Robert Graves

“ Let meekness crawl below in catacombs,
Pride drives the money-changers with a scourge,
Keeps silence to accusers, chooses death
When an escape is more acceptable
To justice than embarrassment of killing. ”

“ One day I must give you the full history of the famous encounter between the archangel Michael and Lucifer (outlined in the Epistle of Jude) when Lucifer asked the riddle still current in English speaking nurseries and Michael dared not answer or even curse him, because an open discussion of this particular point might prove dangerous to the fortunes of Jehovah. In the Revelations chapter which provides the familiar lesson for All Saints’ Day we hear that Michael had to admit the implied charge by resorting to violence. But guess the riddle and you shall have the answer given you ”

“ When at last the sour grapes idea, with its accompanying fantastics, has determined a reasonable and apparently final decision of rupture both with the girl herself and with the traditional religion she represents, the effort relaxes and the mind is overborne in sleep by nightmares, its revolutionary enthusiasm flattened by the reaction of tradition. ”

“ The Morning Star theme is an interpolation by the outside Orator to stabilize the drama which without some such solution comes dangerously near a manifesto of atheism.
When you visit us in England I want to talk to you about Lucifer and explain how I had been reading the Old and New Testaments while writing this poem. Briefly in this way, as a record of the progressive understanding of God throughout the ages by a single representative race, the Jews. God is presented in three degrees at least. ”

“ Assure them that neither does the author nor in a more normal mood would the hero of the poem himself imagine convent [6] life to be what it here seems to be; but that the staggering rebuff to the young man’s typical bullying attitude in love leads him to invent this monstrous libel in compensation; which libel is merely flattery to his own wounded pride. ”

“ Explain that it is a study of a fatigued mind in a fatigued body and under the stress of an abnormal conflict, that they can read it, if they will, as a cautionary tale after the style of John Bunyan’s unregenerate Mr Badman, only that Badman was unregenerate (wasn’t he?) to the last, while I leave my young man in the throes of nightmare. ”

“ This Light-Bringer Lucifer has been persistently misidentified by the priests of Jehovah with the spirit of [8] Evil, their God’s arch-enemy. But I would have it put like this: if John Milton had paused to enquire why Jesus Christ promised his followers the Morning Star as a reward for virtue, Milton would have been spared the compunction which certainly was besetting him in Paradise Lost for having conceived of his Prince of Darkness as so much of a gentleman. ”

“ The story of Lucifer’s fall is clearly written in the Acts of the Apostles; where the violence of Moses towards the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath Day is worthily imitated by Peter when he strikes dead Ananias and Sapphira for a partial witholding of a voluntary gift ”