The Naked and the Nude

Robert Graves


For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
That same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their deshabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked sin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips persued,
How naked go the sometime nude!