You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.


from `Counting the Beats'

After Laura Riding had parted company with him in 1942, Robert Graves moved into a new and decisive phase in his work, producing the White Goddess and the Black Goddess poems. This final volume of the Complete Poems brings together the last three decades of the poet's work, among the poems the most original and least familiar of his writings, showing him at the end as the mature voyager under the protection of the Black Goddess. Many of the poems are previously uncollected.