The White Goddess

“The White Goddess” is technically a free-verse poem. Graves invented a form for it based on classical forms in the western literary tradition. The twenty-two lines in “The White Goddess” do not follow a regular meter. The lines range between eight and eleven syllables each, and the stresses vary as well. The lines are broken into three stanzas. The first stanza is a sexain (has six lines) and the second stanza is an octave (has eight lines).

The octave and sexain are most commonly seen together in Italian sonnets; however, in the sonnet form, the octave comes first, and the sexain is called a sestet. Graves’s third stanza is also an octave. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the octave was “a favorite of the troubadours” (969). The troubadours’ chivalric (i.e., the chivalry also seen in Arthurian romances) worship of women is also mirrored in Graves’s worship of his Goddess (and her embodiment in his muses).

However, Graves’s rhyme scheme does not follow the rhyme schemes that appear in other octave and sexain forms. In the Italian ottava rima form (an octave form), the