the trauma of meter 155
yet Graves, himself a captain, participates in this “academic extravaganza” in
his loosely formed “free verse,” which is, with its odd “straight-laced” rhyme,
anything but “free.” Like Owen’s lament that the “throb” of metrical beats does
not align with his heartbeat, Graves makes the act of aligning metrical feet
menacingly corporeal. The verses are chopped, chewed, hacked, and hewed
like mutton. The “might and right” of classical and military tradition are
made ironic; Owen’s later allusion to Horace’s “sweet and meet,” becomes, for
Graves, “sweet” and “meat”: the coming butchery of the soldierly bodies can
be read as powerfully foreshadowed by the complacency with which soldierly
feet are hacked into Graves’s Skeltonic lines.
Despite the chilling collision of military and metrical form in “Free Verse,”
(later titled, provocatively, “In Spite,” in 1927), the second section of Over the
Brazier titled “La Bassée” (referring to the Battle of La Bassée in the fall of
1914) considers the familiar themes of military and poetic glory. “The Shadow
of Death” laments (like Owen’s prewar letter) that dying young for Graves
would also mean the end of his poetic gift. “Here’s an end to my art! / I must
die and I know it, / With battle murder at my heart — / Sad death for a poet!
// Oh my songs never sung, / And my plays to darkness blown! / I am still so
young, so young, / And my life was my own.” Graves’s unwritten poems are
mourned like dead soldiers or his dead children: “song, / I may father no lon-
ger” (19). In the sonnet, “The Morning Before Battle,” Graves contrasts how
he “carelessly sang, pinned roses on my breast” in the octave, to the stark final
three lines of the sestet that anticipate the now famous image from T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land: “the pale rose / Smelt sickly, till it seemed through a swift
tear-flood / That dead men blossomed in the garden close” (21). Though war
and poetry seem incommensurate in these two poems, Graves comments on
how the war inspires less macabre transformations. “A Renascence” describes
the “white flabbiness” of arms turning into “brown and lean . . . brass bars,”
men who have “steeled a tender, girlish heart, / Tempered it with a man’s
pride, / Learning to play the butcher’s part / Though the woman screams in-
side” (13). The inherent chauvinism of these lines is amplified by the fact that
metrical poetry must be made into a manly art. The men are taught to “leap the
parapet” and “stab the stark bayonet” but the rebirth is not their transforma-
tion from effeminate bystanders into hardened heroes, rather it is the transfor-
mation of this military world—and the misery it brings with it—into poetry.
Graves performs the transformation of brute action into the potentially more
redemptive act of writing poems, thus enacting the rebirth of the title: “of
their travailings and groans / Poetry is born again.”^21
Graves refused to reprint many of these early war poems in later volumes,
though he continued to elaborate on the problems of military and musical
form in his memoir Goodbye to All That (1929). “La Bassée” is where Graves
questions the innocence of marching songs and demonstrates how these take
on a maddening repetition and murderous connotations: