1915
I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.
Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Considered by scholars to be addressed to Robert Graves’s schoolboy crush, G. H. “Peter” Johnstone, “1915” was published in the collection Fairies and Fusiliers (William Heinemann, 1917), written during Graves’s service in World War I. About the poet, Dustan Ward, a retired professor of English at the University of London Institute in Paris, writes in his essay, “Poetic Correspondence: The Verse Letters of Robert Graves,” published in The Robert Graves Review, Issue 3, “Graves’s romantic vision of Johnstone had sustained him through all the wartime horrors: ‘Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack / in these soul-deadening trenches,’ he wrote. In October 1915 he had described [Johnstone] in idealistic terms as ‘my best friend, a poet long before I’ll ever be one, a radiant & unusual creature.’”
Robert Graves
The author of numerous collections of poetry, novels, and translation, Robert Graves fought in World War I and was viewed as an accomplished war poet. Also the author of the historical novel I, Claudius, Graves died in Majorca in 1985.