Home icon. The Works of Robert Graves. Exhibition: 1 April to 17 June 2011.

Cabinet 18: Poetry


The Green-sailed Vessel: Poems.

Robert Graves, The Green-sailed Vessel: Poems. London: Privately printed, 1971.

By October 1966, Graves’s relationship with Aemilia Laraçuen had ended. While recovering in a London hospital ward from a gall bladder operation, he wrote to his friend Ralph Jacobs that while he did not want a new focus (read a ‘Muse’), he admitted

‘as you can guess, dozens of women are waiting to pounce on me when I am disengaged.’

Seventeen year old ballet school student Julia (Juli) Simons entered the ward, and on her second visit said to Graves:

‘I have fallen in love with you’.

Graves was caught, and in what was a ‘constructive alliance’, she would be his longest-serving Muse.

Many of the poems in this limited, signed edition are written for Juli.