Robert Graves - The Naked And The Nude

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The 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 dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.


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 pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

I love to read Robert Graves, it is all made more personal as he fought in the same unit as my Grandfather in the Great War. What is interesting in this poem is the distinction between The Nude and The Naked, one is higher, better than the other. What he does not account for is the meaning ascribed to each word by the reader in contrast to the lexicographers. In common use, these words have widely differing meanings. Some will say nude means without clothes and naked is almost synonymous with vulnerable.