Cabbage white

Robert Graves is one of my favourite poets and writers… I haven’t read any of his work for a while so maybe I should go back and look at it… I have a book of his poems behind me on the book shelf… He was born in 1895 and lived an extraordinary life. With this being the centenary of the start of World War 1, I guess many people will be reading or rereading ‘Goodbye To All That’, a classic. He was a close friend of Siegfried Sassoon and also knew Wilfred Owen. After the war he wrote many novels including ‘I, Claudius’ which was made into  a remarkable TV series. His poetry is wonderful and if you haven’t read it, I really recommend that you do. Robert Graves died in 1985

I was doing some writing, and thought of this funny little poem which many of us will have learned at school, and may have been the first time we came across Graves!

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has – who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves