This image of Robert Graves comes from WarPoets.org. In his account of World War I, Robert Graves noted a staggering fact which almost nobody knows or remembers: “At least one in three of my generation at school was killed [in World War I], and the average life of the infantry subaltern on the Western front was, at some stages of the war, only about three months.” I quote here Robert Graves’s account of the first World War because it’s vital in understanding his poem below.

DEAD COW FARM

An ancient saga tells us how
In the beginning the First Cow
(For nothing living yet had birth
But Elemental Cow on earth)
Began to lick cold stones and mud:
Under her warm tongue flesh and blood
Blossomed, a miracle to believe:
And so was Adam born, and Eve.
Here now is chaos once again,
Primeval mud, cold stones and rain.
Here flesh decays and blood drips red,
And the Cow’s dead, the old Cow’s dead.

— Robert Graves (1895–1985)

The following is a draft which Robert Graves corrected in the final manuscript. I include it here primarily as a point of interest. Note the self-editorial acumen in Robert Graves changing the opening of his war poem (“I’ve read an ancient saga, how” becomes “An ancient saga tells us how”):

Image from World War I First Digital Archive

Note the self-editorial acumen, as I say above and repeat again now, in Robert Graves changing the opening of his war poem — and the reason I repeat myself here is to emphasize that this is a war poem and cannot be properly understood outside the context of war. It simply cannot.

War is chaos.

World Wars are the most chaotic wars of all.

Retrospectively, when we have decades of history and the wisdom of history to draw from and when we therefore know the outcome of wars — World War I, for example, wherein Captain Robert von Ranke Graves was brutally injured and pronounced dead (forever after shell-shocked from this experience) — it becomes stupidly simple to let slip from mind and memory the chaos created by war. By this I mean that it becomes far too easy for us to lose perspective on the full context of war because that context fades rapidly from memory after the immediacy of the horror has passed.

It then becomes tragically simple to forget that when you’re living through the atrocities of wartime — as we are now living through precisely such atrocities, in a bioterror war conducted with unprecedented stealth — the final outcome is always uncertain.

Will the malevolent chaotic forces responsible for the initiation of aggression prevail?

Will the people being attacked by these forces of aggression, the individual humans striving to battle back, lose their lives?

I say to you again: it becomes stupidly, tragically simple to forget the chaos created by war — the utter and yet unutterable chaos that war generates.

Make no mistake, however, and never let yourself forget: all war is chaos, and the outcomes are always far from certain.

Never forget also: the root of all war is found precisely in the initiation of force and aggression. It’s found precisely here and nowhere else.

War is the initiation of force and aggression.

War is the initiation of force and aggression.

War is not the battling back.

The battling back has a different name, which is Justice.

Justice is righting the wrong.

Another name for justice is proportionality, which is also called fairness.

War is chaos.

Chaos is the opposite of life, which is death.

War is by definition chaos, and war can only be instigated by governments.

Why?

Because government is the only apparatus which possesses legal control over and legal privilege to instigate force and aggression, and to do so with impunity.

Government alone is for this reason responsible for all wars in history, all wars presently, and all wars to come, because war is the instigation of force politically enacted, state-sanctioned, governmentally maintained, managed, and controlled.

The psychological manipulation and confusion and terror that issue from the well of chaos are exactly what the political purveyors of force and the state ministers of coercion seek first and most fundamentally of all to instill within humankind — to instill and sustain: chaos and the terror and confusion that chaos generates.

The first two lines of Robert Graves’s poem deliberately (yet obliquely) echo the Book of Genesis — specifically, I believe, in how the beginning of time is biblically portrayed — which is then reinforced in line eight, when Robert Graves names Adam and Eve explicitly.

“An ancient saga” — also from the opening line — refers to obscure Nordic mythology, which concerns a mythical cow and describes this mythical cow as the creator of life on earth.

The Cow in this poem is a figurehead and symbol of ultimate good.

The Cow is a life-giving force standing diametrically opposed to the forces of chaos.

Chaos is death.

It’s neither poetic accident nor linguistic coincidence that “Cow” and “God” both contain three letters.

The Cow is thus capitalized in the poem to represent God.

I find in this fact the key to unlocking the entirety of Robert Graves’s brief, bleak, beautiful, cryptic poem and the fundamental meaning Graves intended, which meaning is profound.

Robert Graves, in all his poetic imagination and syncretic brilliance, has integrated two disparate origin myths and made them into one, and made them into his own.

Robert Graves, like all other war poets, was one soldier striving to speak for himself and for the countless million non-writing soldiers — striving to articulate poetically the monstrous chaos created by war, including most terrifying of all the unknown outcomes of these acts of aggression and the initiation of force, which is war, which is chaos, which is death.

Will these forces of death prevail?

The answer to that question is entirely unknown ahead of time.

As the later poet Edna St. Vincent Millay memorably wrote, though in a completely different context:

The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent there is no death.
But what does that signify?

I have an answer to her question:

There is nothing greater than life.

The will is eternal.

Goodness is timeless.

[Editor’s note: To those readers who interpreted this essay as being about or in some way related to the issue of abortion, you’re fools.

This essay is not in any way about abortion. It never was. It never will be.

Neither was Voltaire making any comment about abortion when he wrote “Nothing is greater than life” — nor am I in recalling his words.

“Nothing is greater than life” is a metaphysical statement. It’s not a politico-economic statement — not at all — and certainly not a politico-economic statement about abortion. Anybody somehow able to with a straight face interpret the words “Nothing is greater than life” in this way is a fool, an arrant fool.

More specifically, she or he is a tendentious bipartisan arrant fool who for absolute certain “aligns” her or himself along the left-hand side of the so-called political spectrum, which, incidentally, is in actuality a figment — a figment and instrument which is without question the most effective method of indoctrination invented in over a century.  

Which is why everything you read and hear and see today is filtered through this instrument, this figment, this invention of control called the political spectrum — whether the subject-matter is religious, scientific, pseudoscientific, or anything else — from Middle-Eastern Wars, to global cooling, to natural disasters, to viruses and virology, to vaccines and vaccination, to gene transfer therapy and failed biotech programs, to everything in between: it’s all filtered through and presented through a politico-economic lens, which is called the political spectrum, which is in actuality a figment.

When Voltaire said “Nothing is greater than life,” he was referring to a metaphysical fact which he rightly regarded as fundamental: namely, the only alternative to existence is non-existence; the only alternative to life is death.

Voltaire is not referencing life at cytoplasmic or protoplasmic or embryonic stages, and he’s not speaking here of life at the most basic single-cellular level or life absent sentience. 

Neither am I in quoting his words in this or any other essay.

To all the fools, therefore, who interpreted any part of the essay through, of all things, the lens of abortion, you’re foolish. You missed the entire point — the entire point of both Robert Graves’s poem and also my interpretation of it.

Think on your own.]