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Over the Brazier
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
- GenresPoetryBritish Literature
36 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2000
2 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Robert Graves
637 books2,061 followersRobert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. Born in Wimbledon, he received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 5 reviews
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December 13, 2014Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
January 27, 2022
There are a number of wonderful poems in this short volume. Those interested in war poetry will appreciate many of them for the perspective they give of the first world war.
My personal favorite poem from this collection is 'The Dying Knight and the Fauns.’ It has a dreamy quality, but imparts a solid, visceral feeling as well, with its beautiful and tragic imagery. It would lend itself well to a Pre-Raphaelite style painting, but as far as I know, no one has ever painted it.
My personal favorite poem from this collection is 'The Dying Knight and the Fauns.’ It has a dreamy quality, but imparts a solid, visceral feeling as well, with its beautiful and tragic imagery. It would lend itself well to a Pre-Raphaelite style painting, but as far as I know, no one has ever painted it.
September 14, 2024
I read this book via its Project Gutenberg upload, thus meaning that it was slightly edited from its 1916 edition - the intro by Graves said he had excised a few of his early poems. I don't think this was a great loss, because the early poems of his are largely nothing spectacular - which of course, makes sense, because he was a kid when he wrote them. It does definitely serve as insight into his growth as a poet, since many of his early pastoral poems read as pretty derivative of 19th century poems by better poets you've read before, with occasional jumps out of the mold in the form of three poems: "Free Verse", an endearing piece about experimenting with poetic form, "Youth and Folly", in which you can see shades of the atheism he would develop as he grew older, and "Oh, and Oh!", a poem that cracks me up a bit because it's a pining love poem written before Graves knew he liked women as well as men, so though it's not obvious it's written to another boy, it sure does go out of its way to dunk on heterosexuals for no reason. Those were pretty much the only ones I found of interest in those works of his youth, even though his young poems take up more than half of the volume.
His war poems, naturally, are the highlight of the piece. It feels a very cruel thing to say, considering how his earlier poems have such a childlike innocence to them that is lost in trauma and horror, but given that the war is when he was older and had begun to mature as a writer, the unfortunate result is that his most painful poems in this volume are his best. Aside from one blip that accidentally interfered with my ability to appreciate one of his poems (the "rhyming" pair of "breast" and "East" - breest?? Est??), they range from "fairly good" to "made me tear up a bit". I like the dark humor and atypical form of "The Trenches", and "The Dead Fox Hunter" broke my heart because, unless I'm misremembering, I believe it was eulogizing an actual friend of his and Sassoon's who was killed during the war. "1915" offers a quieter, far sadder love poem of his (again, not explicitly queer, but written before he was known to love any women) than his more immature "Oh, and Oh!", and I particularly liked the ending of "Big Words", which seems a disparaging response to his older poem "The Dying Knight and the Faun", and of its degree of glorification of death in battle. But the poem the volume is named after, "Over the Brazier", is probably the best - in its small, human conversations, and its quiet despair.
I'm not a poet, nor do I read a lot of poetry in my free time (not because I have anything against it, I just typically read and write fictional prose), so perhaps I'm not the most qualified to review this piece, but I think it serves as an interesting, tragic look into one man trying to express his traumatic experiences in art.
His war poems, naturally, are the highlight of the piece. It feels a very cruel thing to say, considering how his earlier poems have such a childlike innocence to them that is lost in trauma and horror, but given that the war is when he was older and had begun to mature as a writer, the unfortunate result is that his most painful poems in this volume are his best. Aside from one blip that accidentally interfered with my ability to appreciate one of his poems (the "rhyming" pair of "breast" and "East" - breest?? Est??), they range from "fairly good" to "made me tear up a bit". I like the dark humor and atypical form of "The Trenches", and "The Dead Fox Hunter" broke my heart because, unless I'm misremembering, I believe it was eulogizing an actual friend of his and Sassoon's who was killed during the war. "1915" offers a quieter, far sadder love poem of his (again, not explicitly queer, but written before he was known to love any women) than his more immature "Oh, and Oh!", and I particularly liked the ending of "Big Words", which seems a disparaging response to his older poem "The Dying Knight and the Faun", and of its degree of glorification of death in battle. But the poem the volume is named after, "Over the Brazier", is probably the best - in its small, human conversations, and its quiet despair.
I'm not a poet, nor do I read a lot of poetry in my free time (not because I have anything against it, I just typically read and write fictional prose), so perhaps I'm not the most qualified to review this piece, but I think it serves as an interesting, tragic look into one man trying to express his traumatic experiences in art.
September 8, 2025
Excellent. I wasn’t so strongly moved one way or the other by the first set of poems, but having just read GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, I was especially primed to love the war poems. Favorites include Nursery Memories, It’s a Queer Time, and Over the Brazier. I love Graves’ translation, mythological scholarly work and prose writing, but I hadn’t read his poetry before. Can’t wait to read more in this collection.
Read in ‘The Complete Poems Collection’ by Penguin Modern Classics (Kindle)
最初の詩は良かったけどそんなに感動してなかった。けどさっき「さらば古きものよ」読んだから第一次世界大戦についての詩すごく感動してた。色んな「戦争のインスピレーションけど話は他の話題について」よかった
Read in ‘The Complete Poems Collection’ by Penguin Modern Classics (Kindle)
最初の詩は良かったけどそんなに感動してなかった。けどさっき「さらば古きものよ」読んだから第一次世界大戦についての詩すごく感動してた。色んな「戦争のインスピレーションけど話は他の話題について」よかった
Displaying 1 - 4 of 5 reviews