In a much longer preface to his successful Poems and Satires, 1951, Graves describes himself as
‘a paunchy Horace-Herrick, jocosely celebrating the trim servant-girl who carries the drink out to his garden retreat.’
The trim girl was surely 17 year old Judith Bledsoe, who arrived in Deyá about November 1950. She became part of the family circle, and Muse to Graves’s poetry.
Much of the first part of Poems and Satires contains poems for her, particularly ‘Darien’, which begins:
‘It is a poet’s privilege and fate/ To fall enamoured of the one Muse/ Who variously haunts this island earth.’