The Cool Web
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
Robert Graves was in his early 30s when he wrote this fierce, small masterpiece, first published in 1927 (in Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry). Directly and indirectly, Graves’s creative output continued to be shaped by his front-line experience as a captain of the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the first world war. His soldiering had been abruptly terminated by a near-fatal bullet to the lung in 1916.
Like a nursery rhyme, The Cool Web rocks between nightmare and lullaby. It’s not a children’s poem, but, unfortunately for me, I first read it when I was a child, and for several years failed to get beyond feeling personally insulted by the opening assertions: “Children are dumb to say how hot the day is …” Oh, no, we’re not, I thought, isn’t that typical of the way adults underestimate us! It was years before I understood the rest of the argument, and felt the impact of the poem as a whole.
Graves was a reluctant war poet: he excluded certain work from his later collections because of his dislike for “the war-poem boom”. He always knew instinctively that language might throw a decorative veil over experience, and he believed that the Muse demanded simplicity of expression. In The Cool Web, simplicity merges with symbolism, and the horror is all the more palpably lurking because of the simple, almost evasive vocabulary. The echoing couplet-refrains of the first two stanzas are notable for their everyday colloquial words: “hot”, “dreadful”, “angry” and “fright”. These lines are climactic: they respond to, and give a menacing turn to, the traditional poetic symbols of hot days and the scent of roses – connecting them, with heightened perception, to anger and cruelty. The image of the drumming soldiers, meanwhile, has lost its archaism and acquired a nightmarish menace with the description of the men as “tall”. Like the monster cat in A Child’s Nightmare these soldiers are not entirely of this world.
The metre is a mixture of strict and supple. The opening foot, “Children are dumb” subverts a strong iambic pulse which seems always to be lying in wait for the poem, but never stifles movement when it appears. Similarly unforced, the rhyme-scheme limits full consonance to a final couplet in the first three stanzas, firmed up to an ABAB pattern to conclude the last sestet. In Harp, Anvil, Oar, one of his Cambridge Clark lectures, Graves called on his wonderful historical imagination to explain this characteristic contrast between flexible and strict prosody in English verse. Flexibility comes from the Anglo-Saxon sea-farers, chanting their unrhymed hemistichs to the to-and-fro rhythm of the oars; rigid metre belongs to the hammer-tapping smiths he hears at work in Irish verse.
In The Cool Web, there’s also a shifting lexical pattern. Stanza three, line four, sounds a seductive Latinate diapason: “We grow sea-green at last and coldly die / In brininess and volubility.” The poem was written many years before The White Goddess, but could the wateriness and sea-greenness advert to the third of the Goddess’s three aspects (birth, erotic love and death)? The poet, perhaps, imagines losing his muse in an excess of self-consciousness and word-wit. “Brininess and volubility” are a dangerous if splendid duo.
Finally, Graves takes his argument to its logical extreme, and imagines experience without the salve of language, a confrontation with sensory overload so unmitigated it leads to madness and death. His imagination is almost certainly returning to the battlefield, to the shattering noises of bombardment, the screams of the wounded, the half-sighted eyes “facing the wide glare of the children’s day, / Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums …” It’s a merciless and powerful conclusion.
In another of his Clark lectures, Graves asserted “the poet’s chief loyalty is to the Goddess Calliope, not to his publisher or to the booksellers on his publisher’s mailing list.” So he might not have agreed to being “featured” on Poem of the week. But, as the most purely lyrical of the 20th-century English language poets, he’d surely have been glad to know that, in 2017, his work had inspired a new musical composition. The Cool Web: A Robert Graves Oratorio by Jools Scott was premiered in Bath Abbey at the end of October. Next year, it will be performed as part of the official commemorations marking the centenary of the first world war’s end.
