The White Goddess

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1948

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“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 rhyme scheme is abababcc, and the octave ballade form in French and English has a rhyme scheme of ababbcbc. Sexains in English poetry often have the rhyme scheme ababcc. Graves uses rhyming couplets throughout “The White Goddess,” often employing slant rhyme, to create a rhyme scheme of aabbccdd in each of his octaves. His opening sestet has the rhyme scheme aabbcc. The entirety of “The White Goddess” has the rhyme scheme aabbcc ddeeffgg cccchhii, where the -er rhyme of Lines 3 and 4 is repeated in Lines 15, 16, 17, and 18.

Rhyming couplets are frequently seen in nursery rhymes. Graves was very fond of this childhood form, saying, “The best of the older [nursery rhymes] are nearer to poetry than the greater part of The Oxford Book of English Verse” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 960).

Blazon

In addition to the octave, Graves uses another literary device from troubadours, the blazon. The blazon is a list of descriptions of a woman’s features, usually starting high up the body and working downwards. In Lines 12-14, the speaker lists features of the Goddess, starting with her brow, or forehead, and ending at her hips. Graves’s descriptions emphasize her blue eyes and titular whiteness. The White Goddess’s brow is “white as any leper’s” (Line 12), echoing Graves’s prose description of her “deathly pale face” (The White Goddess, 24). Where troubadours and Arthurian romances associate whiteness with fairness and purity, Graves associates whiteness with sickness and death, emphasizing the darkest side of the Goddess’s threefold nature.

Graves casting the Goddess’ whiteness as deathly contrasts with Shakespeare’s rebuttal of the blazon’s stereotypical whiteness in “Sonnet 130”—“If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun” (Line 3). Graves uses the blazon device at the end of the second stanza, which is the end of the sexain and octave, or first 14 lines. The length of this particular section (14 lines) further connects Graves’s poem and the Shakespearean sonnet, which also typically has 14 lines (an octave and a sestet).

Greek Allusion

In crafting his version of the White Goddess myth, Graves uses allusion—a literary device whereby a work references something beyond itself (usually another work of art or a historical event or figure), oftentimes indirectly. In the case of “The White Goddess,” the poet draws upon Greek mythology and philosophy. He discusses the men “Ruled by the God Apollo’s golden mean” (Line 2); Apollo is frequently mentioned in Graves’s prose work The White Goddess. He writes, “Apollo, though the God of Poetry and leader of the Muses, did not yet, however, claim to inspire poems: the inspiration was still held to come to the poet from the Muse” (391). Graves argues that the Triple Goddess, or “Triple Muse” (392) predates Apollo and is the source of true poetic inspiration.

This formulation means that the “sober men” (Line 1) who follow Apollo follow a lesser God. Graves argues for a more ecstatic, or excessive, style of worship than the “sober” (Line 1) mathematical reasoning of the golden mean. The golden mean, an ideology of moderation, is part of Greek philosophical thought, including the works of Aristotle. Graves later expands his commentary on Apollo, and Greek mythology more generally, in his 1955 book The Greek Myths.