Playing in a Lowly Grove

Two Views of Midsummer from 

Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar for Iune

Hobbinol:

But frendly Faeries, met with many Graces, 

And lightfote Nymphes can chace the lingring night, 

With Heydeguyes, and trimly trodden traces, 

Whilst systers nyne, which dwell on Parnasse hight, 

Doe make them musick, for their more delight: 

And Pan himselfe to kisse their christall faces, 

Will pype and daunce, when Phoebe shineth bright: 

Such pierlesse pleasures haue we in these places. 

[...]

Colin:

Of Muses Hobbinol, I conne no skill: 

For they bene daughters of the hyghest Ioue, 

And holden scorne of homely shepheards quill. 

For sith I heard, that Pan with Phoebus stroue, 

Which him to much rebuke and Daunger droue: 

I neuer lyst presume to Parnasse hyll, 

But pyping lowe in shade of lowly groue, 

I play to please my selfe, all be it ill. 

The urge to idealise from Hobbinol is here opposed by Colin (Spenser's alter ego) who rejects the urge to join the gods on Parnassus but prefers instead to play his pipe in a 'lowly grove'. I'm reminded of the modern poet R.S Thomas who said he "played a small pipe by the side of the road" and affected to prefer an unfenced Welsh mountain to the ordered gardens of a London park. Neither Spenser nor Thomas could be said to have absolutely resisted the preferments of high office but both embody this urge in at least some of what they wrote and Thomas maintained his aloofness from the establishment to the end.

The value of a life lived away from the cut and thrust of the city, the court, the high table, the Parnassian heights has been the stuff of a pastoral ideal in many periods of history that has at times been a major impetus and at others seemed like an odd aberration. But not to me. 

Waldo’s Fields

“Yr oedd yr heliwr distaw yn bwrw ei rwyd amdanom”
(Waldo Williams)

Those fields – I’ve walked across them - they are
Extraordinary fields, though inaccessible to the seeker
After transcendence this is no loss for the page
Holds them in view and they extend into the margins
Between field hedges and the nets of the Hunter

In many places and times where time
Is arrested and held captive by a tether
Of stillness long enough to feel chastened by silence.
Sunlight touches a wall on a summer afternoon,
Shadows enclose a moment which passes from forever

To forever: Such blessings are felt to be precious.
But hearing beyond them voices calling in a common
Tongue of work and worship echoing through centuries,
And knowing that they witness this moment
When all is still, so that being alone

Is to be with them, resonates beyond solitude.
Voices heard in the echoes of whistling lapwings
Tremble to life over empty meadows; each hand,
Each tongue unique in the passing of time yet fused
In a moment making one of many things.

In Two Fields

O ba le'r ymroliai'r môr goleuni

Oedd â'i waelod ar Weun Parc y Blawd a Parc y Blawd?

So begins the poem 'Mewn Dau Gae' ('In Two Fields') by Waldo Williams, one of the great mystical poems of the twentieth century. From where, he asks, did the sea of light roll  across the two fields 'Weun Parc y Blawd' and 'Parc y Blawd'? The poem continues for fourty-eight lines of exploratory response to that question, culminating in images of 'the outlaw', the hunter', 'the exiled king' claiming back his territory as he parts the rushes. The poem recalls an experience the poet had in the gap between the two named fields which I visited recently (see photo above). One field is level and comparatively dry, the other (as the word 'weun' suggests) is wet and uneven with rushes growing in it as well as grasses. 

Here are some lines I wrote in my notebook - necessarily in Welsh although it is not my first language:

Ar daith mewn bro'r ffiniau - rhwng dau fyd

Un cyfrin fel ym mherci'r blodau

Canai Waldo ynddynt ynghˆyd;

Er byd arall ydoedd, yr un hyn o hyd.

Paraphrased poorly in English this means:' Exploring borders between two worlds/One hidden as the flower meadows/Waldo brought together in his verse/Another world which remains this world.'  The landscape of Pembrokeshire is particularly resonant with other-world images in Welsh literature back to Y Mabinogi. And Waldo's poems, while not referring back specifically to these examples, are particularly suggestive of mystical dimensions to common features of the living landscape. Rowan Williams has discussed the difficulties of translating the final lines of 'In Two Fields': 

'No man's land' is a risky gloss; it has something to do with the 'bwlch' of the original, since this is most prosaically the gap between territories, but also brings in some sense of 'standing in the breach'. 

The 'gap' between the fields is a gap between worlds. Metaphorically, perhaps, but I think in some sort of literal sense too for the poet. The Other World from which the 'outlaw' returns seeking to claim his territory in our world is set here in a Christian context, but mysticism transcends religious denominations and even religion itself. The vision here is deeply infused with the natural landscape, with the poet's own inner landscape of ideal community (he imagines the empty fields "full of folk") and have been received, culturally, very much in the spirit of wishing to reinforce that ideal of landscape and community.  The 'outlaw' is a 'hunter' who "throws his net around us". This image, and the image of the 'sea of light' set against the darkness, together with other images in the poem, have direct correlations in early Quaker writings that the poet must have been reading prior to his formally becoming a member of the Society of Friends in 1953. But the poem reveals an experience that predates its writing by many years, an experience that  seems to have been triggered by the place itself. At one point a tree in the hedge is imagined as a fountain breaking towards Heaven

Ac yn syrthio'n ôl a'u dagrau fel dail pren

(And falling back their droplets like the leaves of a tree)

The image here is,of course, from the Book of Revelation: 'the leaves of the tree for the healing of nations'. Heaven, as Waldo Williams made clear elsewhere in his writings, is another world; but one with which our own world might interact.

The hedge between the two fields