The White Goddess

The mountain in “The White Goddess” represents a deity who is part of the earth. Graves refers to the Goddess as “Mountain Mother” (Line 16); the mountain is a manifest part of the deity. This draws upon canonical symbolism of mountains. In A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, Ferber explains that mountains are “awesome, sacred, or dreadful. In the western tradition they are often the homes of gods” (131). Ferber’s multifaceted descriptors for the mountain can be compared to the threefold nature of Graves’s White Goddess. Graves’s manifest deity takes Ferber’s definition of mountain—a home for gods—another step, making the mountain itself the Goddess.

Graves includes both the forest and a specific tree reference in “The White Goddess.” He mentions the “Green sap” (Line 15) of the “young wood” (Line 15), describing an entire forest and the season of “Spring” (Line 15). Then, in the description of the Goddess’s features, he focuses on a specific type of tree: Graves says her lips are the color of a “rowan-berry” (Line 13). The rowan tree, Graves writes in his prose book The White Goddess, is known as “quickbeam (‘tree of life’), otherwise known as the quicken, [.