The White Goddess

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1948

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Goddess Mythology

In his book The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Graves defines the theme he crafts in many of his poems. He writes:

The Theme, briefly, is the antique story [...] of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride, and layer-out (Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. Faber & Faber, 24).

The waxing and waning year refers to the cycle of the seasons, a longer cycle than the related monthly waxing and waning of the moon. In Graves’s poem “The White Goddess,” the changing seasons and threefold nature of the Goddess are emphasized.

Aspects of all of the seasons can be found in “The White Goddess.” There is a direct discussion of “Spring” (Line 15), which is capitalized by the poet to emphasize its importance, and “November” (Line 18) clearly indicates autumn in the northern hemisphere. There are also more indirect references to summer and winter; the “volcano’s” (Line 9) heat represents the heat of summer, and the “pack ice” (Line 10) represents winter. November, the “Rawest of seasons” (Line 19), is where the poem settles in the final stanza. This is when the Goddess’ “nakedly worn magnificence” (Line 20) is on display for the speaker’s group. The four seasons are connected to the threefold nature of the Goddess.

Like the seasons, the three faces of the Goddess are described in varying degrees of directness. The maternal face of the triple-natured Goddess is explicitly mentioned in her alternate name, “Mountain Mother” (Line 16). This is connected with the “young wood a-stir” (Line 15) and the “song-birds shout[ing]” (Line 17). The springtime mother is kind and easy to love. Another face of the Goddess, the bride, is seen in her nakedness that is “gifted” (Line 18) to the speaker’s group in the autumn. She is a sexual, rather than maternal, figure, and her sexuality is powerful enough to cause the group to forget about her third face.

The Goddess’s third face is cruel—the one that chooses the waning year over the waxing year. In the end of “The White Goddess,” her “past betrayal” (Line 21) refers to the previous years’ cycle of choosing one God over another in Graves’s construction of his Goddess-centric “Theme” (The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, 24). Also, the Goddess’s third face is similar to a death doula—a “layer-out” (24) is someone who helps people during the process of dying, the opposite of a midwife or doula. Her cold “cruelty” (Line 21) can be connected to the “ice” (Line 10) of winter.

The myth of the Goddess can be understood as part of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious. Jung’s collective unconscious is a method for compiling similar myths into a single narrative, like Graves’s definition of his “Theme” in his book The White Goddess (24). In his poem “The White Goddess,” Graves’s use of the undefined pronoun “we”—one that lacks a referent that defines how many people are included or who these people are—supports this Jungian reading. “We” (Lines 3, 5, 18, 21) can represent all people who share Graves’s conception and worship of the Goddess or, in other words, a collective.

Human Women as Natural Embodiments of the Goddess

For Graves, the poetic myth of the Goddess carries over into the treatment of human women. “The White Goddess” describes female human features using natural elements. The colors of the Goddess’s lips and hair are described using natural food in hyphenated adjectives. Her lips are “rowan-berry” (Line 13) colored, or the color of berries that grow on undomesticated rowan trees. Her hip-length hair is “honey-coloured” (Line 14), or the color of the honey that bees make. The punctuation used here, more than in any other rhymed couplet, is the hyphen in compound words. These resemble kennings, a literary device from Old English poetry, in that they replace other more common words for colors, such as red and blonde. This choice of a very old literary device gives the poem a mythic tone and makes Graves’s assertions sound more rarefied.

Graves also explicitly includes rowan-berries in his prose descriptions detailing the mythology of the White Goddess. In his prose book The White Goddess, Graves writes, “The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, starling blue eyes and long fair hair” (24). The prose description of her hair does not include honey but matches the length and color of the hair description in the poem. This reiteration of description across genres of writing emphasizes the importance of the Goddess looking like a human woman—a very light-skinned, ghostly woman, but one whose beauty comes from nature.

Furthermore, Graves argues that human women are to be treated as if they are the Goddess. The poet “identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess” (24). The act of humans playing the roles of God and Goddess is central to ritual arts practiced by who Graves calls “covens of the anti-Christian witch-cult” (24), the people whom 21st-century scholars would call Wiccan, Celtic, pagan, or occult groups.

Religious Oppression

Before describing the seekers of the Goddess, the speaker discusses their opposition, developing a sub-theme about religious oppression of the Goddess myth. The speaker’s group is “headstrong and heroic” (Line 8) in their “way” (Line 8), or spiritual path. Stubbornness is not always a positive attribute, so the speaker is admitting the group is not flawless. However, their opposition does not admit such nuance into their ideas; “saints” (Line 1) simply and fully “revile her” (Line 1). They do not admit that any spiritual path alternative to their Christian path has any merit; this is an act of hypocrisy, because the early Christians were oppressed by Romans. This hypocrisy of the “saints” (Line 1) is alluded to with the “cavern of the seven sleepers” (Line 11), which is a holy site in Jordan where a group of young Christian men hibernated for over 300 years to escape religious persecution by the Romans.

The speaker defines the “heroic way” (Line 8) of following the Goddess as more troubled than the plight of the cave sleepers in Jordan. The travelers go “where the track had faded / Beyond the cavern” (Lines 10-11). They are journeying beyond the Jordan holy site, “beyond” (Line 11) being the key word that points to religious oppression of Goddess-worshipers going beyond the oppression of early Christians. In The White Goddess, Graves writes, “In Christianity [...] the Theme is mutilated [...] The cruel, capricious, incontinent White Goddess and mild, steadfast Virgin are not to be reconciled” (425). The “saints” (Line 1) dislike the threefold nature of the Goddess that the poem celebrates alongside the nuanced nature of her followers.