Graves on Lovers, and Shakespeare at a Lovers’ Funeral

Summary

In the Foreword to his Collected Poems 1965, Robert Graves wrote that his ‘main theme was always the practical impossibility, transcended only by a belief in miracle, of absolute love continuing between man and woman’.

Certainly a large proportion of Grave’s poetry is about love; and the range of experience is wide. At one end are humorous or disgusted encounters with sex, and at the other triumphant claims that the miracle he allows for has come about, in the love between himself and embodiments of his Muse or Goddess.

Somewhere in the realistic or even disillusioned area is the popular anthology selection 'The Thieves'. It is short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

Lovers in the act dispense

With such meum-tuum sense

As might warningly reveal

What they must not pick or steal,

And their nostrum is to say:

' I and you are both away.'

After, when they disentwine

You from me and yours from mine,

Neither can be certain who

Was that I whose mine was you.

To the act again they go

More completely not to know.

Theft is theft and raid is raid

Though reciprocally made.

Lovers, the conclusion is

Doubled sighs and jealousies

In a single heart that grieves

For lost honour among thieves.