Caravaggio, “David” (c. 1606-07)
Spiritual Sunday
As today’s Old Testament reading is the David-Goliath story, here’s Robert Graves’s alternative version. Graves saw action in World War I—he suffered a serious injury, was reported dead at one point, and afterwards suffered from PTSD—and the poet shares some of the anti-war sentiment of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
If the Old Testament story claims that, with God on one’s side, the underdog can conquer the powerful, then the poem asks about the absence of God when the powerful prevail. Perhaps the dead companion to whom Graves dedicated the lyric was someone who believed in the righteousness of the English cause. When, despite the man’s confidence, he was cut down by superior fire power, perhaps “the historian of that fight/ Had not the heart to tell it right.”
To set up the story as told in the Book of Samuel, here’s the climax:
The Philistine said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the field.” But David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.”
When the Philistine drew nearer to meet David, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. David put his hand in his bag, took out a stone, slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell face down on the ground.
In Graves’s poem, we know from Goliath’s spike helmet that he stands in for the Germans. The stoutness of David’s staff, made of Mamre oak and hearkening back to the British yeoman tradition (including Robin Hood), is contemptuously brushed outside by new weaponry. A war that began with cavalry charges ended, after all, with tanks and poison gas. As the poet puts it,
Steel crosses wood, a flash, and oh!
Shame for Beauty’s overthrow!
Graves mimics heroic verse in “Goliath and David,” only to turn it on its head. We may claim that God is on our side, but what if “God’s eyes are dim, His ears are shut”? What if, to quote Tess of the d’Urbervilles following Tess’s rape,
But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.
The poem, in other words, confronts us with the age-old question of God’s apparent absence when humans suffer. Other World War I poets questioned their beliefs in the face of trench warfare. This is how Robert Graves asks the question.
Goliath and David
(For D.C.T., killed at Fricourt, March 1916)
By Robert Graves
Once an earlier David took
Smooth pebbles from a brook:
Out between the lines he went
To that one-sided tournament,
A shepherd boy who stood out fine
And young to fight a Philistine
Clad all in brazen mail. He swears
That he’s killed lions, he’s killed bears,
And those that scorn the God of Zion
Shall perish so like bear or lion.
But . . . the historian of that fight
Had not the heart to tell it right.
Striding within javelin range
Goliath marvels at this strange
Goodly-faced boy so proud of strength.
David’s clear eye measures the length;
With hand thrust back, he cramps one knee,
Poises a moment thoughtfully,
And hurls with a long vengeful swing.
The pebble, humming from the sling
Like a wild bee, flies a sure line
For the forehead of the Philistine;
Then . . . but there comes a brazen clink.
And quicker than a man can think
Goliath’s shield parries each cast.
Clang! clang! and clang! was David’s last.
Scorn blazes in the Giant’s eye,
Towering unhurt six cubit’s high.
Says foolish David, ‘Damn your shield!
And damn my sling! but I’ll not yield.’
He takes his staff of Mamre oak,
A knotted shepherd-staff that’s broke
The skull of many a wolf and fox
Come filching lambs from Jesse’s flocks.
Loud laughs Goliath, and that laugh
Can scatter chariots like blown chaff
To rout: but David, calm and brave,
Holds his ground, for God will save.
Steel crosses wood, a flash, and oh!
Shame for Beauty’s overthrow!
(God’s eyes are dim, His ears are shut.)
One cruel backhand sabre cut —
‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries,
Throws blindly forward, chokes . . . and dies.
And look, spike-helmeted, grey, grim,
Goliath straddles over him.