Robert Graves signed this portrait for me with his inky pen when I was a student at UCC in 1975. When does our adult life begin? Like the loner Lois in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, I often ask myself that question about beginnings. But I think adulthood began its long beginning for me on that evening in May, 1975, when I was twenty-one, a day when I sat beside Robert Graves and his wife Beryl at the Oyster Tavern in Cork after a wonderful UCC English Literature Society reading. As I wrote in a February Reading List in POETRY, at one point on that evening long ago, Robert Graves at dinner turned to me and said ‘Thomas, I’ve been to Heaven several times this month.’

Around the restaurant table were John and Evelyn Montague and Seán and Pat Lucy, and Theo Dorgan, poet and UCC’s leading student-poet and Graves expert, a youthful master of both The White Goddess and Poetic Unreason. There must have been others there as well, but I can’t remember now. The atmosphere was electric, as it always is when people know that they are in the presence of true literary greatness. Although Graves was 80 years old that summer, his presence was still dominating and overwhelming. He spoke about the past, he had so much of the past to speak about. When I asked him about Edward Marsh’s Georgians and what they were like he said to me that Rupert Brooke was the nicest of the entire circle around Marsh and Harold Munro. He also said that ‘of that lot’ Winston Churchill was the only gentleman. He said that poetry was no longer being written in England but that he got ‘the sense of poetry’ when he landed in Ireland. He believed in these feelings, in hauntings, in the sense of things. But his ‘sense of things’ was wrong because the following decade would see the ‘Martians,’ and the greatest flowering of English poetry since the 1930s; a flowering that continues to this day (just think: Craig Raine, George Szirtes, Pascale Petit, Sasha Dugdale, James Fenton, Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Oswald etc. How wrong can a poet’s ‘sense of things’ be?) Graves was 80 and I wasn’t aware of that limitation back then.

But at the reception afterwards, that day in 1975, Graves was besieged by worshippers. He became very fatigued, with his distressed, elderly face becoming the colour of aluminium. I was worried then. He looked at the crush of students, then looked at me, and seemed very frightened. I didn’t know then, nobody knew, that he’d already been touched by the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually freeze his life. I talked to him as if I was talking to an elderly patient. Montague addressed him as if addressing the crowd, saying that I’d be the first gardener-poet of Ireland. I wasn’t sure if this was true, but it could have been true. At the time I thought that Montague was in a very academic, categorising frame of mind: like all graduates of that intense UCD of the 1940s, from Anthony Cronin to Denis Donoghue, John had rushes of theorist blood before settling back into poetry. Right then he saw himself as the Exile-Poet, Heaney as the Farmer-Poet, Richard Ryan as the Diplomat-Poet, Theo Dorgan as the Lover-Poet; and now he wanted me, his other student-poet, to become the Gardener-Poet - well, at least while Graves was in town. The categories might change later. John was happiest once a category had been settled upon. One thing was certain that evening: Robert Graves had never ceased to be the Servant-Poet of the White Goddess. He had consulted the Oracle, he had spoken with ghosts, he had been to Heaven and back. The firmness of his poetic convictions were thrilling. He was exactly as we expected a great poet to be, trenchant, provocative, wise, amusing, and worn out.

When the Master-Poet said that he had been to Heaven several times that month, I thought he had taken too much drink, until he showed me his box (silver with what looked like an emerald set into the lid), a little box of hallucinogenic mushrooms that had been a gift from Carlos Castanada after a reading in New Mexico. Graves’ wife Beryl slapped him on the wrist and said ‘You mustn’t ruin that young boy with your dirty mushrooms!’ He returned his magic mushrooms to his pocket very sheepishly. What an old devil he was, what a pure, irresponsible lyricist of the mid-Century. Still, his sanity was recovered every ten years with every new version of his Collected Poems.

Later, at the not very successful seminar in the English Dept.( the poet was too tired) Graves was asked if he had any advice for budding poets. He answered ‘Poets, if you are budding come into bloom!’ One of the most amusing incidents during that visit occurred when John Montague suggested that he and the poets present, certainly Theo Dorgan, should be anointed. Theo and I bowed while Graves patted our heads, in the same manner that Graves bowed when Thomas Hardy had patted him on the head, Hardy who had bowed when Robert Browning or Coventry Patmore patted him on the head, as Browning or Patmore had bowed when Lord Tennyson had patted him on the head, just as Tennyson had bowed while Coleridge had patted him on the head; so that the patting on the head came all the way from Coleridge to us, thanks to Robert Graves. Interestingly, no female student-poet present wished to be patted on the head, it was is if all this patting of men and boys would have to come to an end in poetry. Women would touch their own heads and do their own anointing, thank you very much.

That May I was with the printers constantly about my troublesome covers for my own small poetry pamphlet, Shattered Frost ( fellow student poet Patrick Crotty remarked unhelpfully at the time ‘Tom, frost doesn’t shatter, ice does’).We all went off to read our poems that month, and the poems of Yeats, at the Old Presbyterian Church in Princes Street, the same church where the future painter of the Royal Academy, Daniel Maclise, had sung as a boy. As always, a great poet had left a vapour trail of enthusiasm behind, enthusiasm for all and every kind of poetry. The atmosphere must have lasted a month at least, a month that included reading Betjeman and Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill’s Annunciations and Mercian Hymns and Tomas Tranströmer’s Night Vision. Not long after I met the young Lisgoold poet Maurice Riordan in the College Quod and he showed me the new Heaney book, North (Riordan was then the Poet-Prince of a tight group of literati who had been educated at St. Colman’s College, a boarding-school that educated James Joyce’s father, the Republican Frank Ryan, not to mention the novelists Canon Sheehan and Tadhg Coakley) Heaney’s North was a stunner of a book, a beautiful production with a grand Edward McGuire portrait on the cover. It was more than a book, it was a kind of towering new statement, calculated to assert and annoy, like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Yeats’ Winding Stair or Kinsella’s Another September. Something of the effect of Gravesean magic mushrooms had fizzled out when suddenly placed against this Ulster bogland, this violent peaty Irishness. Maurice Riordan and I looked at each other in the summer sunshine, both of us still dazed from the enormity of Robert Graves, certainly, but urgently re-centred by this Ulster voice: that L’Ombra di Derry that would send us Southern poets in girum nocte et diem for all our poetic lives. We both felt a sudden real sense that Heaney had now arrived at the zenith of Irish poetry, that he had just staked a huge pioneering claim to vast territories of poetic imagination. Mossy Riordan agreed that from now on all the others would be running themselves ragged in order to catch up with him. In terms of public profile he was now light years ahead of the Irish pack; so far ahead that he didn’t even hear them snarling at his ankles. I raced into town, never pausing for breath, just to get my own copy of that new book in the Mercier Bookshop. Like a child racing for the last copy of the Hotspur in the early Sixties, I was terrified that the collection would be sold out. I managed to get the last copy in the shop. It’s really funny the way our adulthood can begin, but mine began with a poet from the mythical trenches of the Great War; and with that new, exhilarating sense of being alive sharpened by the flint of a great new Ulster talent. The words of Robert Graves sum up the wonderful feeling of that summer, though: the wonderful feeling of being a young poet and present at the beginning of important things. Words like these that are worth their weight in gold:

‘Now I begin to know at last, These nights when I sit down to rhyme, The form and measure of that vast God we call Poetry, he who stoops And leaps me through his paper hoops A little higher every time.’