A Slice of Strawberry Poetry with Robert von Ranke Graves

Image Credit: spartacus-educational.com

Yesterday, we celebrated National Strawberry Month with some delicious tea flavors from a few of our favorite tea experts. Today, we are serving up the poem, A Ballad Of Nursery Rhyme, by English poet, translator and novelist, Robert von Ranke Graves, for a slice of strawberry inspired poetry to accompany your strawberry tea.

Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths; his memoir of his early life, including his role in the First World War, Good-Bye to All That; and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print. His versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular, for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

A Ballad Of Nursery Rhyme

By Robert von Ranke Graves

    Strawberries that in gardens grow

     Are plump and juicy fine,

    But sweeter far as wise men know

     Spring from the woodland vine.

    No need for bowl or silver spoon,

     Sugar or spice or cream,

    Has the wild berry plucked in June

     Beside the trickling stream.

    One such to melt at the tongue's root,

     Confounding taste with scent,

    Beats a full peck of garden fruit:

     Which points my argument.

    May sudden justice overtake

     And snap the froward pen,

    That old and palsied poets shake

     Against the minds of men;

    Blasphemers trusting to hold caught

     In far-flung webs of ink

    The utmost ends of human thought,

     Till nothing's left to think.

    But may the gift of heavenly peace

     And glory for all time

    Keep the boy Tom who tending geese

     First made the nursery rhyme.

    By the brookside one August day,

     Using the sun for clock,

    Tom whiled the languid hours away

     Beside his scattering flock,

    Carving with a sharp pointed stone

     On a broad slab of slate

    The famous lives of Jumping Joan,

     Dan Fox and Greedy Kate;

    Rhyming of wolves and bears and birds,

     Spain, Scotland, Babylon,

    That sister Kate might learn the words

     To tell to Toddling John.

    But Kate, who could not stay content

     To learn her lesson pat,

    New beauty to the rough lines lent

     By changing this or that;

    And she herself set fresh things down

     In corners of her slate,

    Of lambs and lanes and London Town.

     God's blessing fall on Kate!

    The baby loved the simple sound,

     With jolly glee he shook,

    And soon the lines grew smooth and round

     Like pebbles in Tom's brook,

    From mouth to mouth told and retold

     By children sprawled at ease

    Before the fire in winter's cold,

     In June beneath tall trees;

    Till though long lost are stone and slate,

     Though the brook no more runs,

    And dead long time are Tom, John, Kate,

     Their sons and their sons' sons;

    Yet, as when Time with stealthy tread

     Lays the rich garden waste,

    The woodland berry ripe and red

     Fails not in scent or taste,

    So these same rhymes shall still be told

     To children yet unborn,

    While false philosophy growing old

     Fades and is killed by scorn.