The Feather Bed

THE FEATHER BED BY ROBERT GRAVES
With a cover design by WILLIAM NICHOLSON
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE HOGARTH PRESS HOGARTH HOUSE RICHMOND 1923




My dear Ransome,
Will you accept the dedication of this poem which seems naturally yours? It was more than a year writing without losing much of the excitement of the original scheme, but when on the cooling of inspiration constructional flaws appeared, these proved to be beyond help of riveting and surface tinkering, so the edition is small and very few review copies will go out. Still the poem is a necessary signpost to those friends of mine who have found the change between the two halves of my recent collection of lyrics, Whipperginny , inexplicably abrupt: and though dissatisfied I am not ashamed. It would be as well, from other considerations altogether, not to let the honest burghers of Nashville, Tenn., already scandalized by your Poems about God , see a copy of the Feather-bed : but if this should happen and they demand an explanation, tell them that I have no anticonstitutional intentions. 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. Assure them that neither does the author nor in a more normal mood would the hero of the poem himself imagine convent 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.
The psychological interest of the piece for me, now I have finished, is in the way that the logical argument broken by circlings of associative thought, all however relevant to the emotional disturbance, is continually being caught up again with an effort by the drowsy intellect. 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.