The White Goddess by Robert Graves

First published: 1948

Type of work: Literary criticism

The Work:

Begun in 1944, The White Goddess was to illuminate the path of Robert Graves’s literary career for the next forty years, the larger part of his creative life. Beliefs expressed in this work concerning the obligations of poetry and poets, the rightful relationship of man to woman, and the priority of inspiration would shape all of Graves’s novels, essays, and books of poetry that succeeded it. So central would it remain to his work that it is possible to claim that The White Goddess represented a way of life, or perhaps a religion, to Robert Graves. The book represents a way of life for scholars of his work as well. Some analyses of his work have stressed the influence of The White Goddess not only on the poems written after it but also the poems that preceded it, examining them for the ideas and attitudes that The White Goddess crystallized.

The White Goddess is an indispensable tool for gaining fuller understanding of Graves’s poetry. One may even suggest that this function is the book’s saving grace. Although, as a work of prodigious learning, it leads readers to reevaluate their understanding of the Bronze Age, anthropologists have preferred to ignore The White Goddess or to marginalize it as a poetical fancy or an idiosyncratic embellishment on the studies of James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890).

The blunt boldness and heterodoxy of Graves’s assertions seem calculated to ward off conventional scholars. Indeed, assessing their anticipated reaction, Graves writes, “They cannot refute it—they dare not accept it!” The richness of reference and the fluid intellectual arguments presented in The White Goddess, and the catlike balance it maintains among research, interpretation, and pure imagination, make it one of the most idiosyncratic prose works of the twentieth century.

The White Goddess asserts that poetry embodies fundamental principles, and these may be traced back in time in Europe to a Neolithic faith that celebrated an inspirational figure linked with the moon, known subsequently in a diversity of ancient and modern languages as the white goddess. “In Europe there were at first no male gods contemporary with the Goddess to challenge her prestige or power,” Graves declares. For evidence of this faith, Graves extends the anthropological and mythological studies of Jane Ellen Harrison and James George Frazer, weaving together an intricate system of natural, celestial, linguistic, and numerological relationships.

Graves constructs what he terms a historical grammar of poetic myth. The figure at the center of his grammar is the theme, or the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the god of the waxing year and of his combat with his brother, the god of the waning year, for the love of the capricious threefold goddess. The goddess was, in her various incarnations, their mother, lover, and destroyer. “The male role was that of consort-lover, represented by a star-son, the Hercules type with which poets have traditionally identified themselves,” Graves explains, “and a wise spotted serpent, Erechtheus, his hated rival. As summer succeeded winter, Star-son and Serpent superseded each other in the Moon-woman’s favor.”

This fundamental myth of Bronze Age matriarchal society also has served as inspiration for all poems capable of moving readers profoundly, according to Graves. He asserts that every poem succeeds only insofar as it recapitulates a part of the theme. Graves demonstrates the extraordinary precision of this statement in a succession of polarities, contrasting inspirational and classical poetry, poetic and prosaic modes of perception, proleptic and linear thought, intuitive and deductive reasoning, and so on. Graves argues that such dichotomies mirror the ancient struggle between the old matriarchal religion and the patriarchal one that came later to vanquish and replace it.

Graves organizes his anthropological insights within a facile analysis of two Welsh poems preserved in the thirteenth century manuscript The Red Book of Hergest. The two poems are “Câd Goddeu,” or “The Battle of the Trees,” and the Hanes Taliesin, or The Tale of Taliesin. Speculating that their lack of sustained clarity derives from their having been jumbled in order to conceal (and thus safeguard) heretical secrets they may contain, Graves seeks to decipher the poems by reordering their lines. He discovers that the Hanes Taliesin reflects a seasonal progression from winter solstice to winter solstice in which is encoded the story of the year. The story of the year, in turn, is about the theme. The theme is the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the god of the waxing year. “The Battle of the Trees” records a crucial intellectual conflict between rival bardic traditions, or a battle for religious mastery waged between the patriarchal worshipers associated with Dôn and the matriarchal worshipers associated with the gods Arawn and Bran. The patriarchal bards prevail by discovering and revealing the name of their adversaries’ secret deity.

A great deal of readers’ fascination with The White Goddess rests with Graves’s wholly unorthodox assertions. Graves is able to argue persuasively that the secret name of the ancient Welsh deity revealed by the patrist bards (but not recorded in “The Battle of the Trees”) is none other than Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. Graves finds corroboration for this surprising conjecture in a number of interesting parallels between the Hebrews and the ancient Britons, which include shared dietary laws that forbid the eating of pigs, rabbits, and certain seafood. Graves ascribes the Jewish suppression of vowels in written texts to reverence for the secret name.

Graves’s discovery of Jehovah’s origin provides no less of a shock. Noting Plutarch’s remark that the God of the Jews was actually Dionysus Sabazius, the barley god of Thrace and Phrygia, Graves documents various cultural similarities, such as comparable ritual celebrations in honor of Jehovah and of Dionysus. Pursuing the identification further, through African and Mediterranean religions, Graves establishes a basis in myth and in linguistics to associate Jehovah or Iahu with the worship of the moon goddess: Iahu, he asserts, stood for “the Moon-goddess as ruler of the whole course of the solar year.” Thus, the name of the God uncovered in “The Battle of the Trees” is, in reality, one name of the White Goddess, a name that endowed Bran with authority “to speak oracularly from her kingdom of Dis.” Bran had earned this privilege by progressing through the five significant stages of the year, or “by being born to her, initiated by her, becoming her lover, being lulled to sleep by her, and finally killed by her.”

The seasonal progression depicted in Hanes Taliesin represents an anthropomorphic view of nature; this view is central to matriarchal religion. The patriarchal victory of “The Battle of the Trees” symbolizes the fall of humanity into history and out of affinity with the natural world. Having established the beliefs and practices of the matriarchal age, Graves seeks to compare them with historical beliefs and practices. This comparison yields an understanding of all poetry.

In the matriarchal past, myth and ritual celebrated birth, life, death, and resurrection as indivisible elements of the sacred entirety of nature. This indivisibility was palpable in the seasonal round and in the process of human life. In the succeeding, Olympian, age, myth was turned toward recording “images of man’s political will,” as patriarchy sought to consolidate its triumph over woman by vanquishing nature. The Olympian age introduced the self-reliant Thunder-child, Axe-child, or Hammer-child, superseding the Star-son and the serpent. This age divided the power of the goddess among a plurality of lesser female deities.

The purely patriarchal age, in which there are no goddesses at all (Mary is not a goddess), followed the transitional Olympian phase. This modern age is unfavorable to poetry. Not only has the theme been displaced from the center of culture, but also, concomitantly, an emphasis has been placed on balance and stability, with an implicit warning to avoid extremes. The poet’s quest for inspiration or poetic intoxication is denigrated. For Graves, the graceful classical verses of Horace, Vergil, and John Milton, for all their majesty and metrical beauty, never attain the immediacy of Catullus’s verse. Lacking inspiration, or a genesis in love—for Graves the sole surviving feature of the matriarchal world—the verse of patriarchs falls short of being poetry. Rather, it qualifies as Apollonian poetry, which, Graves suggests, is a type of musical prose, a poor substitute for the material it replaced.

Poetry and prose for Graves are not merely literary genres but also radically divergent modes of thought. The difference between them is crucial in Graves’s system. Prose, he asserts, originated with the classical Greeks and belongs to the patriarchal world. The prosaic mode of thought finds articulation through words carrying only a single sense at a time. The final effect of the prosaic mode is to produce specialists with stringently limited expertise. Of them Graves writes, “To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind.”

The poetic mode, however, “resolves speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combines these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense.” The language of the poetic mode, Graves argues, must seem like nonsense to a mind trained only in comprehending prose. Words in poetry mean more than one thing at a time.

Appraising the modern development of poetic thought, Graves contrasts the ideas of originality held by poets of the Augustan Age and the Victorian era with those of poets he accepts as true poets, such as William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats. The Augustan Age discouraged originality because of its subversiveness. The mid-Victorian era, in which the monarchy and the social order it represented were unpopular, reevaluated originality. This era’s yoking of originality to pedestrian themes, however, meant that originality became trivialized. By contrast, the true poet, addressing his poem to a real woman rather than to posterity, always has to be original, in the simple sense of telling the truth, in his own passionate and peculiar words, about himself and his beloved. Graves’s sincere dedication to this romantic vision makes The White Goddess one of the most significant poetic treatises by an English poet.

Bibliography

Canary, Robert H. Robert Graves. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Includes an abstract of The White Goddess, a survey of critical perspectives on the work, and a look at the book’s relationship to Graves’s novels and poems that succeeded it.

Firla, Ian, and Grevel Lindop, eds. Graves and the Goddess: Essays on Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess.” Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2003. Collection of essays offers a wide range of interpretations, including discussions of the book’s sources, context, and meaning; The White Goddess as a proselytizing text; how Graves proceeded as a poet after publishing The White Goddess; and a comparison of the poetry of Graves, William Butler Yeats, and Seamus Heaney.

Graves, Robert. Five Pens in Hand. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. Contains “The White Goddess,” a lecture delivered in New York in 1957, in which Graves tells how he came to write The White Goddess. Repeats some of the book’s central themes, including Graves’s idea of the poetic mode of thought.

Kernowski, Frank L. The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Portrait of Graves and his work benefits from the author’s own interviews with his subject and from input from Graves’s daughter.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work. 1982. Reprint. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. Provides a chronology of the evolution of The White Goddess. Seymour-Smith is dismissive of Graves’s notion of a prehistoric matriarchy, but he emphasizes the book’s indispensability as a tool for understanding Graves’s poetry.

Vickery, John B. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. Biographical work provides one of the most thorough examinations available of Graves’s debt to James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.