On Robert Graves' "Recalling War"

Elizabeth Claessens (September 27th, 1999): English 354/Finley

(See peer comments by Nadine Cohen)

In his poem "Recalling War,"Robert Graves writes with twenty years perspective about how the Great War is remembered by the men of his generation. For Graves the common memory of the war is problematic because there is so little physically remaining to remind people of its existence in the past. Not only do the survivors ignore the warís remaining symbols, exemplified here as amputated arms and legs and blindness, but they have forgotten what the war really was. In "Recalling War," Graves criticizes the false memory and attempts to set the record straight.

What marks or scars remain to remind the soldiers that they fought? Are not missing limbs or blindness a constant reminder?

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,

The track aches only when the rain reminds.

The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,

The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.

Even these painfully obvious injuries have been integrated into the routine of post-war life, and forgotten about. Everyone has moved on, except Graves. He writes of "their war," not his own, because their memory is not his. Others are able to function normally with or without their disabilities, as if the war had never interrupted their lives at all. Time has erased the evidence so much so that what little that is left to see only creates bewilderment among survivors. How did we get from there to here they must wonder? The first stanza establishes the sense of distance from the war that Graves finds so frustrating.

"What, then, was the war?"Graves asks the reader at the beginning of the second stanza. It was not the diplomatic disagreement that you falsely recall he argues, but rather "an infection of the common sky," that knew no boundaries and contaminated regardless of season or circumstance. The choice of "infection" is especially powerful because it does not allow for the concepts of right and wrong on which war is so reliant. Graves dismisses patriotism and justice as rallying cries; this infection of the skies was "oppressive" and its oppression incited men to fight:

Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out

Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.

This relieves all sides of personal responsibility while simultaneously criticizing men's eagerness to fight. "Death was young again," he writes, but men were blind as to what fighting and dying meant. The young glorified and romanticized death because it was previously so far removed from them. Graves does not exclude himself from his contemporaries and their fascination with "life's discovered transitoriness," but his twenty years perspective have given him a more realistic view. We were blinded, he is saying, and we could not see how wrong we were because the physical and tangible body was our only concern. Graves laments this so poignantly with this line: "Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind." It is a line full of implications about responsibility and the drive to kill; if the youth "waive the mind" they are essentially waiving their conscience and becoming an army of killers. Obsession with the flesh can be linked to sex or death, and though there really isn't any allusion to sex in "Recalling War," here they appear to be intertwined though the focus of the expression remains on death and killing.

After reminding the reader what the war was really like, Graves reverts back to the false memory for the last stanza. Here, instead of reiterating the first stanza, he sarcastically describes how a truly horrific experience has been remembered after twenty years as a childís game complete with toy guns and tin-soldiers. The war's harsh reality has been lost amidst the bravado and trivialization of death and destruction. Have the men without arms or legs forgotten how they lost them? Graves wants us to reconnect the effects with their causes. His frustration and anger is made more evident in contrast with the previous stanza that sets out to define the war's purpose: the loss of the world's faith and innocence. Prior to the war Graves writes, "the world had still kept head in air." But there is a particular moment when it became unbearable, the infection's oppression, and the "inward scream," signaled "the duty to run mad." Graves is clearly saying that the world's innocence had to end, but he does not think the end has justified the means.