Country Sentiment

Robert Graves's Country Sentiment is a sharp, intimate collection where nursery-rhyme music, folk-song warmth, and ironic wit meet the darker truths of rural life, war, and memory. From playful portraits of children, parents, ghosts, and household secrets to unsettling moral fables about vanity, pride, desire, and social folly, these poems turn ordinary scenes into moments of surprise and unease. Graves moves easily between tenderness and satire, using ballad rhythms, dialogue, and vivid imagery to show how innocence is shadowed by experience. The collection ranges widely: theater can become a revelation, love a bittersweet bargain, and nature a harsh but beloved country of the imagination. Myths, outlaws, old gods, wartime memories, and legendary beasts all appear beside cupboards, beacons, birds, and rain, linking the domestic to the uncanny. Throughout, Graves emerges as a poet of paradox—playful yet grave, lyrical yet skeptical, deeply human in his attention to fear, resilience, and the stubborn persistence of feeling. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.