The White Goddess

Robert Graves’s romantic relationships with women are deeply connected to his ideas about the Goddess. He believed it was important, as a poet, to have a muse that one would worship as a representation of the divine. Graves was married twice, but his most dramatic relationship was with the poet Laura Riding. These three women were his main muses. When he composed “The White Goddess,” Graves was with his second wife, Beryl. In addition to his own, particular muses, the poet deified women in general; In a Guardian article, Rosemary March cites Graves as saying to her that certain women “are possessed of this thing I call magic […] They are aware of the power of creation, the love force, and they remind mankind that its soul can recall golden times” (“Robert Graves on Magical Women—Archive, 1968,” The Guardian, 2019). Graves thus ascribes to the feminine a salvific power to redeem elements of humanity (“magic”) that have fallen into neglect in the modern age.

Also, according to the editors of Robert Graves: The Complete Poems, Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward, in “his mid-fifties [Graves] experienced again—through his encounter with a girl of seventeen—her inspiration and apparent betrayal, a pattern that was to continue and dominate the future” (xli). This encounter, and others like it, can be seen in the “cruelty” and “betrayal” (Line 21) the poet includes at the end of “The White Goddess.”