You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both, through fields of thought confined,
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
_Robert Graves_
Robert Graves was born July 26, 1895. One of "the three rhyming
musketeers" (the other two being the poets Siegfried Sassoon and
Robert Nichols), he was one of several writers who, roused by the war
and giving himself to his country, refused to glorify warfare or chant
new hymns of hate. Like Sassoon, Graves also reacts against the storm
of fury and blood-lust (see his poem "To a Dead Boche"), but,
fortified by a lighter and more whimsical spirit, where Sassoon is
violent, Graves is volatile; where Sassoon is bitter, Graves is almost
blithe.
An unconquerable gayety rises from his _Fairies and Fusiliers_ (1917),
a surprising and healing humor that is warmly individual. In _Country
Sentiment_ (1919) Graves turns to a fresh and more serious simplicity.
But a buoyant fancy ripples beneath the most archaic of his ballads
and a quaintly original turn of mind saves them from their own echoes.