For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.
Robert GravesRead
Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the harsh realities of war and the bittersweet nature of survival.
In this quote, Robert Graves captures the grim logic of survival in the context of warfare. The act of pooling resources before an attack illustrates the communal bonding that occurs in life-or-death situations, where material possessions become secondary to the instinct of survival. It starkly conveys that those lost in battle have no opportunity to voice their grievances, while the survivors receive a token of consolation that pales in comparison to the trauma and sacrifices they endure.
Themes
WarSurvivalPainSacrificeCommunity
In practice
Example use cases
During a memorial speech for fallen soldiers, this quote can highlight the shared experience of loss and survival.
More from Robert Graves
All quotes →To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
Robert GravesRead
A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.
Robert GravesRead
Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood!
Robert GravesRead
No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Robert GravesRead
Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.
Robert GravesRead
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