A PARABLE FOR WRITERS
49
millennium B.C. and were called "the People of the Sea." Through
the mercantile tribes Graves artfully creates a union of the Aegean
and Irish seas and a meeting place of ancient civilizations which
range from Asia Minor to the coast of Wales. There, in a Druid for–
est, he reconstructs an alphabet of trees. Is Graves right or wrong in
his speculations? No one will ever be quite sure, for Graves has
shied away from quoting sources concerning the wanderings of the
second millennium B.C. and, at various other points within the book,
keys to his argument are set aside or mislaid. At best one must be
content with a display of his intuition. All this
is
another way of
saying that his case for the White Goddess
in
a
court of law, or
among professional anthropologists (like a Scotch verdict in cer–
tain murder trials ), remains "Not Proven."
What we have is not "a grammar of poetic myth" but a yielding
to an Anglo-Irish flight into irony and passion-and how Irish
Graves can actually become shows when he writes, "there is nothing
in the language to match the Irish poets in vindictiveness, except
what has been written by the Anglo-Irish," and this is spoken from
a deep chamber of the divided heart, rather than brought to light
by scholarship. The statement resembles another passage from the
book:
Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from
the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature
of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the
lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke
of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their
bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: "Kill!
kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood!"
The White Goddess
is,
of course, associated with the moon- but
as
Graves describes her ritual, one
is
less terrified than convinced
that such a vision would leave even the hardiest of poets exhausted
if
not entirely depleted on the following morning-and it would be
imperative for him, I think, should he sit down to write a poem, to
make sure that his emotions were recollected in tranquility.
One had better be content with the conclusion that The White
Goddess with her associations of various mythological origins
is
Graves's muse and that in his book about her, he has been inspired
