Sixteenth Century Weather

The Shepheardes Calendar

September

Diggon, I am so stiffe, and so stanck,

That vneth may I stand any more:

And nowe the Westerne wind bloweth sore,

That nowe is in his chiefe souereigntee,

Beating the withered leafe from the tree.

Sitte we downe here under the hill:

Tho may we talke, and tellen our fill,

And make a mocke at the blustring blast.

Now say on Diggon, what euer thou hast.

Were the seasons in a different configuration in the 16th century? September seems rather early for the leaves to be blown off the trees and I've noticed this elsewhere since deciding to use The Shepheardes Calendar to mark the passing months. Either Spenser was not particularly accurate in this or changes happen at different times now. The New Style calendar, adopted in 1732, means that we are thirteen days in advance of Spenser's time. So this might account for part of this effect. But surely not all of it.

Dic Jones

' ... yr hen iaith,
yn nillad gwaith ei hafiaith cartrefol'

' ... the old language,
its homely zest in work clothes'

Dic Jones

Dic Jones, the archdruid of the Gorsedd of Bards died today. He was a farmer all his life and said in an interview featured on a BBC tribute

HERE

"I farm for bread and butter; I write for some jam on it". He farmed all his life and composed cynghanedd while sitting on his tractor. Nothing epitomises the unpretentious nature of literary culture in Welsh better than this.

The Spider (Y Corryn)

Iwan Llwyd was winner of the National Eisteddfod Crown in 1990, and, with Twm Morys, has been a productive deviser of poetic and musical entertainments in Welsh. In this well-known poem he compares the process of the weaving of a web by a spider to the making of a poem. I have aimed, here, at reproducing both the meaning and the formal structure of the original.

Iwan Llwyd (front) with John Barnie, Twm Morys and Nigel Jenkins

(prospectus for a bilingual poetry and music tour)

The Spider

His web was perfect

and him sitting there

where the glistening threads intersect:

he spent his life knitting sunlight

to a round plane of dew;

the end of his labour in sight

he'd listen to the drip of the rain

between the lines

silently shifting their refrain

and the grey river in full flow

irritable as it falls

companionless below

to meet the brackish floods

between the autumn cliffs

and the fringed woods;

he is impatient

weaving intricate patterns,

each answering assent

marking an exact measure

between corner and centre

stealing the stars' treasure

of diamonds to entice

insects along steel threads

towards the silence:

then a sudden rush of air

a quiver through the intersections;

like an old man he's there

under the yellow leaves

gathering it all in

to the pattern that he weaves.

The Crown and the Chair

The Empty Chair

A oes heddwch? Nac oes! There is is fact some disquiet in bardic circles. The two main prizes awarded for poetry in the National Eisteddfod of Wales are the Crown and the Chair (there are a number of other prizes for short poems). The winner of the Crown this year was Ceri Wyn Jones. Usually the Crown is awarded for a long poem or sequence NOT written in cynghanedd while the Chair is awarded for a poem in full cynghanedd, conforming to the rules of the strict metres. Some of his fellow bards were surprised, therefore, that the winning poem for the Crown was in cynghanedd. A quick check with the exact specifications confirmed that the words "not in full cynghanedd" did not appear. So the poem was within the rules though not, some argue, in the spirit of the competition. The feeling is that poems in cynghanedd should be for the Chair, not the Crown. Twm Morus characteristically contributed a robust version of this objection which played with images of a squirrel among Welsh Black bulls.

All this was compounded at the end of the week when it was revealed that the Chair was not to be awarded as no-one was judged good enough. One of the judges that decided this was Ceri Wyn Jones which was why, he explained, he couldn't enter a poem for the Chair. So disappointment tempered by a feeling that standards are being maintained was the order of the day on Friday. As for the Crown, commentators are predicting that future specifications will ensure that it is spelled out that it is for a poem in the free metres.

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol

As I prepare to visit the National Eisteddfod, held this year in Bala (the festival moves around Wales to a different site each year), I am reminded of the conclusion of Emyr Humphreys’ poem ‘Ancestors’:

Their voices live in the air
Like leaves like clouds like rain
Their words call out to be spoken
Until the language dies
Until the ocean changes.

The sense of the language being alive in the natural as well as the cultural environment is a persistent one. Waldo Williams, writing of the Welsh mountains, said

Ni fedr ond un iaith eu codi
(Only one language can lift them)

and the poet Gerallt Lloyd Owen, about whom there will be a talk this year in the Pabell Lên (Literary Pavilion) on the Eisteddfod field, writes, in his poem ‘Etifeddiaith’ (Inheritance):

We had a language, though not by choice,
for it had already quickened in the soil
its strength restless on the mountains.

(a translation of the whole poem appears on my poetry translation pages HERE )

This sense of the language having some sort if interpenetration with the land of Wales is common, even among many who can’t speak it. The Eisteddfod’s peripatetic existence, setting up camp even in areas where Welsh is not common currency, acknowledges this. But Bala is certainly in the heart of ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ and I’ll be in the thick of this particularly intense form of ancestor worship while there.

And afterwards…? When I walk the mountain paths will the language seem to be with me there, or are culture and nature distinct? At times they seem completely unconnected; at others inextricably interpenetrated. Waldo William’s suggestion that those mountains can only be raised in one language rather carefully qualifies the assertion by relating it to “a sky of song”. That is, the celebration of the mountains is what gives them meaning in language. But this is ambiguously expressed. And it is not to say, as Gerallt Lloyd Owen indicates, that we have any choice in the matter: “It’s strength restless in the mountains”. Waldo Williams too characterises this language as if she were both eternal and “as young as ever” and “full of mischief”. So she has to be to survive.

August

TELL me Perigot, what shalbe the game, Wherefore with myne thou dare thy musick matche?

Or bene thy Bagpypes renne farre out of frame? Or hath the Crampe thy ioynts benomd with ache?

*
Ah Willye, when the hart is ill assayde, How can Bagpipe, or ioynts be well apayd?