The Olive as an Emblem of Love and Rootedness in the Work of Robert Graves

Abstract

[eng] This dissertation analyses the use of the olive in the oeuvre of Robert Graves (1883-1958) as an emblem of love and rootedness. As a consequence of the dramatic advance of industrialisation, many Victorian and Edwardian intellectuals visited the Mediterranean to encounter the last vestiges of antiquity. Those travellers expressed their fondness of the olive tree in their writings and considered it an epitome of the nature and culture of the area. Decades later, Robert Graves moved to Majorca and presented his own point of view of the Mediterranean and the olive. The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the role of the olive as a symbol of fruitful and eternal love, as well as rootedness of the ancient world and Majorcan identity in the work of Robert Graves. In order to achieve this, Graves’s poetry and short narrative has been analysed, and data has been gathered from a variety of books and articles by several scholars and British travellers from different centuries. Finally, I suggest that while travel writers opt for other symbols during Graves’s time, he recovers the use of the olive as a token in order to preserve the classic way of producing literature.