODDESS (412 pp.)—Robert Graves—Creative Age ($4.50).

Robert Graves has beaten his critics to the punch by calling this “a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one.” It is a candid and justifiable warning. As a historical novelist, Graves is famed for his power of mazelike ingenuity, but his novels (I, Claudius; Hercules, My Shipmate; and others) are as simple as Mother Goose rhymes compared to The White Goddess.

Subtitled “a historical grammar of poetic myth,” the book would easily provide a term’s work for advanced students of archeology, linguistics or comparative mythology. Graves juggles at least 1,000 mythological figures, drawn from thousands of years of Asian and European history and prehistory, with scarcely a slip or a hint of confusion, but with scant respect, at times, for the aching head of the common reader. According to his argument they are all, or almost all, reducible to a few characters in one primordial master myth, or Great Theme, infinitely varied.

Waxing & Waning Years. “The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into 13 chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious, all-powerful, three-fold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry . . . celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story . . .”

The religious point of this is that the Deity is female, not a Father but a Great Mother, as the early races of the Eastern Mediterranean believed; that she is identifiable with the earth, or on a larger scale, with the firmament; that beautiful and dangerous women are her images, and that by them—and by her—men are created, exalted and destroyed. Cults of the Goddess persisted for centuries, according to Graves, along with the official Christianity of Europe, sometimes taking the form of witchcraft. Sometimes, he thinks, the cult of the Goddess was more or less assimilated into the church as devotion to the Blessed Mother Mary. Whether they know it or not, says Graves, true poets adore the Goddess. He has himself paid her homage:

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,

Do not forget what flowers

The great boar trampled down in ivy time.

Her brow was creamy as the long ninth wave,

Her sea-blue eyes were wild

But nothing promised that is not performed.

It appears that with the possible exception of John Skelton and Ben Jonson, the last poet—before Graves—with enough learning and intelligence to understand the Theme fully (and the meaning of “boar,” “ivy time” and “ninth wave”) was a 13th Century Welsh minstrel named Gwion. The whole argument of The White Goddess is strung on an elaborate unraveling by Graves of the pre-Christian riddles hidden by the wily Gwion in his poems.

What the Sirens Sang. If the reader has the patience to follow it, he will be rewarded by luminously original linkages between ancient calendars, ancient alphabets and ancient rituals from Ireland to Asia Minor. Incidentally he will be given answers to such hoary literary puzzles as what song the sirens sang and what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women (Graves thinks it was “Drosoessa”).

The charm and plausibility of Graves’s style, and his curious, dazzling learning, will not in the end distract critics from trie enormous eccentricity of his position. Like the smart schoolboy with his hand up, ever ready to correct his classmates and often the teacher, Graves dismisses philosophy as a prose logic inferior to poetic logic, thus making a virtue of his apparently total incapacity for philosophical thinking. Christians acquainted with their religion know that it dignifies nature more than Graves’s earthbound Goddess does. And poets may feel that a greater devotee of the Muse could have divulged still more profound secrets about her.