HILL'S CHRONICLE

Hearthlife

2012-02-02T20:16:00.000Z

When the darkness comes
we prefer
the pleasures of a flickering grate
worn by the fires we have built
chipped by the lazy stab of a poker
known and loved as the light of our evenings.
There in our hearth is our life
lived closely
around its wavering light.

Outside frost creeps across the ground
chill creeps through the air

Then sister
weaver of the fabric
weave us a bright cloak
many-hued and various
keep the colours twining
blue, red, green,
keep the waters running
through the rivers of our life
bind fast the dark thread
hide it from the spinner
searching for the dark stitch
to catch us in her web
searching for the dark thread
running through the darkness
she can see her dark thread
in any dark night
she will prick the bright cloth
find the bright waters
catch us in her grey web
where all the colours end.
So weave for us sister
and we will love you dearly
weave us a bed cloth
to take away the night
weave all your sweet dreams
as we lie down snugly
show us all your colours
and make the morning bright.

Icelandic Saga

2012-01-22T18:29:00.000Z

Fǫgr er hlíđin, sva at mér hefir hon aldri jafnfǫgr sýnzk, ..... ok mun ek ríđa aptr ok fara hvergi.

(Fair is the slope, so fair as it has ever seemed to me ..... and now I’ll ride back home, and not go anywhere.)

So said Gunnar when, about to ride away from his homestead at Hlitharendi after being outlawed. He looks back and decides that he cannot leave the place he loves. By staying he knows he could be killed by his enemies and the decision leads to many more deaths than his.
I am led to reflect on this scene from the Njal’s Saga as I re-read some of this great literature in preparation for a visit to Iceland in a few weeks. We hope to see the Northern Lights (hence the apparently senseless visit in the winter rather than the midnight sun period in the summer). I also hope to get a look at some of the manuscripts of the sagas on display in the museum in Reykjavik.
Gunnar’s inability to ride away in spite of realising the fateful consequences of his decision is one of the great statements of attachment to place. In a culture of viking forays to far-flung places he nevertheless feels bonded to his home so intensely that he has no choice but to remain there. In spite of the wise ministrations of Njal, after whom the saga is named, the ensuing blood feud follows tragically in the wake of Gunnar’s decision to stay and Njal himself is burnt to death in his house.
In the saga it is a twist of fate that leads Gunnar to stay. He is on his way abroad. His horse stumbles and he falls off and finds himself sitting looking down at his home. In context his decision is seen as heroic rather than sentimental. But for me the scene is as much about attachment as it is about determination.
I’ve always felt the pull of the North in spite of the sunshine and food of southern climes. But previous trips to places like Norway have always been in the summer. Winter will be a real challenge to any sentimental attraction, in fact my response might well need to be heroic!

Even the weariest river ....

2012-01-14T18:11:00.001Z

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

(One of the marginal glosses appended by Coleridge to The Ancient Mariner.)

Culhwch ac Olwen (a synopsis)

2011-12-29T00:42:00.000Z

Ysbaddaden Pencawr

(Cwmcarn Forest Art)

The giant leered, the props holding up his eye-lids dripped tears so salty the tides of a dead sea flowed across his cheeks , washed the spittle on his chin and dried in a dawn that left his age behind, a residue on an arid shore.

From which Olwen walked onto grass moist with dew so that white flowers sprang in her footsteps......

And Culhwch to accompany her into the living day of their new age.

This is the life of myth, glossing intimations of ogrish fathers in images of fantastic proportions.....

Gleaning from a jealous stepmother sending her stepson to certain death, an heroic ride to Arthur’s court and the hunting of a boar of power as condition for a marriage.

Were dragons slain? Or arrangements made to preserve appearances?

The Darkling Thrush

2011-12-22T20:20:00.000Z

John Donne's 'Nocturnall on St Lucy's Day' is the definitive Midwinter poem.
But for a change here's this from Thomas Hardy:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Dot CYMRU?

2011-12-16T22:54:00.000Z

For many years the company ‘dotCYM Ltd’ has been working to establish ‘*’.cymru as a top level domain on the web. In spite of being ready to do this for some time they have now learned that the Welsh Government apparently has no interest in the .cymru suffix for domains based in Wales, controlled from within Wales. Instead they are happy to allow Nominet, the company that controls the .co.uk domain suffix, to go ahead with developing a .wales suffix owned by them and controlled from outside Wales. According to dot.CYM Ltd the situation changed when Edwina Hart, the Labour minister in the Welsh Government, was given responsibility for the project and she “refused to talk to or meet dotCYM and the civil servants approached Nominet to bring them into the game”. Further they claim that the Welsh Government has no interest in doing anything except for giving one applicant the letter of no objection that is needed as part of the application to ICANN for a new domain suffix and that "It is unheard of for a Government to show so little interest in its own top-level domain". They cite the fact that "The London, Scottish, Basque, Galician and Breton Governments are working very close with their local applications for their names online.”So it appears that the current administration in Cardiff not only has no interest in promoting the .cymru domain suffix, but are also happy to allow Nominet to take ownership of the proposed .wales suffix on the grounds that it will be cheaper to let them do it rather than maintain control within Wales.This does seem to be a strange state of affairs and it certainly a kick in the teeth for dot.CYM Ltd who have grown the idea of a Welsh domain suffix over a number of years. However well-disposed Nominet may or may not be towards Wales, the idea of letting a company in England have the Welsh domain suffix at their disposal seems odd to say the least. Applications to ICANN, the international domain name controllers, are due by 6 January and, with dot.Cym Ltd having been sidelined by the Welsh Government and unable to raise the necessary cash to put in an alternative bid in time, it looks like the forces of bureaucratic convenience have won both over the aspirations of idealism and simple common sense. Not for the first time. But in this case in a particularly wooden-headed way.

More information available at the dot.Cym website : http://www.dotcym.org/home/ or on their twitter page @dotcymru

For Toothache

2011-12-10T14:25:00.001Z

Root of this herb: yellow flag iris

Chewed into the cavity

Carries the hope of cure

But also the fear

Of delirium, or death.

Why risk it? The tongue

That finds the opening

For the root knows compulsively

That to stop it anything

Is possible, even oblivion.

In The Physicians of Myddfai, the herb 'gellhesg y nant' is recommended for toothache but there is also a warning that swallowing it could result in 'days of delirium' or it could 'take your life'. In Pughe's translation the name of the herb is given as 'water flower de lys', though it is certainly the yellow flag iris that grows in wet ground. However, none of the other herbalists - early or modern - suggest that the plant is poisonous, though it is used herbally as an emetic. Was this, then, a flight of fancy from Iolo Morganwg who is known to have supplemented the medieval manuscript of the recipes of the Physicians with his own additions?

Old Man's Beard

2011-11-02T15:10:00.001Z

It doesn’t belong here
But still I see it year after year
Taking the lime it needs from the spoil
Of a house long gone, so it grows up
And greys the bare hedge in Winter.

Old men lived there once, women too;
Perhaps they died there before it crumbled
And it commemorates their grey hair
And ragged clothes. It was long ago

That the house fell but when the seed came
Is hard to tell. It was there from the first
Time I passed in Winter. I always mean to look
When Summer comes for the flowers in bloom

But I’ve never seen them. It is passing
That it means to me, leaving things behind.
Old men, old women, lives like green leaves
That withered before I knew them.

Literary Locations

2011-10-19T14:43:00.000+01:00

I recentlyvisited the cottage in Nether Stowey, Somerset, where the poet Coleridge livedbetween 1797 and 1800. He was not born there and three years is not very longto make a place significant. But it was from there that he developed hiscollaboration with Wordsworth on the groundbreaking collection LyricalBallads and where he wrote many of his most significant poems.

How should suchplaces be conserved and maintained? Following his brief residence at nearbyAlfoxden to be near Coleridge, Wordsworth moved back to his native LakeDistrict to the similarly iconic Dove Cottage. In spite of its being a hive fortourists seeking literary honey, in spite of its bookshop and its contextualistionas a place of pilgrimage, there is a sense of the lives of William and Dorothywhen they lived there. The cottage at Nether Stowey seems, in contrast, emptyof the presence of Coleridge. It has recently been renovated by the NationalTrust so perhaps the newness of its atmosphere contributes to this. The cottagehas also been extended since 1800 and has since had other uses while DoveCottage has remained comparatively intact.

In the absence ofvery many Coleridgean artefacts in the cottage apart from an inkstand, attemptshave been made to recreate the settings of some of the poems. In the living rooma crade has been placed by the flickering fireplace, and a writing desk in thecorner gestures to the composition of ‘Frost at Midnight’ where his child “slumberspeacefully” in the cradle while the poet is carried back to his own childhoodby the flickering flame in the hearth.

In the garden a‘lime tree bower’ has been created to represent the poem ‘This Lime Tree BowerMy Prison’ and ferns planted next to it, presumably to echo those referred to inthe poem. Representation rather than recreation was perhaps all that waspossible in this location. It is one way of exhibiting a place thatremains significant in memory rather than as a manifestation of what isremembered. The poems represented in the examples given above can be revisitedin a room containing editions of the poet’s work and recorded examples of someof them. Other parts of the cottage, such as the kitchen, represent theway of life of the period as much as that of the poet and his family, thoughsome emphasis is put in the interpretational material on the role of the poet’slong-suffering wife Sara in the family’s domestic arrangements. One aspect ofthe poet’s life is represented obliquely in the swathes of large opium-stylepoppies in the garden, surely creating (rather than re-creating) a floweryhinterland on the borders between irony and a tasteless joke. Never was thepoet’s distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ better represented, if notin intention, then in representational fact.

Dove Cottage in 1882

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

2011-10-01T00:06:00.000+01:00

Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Grey Mare Press

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth recently mounted an exhibition of the work of Clive Hicks-Jenkins to mark his sixtieth birthday. Two books were also published during this year, one offering colour plates and critical discussions, the other a collection of poems by six poets with detail from paintings on which they comment.What follows here are some of my own instinctive responses to this art.

I referred some time ago to this artist's work by using one of his illustrations to accompany previous blog comments on ‘The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’ by Vernon Watkins. The collection of poems published this year includes a more recent Mari Lwyd poem by Catriona Urquhart. The stark black & white series of conte drawings featuring a looming horse's head attached to, or manipulated by, naked male figures have all the balletic energy of the artist’s previous trade of choreographer. His fascination with this folklore figure is apparent but many of his other paintings also feature animals in some relation to humans and this, for me, emerges as a dominant theme in my response to the paintings.

‘Green George’ re-interprets the dragon-slaying myth, portraying the beast with a set of human-like teeth and eyes directly confronting his killer who rides on a crimson horse returning his gaze, has green-hued flesh and wears a soldier’s steel helmet. Physically near, but as if inhabiting a different plane, a girl sits self-absorbed. Symbolic items like a maze are placed in the paintings in a style reminiscent of David Jones.

‘Elijah and the Raven’, ‘Kevin and his Sheep’, ‘The Blind Boy and his Beast’ and many other paintings convey a world where humans and animals are configured together in attitudes ranging from love to antagonism, but always with an essential sense of relationship. Wolves often appear as pet dogs, but without losing any of their fierceness or wildness. Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ work is characterised by Damian Walford Davies as ekphrastic, underlining the interactions between his art and literature. Given his own inspiration by literary texts, and the number of poems inspired by his paintings, it seems appropriate to offer my own brief commentary on one of his works:

The Mari Lwyd Approaches

Barely contained, the man-horse or

Horse-man who is also

The Night Mare from Midwinter’s

Darkness strains at a leash
That hardly reigns him in
As the white sheet falls away
Revealing no ghost but
Bare flesh rampaging
Through the hard edges
Of habitations defensively protruding.

The Other Side

2011-09-21T17:55:00.000+01:00

It was an interlude between intensities ˘ A path never before taken so far ˘ Though often tasted along its beginning. ˘ Venturing farther than ever before through ˘ The gate into the paddock and the farm ˘ Beyond it, I passed through the horses ˘ Without fear but with some trepidation ˘ And found myself on the other side ˘˘ As if in a different world, stiller, more tranquil ˘ The lake, the willows, and the diffusion ˘ Of dew across those water meadows ˘ Infused the place with more than moisture ˘ In the late summer haze of september ˘ Still green, but hued with an autumnal aura.

Poetry Path

2011-09-09T00:20:00.000+01:00

The village where I live in West Wales – Llanfihangel Genau’r Glyn (Llandre) -has a number of themed paths through a wooded hillside behind the church. The local Heritage Society has just added a Poetry Path to this network. The idea is that poems by people from the area, as well as poems about the area, are displayed on plaques that are themselves mounted on wooden cradles set at key points along the path. Most of the poems are in Welsh but some are in English, reflecting the linguistic balance of the area, past and present. The first poem to be encountered on the path is an extract from Huw Meirion Edward’s Tir Neb, which won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in 2004 for a long poem in traditional metres using cynghanedd. This part of the extract evokes a February morning in the village:

I’n gwlâu oer yng Ngenau’r Glyn - yn ei thro

Daeth yr awr deffro hyd eitha’r dyffryn

Mis bach, amhosibl o wyn - fel manna

A gŵyl o eira’n ein gwadd yn glaerwyn.

(To our cold beds in Genau’r Glyn - in its turn

Deep into the valley came the hour of awakening

A small month, impossibly white - as manna

Inviting us to a celebration of snow, gleaming bright)

My own contribution to the path follows and was written especially for it. It is an attempt to express my feeling for the atmosphere of the area around the village and the historical, legendary and geographical features of the valley of which it is a part. It refers both to the general topography and specifically to features such as the site of a medieval motte and bailey castle as well as associations with Brigid (Ffraid) further along the valley of the Leri (Eleri) and also the ‘lost land’ of Cantre’r Gwaelod under the sea near the river’s estuary on the nearby coast. Here is the poem:

Cwm Eleri

Genau’r Glyn: the gap into Eleri’s vale

Where road and rail run in parallel

To join the line of the river’s glide

And turn, here in a sinuous slide,

Far from Craig y Pistyll where Eleri

Falls to Cantre’r Gwaelod and the sea.

Seen from the tump of Castell Gwallter

Or, higher still, the spur of Bryn Hir,

The lane turns above the stream

Past Glanfrêd, a far vista, a dream

Of an old chapel by Ffraid’s spring

From Llanfihangel’s heights seeming

To be hidden in the valley’s past:

Time, like the river, slips from our grasp.

-*-

Gwenllian

2011-08-27T17:05:00.000+01:00

I have remarked before about the continuing significance in Welsh culture of the killing of Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, in 1282. I was reminded of this, ironically enough, during a recent visit to Lincolnshire. There, in the fens of eastern England, stands a memorial to Gwenllian, Llywelyn’s daughter, who was placed in the Priory of Sempringham as a baby after her father’s death and remained there until her own death at the age of 54. It is said that she was not told who she was until late in her life.

The Priory no longer stands, but fragments of its sandstone walls lie scattered across the surrounding land where its foundations are clearly visible, unploughable, in the middle of a wheat field. The medieval church is still standing and, in spite if being at the end of a cart track a mile or so from the nearest tarmaced road, and without electricity, is still in use. The memorial stands on a bend in the cart track just outside the church enclosure. A commemorative stone was first placed here in 1993 but had been vandalised and was falling into disrepair. The current memorial stone, with its inscription by the calligrapher Ieuan Rees, was set up in 2001 and is maintained by the Princess Gwenllian Society.

We approached the place indirectly across the fields using a public footpath. The church emerged into view first, surrounded by trees like an oasis in the flat, open, landscape. Nearing the church, we came, suddenly, to the memorial as we turned onto the track around the end of a short stretch of hedge, seeing first the edge of the stone which is said to look like a nun (use your imagination):

In the church, which was opened for us by a helpful chap called Nigel, there is a small exhibition about Gwenllian. Outside, in the churchyard, is a well which is said never to have run dry. This seemed a fitting testament to a woman whose continuing presence in the cultural memory of Wales is itself a testimony to the power of such symbols of lost sovereignty, embodied here in the otherwise forgotten life of a medieval nun.

The remains of the priory with the church in the far distance.

HARVEST

2011-08-21T15:41:00.000+01:00

Sunlight slants low
Pellucid on shorn fields
Pale brown now with
Just a hint of orange.

By the far gate a tractor
With stopped engine,
Still now as light deepens.

A marigold summer
Passes in a film of deep yellow.

Haiku

2011-08-15T11:29:00.001+01:00

Through a high window,

Sunlight on a red kite's wings:

Daybreak's reflection.

Dandelion (Compositae: Taraxacum officinale)

2011-08-02T22:25:00.001+01:00

19th century lithograph by Carl Friedrich Schmidt

Dant y Llew, like Dent de Lion
sounding fierce with ragged teeth;
as kids we called it ‘wet-the-bed’
(like piss-en-lit), shreds
of meaning to compose a memory:

Pulling the yellow heads off the stalks
we’d sit on the grass plucking each petal,
daring each other to nibble, and then
“you’ll wet the be-ed” from the girls
and we thought of them wetting the bed
too and plucked again as, tooth
against tooth, we dared damp sheets.

On waste ground or green fields
they have always infused
memory’s sweet wine
calling back lost hours:

Blow on white feathers – one-o-clock, two …
drifting through passing years they shine
on every roadside edge and seedy garden
keeping their own time after time.

RAGWORT - Senecio jacobaea

2011-07-21T00:07:00.000+01:00

Cinnabar Moth caterpillars on Ragwort

  These clusters of sunlight
  shine with the wings of bees
  but are dark honey when
  hidden in sweet hay.

  I’ve seen them, untouched,
  seeds drifting over close-bitten grass
  where horses graze. Caterpillars
  of cinnabar moths
   dependently displaying

  In their tiger stripes its dark
  And its sunny aspect, the black
  And red moths returning to lay
  Eggs where no ruminant rasps them.

Cinnabar Moth

Ragwort is poisonous to cattle and horses who have the sense to avoid it when growing in fields where they graze, but if too much of it gets into hay it can cause problems. The Scottish poets Robert Burns and James Hogg both have poems where the stalks of Ragwort are ridden by fairies or changed into horses by witches. The specific name 'jacobaea' apparently comes from the fact that the plant is in full bloom on St James' Day (25 July).

The Scottish Muse

2011-07-10T00:03:00.000+01:00

The Rhymer's Stone

On a recent visit to the Scottish Borders I took with me an anthology of Scottish verse and Walter Scott's Border Minstrelsy. There is much to see along the valleys of the Esk, the Teviot and the Tweed including memorials to writers such as Walter Scott and Hugh Mac Diarmaid. I also followed the trail from the medieval abbey at Melrose up onto the Eildon Hills and past the 'Rhymer's Stone', a memorial to the 13th century writer Thomas of Ercildoune, where he was said to have been sitting under a thorn tree and carried off by the Queen of Elfland. This event is related in the Scots 'Ballad of True Thomas' and was a source of John Keats' poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. I have known the ballad for some time but had not always known that Thomas was an historical figure with a body of prophetic and vaticinatory verse associated with him. The story of him being carried off to Elfland to be granted the gift of 'true speech' no doubt validated his role as a prophet. But the story of his abduction has too many parallels elsewhere to be confined to him alone and it is no doubt far older than the 13th century.

So part of my reading while in Scotland included the ballads collected by Scott and, in particular, his account of Thomas's history. It is fascinating to see how Scott himself contributed to, and to some extent appropriated, the legend of Thomas. He apparently obtained the ballad from the Scottish redactor of traditional ballads Anna Gordon Brown, but he then supplied a second section based on material from the Prophetic writings (which also contain a version of the ballad narrative) and went further by adding his own epilogue. Scott's estate at Abbotsford was laid out to include 'the Rhymer's Glen' in his woodlands, though the Eildon Tree and Thomas's home at Ercildoune (Earlston) is some miles further along the valley of the Tweed. The walk through the Eildon Hills is well signposted, provides panoramic views of the area, and is worth anyone's trouble to follow. The added dimension of the pursuit of a legend also provided the sense of a quest, which made the trail that much more inviting.

My evening reading of the ballads and the legendary history of Thomas was supplemented by a more wide-ranging survey of Scottish verse in the anthology I also took with me. Verse in Scots always seems to me to have a visceral quality that makes taking the trouble to absorb the dialect so worthwhile. One poem I found myself returning to in my browsing was this from William Soutar (1898-1943). I have no idea whether the event was real or imagined. But Soutar had clearly, himself, been visited with the gift of true speech.

The Tryst

O luely, luely, cam she in,
and luely she lay doun:
I kent her by her caller lips
and her breists sae smaa and round.

Aa throu the nicht we spak nae word
nor sindered bane frae bane:
aa throu the nicht I heard her hert
gang soundin wi my ain.

It was about the waukrif hour
whan cocks begin to craw
that she smooled saftly throu the mirk
afore the day wad daw.

Sae luely, luely cam she in,
sae luely was she gane;
and wi her aa my simmer days
like they had never been.

Public and Private Life

2011-07-07T14:43:00.000+01:00

The current furore about phone hacking by journalists at the News of the World and the corporate culture of News International that clearly led to the abuses may not surprise those who have long doubted the integrity of the organisations concerned. It looks likely that some individuals will be held to account for the particularly disgraceful examples of intrusion into people's privacy that are now coming to light. No doubt there will attempts to limit this to as few as possible. But beyond the need to hold culpable individuals to account, it would be a pity not to also examine both the corporate and the wider social culture of intrusion that is implicated in these events.

It has always been a mystery to me why anyone should be interested in the minutiae of the lives of those with even the remotest claim to 'celebrity' status. I would like to think that is merely the creation of a few tacky magazines, but clearly people buy the magazines. Beyond this, gossips, curtain twitchers and scandalized hypocrites have always been with us. So if it were simply the domain a few magazines dealing in the trivia of the lives of actors, or retailing scandal about footballers sleeping with soap opera stars, then perhaps this could be allowed its place. But when the mainstream media starts to think that such things are interesting, and begins to extend the 'need to know' to anyone who is currently in the news, then certain lines are being crossed not just by unscrupulous individuals but by the public expectation of the availability of information. Few would actively want to be as intrusive to vulnerable victims as the phone hackers have been, but collusion by the passive consumption of information is far more pernicious. The driver for the gathering of such data is the sense of fulfilling a public desire for information for its own sake.

What lines should be drawn between public and private lives? It is worth asking the question in a general way rather than in the context of specific abuses because it then addresses the principles of publicity and privacy and the proper balance between them. It's not so much the often discussed distinction between the two meanings of 'interest' in what is legitimately of public interest, but what is implicit in the word 'public'. To what extent are you or I members of the 'public' and therefore on view to others, and to what extent can we expect to remain private, in our own world or that of a defined group? This is to some extent a matter of personality. It may also be determined by the wish to act in the public arena for a particular cause or to pursue a profession. But it might still be the case that there are areas of the life of an individual not involved with these public spheres which it should be expected will remain private.

I speak as one who has acted publicly in some contexts and therefore accept the public notice that this brings, but who also values the notion of my own privacy. I would go further and say that, in some significant sense, my 'soul-life' requires a veil to be drawn over some aspects of my inner self, though this is perhaps too metaphysical for the current discussion. But it needn't be the case that people who wish to remain circumspect about some aspects of their lives have anything to hide in the legal or moral sense. There is is also a debate to be had about the relative values of inwardness and outwardness in our society. A balance has to be struck and different individuals will not all want to strike it in the same way. Different societies, at different periods of history, have valued one over the other in varying ratios. But if we now live in a society where the balance is tilted so far towards outwardness that inwardness has no place to hide, perhaps the only surprising thing is not that the current scandal has happened but that we consider it a scandal at all.

It is true that many people today seem prepared to expose themselves to 'the public' via social media sites and that modern technology drives the tendency to self-exposure. Simply by writing this blog I am participating in that process. But at the same time the fact that I have opted for the weblog medium and have chosen not to have a Facebook page, indicates my own choices with regard to degree of exposure.

We all, I hope, still have the right to make those choices. There may be exceptional circumstances when they will be overridden by legal or other constraints. But that word 'exceptional' is important. It clearly should not include the victims as well as the perpetrators of misdeeds. I am doubtful that all of those who authorised recent intrusions will be held responsible for their actions, though I hope they will. But until we restore the idea that a private life is something that is valuable in itself, then the idea that there is a right to pry will continue to be part of the ethos of those who have the means to do so.

Pyramidal Orchid

2011-07-04T21:55:00.000+01:00

Anacamptis pyramidalis

A pyramid of pink in this dingle
Where rough grasses dissemble
The wind-blown sand with a tangle
Of growth and these petals tremble.

Midsummer Orchids

2011-06-24T00:27:00.001+01:00

As the poem in the previous entry indicates, we often make a point of being out in the open on Midsummer’s Day. We do this whatever the weather. The poem records a previous Midsummer. There St John’s Wort provides the Midsummer theme, a plant especially associated with this time of year. Although the longest day usually occurs on the 21st June, and so is called Midsummer Day, the 24th June (St John’s Day) is also often so called. In fact the day length, rounded to whole minutes, is the same for each day between the 21st and the 24th June. So ‘Midsummer’ is best thought of as a time of year rather than a precise event as suggested by the Summer Solstice.

Nevertheless, we always choose to go out on the ‘Longest day’ for a picnic and to spend some time in the Midsummer atmosphere, I suppose as much for symbolic reasons as for any other . This year we went out to the sand dunes to look for orchids. Some heavy showers of rain fell in the morning, but by the time we had prepared our picnic lunch and were ready to go out, the sky was clearing with some patches of blue appearing. So, following our picnic, we went in search or orchids on a bright, if windy, afternoon.

There were plenty of marsh orchids and pyramidal orchids in flower and quite a few helleborines still in bud.This splendid specimen, towered above the other orchids and had purple blotches on its leaves.

We identified it as a Broad-leaved Marsh Orchid (Dactylorhiza majalis). We found this at the end of a long afternoon on the way back from the far reaches of the nature reserve, on our way to the Information Centre where we intended to ask where we might find the Bee Orchids that we knew were there but could not find. But we had left it too late and the centre was closed. No matter. We spent the end of the day looking across the estuary to the distant mountains and watching the waves roll onto the sandy beach which, by then, we had almost to ourselves. Rain clouds were gathering again as we made our way home. But it had been a perfect Midsummer’s Day for us in the brightness of the afternoon and the extended tranquility of the evening.

Midsummer

2011-06-19T14:57:00.001+01:00

Hypericum perforatum

The longest day, and we went
Into the mountains to see it through.
The shallows of the river were dry
So we sat for the feast of Midsummer
On grey sand and shingle and only
The deeps of the river ran swiftly
In a narrow channel beneath the sky.
We lingered there till the day was spent.

It was open season and hunting weather
So we stalked flowers in grass and heather,
Slender St. John’s Wort had translucent spots
And petals edged with a beading of dots:
Small suns of the mind to hallow the day
And keep from Time its passing away.

Hypericum pulchrum

A Consolation of Philosophy

2011-06-14T00:10:00.001+01:00

To contemplate the venation of a flower

Is not to look at the flower,

Not to inhabit the scented bower,

But to find form where beauty blooms.

Flower Key

2011-06-02T22:53:00.000+01:00

Red Campion (Silene dioica) - with bee!

First, discover the parts:
the ovary, womb
for the fructus, small
fruit in the pregnant bower;

To this a style
carries to the stigma’s
lips the pollen,
wild gift of vicarious
stamens, still witnesses
to the end of procreation;

The calix, a green
ring of sepals holds it
all to the stem, echoes
the softer robe they bind -

A summer frock, the
corolla – crowning glory
of the flower;

And then seeds
for the brown earth:
fructus ad terram fecundam.

Achillea

2011-05-26T00:05:00.000+01:00

Later flowering, the feathery leaves

Modest among the petals of Spring

Are soon topped with white bunches, tinged

Perhaps with pink or purple

Gracing the green with a look of old lace.

Lore:
Yarrow is a plant reputed to have healing properties. Its generic name Achillea derives from Apuleius Platonius and from Dioscorides who both claimed that Achilles used it to heal wounds caused by iron weapons. Similarly the Anglo-Saxons (who gave it the name gearwe) recommended that it should be pounded with grease and applied to wounds whence it “purgeth and healeth” them(*).

In Scottish Gaelic folklore it was held to help young women maintain their beauty:

“I will pick the smooth yarrow that my figure may be more elegant…”

but also for protection:

“I shall wound every man, no man shall wound me”. (**)

Sources:
Geoffrey Grigson An Englishman’s Flora (1958)
(*) O Cockayne Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Old England (1864-1866)
(**) Kenneth Jackson (translator) A Celtic Miscellany (1951)

Alchemilla

2011-05-20T20:45:00.000+01:00

Alchemilla (Lady's Mantle)

Photograph by Sue Greaves

The frilled edges of its leaves frame a bowl

In which is gathered Alchemist’s Dew:

Fine drops of water reflecting morning light

Drawn from the air; purer than gold.

The Merry Month of May

2011-05-13T19:59:00.000+01:00

In somer when the leves spryng
The bloschems on every bowe
So mery doyt the berdys syng
Yn wodys mery now.

So one of the medieval Robin Hood ballads.

Merry (myrige), 'mirthful' (as the birds sing), 'pleasant' (as the woods are) all in the merry month of May. Robin and his merry men (outlaws who were not merry until they danced in the May Games – men in green following Robin from grisly guise to Green God) leading revels for the May Queen and all her wanton company under the leaves of lyne.

Love trysts in the greenwood: Dafydd ap Gwilym lingering under “May’s sweet branches” setting up an altar to love “among the birch and hazel, the mantles of May”. The sensuous sweetness of all those blossoming boughs, ribbons of white across a patchwork of green as the hedgerows come alive with the scents of Summer : hawthorn and elder, the air heavy with their pheromones. The bosky shade of copses, small groves, whispy strips of tree cover adopt the depths of forests as the glamour of the greenwood is cast by every green tree.

Dafydd asked Summer where it came from and received the reply ‘Annwfn’. So the Otherworld is with us for a while as the pulse of Spring brings Summer to life.

Little John said to Robin “It is a full fayre time in a mornyng of May”. And Ariel, freed to live as an airy spirit, sings:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough

released by Prospero, to inhabit a perpetual season of Summer.

As for us, time-bound as we are, we should follow Dunbar’s advice while we can:

(adapted from an inscription by David Jones)

BOGBEAN

2011-05-06T00:10:00.000+01:00

Menyanthes trifoliata

BOGBEAN

The lake laps at the ooze

In the far corner edged with willows.

Here grows the bogbean:

Three sails for leaves and almost unseen

Beside them the spill

Of pink-white hairs from milk-white petals.

The Language of Poetry and Inspiration

2011-04-27T15:32:00.000+01:00

It is of facts I sing; though some may say
It’s fiction that mortals can see divine beings.
There is a god in us : he awakens us to inspiration
And an impulse to respond to his being.
To me, in particular, it is given to see the gods
Because I am a poet and because I sing of sacred things.

FASTI VI, 3-8

So the Roman poet Ovid. Poets have often claimed divine inspiration for their art, or that it is particularly suited to the expression of divinely inspired thoughts. Why should this be so? Why, that is, should language forced into a pattern that is, usually, different to natural speech, be a better vehicle for inspiration than the way of speaking we are all blessed with?

The answers to this question have been various. Emily Dickinson for, instance, suggested that indirect or elliptical expression was the only way to get close to saying what needed to be said. So her “say it slant” was a way at hinting at that which could not be said directly, offering a glimpse of a reality that can only be seen at all by avoiding the eyes from looking straight at it.

One way to come at things in this indirect way is to tell stories. Which is not necessarily poetry. But stories, like poems, don’t have to be ‘true’. The question ‘Did it really happen?’ is not one that we think it appropriate to ask of them. But Ovid’s “Some may say its fiction” when he tells us that he has spoken with a god suggests that not everyone will believe him outside of the limited context of ther story he is telling. We do, of course, need to believe fictions when we are reading or listening to a story. But we might, afterwards, say that it is not ‘reality’. By which we would mean something rather different from the ‘reality’ which Emily Dickinson seeks, elusively, to convey. Something very different from the ‘reality’ of which T. S. Eliot says we cannot bear very much.

But still, we say, outside of the story there is a familiar life that we know and recognise. Such lives come into stories, supply contexts for fictional events, whether these are reflections of ordinary life, parables, myths or narratives that take us down byeways that do not lead from any of the highways that run in our familiar world. So in spite of the fact that human beings live much of their lives in the mind, live as might be said, mythologically, many would object to Ovid’s claim that he sings of ‘facts’. Language, they might say, has to be rooted in referents to the world as it is, whatever else it is capable of.

Which, though it may not be obvious, brings us back to poetry. There have been periods when poetic diction has been far from that of ordinary speech, but these have not been the periods in which significant religious verse has been written. Poetry has much more often remained close to plain speech – or rather a highly-charged version of it – and is often all the more evocative and resonant when it does so. And yet, gestures to that deeper reality, to otherness, to the shady recesses of the grove in which Ovid sat and heard the words of a goddess, often reveal themselves in a compact phrase, a sudden change of cadence, in the words that come together to combine a certain tone, a rhythm, an image, to turn the hint at otherness into a view of somewhere or something the reality of which is undeniable.

-*-

That day I went into the grove

It was the imperceptible turn from the path

That caught me unawares,

The rustle of leaves that taught me

Of another world in the held breath

Before a footfall
That never found its footing.

Epiphany

2011-04-16T21:23:00.001+01:00

Today I feel

Woven into the

Stuff of the Universe.

Like a cat

I purr

As the waves

Of life

Wash silkily

Through my hair.

The Earth

Purrs too.

As dusk

Surrounds us

We feel otherness again,

Something else

Breathes mystery

Into the

Evening air,

Silent with birdsong.

Night brings stars

And the distances

In the closeness of darkness

And the otherness

Deepens:

I am aware of space.

The Earth

Holds me;

She is my anchor

When I sail to the stars.

Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

2011-04-12T23:37:00.001+01:00

Bluebells after rain - have you ever tasted that experience? In a greening woodland where the floor is a thick carpet of blue is a place to be at this time of year. It's like you've stumbled across some archetype of the nascent summer emerging from Spring. Something which defines a particular moment in the year in all its enchanting sensuousness. And then rain ... clearing to sunshine. At that moment while the wood is still wet, then is the time to step inside and be touched by something that you never quite register as a reproducable experience, that you can never quite define. It has a hint of faerie about it, liminal as if touching another realm through a border that is porous but, still, cannot be crossed. So although this 'other' world is here all about you, a verifiable part of the natural world, it remains 'other'. Is this the reason for the folklore tradition that anyone who wanders into a ring of bluebells will fall under fairy enchantment?

That is one way of writing about bluebells. Another is to explore their nomenclature. Many books still give the botanical name as Endymion non-scriptus which already opens up a treasure house of allusion. Endymion in Greek myth was beloved of the Moon goddess Selene who ensured that he could remain in his state of youthful beauty providing he remained asleep.

The part of the scientific name ‘non-scripta’ means ‘not written [upon]', and distinguishes this species from the ancestor of cultivated hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) which in Greek mythology grew from the blood of Hyacinthus as he died. The God Apollo wrote ‘AI AI’, which means ‘alas’ on the petals of this flower as a lament. These marks are supposed to appear on several different species which might refer to the flower in question, but it is the bluebell that has it enshrined in its botanical name. Here is Ovid:

As God Apollo spoke his prophecies,
The blood that filled the grasses at his feet
Turned to brighter dye than Tyrian purple.
And from its lips there came a lily flower.
And yet, unlike the silver-white of lilies,
Its colour was a tinted, pinkish blue.
Nor was this miracle enough for Phoebus;
He wrote the words 'Ai, Ai' across its petals,
The sign of his own grief, his signature.

(from Metamorphoses Book X)

Raymond Garlick 1926-2011

2011-03-22T20:50:00.001Z

I learned today of the death of the poet and critic Raymond Garlick. Born in 1926 in London he spent most of his life in Wales, making a significant contribution to the literary culture of this country. An acquaintance of John Cowper Powys and a friend of R S Thomas, he was, if less famous than them, in some ways more influential. In 1949 he founded the magazine Dock Leaves which was later renamed The Anglo-Welsh Review. Much later, long after he had ceased to have any formal connection with the magazine, I took over the editorship from Gillian Clarke. Shortly afterwards I received in the post a copy of an issue of Dock Leaves inscribed in Raymond Garlick’s distinctive black calligraphy ‘To Greg Hill, editor of No 78 from Raymond Garlick, editor of No.8’. It was accompanied by a letter wishing me well and remembering a brief meeting in a poetry reading a few years before. I received other letters from him over the years and was pleased to be able to publish some if his work in the magazine.

A brief account of his career and publications can be found on the Academi website:

HERE

No doubt better informed obituaries will appear in due course. In the meantime I want to record here my appreciation for the encouragement he gave to me as a literary editor and also to the work he did, together with Roland Mathias, in defining the canon of ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature via the magazine he founded, in the publication of the anthology Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980, and his Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature. The concept of a literature that is both of Wales, and in English, alongside Welsh literature which is of Wales and in Welsh, was an insight which created a conceptual framework for many of the Welsh-indentifying English-language writers who contributed to his magazine and its successors. But he must have the last word:

I speak from Dyfed, Wales within Wales, world
Within world, within whose heart lay curled
The flower from which Four Branches were unfurled –

A green and mighty myth where princes pass
And galleys glide as on a sea of glass,
And poetry the wind that stirs the grass.

Wordsworth, Poetic Diction and Public Utterance

2011-02-13T23:43:00.001Z

William Wordsworth

According to Donald Davie*, Wordsworth “believed in a culture of the feelings, not in the cultivation of taste”. Davie claims that this is because “he thought he found, among readers of poetry, only vicious taste and unstable judgement”. For Davie, “pure diction embodies urbanity” but “Wordsworth was not interested in urbanity” and opposed to it “a determined provincialism”. He spoke, says Davie, “as a solitary, not as a spokesman; urbanity was none of his business, nor diction either.” What are we to make of this, and does it really apply to the poet who defined the practice of his art as that of “a man speaking to men”? No doubt his pursuit of a diction for poetry that was as close as possible to common speech, and his refusal of inflated rhetoric in the construction of poems, marks him out as one who avoided the forms of public address that apostrophises readers or listeners in the category of those engaged in a political debate. In seeking a quieter voice he did, indeed, seek a provincialism that implies “speaking to men” in the most intimate of fashions.

In this sense Davie, in appearing to do an injustice to Wordsworth, in fact identifies a crucial aspect of his practice as a poet. It is not one that leads to what Davie might have desired in terms of “purity of diction”, but it puts that lack of urbanity into a context that enables Wordsworth to be recovered from his apparent censure. Urbanity, or at least 'urbaness', is very much our condition today in a way that Wordsworth cannot have foreseen. But his “the world is too much with us” has never seemed so urgently to the point. If, therefore, to continue with his assertion, by “getting and spending/We lose all our powers”, then we might wish to conclude that it was never so pressing that we should return to just such a provincialism as his life in the Lake District represents; to just such a concern with solitary experience that prioritises the private over the public voice. Public voices in our time, whether they take the form of Tony Blair's 'sincere' professions of good intentions at the Iraq Enquiry, David Cameron on the 'Big Society' or simply a prurient interest in every detail of the lives of people known as 'celebrities' are, one might conclude, beyond redemption.

Public life has, then, lost the savour of anything that might approximate to the proper exercise of men or women speaking to other men or women. To recover that might be to rediscover a provincialism that enables, in the words of Emily Dickinson, “letters to the world” to be more convincingly written. What of the ultimate expression of the solitary in the leech gatherer, presented by Wordsworth in his poem 'Resolution and Independence' as “Like one that I had met with in a dream / Or like a man from some far region sent, / To give me human strength by apt admonishment.”? Wordsworth himself found the confrontation with isolated solitariness (as opposed to his own adopted solitary stance) liberating. For Wordsworth the confrontation with “the leech gatherer on the lonely moor” brings his own superficial concerns into focus. He is enabled, by this token of the wild and of independence from the demands of public life, to return to himself in a way that puts this life into a context which transcends those demands.

Davie's concern with diction is a concern with the media of public discourse. Wordsworth, as Davie himself was well aware, sought a more significant discourse that employed a speech that was at once both less august and yet deeper in its engagement with the significant depths of human experience. Not 'pure' but 'essential' if I may employ a term that has itself been demonized by contemporary sensibility. So much the worst for that.

In a succeeding volume* Davie said that what Wordsworth brought to poetry was “the reek of the human” which is what defines his poetry in spite of the lack of 'purity' in his diction. Quite so.

Donald Davie
*Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952)
*Articulate Energy (1955)

Worlds Apart

2011-01-18T00:02:00.000Z

One of the most absorbing books I have read recently is Ned Thomas’ Bydoedd (Worlds). It is subtitled ‘Cofiant Cyfnod’ suggesting that it is a personal record of a period and to some extent that is true. But it is the ‘worlds’ encompassed by this record that are the subjects as much as the personal autobiography of the author. The first of these worlds is Germany immediately after the Second World War. As a young boy Ned Thomas went there with his family because his father was part of the British legal establishment involved in the de-nazification process. The view one gets of Germany at this time is through the eyes of a child for whom the world is just coming into sharp focus, reinforced by later research to fill in the inevitable gaps in a child’s knowledge. It is a vivid account of a particular place at a particular time that has now passed. Receiving his early education in Germany and Switzlerland, before returning to complete it in Wales, he then learned Russian as part of his compulsory army service before going on to Oxford for his degree.

In the 1980’s I wrote an article for the Canadian magazine Ariel suggesting that Ned Thomas had brought to Wales an internationalist perspective having, in addition to his childhood in Germany, held teaching post in universities at Salamanca and Moscow. I made the statement as one of bare fact in order to go on to discuss his contribution to Welsh life via the editorship of the magazine Planet (‘The Welsh Internationalist’) and his ‘journey’ as a literary critic which took him from writing in English about George Orwell to writing in Welsh about Waldo Williams. In between these he, among other things, published a book entitled The Welsh Extremist, a work designed to present contemporary Welsh-language authors to English-speaking readers. He describes this work, in retrospect, as a ‘social event’ rather than the work of an individual.

During this period I had known him personally both as a tutor in the English Department of Aberystwyth University and because I contributed to Planet both under his editorship and under subsequent editors. He went on to become the head of University of Wales Press and then to attempt the setting up of Y Byd , a daily Welsh-language newspaper, before politicians withdrew expected funding support. So the events related in the latter chapters of the book are familiar in that I witnessed some of them directly and was a distant spectator to many others. But, even so, I eagerly followed his direct and personal narrative accounts of the way worlds are constructed – whether in post-war Germany, Fascist Spain, Soviet Russia, bureaucratic London or, more recently, concerning the identity of Wales as a nation at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. All this is conveyed in fascinating detail infused with a humanity that brings the reader close both to the narrator and the ethos of the worlds he narrates.

Other events chronicled in these last chapters include his protest at a television transmitter which he turned off, together with two other respectable figures, in support of the campaign for a Welsh-language television channel, the establishment of the Mercator project on minority languages in Europe and some fascinating encounters across the continent as a result of this. And it goes on. The final sentence of the book follows an imagined transformation of Aberystwyth Prom at night into a beach in Donostia. But reflects, finally, that tomorrow it will be in Wales, and it will be a new day.

Sarn Gynfelyn

2011-01-12T00:30:00.000Z

Sarn Gynfelyn and the Lime Kiln at Wallog

The sibilance of the sea on the stones carries whispered messages from drowned acres out of our own time, cut off from us by memory as much as the sea. Who can hear the voices in the hiss of the foam around jagged rocks?

The sudden yellow of the horned poppy amongst grey pebbles startles, jolts a sharp recall which ebbs as the wave that crashes on the beach retreats.

A world of empty vessels is figured in the freight of flotsam carried here: empty margarine tubs 'au Pays Bretagne', tarred wood, oil cans.

Above the beach, the arched stone structure of a long-disused lime kiln from a hundred years back is like something from a far remoter past. They would land rock here, burn it for lime for acidic soils. Now the openings are stuffed with beer cans and other detritus clogging the passages into its mysterious interior.

If this is too far back to remember, what of the causeway running out into the sea? Named after a local saint from the sixth century but far older than this, each nomination accuses another and becomes dative, frames of time receding through recession after recession. Imagined as a road leading out to the legendary drowned land of Cantre'r Gwaelod, it runs to a rock called Caer Wyddno, seat of the legendary king of that land. But the waves lapping the causeway run along the detritus of a glacier too far back for tales to be told but something that can be read in the rocks, the upturned layers of mudstone oblique to the rippled level of the sea.

Into which the morraine runs, holding its secrets down where embedded stones grip the shifting sands. At low tide you can walk out here as along a submerged pier and appear to be walking on water; imagine drowned lands or recite images of ancient glaciers before this land was our land and think on when the pulse of the tides throbbed over what's now under or when the fissured cliffs will hear not the sound of the wind and the crash of the waves, but mantras of supra and infra deep in the abyss of the future.

Mererid and the Deluge

2011-01-09T01:10:00.002Z

The popular version of the legend of Cantre'r Gwaelod, the sunken land beneath the sea in Cardigan Bay, West Wales, is that a character called Seithenyn got drunk and failed to close the sluice gates before the tide came in, and so the sea drowned the land. This version is comparatively recent, though it allows one of Iolo Morganwg's phony triads featuring Seithenyn as one of the three great drunkards of Ynys Prydain. In the older story Seithenyn was not the culpable drunkard but the king of Maes Gwyddno. The story is told in verses in the Black Book of Carmarthen of a young woman called Mererid who removes a vital stone to allow the water in becuase she is distraught at the death of her lover who has been killed in battle on behalf of Seithenyn. The verse accuses her of pride ('traha') and suggests that she cries to God in remorse for what she has done . It has been suggested that one of the verses may have been responsible for the later 'drunkard' story:

Diaspad mererid y ar gwineu kadir
kedaul duu ae goreu
gnaud guydi gormot eisseu

translated originally as

Meredid's cry over strong wines
bounteous God has wrought it:
after excess comes privation.

However, the words 'gwineu kadir' do not in the opinion of recent scholars mean 'strong wines' but refer to the chesnut coloured horse Mererid rides (gwineu = 'reddish-brown).

But is the tale of Mererid herself a rationalisation of an even earlier story? John Rhŷs suggests that there are parallels with well legends in which the guardian of the well or spring might, if violated or offended, release the cap on the conduit from a vast deposit of water - perhaps from the Other World - which then inundates the area around the spring. This Rhŷs suggests, is the origin of several lake legends such as that of Llyn Llech Owen, and Llyn y Fan from which, as is well known, an Other World woman came through to our world carrying her own taboo of violation.

If the story of Mererid ('pearl') is such a rationalisation then we must regard the legend as a fluid(!) story, changing according to the predelictions of different ages, and decide if this particular restructuring of the 'original' has meaning for us; if the return of the water world speaks to our condition in the 21st century. If so the significance it carries of lands inundated because the guardian of the gateway to the waterworld has been angered is potentially greater than the playful interaction with legend. However deeply embedded in archetypal imagery of the deluge, it may become a dynamic image of our own experience of a deluge that flows through legendary gateways into our own dry comfort zone. Then we may think:

The oyster containing Mererid's pearl
Is no mermaid's tale or
Cultured setting of disaster:
Intact it seals our future.

Tide

2011-01-02T16:12:00.000Z

R i b b e d s a n d , w e t i n t h e w a v e – s p r a y
w h e r e t h e s e a r u n s i n r e l e n t l e s s l y
a n d s t r e a m s b a c k o v e r a compact o f

f i n e g r i t s s m o o t h i n g t h e m t o a
s i n g l e s u b s t a n c e w h i c h y e t , w h e n
d r y , f l o w s l i k e w a t e r t h r o u g h t h e

f i n g e r s o n t h i s b e a c h , a n d t h e
d u n e s b e h i n d i t , n o s t o n e t h a t w o u l d
b e c a l l e d a s t o n e ( n o r o c k , n o p e b b l e )

j u s t t h e s a n d , w e t i n t h e w a v e – s p r a y
a n d s t r e a m i n g b a c k o v e r i t t h e s e a
r e t u r n i n g w a v e u p o n w a v e r e l e n t l e s s l y

Shells, Stones and Mermaid's Purses

2011-01-01T18:30:00.003Z

Shells on a beach lying between pebbles banded with quartz, others the colours of jade or garnet, embedded in gritty sand, infused in some far-distant geological event, worn smooth by the tides ebbing and flowing across a beach that was once a forest and before that a salt marsh, changes in the ebbing and flowing of the land itself through the relentless tide of time seeming to flow one way only but bringing with it changes that turn sea beds into mountains and wash away even the highest mountains.

Yet on this beach now, lying next to fragments of ancient rocks, are these shells, new-formed by comparison but discarded, their inhabitants digested by the oystercatchers foraging in the sea's edge. And here, too, the empty egg case of a dogfish, its hard casing and vetch-like tendrils obsolete on this beach where it attracts the name 'mermaid's purse', an apparently more fitting identification for so durable an object than one that assigns its purpose as a container for the eggs of a fish. So fact and fancy dwell together in the combination of the name of the object and what we know it to be in this blink of time's eye, though two blinks ago it would have been otherwise.

So as the the Sun in the northern hemisphere begins, gradually, to strengthen (as from the standpoint of this beach it appears to us)and we turn our calenders to day one of our arbitrary reckoning of a new year, these shells, this mermaid's purse, these ancient stones - all fragments of time's relentlessness - lie in witness ( lie in witness?)to what was, to what is, and await with deceptive stillness the flux of what will be.

Beachcombing

2010-12-28T00:05:00.001Z

items of driftwood

I live a mile or so from the sea, which means that although I do most of my adventurous walking in the mountains, just a little way inland, we also often walk along the seashore. Some time ago we also began taking a couple of bags with us to pick up small pieces of driftwood to feed the fire. These are mainly irregularly shaped pieces, worn by the waves and the shingle into fissured shards of the trees they came from, or smaller pieces worn smooth by the same process. They make elegant piles on the hearth and, well-seasoned, burn well, sometimes with a blue flame from the salt in them. But we soon moved on from this to taking our estate car as near as we could to particularly good spots and filling it with larger pieces of wood and have now extended our capacity further by buying a small electric chain saw to cut up even bigger pieces when we get them home.

So now it is not so much a matter of picking up wood on a walk as incorporating a walk in a wood-gathering expedition. This has almost replaced the need to buy-in logs and all we need is a small amount of coal to keep the fire burning. This also means that we go more often and so have become more familiar with the inhabitants of the tide line: the waders foraging on the shore and the gulls dipping into the crashing waves as they roll onto the beach.

But on a recent visit all was silent. The beach was covered with sheets of ice and not a bird was to be seen. Today, though, was different. The gulls swooped overhead and oyster catchers stood in the foam of the waves that ran across the sand. On the cliffs huge icicles hung down, but dripping in the slow thaw. As the temperature rose there were shifts in the cliff face. Lumps of earth fell away and a huge boulder came crashing down onto the shingle shelf above the edge of the sand at the high tide line.

This is a coastline in transition. Five thousand years ago a forest grew on what had previously been marsh. Then the waters returned and all the beaches north and south of here have the remains of trees buried beneath them and sometimes exposed, as at Borth where the semi-fossilised stumps are often visible sticking out of the sand at low tide. The legendary expression of this fact is the story of Cantre’r Gwaelod a land lost beneath the waves. As the cliffs erode and water levels begin to rise perhaps some of what is now standing against the coast – the leisure centre, the caravan park and miles of cliffs – will be washed by waves running in relentlessly over fallen rocks, bricks and mortar.

In the meantime we’ll carry on going to our favourite beach where two currents meet and pile up rows of seaweed, driftwood and other debris along the side of the estuary of a small river that meets the sea here and brings down tree branches and other items onto the beach from inland. The wood we take, if left, would rot and release its carbon into the air, and we only accelerate the process by burning it. We also remove from the beach much natural and manufactured timber such as fence posts, bits of boat and other unidentifiable items. Perhaps it is naïve to believe that burning this instead of coal or electricity will do much to delay the onset of climate change that may eventually make the beach a ‘lost land’. But it keeps us in touch with the pulse of life at the edge of the ocean and also keeps our midwinter hearth burning bright.

Rachel Bromwich

2010-12-19T16:21:00.001Z

The news about the death of Rachel Bromwich in the last week was hardly unexpected as she had been ill for some time. The ninety-five years of her life were distinguished by scholarly achievement that was the continuity of a tradition stretching back through her teacher Ifor Williams, and beyond him to John Morris-Jones and further back still to John Rhys. The third edition of her magnum opus, Trioedd Ynys Prydein published in 2006 was prepared for the press by her assistant Morfydd Owen from her papers as she was already at that stage unable to do it herself. This work, apart from being a definitive text for the Welsh Triads, is also major work of reference for related studies because of the extensive notes appended to the main text. Taken together with her edition of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poems, her edition with Simon Evans of Culhwch and Olwenand her collaboration with A O H Jarman and Brinley Roberts on the volume The Arthur of the Welsh, among many other works,this represents an immense scholarly achievement.

Her funeral is to be held in Aberystwyth, according to the Quaker tradition to which she adhered, on the last day of 2010.

Cara Wallia Derelicta

2010-12-11T00:40:00.002Z

The inscription above by David Jones is in a mixture of Welsh and Latin. It reads
Cara Wallia derelicta....Literally 'Dear, abandoned Wales' (though David Jones himself once rendered it 'Poor buggered-up Wales'), 'on the feast day of Damaseus, Friday the Eleventh day of December, then was all Wales cast down' (the last bit of that is a line from the Elegy to Llywelyn the Last native Prince of Wales who was killed on that day). The inscription goes on to suggest a lineage for Llywelyn such as that claimed by Geoffrey of Monmouth for Arthur, but using the Latin of Virgil mixed with the Welsh of Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch:

The ineluctable hour of Troy has come
A leader's head, a dragon's head was upon him
Fair Llywelyn's head, a shock to the world
That an iron stake has pierced it.

(Llywelyn's body was buried at Abbey Cwm Hir in Wales but his head was impaled on London Bridge.)

And then, still echoing the Elegy from Llywelyn's bard:

'There is no counsel, no closure, no opening' (this running up the side of the inscription).

So here, on the 'first day after ten' of December, this is in memory of that winter - ab hieme - 1282.

Light ebbs yet, and the turn of a tide is slow, but certain.

Horse Sonnets

2010-12-03T19:36:00.001Z

{I}

The cottage is from an older world

Than the road that runs past it.

Sitting in its bedroom viewing trees

In the far distance I relish,

From my sick bed, the Sunday

Quietness in this busy time of the world

As if the noise had been carried away

By the analgesic that dissolves my pain.

And in the afterglow of this moment

Bridged by the growing and the shrinking

Sound of a car, the quiet returns

With a clatter of hooves on the road

Which I know I can share

With those others that lived here before.

{II}

And then the strangeness of it all, the ghostly

Clop of those hooves and the reality of those horses.

With only the sound to go by I must reconstruct

That substantiality, the hard muscle and yellow teeth,

And the rider: I see a tall woman with a black hard hat.

Or I can refuse the specific location of sound in solidity

Posit riders from the spirit world, the wild hunt,

Phantom steeds in the quiet of the afternoon.

Even so, the imagination, capable of so much,

Returns to its roots in the real, reviews what it remembers

Making what I might see if I went to the window,

In spite of the semi-delirium of fever,

To wonder if horses from the Otherworld

Would have such hooves as beat the hardness of the road.

{III}

Ranging along the bridleways of being

Thoughts drift to an old story of a woman

On a white horse who came into the world

Much as my thoughts drift in and out of it:

Elusive, though she rode a straight path

At a steady pace, she would not be caught

By any who followed her save one she sought

And he only by asking her to stay awhile.

Then her horse stood, and she in the saddle

Conversed with her veil cast aside,

All her glamour revealed

So the pact was soon sealed

That in one year, if he came, she would be his bride

And so it was, though delayed till he showed his mettle.

{IV}

In the high field above the trees is a horse

We can visit, and in walking weather

We take her an apple and she comes to the gate

For it and each of the children force

Themselves to hold a piece in their palm and her nether

Lip slobbers them as she takes it, and they concentrate

On holding the hand out flat. Their hands are wet

When they climb from the gate with shining eyes

For they have touched another life and a world

That is not theirs beckons, but under their own skies

Where there are things to discover, banners to be unfurled.

We look out at them and the horse through a glaze

Which is between us and their country and its untrodden ways.

The Philosopher and the Magician

2010-11-24T23:05:00.000Z

Having spent years of my life teaching Shakespeare to students who want to know what all the fuss is about, I have often referred myself to the following comment by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“ The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry.”

(Culture and Value, p.86)

I say ‘referred myself’ because I could hardly have further confused the students by referring them to the quote. For them it had to be the works themselves, or the particular play we were studying, that I would take them through and make some attempt to convey the effect of all that asymmetry and the elusive appeal that has enticed generations of readers – as well as playgoers – over the centuries. In spite of my understanding - and to some extent subscribing to - the modern view that ‘the play’s the thing’ and what happens on stage is what is important, I also have a personal empathy with those like Charles Lamb who suggested that a play like King Lear can only really achieve its full effect when played on the stage of the mind. Or Hazlitt, who said of the same play that "All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even what we ourselves conceive of it."

Those students, if they were being prepared for external examinations, had to be taken through the themes, figurative language, dramatic ironies, character studies etc, which would enable them to pass the examination. But even where this was completely successful, I still felt that many of them still did not ‘get’ Shakespeare. Where I was teaching for internal assessment I had more freedom to design a programme of study that got closer to what I felt was really needed. We could study imaginative reality, the intuitive rightness of Shakepeare’s presentation of fictional events grabbed from any source available, the language which was by turns rough and unsophisticated, highly poetic, deeply grounded in the soil of Britain even when the setting is elsewhere. But, to get back to Wittgenstein, he was surely right when he described the corpus of work as a dream:

“A dream is all wrong ….. and yet at the same time it is completely right ….. If Shakespeare is great, as he is said to be, then it must be possible to say of him : it’s all wrong, things aren’t like that – and at the same time it’s quite right according to a law of its own.”

(Culture and Value, p.83)

And that’s just it. He sets his own terms and performs the mystery of making it all work. Wittgenstein goes a bit further than this and justifies his ‘dream’ comment by saying that the plays “create their own language and world [which] is completely unrealistic”. But if this is a dream, it is one that we are all drawn into. Or, in the case of those that don’t ‘get’ it, not drawn into. But, like actual dreams, it is a dream that interrogates reality rather than attempts to escape from it. Shakespeare casts a spell to which some are immune. But I would not for the world be among them. That scene at the end of The Tempest where Prospero casts his staff and his book into the waters is much more than a metaphorical farewell to the playwright’s craft. It really is a renunciation of magic.

BABEL

2010-11-04T16:35:00.001Z

Tower

"nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do"
Genesis II.6
They built it to climb to God
but he descended their stair,
Twisted tongues of each of them
gaping empty air

Speechless
averting
faces from Heaven
they laboured apart

-restrained
from common bonds
imagined diversely,
strove vainly.

So each of us
stretching across the sundered plain
to grasp hands in friendship
finds again
a piece of broken foundation stone -
not from a tower of burnt clay and slime
but a bower in Eden at an end of time.

And Babylon -

"I will make of it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction"

Isiah XIV.23

How many miles ...?

(the light begins to fade

words fail in the flicker
of a candle flame and trickle

away, gaining no hold,
dissolve and are made rough again:
corrugations of wax
in the runnels of history)

... by candlelight

but not back again

to any stone-built tower,

to any kindled flame.

Light ebbs to flow

around our darkness.

Bālāl
Gate of God
Or the God of the Gate?

What do we know?

Only words, which confuse us.
Language, which leaves us
Bereft of its significance.

Hanging Garden

“the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from one another tier on tier”
Diodorus Siculus

Were trees dependent
On terraces,
Was earth banked
(treasured loam in lime-clad stone),
Did the wind sing of weeping
In dangling leaves
Euphrates via Archimedes
To wet those roots
And dampen those notes
Sounding lost love?

Or did these words make
A shape in air?

Gypsies in Literature

2010-10-25T00:02:00.000+01:00

"There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; ….”

Jasper Petulengro in George Borrow’s Lavengro

My discussion below of George Borrow’s links with the gypsies leads me to reflect on the appearance of gypsies in literature. In Borrow’s time references were not uncommon. I think, for instance, of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ who “went to learn the gyspy lore” but “came to Oxford and his friends no more”, or George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in which the child Maggie Tulliver runs off to join the gypsies and is brought back by one of them (minus a silver thimble) in expectation of a reward. The dominant themes during this period contain both a romantic sense of a mysterious people emanating strangeness and a sense of outcasts living on the edge of – if not beyond – ordinary human life.

Walter Scott reports that they were regarded in Scotland as possessing similar powers to the fairies. But at the same time anthropologists were linking them not to Egypt – as had been thought - but to India and finding analogies between the Romany language and Sanskrit. Nevertheless they remained mysterious: Fortune tellers, horse-whisperers, travellers on the green roads able to melt into the countryside at will. As such they inhabit a different space in the ethos of the life on the land than, say, other groups of travellers, tinkers, disenfranchised groups wandering homeless across the country. But at the same time not. Such are the contradictions of our attitude to otherness. In our own day we hear of France expelling Romany back to Romania. This is not new. An edict of Elizabeth I ordered them to leave the country under pain of death, but it was said at the time that if one were executed they would divide into many more.

How far back does literature celebrate this complexity? The earliest references I know of are from the sixteenth century: There is a general account of them and of their speech by Andrew Boorde in 1547. There are a few passing references in Shakespeare (was the ‘Egyptian’ who gave Othello the fated handkerchief a gypsy or an inhabitant of Egypt?). Thomas Dekker says they were called ‘Moon Men’ because of their coming and going. He says “The men wear scarfs of calico or any other base stuff, hanging their bodies like morris dancers with bells and other toys to entice country people to flock about them and to wonder at their fooleries, or rather their rank knaveries. The women ….. wear rags and patched filthy mantles uppermost when the undergarments are handsome and in fashion.”

But best of all is Skelton’s description of Elynour Rummynge:

Her kyrtel Brystow red

With clothes upon her hed

That wey a sowe of led,

Wrythen in wonder wyse,

After the Sarasyns gyse,

With a whym wham

Knyt with a trym tram

Upon her brayne pan

Lyke a Egyptian

Capped about

Whan she goeth out.

The Romany Rye

2010-10-19T01:10:00.001+01:00

George Borrow

Reading George Borrow can be a frustrating experience. I have long been familiar with his Wild Wales (1862). There one gets a picture of him as an eccentric English gentleman walking across Wales and telling the natives what they ought to know about their literature. But this is a late work. Reading his (semi?)-autobiographical books about his early life offers a rather different picture of him. His early childhood was spent travelling from town to town – including extended stays in Scotland and Ireland – as his father was a recruiting sergeant during the Napoleonic wars. His later youth, following his father’s retirement, was spent in Norwich. His wanderings in the Norfolk countryside led to him meeting a snake catcher who, he claims, gave him a tame viper. One day he wandered into a place where some gypsies were camped and, in response to a hostile reception, pulled out the snake. They were impressed and called him Sapengro (‘snake master’) and he became a sort of blood brother to their young son. The relationship led to further contact with the gypsies when he and his ‘brother’ Ambrose – but called Jasper Petulengro in his books - were adults. By this time Borrow was known as Lavengro (‘word master’) due to his mastery of many languages, including Romany. He referred to himself as

A lad who twenty tongues can talk
And sixty miles a day can walk

His facility for languages extended to Manchu, into which he translated the New Testament. But his knowledge was wide rather than deep. He made elementary mistakes and tended to rely on his photographic memory to support the breadth of his learning. Although apprenticed by his father to a law firm, he spent much of his time there translating the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym from an edition he found in a secondhand book shop. He eventually abandoned the law firm and moved to London hoping to get his translations from Welsh, Danish and German published. But after a year working as a hack writer he took to the road. All this is recounted in Lavengro (1851), which also tells of his near death from a drow (a poisoned cake) administered by the gypsy sorceress Mrs Herne who said he had stolen her language. He is discovered by an itinerant Welsh preacher and nursed back to health by him and his wife. The rest of Lavengro and his next book The Romany Rye (Gypsy Friend) (1857) provides further fascinating details of his life on the road and his encounters with the gypsies. It also tells of his relationship with a road girl Isopel Berners alongside whom he lived for a while in a secluded dingle. She eventually left him in frustration as he insisted on their most intimate moments together being spent trying to teach her Armenian! One senses certain wry ironies here, but with Borrow it is not always possible to be sure.

While all this is clearly based on true events it, at times, strains credulity as straight-forward autobiography. Borrow rarely displays skill as a stylist, though once or twice he reveals a potential for such skill in a response to a beautiful morning or a starry night. But for the most part he marches doggedly on with his narrative. Interleaved with this material are various episodes telling the stories of people he meets. These are not always interesting and Borrow seems not to perceive the distinction between the significant and the trivial. Several chapters are devoted to a tedious debate between him and a proselytising catholic priest to no particular purpose other than to expose what he saw as the corruption of the Catholic Church. There is also a chapter entirely devoted to a joke about a poet (apparently Wordsworth) whose work is a guaranteed cure for insomnia. Borrow was not really a literary man, except in so far as literature was a way of studying languages. If he has a literary model at all it was Daniel Defoe.

These books were written some twenty years after the latest events they recall. During some of those years he was employed by the British and Foreign Bible Society to produce and distribute Spanish Bibles in Spain. He wrote about his experiences there in Zincali (1841), an account of the Spanish gypsies and The Bible in Spain (1843) which was a runaway best-seller. The proceeds from the latter work enabled him to retire to his small estate in Norfolk where his gypsy friends had an open invitation to set up camp. It is at that distance of reflection that he then wrote Lavengro and The Romany Rye and managed to publish his translation of the Welsh classic, Ellis Wynne’s Visions of the Sleeping Bard (1860). He had told the preacher who helped him after he was poisoned that he would not then return with him to Wales as he wished to be received there with due honour as the author of his as yet unpublished translations. So that view of an eccentric English gentleman in Wales is not so far from the mark by the time he undertook his journey thinking of himself, no doubt, as having achieved that renown. But he had travelled a long road to get there.

His final work Romano-Lavo Lil : Word Book of the Romany (1872) was soon superseded by more scholarly work published by the Gypsy Lore Society which was started shortly after his death. Ernest Rhys published a selection of his translations from Dafydd ap Gwilym, Iolo Goch and Ellis Wynne in 1915.

The Dancing Pilgrimage of Water

2010-10-07T23:41:00.001+01:00

" ........... The speech
of the shaman is locked in the water web
where rivers meet."

So writes Glenda Beagan in her poem 'Shaman' included in The Dancing Pilgrimage of Water, a book of photographs by Phil Cope and writings selected by Dewi Roberts. In a previous book Holy Wells: Wales, Phil Cope had included some poetry alongside his commentaries on the wells. Here the idea is that the creative writing and the photography are in balance and complement each other. The selection of writings ranges from the seventeenth century to the present, but with a strong representation from modern works.

When I received my copy of the book I soon realised that something had gone horribly wrong with the typesetting or the editing as my poem 'Trawsgoed' ends suddenly in mid sentence five lines from the end, but with a neat full stop seemingly indicating the end of the poem. I have since learned that I am not the only contributor to suffer in this way.

Be that as it may, the photographs are stunning and the texts accompanying them, including some translated from Welsh, all engage deeply with the flow of waters through, across, over and under the earth. There is much more that I could quote, but having started with Glenda Beagan's reflections on the confluence of the Elwy and the Clwyd, I'll end by following with her the flow of waters back through time:

" ........... Hear heavy wains,
the whining of horses, the voices in the dusk -
chill calls, that Norman French nasality,

Tegeingl mingling Mercian : vowels broadening,
lengthening, but never merging with the plaited water
nor interweaving on a loom of moisture.

The threads remain: sharp, several, sure."

Reading Dorothy Wordsworth

2010-09-29T00:07:00.000+01:00

Dove Cottage from an illustration of 1882

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I have been using Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal below the title heading to mark the progress of the year. In the current entry above she records travelling from London with William for his marriage to Mary Hutchinson following an extended stay in France where he settled his affairs with Annette Vallon, the mother of a child by him that he had never seen because of the impossibility of visiting France after the French Revolution.

Dorothy’s Journal was begun when she and her brother William settled for a while in Alfoxden, Somerset to be near Coleridge. The so-called Alfoxden Journal records everyday incidents and the responses to nature and the passing seasons during 1797 and 1798. It also records indirectly the development of the friendship between both the Wordsworths and Coleridge at this time. But it was not written for public consumption so gives glimpses rather than a full account of this process.

William was the main reader of the Journal and apparently encouraged Dorothy to continue the practice of keeping it when they set up home together at Dove Cottage in their native Lake District. The so called Grasmere Journal runs from May 1800 to January 1803. Many incidents recorded in the Journal also occur in William’s poems, notably the famous ‘Daffodils’ vision which Dorothy describes in some detail.

Reading between the lines of the Grasmere Journal, we perceive the developing relationship between William and Mary Hutchinson – and the parallel attraction between Sara Hutchison and Coleridge who could not pursue it because he was already married. Dorothy’s often matter-of-fact comments often reveal anxieties that were, perhaps, not fully on the surface. Her simple “poor Coleridge” is easy enough to put in context in retrospect, as the nature of the relationship with Sara is now well-known. Her feelings about William’s attraction to Mary emerge more subtly in images of domestic dislocation which display less obviously what must have been uncertainties about her own continuing close relationship with her brother after his marriage. These reached a culmination in the entry where she notes, following the positive comments on their arrival at the Hutchinson’s house, that she was ill for most of her stay.

Further on she records

“On Monday 4th October 1802 my brother William was married to Mary Hutchinson.”

A little further on in the same extended entry she writes:

“William had parted from me upstairs. I gave him the wedding ring – with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the breakfast. I kept myself as quiet as I could, but when I saw the two men running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no longer & threw myself on the bed where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything, till Sara came upstairs and said ‘They are coming’.”

These words are heavily scored through in the Journal and have been restored for publication. After this the tension eases and there is a detailed account of the several days the three of them took travelling back to Grasmere. Dorothy clearly felt in retrospect that her expression here was best hidden perhaps even from William’s eyes. The Journal continues in more relaxed manner for the rest of the year, then ends when the notebook runs out in January 1803. There are later diaries of trips to Scotland and the Continent. But here the Journal ends.

Should Dorothy’s private words, whether scored out or not, be revealed to the public gaze? Perhaps not. But I would not be without them. The Wordsworths have by now become an industry. Dove Cottage itself is visited by hordes of tourists annually “To sink their eyes into a room/Filled with the unused and unworn.” in Geoffrey Hill’s distanced view of the proceedings. It might be thought to say much about modern cultural fetishism, but the cottage was purchased for this purpose in 1890. The Wordsworths moved out in 1809 to a larger house at Rydal Mount and it was subsequently occupied by Thomas De Quincy. Leaving it temporarily before his marriage in 1802 William had written “Farewell thou little nook of mountain-ground” and described it as “The loveliest spot that man has ever found”. If it is hard to recover that loveliness as a modern visitor jostling others around the tiny spaces within the cottage, it can be intimately recreated in a quiet reading of Dorothy’s Journal.

Secret Garden

2010-09-21T20:37:00.005+01:00

Turning I saw the sun's last light fading

On the closed door and passed

A shadow a tree had cast

On the wall across my path.

Shock of the New

2010-09-18T17:04:00.001+01:00

Recreation of Nijinsky's 1913 Choreography of Le Sacre du Printemps

I’ve been sorting out a drawer full of video tapes to play through those that might be worth transferring to DVD. One contained a recording made some years ago of an ‘Arena’ dramatization of the first performance of The Rite of Spring. The background plot was of Stravinsky persuading Diaghilev to set his music to a ballet, and then the rehearsal and performance of the ballet choreographed by Nijinsky in Paris in 1913. But the performance of the ballet itself and the riot that broke out in the Theatre des Champs Elysee when it was performed, provided an atmospheric culmination. At times such was the noise level that Nijinsky had to beat time from the wings to help the dancers who could barely hear the music.

Although the riotous events in the theatre have entered into myth as a response to Stravinsky’s music, it may well have been Nijinsky’s choreography that upset many present (see recreation above). Even so, Stravinsky’s score must have sounded raucous and dissonant to those who could hear it above the general din. The music has long been familiar to me, and was one of the first pieces or orchestral music I got to know. But watching the dancers move around the stage to the music in their heavy costumes (most recent versions seem to put the dancers in flesh-coloured body stockings) while the audience cat-called, booed, cheered and argued among themselves, set the piece in its contemporary context and underlined the revolutionary nature of the work.

This was the age during which high modernism launched itself onto a bewildered world. In many ways the experimentation in music, literature, and indeed all the arts has not been equalled. Much of the ‘revolutionary’ art that has developed since seems derivative and to lack substance by comparison. Stravinsky, Eliot, Joyce, Picasso and many others remain as icons of ‘the modern’ even today.

You Cannot be Serious!

2010-09-06T23:21:00.000+01:00

Is anything a fit subject for humour? I’ve not usually got much time for those who complain, for instance, about jokes about religious belief or ritual, though I can see why those who wish to take their religion seriously object to them. I am led to this reflection after seeing a poster in my local arts centre advertising a one-man show called ‘Lord of the Rings’. The poster suggests that if you like Lord of the Rings, you’ll love this, and the quoted reviews claim that it is hilariously funny. I found myself thinking that the one thing I didn’t want Lord of the Rings to be is funny. I’m not, of course, going to protest outside the show or write letters of complaint to the theatre management. But I won’t go to see it.

I’m not usually averse to humour and especially enjoy satire directed at those who deserve to be lampooned. I can even see that some people might think Lord of the Rings deserves to be lampooned, though that does not seem to be the case here. Thinking about it, I find that I am less keen on such things as mimics pretending to be someone else in order to get people to laugh at them. But my specific objection here seems to be to parody. It could be said that Lord of the Rings is fantasy, and so it is not ‘real’ so there can be no objection to making fun of it. On the other hand the only way such high fantasy can work (except I suppose as spectacle which might be the main attraction of the film version) is if it is taken seriously. So to laugh at it is to undermine it.

Do I want to ally myself with the killjoys, the religious fanatics and those who say there shall be no more cakes and ale? Do I wish to assert that certain areas of human culture are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to humorous interpretation? My clear answer is no. But the feeling persists that trivializing some things that should not be trivialized is to detract from the human potential for deeply felt experience.

Derek Jarmarn's 'The Tempest'

2010-08-27T20:35:00.001+01:00

Having got used to the technical innovations of digital film and, more recently, 3D effects, it was a salutary experience to attend a film club showing of Derek Jarman’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest shot in 16mm on a low budget in 1979. The pictured flickered at times and in one section flecks appeared to be spattered down the screen. The soundtrack volume was slightly uneven and at one point was overlaid with a clicking noise. It was a bit like listening to an old 78rpm record. But in spite of all this, the magical atmosphere was deeper than is often the case with slick digital special effects.

The film is set in a crumbling mansion rather than on an island. Heathcote Williams appears rather young as Prospero, though his dishevelled and rather seedy look makes him rather more like a castaway than the usual dignified Duke of Milan. Toyah Willcox as a wilful teenage Miranda giggles at Caliban’s sexual gestures and looks as if she can’t wait to get hold of Ferdinand. Jarman adopted a minimalist approach to the text: whole speeches are cut down to a couple of lines and many of the play’s rhetorical flourishes reduced to low-key exchanges or soliloquies delivered as voice-overs to e.g. Prospero turning over the pages of a book displaying magical symbols or Miranda riding provocatively on a rocking-horse. Jack Birkett as Caliban breaks raw eggs into his mouth and is graphically shown being suckled by a grotesque Sycorax. Karl Johnson’s Ariel is grudging and petulant and seems to sneak away while Prospero is sleeping at the end rather than being amicably released.

But Jarman’s outrageous pièce de résistance is the camp adaptation of the masque scene as a troupe of sailor boys dancing a hornpipe culminating in a punning, bluesy rendition of ‘Stormy Weather’ (see clip) by Elisabeth Welch, presumably as Juno and Ceres in one (though, in the cast list, simply described as ’a goddess’).

With such an idiosyncratic approach to the play it may not have been wholly inappropriate to watch it in its grainy analogue version in which the colours seemed almost painted on and the actors appeared, in some ways, to be playing out their allotted parts in a masque that constitutes the whole film, moving around the set like “spirits … [in an] … insubstantial pageant”. We are, indeed, “such stuff as dreams are made on”. If nothing else, the film certainly underlines that assertion.

Toyah Willcox as Miranda

Reading Orlando

2010-08-04T15:39:00.003+01:00

House-sitting – so away from home - I brought with me at random a book from my shelves not read for many years. It was not in good condition. Later, after a long drive then food and wine, I was tired and took the book to bed. As I opened it the binding glue on the spine cracked. The pages had turned a rusty-brown colour around the edges. I checked the date of the printing: 1972. I must have bought this Penguin Modern Classics paperback some time not long after that date and first read it then. I managed a few pages just to re-acquaint myself with the novel before succumbing to sleep.

But this is a novel (cum veiled biography) requiring long spells of concentrated reading with time ebbing backwards. So for the next two days, after some exploratory walks on the footpaths surrounding the village, I settled down on a sofa with the amiable long-haired moggie who is a permanent resident of the house, to unravel Virginia Woolf’s long and often involved sentences – frequently re-reading whole passages – which tell the story of Orlando.

As I turned the pages many of them detached themselves from the spine of the book. It seemed appropriate for such a tale to be undoing itself as I read it. The absorbing account of Orlando’s journey across nearly four hundred years, beginning as a boy and ending as a woman, carrying with him and her the manuscript of an evolving poem and puzzling over the relationship between life and literature, played itself out once more. The work does, of course, have a putative link with life in that it re-presents the life of Vita Sackville-West. Is it best for the reader to keep this well in the background while reading? I think so. The life of literature is best not confused with unimagined fact.

About half way through, at the point where it is revealed that the archduchess is an archduke, I abandoned literature for life and went to the pub. Here was reality enough. The beer was good. The food was OK. Above the general buzz of noise one nearby very loud and raucous voice entertained the rest of the table and far beyond with largely inane but occasionally offensive banter. That’s life! A couple sat at the next table, one of the pair had doused herself in some sickly-sweet essence of drain-cleaner which permeated the air all around her. My appetite receded. So much for life.

Returning the next day to literature I took apart the rest of the book. Consider the condition of Orlando's own manuscript:

“She had carried this about with her for many years now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing-paper when with the gipsies had forced her to over-score the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for close on three hundred years now. It was time to make an end.”

I made an end. Her world is gone. I no longer have possession of it except in pieces. Should I abandon that paperback? Or keep it tied in a bundle as a counterpart to Orlando's own manuscript?

At the end she decides, Prospero-like, to bury her book. But the "secret transaction" between poetry and nature diverts her:

"So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it."

The book remains in the world even when out of it.

Iwan Llwyd : Aneirin

2010-07-22T13:41:00.002+01:00

In a comment on my earlier post on the death of Iwan Llwyd, Hilaire asked about the poem below and subsequently sent me a copy of the Welsh text suggesting I translate it. So here is an initial attempt. Aneirin was the author of the ‘Goddodin’, a series of elegies for Brythonic warriors killed at the Battle of Catraeth in the Sixth Century.

Aneirin

With your camera and your helmet
you jumped down from the helicopter
a bare mile from the battle,

then escaped it squatting
in the nearest refuge while missiles
exploded in bits all around you:

past the burning skeletons of tanks
and the ashes of empty bodies, wounded soldiers
and the raw flesh which fed the crows,

you stumbled and fell through the mud
getting up from time to time to take a picture
in colour of a man killing:

in black and white
in Catraeth, Kampuchea,
the Somme and the Six Counties

you nurtured the magic of a familiar story
gathering the boys to answer your questions
their eyes following the lens’s prophecy:

you gave them fame to survive the battle
a glimpse of eternity
from the unbiased muse of a journalist.

KINGFISHER

2010-07-18T23:08:00.000+01:00

Sitting under the shade of alder trees
A sense of stillness and silence out of the Sun

Though a breeze is rustling the leaves above
And the ripple of the flow of water over stones

Tells of movement and fills the place with sound:
Eleri sings a soothing song as she rushes on.

Then, against the flow, the whirr of a bird
Flashing past over the river, flying upstream

And following it with my eyes I caught
In a patch of sunlight – a gleam

Of electric blue – then blinked it away
Back into the shade and round the bend

Of the river. Still she sang
Rushing on to the sea, Eleri,

Bringing back a stillness and a silence
Out of the tumble of water over the stony bed.

I sat and added to my store of treasure
A blue jewel flashing in dappled shade.

None of it is mine, though I hoard it all
In the nest of memory Time has lent me.

Iwan Llwyd (1957-2010)

2010-06-25T13:46:00.002+01:00

I'm re-blogging my translation of 'Y Corryn' by Iwan Llwyd following his recent sudden death at the age of 52.

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.

Lady's Smock

2010-05-19T22:00:00.004+01:00

Cardamine pratensis (Lady's Smock) flowers

growing between the leaves of Tansy in my garden.

When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver-white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

‘Cuckoo, cuckoo’ – O word of fear

Unpleasing to a married ear!

So wrote Shakespeare at the end of Love’s Labours Lost, in his verses for the Spring. I always associate Lady’s Smock with the month of May and this year seems especially to favour them as they are everywhere in abundance. Other common names for the plant are ‘Cuckoo Flower’, ‘May Blobs’ and ‘Milkmaids’. Shakespeare’s verse suggests associations with amorous activities as part of the May festivities and the Old English name ‘lustmoce’ may reflect this. Shakespeare obviously knew much lore about this plant and its associations, although the words of the verse seem to suggest a reading of Gerard’s Herball (published just a year before the play was written) which also describes them as white, the colour of the bleached smocks of milkmaids, while the flower itself is more often somewhere between pale lilac and pink in colour.

Here is another verse from the same period as Shakespeare from Irish, given by Kenneth Jackson:

Tender cress and cuckoo flower:

And curly-haired, fair-headed maids,

Sweet was the sound of their singing.

Sweet indeed are Lady-Smocks in May.

Jean Earle : A Naïve Poet?

2010-05-12T22:35:00.002+01:00

I have written on this blog about Jeane Earle in the past. I discuss her at greater length in the current number of the online arts and literary journal Horizon Review. It also contains a number of poems, fictions and articles, and is well worth a look. THIS LINK leads to my article on Jean Earle in which I argue that her deliberate - and I argue sophisticated - use of 'naïve' techniques constitute part of her honesty as a poet.

Her poem on Jean-Baptist Giraud's 'naïve' painting 'The Picture of the Tiger Hunt', a detail from which appears on the cover of her Selected Poems articulates the idea directly:

I did not wince because the tiger is pinned by spears,
Stuck and lifted on the elephant's tusk.
Nor for the blood too bright
Nor for the forest leaves
Streaming to blaze the scene,
As in frightening dreams.

No; what moved me was the tiger's hands.
Hands - not paws -
Past all powerful dealing.
Sprawling out wide, loose.
Asking astounded of the continuing spear,
Of the red workaday gleam in the elephant's eye.

So do all creatures, peaceful or tiger, lift hands,
Not paws,
At the flash of death.

The picture was done by a 'naïve' painter.
'Naïve' we call him - and we look for truth.
Hands open and shape NO! Hands, not paws.
Two or four hands - or one, as in a dying flower.

Towards light is the last appeal,
And should evoke tears.

This statement, from her first published collection, could, I argue, be taken as a working principle of all her later poetry both in matters of subject and style. Her statement "we look for truth" I take to be an invitation to look for a similar truth in her writings. This is what I attempt to elucidate in the article.

The last volume published by Jean Earle before she died.

MAY

2010-05-10T16:56:00.001+01:00

So green the hillside, with a message of love

So long the day with the freshness of May,

Such bright greenness could not hide itself away.

Fair breasts of hills' bright bushes in May,

So short the night, it’s no hard journey,

Such fair hawks and blackbirds of May

So lively the nightingale when she sings

And all the small birds of May.

Such quivering passion it would teach me

There’s nothing so glorious as May.

Dafydd ap Gwilym

(my translation of):

Neud glas gofron, llon llatai,

Neud hir dydd am irwydd Mai,

Neud golas, nid ymgelai,

Bronnydd a brig manwydd Mai,

Neud bernos, nid twrn siwrnai,

Neud heirdd gweilch a mwyeilch Mai,

Neud llon eos lle trosai

Llafar, a mân adar Mai,

Neud esgud nwyf a'm dysgai,

Nid mawr ogoniant ond Mai.

GREEN

2010-05-08T22:42:00.000+01:00

Shades of green on the trees in May: soft, pale greens, yellow-greens, deep greens and dark green on the evergreens. Up on the mountains subtle gradations of green across the open slopes: bilberry is green tinged with red close-up, but on the far slope the effect is tawny-green interspersed with moss green and vivid grey-green of lichens.

A cuckoo calls to tell us it's Summer but the north wind is chilling up here and the grass is not yet green but bleached white-brown still from Winter.

Heathers between the bilberries are brown-green and gorse is dark green with yellow. All this, looking down the valley from the vantage point of Pen-y-Graig creates a subtle patchwork of soft greens shading to other hues.

Spring and early Summer on the mountains; speckled green.

Poetry and the Visual

2010-04-27T12:26:00.001+01:00

The current issue of Poetry Wales magazine is a special ‘Poetry and the Visual’ edition. My contribution ‘Tide’ is jostled by an array of concrete, visual and conceptual poems. The magazine’s editor, Zoë Skoulding, comments that “all language takes on a visual shape …..the emphasis here might be what happens when we start to look at the poem rather than through it.” The magazine also contains some featured essays on links between poetry and the visual arts and the way words can interact with images. The artist Iwan Bala, who likes to place text in his visual constructions, observes that this questions the notion of the transparency of the visual image: “Having words in there adds layers, particularly if those words are used in Welsh, and therefore probably hermetic to a majority of viewers. They become marks, scribbles – a secret language.”

This is similar to a point which was also made by the poet and artist David Jones whose painted lettering used the words of different languages to make visual presentations that also contained written texts (see the example in the sidebar). Often, however, the ‘message’ moves between different languages, most typically English, Welsh and Latin but might also contain words from other languages such as Old English, Greek or German. He did something similar in his poetry, placing words from Welsh and Latin in his English texts. I discussed this in a previous blog HERE . It could be objected that those who cannot read these languages are excluded from full appreciation of the work, and this objection extends to the density of cultural references which he employs.

To some extent this must be true, and to that extent the only adequate response is that these are things that you’d better know. David Jones wrote: “The grey wolf, Fenris, that sits on the ‘throne of heaven’ in Northern myth is just about as meaningless to people today as Rhiannon or Ceridwen or the Twrch Trwyth or Olwen the daughter of Ysbaddaden Pencawr. When I write these names in my work I try to make them come naturally … but I realise that they mean virtually nothing to the reader. […..] It gets difficult if people don’t know what Aphrodite, let alone Rhiannon, signifies.” His answer was that all we can do as artists is ‘show forth’ what seems real to us.

Zoë Skoulding’s editorial speaks of “what is created anew in the encounter between different signifying systems”. The question of signification is, I think, crucial here. But Iwan Bala’s point also has some force. The effect of the placing of words in Welsh can be that, simply by being in Welsh, they can be significant (be a ‘sign’). He says these things are “metaphors for a culture. My culture.” He does not follow David Jones in making inscriptions that mimic calligraphy and establish themselves as if carved in stone but deliberately creates works that are written on like “graffiti … in danger of being washed away at any time”. Fragility, therefore, is built in to the pattern of significance in presenting his culture.

The Country and the City

2010-04-19T17:09:00.000+01:00

I prefer the country to the city. Why? It is often said that all of us now have urban lifestyles and mindsets wherever we live, and there is some truth in this. All of us, in this view, inhabit the city via the mass media, other forms of information sharing and communication links enabling travel. The image of the city is its centre, the hub of slick merchandising, business and public institutions. But even for the inhabitants of at least the larger cities, many of whom live in distinct areas within the city sprawl, this is a place to visit or to work in rather than a place to live. The same can be said of those who interact with the city on a regular basis while living in the suburbs or outlying villages and smaller urban centres.

But what of those further away who visit only rarely and who live and work entirely in the country or in a small country town? I grew up in a city but have spent most of my adult life living far away from any major urban centre. Usually, when I go on holiday, I choose more of the same: remote mountains or forests to walk in, wild landscapes to explore. I’ve just returned from a long weekend in Cardiff, a city with an increasingly vibrant urban pulse. Even so, I spent one of the days there in a leisurely circuit of Roath Park, including its expansive lake where I saw a greater array of wild birds – such as the Great Crested Grebe – than I could have hoped to see on a walk in the country. The lake’s swans, geese, ducks, gulls and other birds on its islands and among the exotic species of trees themselves inhabited a metropolis of sorts. The heron I saw in the air, winging away from the lake, was presumably going somewhere quieter.

I can’t help comparing this to a recent experience on a solitary walk through the Eleri gorge near my home. A single duck flew in and alighted on the river. I watched him with a long, slow, intense focus as he swam, waddled and clambered over rocks and made his way upstream. What made this experience qualitatively different from witnessing the lavish display on the lake? Or, to ask a parallel question, what makes the daily life of a hill farmer qualitatively different from that of an urban worker, even one who works outdoors? The superficial difference is obvious and in some ways the question is too easy. There are many individuals living in rural areas who, for instance, take heavy lorries out onto the motorway system or interact regularly with the urban environment. And the rural environment itself is not all peace and tranquillity. Even in the hills where heavy industrial style farming does not take place, the buzz of chain saws is as likely to fill the air as birdsong.

But, in spite of a wish to avoid clichés or stereotypes, I still find that a crucial difference remains. I can’t deny that, along with almost everyone else in the developed world and beyond, I have an ‘urban sensibility’. Yet still it is a rural muse that moves me and places my focus on what is deep and important as far away from thronging crowds and tall buildings as possible.

A Negative Arthur?

2010-04-12T23:17:00.001+01:00

I have commented before about the way the figure of Arthur is available as an image of cultural continuity for writers in Wales, for instance the use of it made by David Jones. But if something can be used as a positive, it can also be used as a negative. Consider this early poem from R.S. Thomas:

A Welshman to Any Tourist

We’ve nothing to offer you, no deserts
Except the waste of thought
Forming from mind erosion;
No canyons where the pterodactyl’s wing
Casts a cold shadow.
The hills are fine of course,
Bearded with water to suggest age
And pocked with caverns,
One being Arthur’s dormitory;
He and his knights are the bright ore
That seams our history,
But shame has kept them late in bed.

There are a number of interesting things about this as a poem, the ambiguous phrase ‘waste of thought’, the imagery of the cold shadow of the pterodactyl’s wing , the metaphors employed in the references to Arthur. But the thing which is most striking about it from the outset (‘We’ve nothing …’) is its negativity. The general sense of absence is compounded by the stinging rebuke of the final line. Just at the point where it does strike a positive note (‘the bright ore’) the metaphor changes and the poem is brought to a devastating conclusion.

This is in line with many other statements by this poet about Wales, and indeed about his religion. He worshipped an ‘absent God’ and nailed questions to ‘an untenanted cross’. Theologically this is often explained by the absence of God defining the need for his presence. Could the same be said about national identity? If Arthur, the ‘once and future king’ can be adapted out of the legendary history of post-Roman Britain into a lost leader who has no grave because he only sleeps to rise again in the hour of need; and if such a story can survive the Middle Ages and persist, even if only as an ironic denial, is this in itself an affirmation of its potency?

Confluence

2010-04-06T23:48:00.002+01:00

Flowing together, two streams of water
Into one river: one a rush down through rocks
The other a glide between level banks.
Where they meet there is a line
Across the surface of the water where
The glide and the rush run together
For a space, then spread into each other

And flow on around an eyot, as if
Still separate for a time, but not so;
The onward flow then is wider, deeper,
And with one purpose between rocky banks
Hurrying forward excited, for a while until
Winding, in a relaxed meander, across the valley floor.

Driving over Pumlummon

2010-04-04T18:52:00.001+01:00

The River Wye in Winter

Striated snow is smeared across the hillsides in streaks of bright white over the dun fields of molinia grass bleached from off-green to washed-out beige at the end of winter.

The pale sunlight's almost bright reflected off the snow-fields on the mountain.

Grey water rushes briskly down the slopes and over the road in running sheets giving the tarmac a silvery sheen but otherwise transparent.

Bare trees of a twisted oak wood writhe out of the moss on a wet slope: remnant vegetation dreaming of a lost age.

Douglas fir and Norway spruce bristle in their plantations, confident denizens of the treescape, contemporary icons of the forest.

At the highest point it's bare and the snow thickens. The car's thermometer clicks down another degree.

We follow the streams off the heights down from here: Tarenig joining Wye and soon becoming a winding river.

The road through the gorge winding too, following the river's curves, determined by water.

Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair

2010-04-02T23:53:00.002+01:00

Harold Bloom, writing about Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan' in 1961, observed that “Behind Coleridge’s poem [are] the dark fates of Collins, the young Chatterton, Smart, and other doomed poets of sensibility. These are the rich-haired youths of Morn, Apollo sacrifices who precede Coleridge in his appearance with flashing eyes and floating hair”. Coleridge had written his own ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ as a young poet still wedded to the style of the late eighteenth century:

O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread the canvas to the gale,
And love, with us, the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale;
And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
Hanging, enraptured, on thy stately song
And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy
All deftly mask'd, as hoar antiquity.

Chatterton had, like Coleridge, blossomed early as a poet after attending a charity school because his father had died and his mother had no other means of support. His facility for original verse went with a talent for reconstructing the works of earlier practitioners. Like Iolo Morganwg, who came after him, and others of his age, he used this talent for antiquarian reconstruction to create imitations of medieval texts. He composed a series of ‘Rowley poems’ to this end. Initially he was taken up by Horace Walpole , the author of The Castle of Otranto , who at first thought he recognized a kindred spirit when Chatterton sent him some of his work, but subsequently dropped him when he realized that he was a poor apprentice. Chatterton remained unrecognized, in spite of attracting the interest of some publishers in London, and eventually committed suicide in 1770, still in his teens. Al Alvarez, in his study of literary suicides, observed that “Later the Romantics transformed him into a symbol of the doomed poet. In fact, he was a victim of Grub Street and snobbery.” Coleridge himself was more fortunate and lived well on into middle age in spite of his opium addiction. It was left to others who succeeded him as Romantic poets, to fulfil the stereotype and die young.

Although he felt he had squandered his talent as a poet “in abstruse musings”, Coleridge’s status as a sage in his later years makes him, in retrospect, a rather unlikely candidate for the title “doomed bard of sensibility”. His Biographia Literaria offered the distinction between ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’ as the way of distinguishing the true poetic facility from the merely clever. And it might be said that, in living the imaginative life to the full, and in the often catastrophic circumstances of his life, he did in fact carry the role of doomed bard into his later years. Whatever the consequences, and however many times he stopped – like his Ancient Mariner – an initially unwilling listener, the bright-eyed youth never lost the ability to convince his audience that "he on honey-dew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise”.

The Genius of Coleridge

2010-03-24T23:10:00.003Z

David Jones

illustration to 'The Ancient Mariner'

The entry which I’ve currently posted for the changing extracts above from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal contains a couple of phrases which are likely to have been picked up from reading the manuscript of ‘Christabel’, which Coleridge had brought for the Wordsworths to read (She records on the 23^rd March 1798: “Coleridge brought his ballad finished”.) In a couple of years Coleridge wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’, ‘Kubla Khan’ (the latter two published some time later) along with several other gems of Romantic sensibility. Wordsworth wrote ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ with it’s article of faith : “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” and addressed his “dear sister” as a fellow worshipper of Nature. Meanwhile she chronicled their daily activities in her Journal. The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published later that year with many of the poems having been written in the months leading up to publication.

But it is the vision of Coleridge that I want to discuss here. He has been characterised as a "damaged archangel", mainly on the basis of events in his later life. But in the closing years of the eighteenth century he and Wordsworth were young poets with a mission to change the face of poetry for ever. They were successful. But they were in fact very different poets. Some of Coleridge's 'conversation poems' may be nearer to Wordsworth's desire to write in the "real language of men" ('Frost at Midnight' being an evocative example) but the visionary qualities of Coleridge's longer poems and the metrical experiments, in particular in 'Christabel', mark him out not, as with Wordsworth, as an innovator in poetic diction but as one who developed metrical practices of the sort that Hopkins, nearly a century later, still felt were necessary to reform English prosody. The following lines from 'Christabel' are often cited:

The one last leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can

Coleridge's preface to the poem outlines a 'new principle' of composition, "namely that of counting in each line the accents not the syllables", and the addition of extra syllables to introduce "some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion".

Consider the pyrotechnics of these lines:

In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!
Thou knowest tonight, and will know tomorrow
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;
But vainly thou warrest
For this is alone in
Thy power to declare
That in the dim forest
Thou heard'st a low moaning
And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair;
And did'st bring her home with thee in love and in charity,
To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.

Those lines are imprinted on my memory, like my name and my mother's name; I carry them around with me as part of my psychic baggage. They never cease to haunt me. By the standards of classical verse of the eighteenth century the rhythm is all over the place. The accents beat out the pulse of the verse while the 'extra syllables' weave a magic spell like no other. This is, in fact, not so much new as a recognition of the natural rhythms of English going back to alliterative verse. But it was certainly 'new' at the time, though others who were shown it - e.g. Walter Scott and Byron - imitated it even before Coleridge brought himself to publish it. It has my vote as one of the essential poems in the English language.

CHANGE

2010-03-22T00:09:00.004Z

After days of bright, clear air the pressure drops and the cold abates. Then the mist, missed, fills in: tiny water droplets hanging along the edge of the ridge. I watched them drift up the valley from the sea, dispersing into nooks, crannies, folds in the earth along the bottom then up the slopes turning the view grey as a heron, as slow as a heron's wing beat.

Poetry, Poets & Versifiers

2010-03-19T21:21:00.001Z

“There have been many most excellent poets, that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets.”

Sir Philip Sidney

Is this too harsh a judgement? In these days of creative writing workshops, poetry as therapy, verse and worse at the service of pop songs, advertising jingles and greetings cards, we inhabit a world that Sidney could not have imagined. His swarming versifiers did not stoop so low. And yet he would not admit them to the Republic of Letters. What should our standards be?

Theories have abounded, prescriptions have been pronounced and accusations both of elitism and of intellectual snobbery fired off in various directions. But poetry is a craft practised out of necessity rather than for profit of either monetary or any other kind. (I nearly said ‘rather than for reasons of vanity’ but that would be a claim too far). I say it is a craft. Not an indulgence. Not an effusion. Not a cleverness of expression.

Sometimes it is a craft with a subtlety in its expression that may not be obvious to all its readers. Poets have often feared the reader who cannot fully appreciate the work produced, or even been afraid that their true readers may not exist. If so, who do they write for? Must they be also educators, instructing their readers in the appropriate skills of interpretation? Some have thought so.

Shall I promise you, dear reader, nothing but the best quality here? Of course. You deserve nothing less. And be sure that you will always get what you deserve.

Romanesque

2010-03-12T16:47:00.000Z

St George's Basilica, Prague

They do not point, these arches,
But bend in a low arc around silence.
Is it that they have nothing
To point at, existing only to let
What light there is suffuse their stonework
And transmit from somewhere else what -
In darkness - is radiantly glimpsed?
Or is it that they frame

That which is beyond them,
The unlit chambers where mystery
Lingers suggestively in corners, unassuming
And unwilling to aspire? Lacking
Sharpness, they do not pierce the sky
But reflect, more subtly, heaven’s domain.

Personal Identity

2010-03-05T16:14:00.001Z

Many people think of their lives as a story with a coherent and pervasive identity enduring throughout the narrative. Some also think that the story of the life they have currently got will endure beyond it. But to stay with the things we can be certain of, the sense of a story to one’s life tends to encourage the notion that there is a meaningful purpose, often perceived of as something that is lost and must be regained: “I once was lost but now am found” as the hymn has it, or “ I once was a child , but now I put away childish things” The sense of growing into one’s correct purpose.

These ideas suggest the fulfilment of one’s ‘true self’ either by growing up or turning aside from waywardness and taking the true path. Consider here the Scottish Border Ballad of True Thomas:

O see not ye yon narrow road,

So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

That is the path of righteousness,

Tho after it but few enquires.

‘And see not ye that braid braid road,

That lies across yon lillie leven?

That is the path of wickedness,

Tho some call it the road to heaven.

‘And see not ye that bonny road,

Which winds about the fernie brae?

That is the road to fair Elfland,

Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.

Here Thomas’s path is subverted and he is taken on a path he had not expected. This takes the ‘story’ in another direction from the usual one of the true righteous road and the false path onto which many stray. It also raises the question of what is ‘true’ identity. The notion of a unified self which is either in a state of grace or, more likely, has to find itself among the distractions of the world is pervasive in our culture. The third alternative indicated by the Queen of Elfland above is one way of questioning that. Another is to ask if we have just one true self or a multiplicity of them spread across time, space and even, some might say, different lives?

That we appear to have a continuity of conscious identity is undeniable, though clearly this changes through time (“I once was a child …”). But even within whatever vague and elastic period we call ‘the present’ we are likely to be living with contradictions of belief, identity and even behaviour. So to oppose the notion of a ‘true self’ it might be possible to say that not only am I not the same person that I was twenty years ago, but that the person I am now is a multiplicity rather than a singularity. Clearly such an approach might cause problems with personal integrity (should that ‘me’ feel responsible for what that other ‘me’ did?) Certainly, as far as the law is concerned, the official ‘me’ will be held to account for anything we do. But that is no more challenging than the idea that a public body must take responsibility for anything done in its name by one of its members or employees.

I should stress here that what I have in mind is not that sort of facile post-modernism which suggests that one can adopt superficial identities according to the velleities of fashion, whim or desire. Rather I mean to suggest that we are complex beings who have deep-rooted contradictions in our essential selves which, in fact, may constitute different selves within the same overall sense of selfhood. So when the Queen of Elfland offers us that choice of a way between the conflicting paths of our proposed true or false selves, that is not simply a third way but a liberation from such dualistic thinking about who we are.

GRYM GRAMADEG

2010-03-01T13:51:00.005Z

Yng ngwladwriaeth y gerdd,

perffaith yw'r llywodraeth a rydd

y grym sydd mewn gramadeg

i ddeiliaid iaith.

(Bryan Martin Davies)

In the poem's estate, perfect

is the governance of grammar

which gives its subjects

the power of language.

Geese on the Mawddach

2010-02-27T20:46:00.001Z

There were eight or nine of them honking in the way geese do and they turned, as one, then glided down onto the sandbank in the middle of the river and settled there. Watching them, and the water swirling around the bank, I attuned myself to the flow below the slopes of the hills in muted February shades of russet, yellow-green and brown. Above, the grey rock was streaked with remnant snow. My attention was drawn back to the river as a heron moved across my field of vision following the flow downstream to the estuary, beating the air slowly with heavy wings. Meanwhile the geese spread out across the bank which had been exposed by the retreating tide.

A light shower of fine rain passed and was gone in minutes. Cloud drifted low in the sky with barely a gap for the weak sunshine to filter through. The white bark of some birch trees, fissured with black incisions, caught the light and I stared at the trees intently as a sequence of sharp sense impressions, each distinct, clear, and bright, though simultaneously forming a blur of consciousness, filled the day with visionary perceptions of such subtlety that they seemed almost ordinary.

The geese remained on the sandbank which was growing as the water level fell. There were some oyster-catchers there too by now. Time passed yet did not pass. Still, un-moving as a heron, I watched from my vantage point above the shore as the river ran down to the sea.

Compounding Images - Dafydd ap Gwilym

2010-02-23T17:22:00.000Z

Peniarth Manuscript 49 114r (from collection of John Davies, Mallwyd - 16th cent)

Text of 'Merch yr Edliw ei Lyfrdra' by Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320-1370)

Think of a language which uses compound phrases and the one that will probably come to mind is German. But compounds have often been used in Welsh, particularly by poets wanting to build up densely-packed images. Take the following example from Dafydd ap Gwilym:

Y wawr dlós-ferch ry dlýsfain

Wrm ael a wisg aur a main.

First here’s my attempt at a translation:

Dawn-fair girl so delicately slender

Dusky-browed, wearing gold and gemstones.

Now a look at the compounds:

There is only one obviously hyphenated compound – dlós-ferch (pretty girl). Normally this would not need to be a compound and the adjective would follow the noun rather than preceding it: merch dlos. Here the obvious compound is linked more loosely to another implied compound: gwawr-dlos (dawn-beautiful) to give the multiple compound ‘dawn-fair-girl’. The word ‘dlýsfain’ at the end of the line is also a compound of ‘tlos’ and ‘main’ (pretty-slender). Preceded by ‘rhy’ it makes another triple compound which is necessary for the accentuation of the line which requires these sounds to be run together. In the second line ‘gwrm’ and ‘ael’ together form a loose possessive compound: ‘[of the] dusky brow’. There are some variations from the sources for the first line. Another uses the compound adlaesferch ( ‘adlaes’ = fair or edlaes = ‘modest’, in either case the word is marked as ”archaic” in Y Geiriadur Mawr).

The above example is cited by John Morris Jones in his A Welsh Grammar where he also remarks that only double compounds (of nouns or adjectives) are formed in Welsh, but the further comment that any element in a compound may also be a compound qualifies the original statement to the point that it is questionable. Certainly the two lines of verse above are compounded so densely that they can scarcely be prised apart. And that’s without even beginning to consider the linkages formed by the cynghanedd ….

A Language Not To Be Betrayed

2010-02-15T23:26:00.000Z

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Commenting on Adam Sargant's blog ANIMYSTIC on the adequacy of language to capture 'reality', I was reminded of a line from a poem by Edward Thomas and have since been moved to go back and read it again. Thomas endorses the view that things are hidden from us but suggests that it is sometimes possible to transcend the barrier and see things as they are. In one sense this is a classic piece of nature mysticism. He is suddenly blessed with the feeling that he is part of everything and can tap in to all the other life forms and share the world with them in language as well as in fact. That is, relationship becomes possible.

Here is the poem:

I Never Saw That Land Before

I never saw that land before,

And now can never see it again;

Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar

Endeared, by gladness and by pain,

Great was the affection that I bore

To the valley and the river small,

The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,

The chickens from the farmsteads, all

Elm-hidden, and the tributaries

Descending at equal interval;

The blackthorns down along the brook

With wounds yellow as crocuses

Where yesterday the labourer's hook

Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze

That hinted all and nothing spoke.

I neither expected anything

Nor yet remembered: but some goal

I touched then; and if I could sing

What would not even whisper my soul

As I went on my journeying,

I should use, as the trees and birds did,

A language not to be betrayed;

And what was hid should still be hid

Excepting from those like me made

Who answer when such whispers bid.

I love the way this poem evokes a very specific, though not idealised, landscape as the poet walks through it noticing every detail and sets this down using the rhymed stanzas not to constrain but to capture the intricacies of his thoughts as he goes on. And that last verse, the second line of which I had remembered and quoted, culminating in those whispers which only "those like me" respond to. He is not, I think, claiming any superiority here so much as the willingness to reply to the whispers, which is certain to be rarer even than hearing them.

Dido and Aeneas

2010-02-13T00:33:00.000Z

So Purcell in his Dido and Aeneas rendered here beautifully by Emma Kirkby in period fashion.

Compare this example of English melancholy with the frenzy of Dido's words of the source in Virgil's Aeneid:

O Sun, you who illuminate all the works of this world,
and you Juno, interpreter and knower of all my pain,
and Hecate howled to, in cities, at midnight crossroads,
you, avenging Furies, and you, gods of dying Elissa,
acknowledge this, direct your righteous will to my troubles,
and hear my prayer. If it must be that the accursed one
should reach the harbour, and sail to the shore:
if Jove’s destiny for him requires it, there his goal:
still, troubled in war by the armies of a proud race,
exiled from his territories, torn from Iulus’s embrace,
let him beg help, and watch the shameful death of his people:
then, when he has surrendered, to a peace without justice,
may he not enjoy his kingdom or the days he longed for,
but let him die before his time, and lie unburied on the sand.
This I pray, these last words I pour out with my blood.
Then, O Tyrians, pursue my hatred against his whole line
and the race to come, and offer it as a tribute to my ashes.
Let there be no love or treaties between our peoples.
Rise, some unknown avenger, from my dust, who will pursue
the Trojan colonists with fire and sword, now, or in time
to come, whenever the strength is granted him.
I pray that shore be opposed to shore, water to wave,
weapon to weapon: let them fight, them and their descendants.”

(translation : A S Kline)

From "pursue my hatred against his whole line" to "Remember Me" might be thought to be a long journey. It is a journey of sensibility as much as one of sentiment. What one age chooses to find in a story might not be the same as what another age chooses to find. Looking back at both, where do we stand?

Is All Physical Matter Conscious?

2010-02-02T17:06:00.000Z

The psychologist C G Jung reported an experience he had as a child:

“Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?”

This might be taken as a case of confused identity, but for the adult psychologist the remembered experience provided an example of how the imagination can animate the world, and how consciousness can create the Creation. That the young boy could consider himself to be the stone at the same time as having the experience of sitting on it brings the stone into the realm of consciousness – not as an inert object but as a living subject.

To regard the world in this way, as a multiplicity of subjects each with their experience of me to match my experience of them is to set the living landscape not in a frame – out there – but at an intersection with a mindscape, which itself is not to be regarded as wholly within a limited consciousness.

There is a balance to be achieved in assessing such experiences. There are some who would say that Jung’s experience was delusional, or that of a child who had not yet sorted out the difference between himself and objects in the world around him, as if the important point is that of his separateness from that world. There are others who would want to privilege the child’s experience as untainted by corrupting ideas, an innocent perception of pure being. Neither of these positions seems to hit the right note. One prioritises scientifically verifiable fact, the other prioritises experience. From the materialist standpoint stones are not usually regarded as having consciousness or any ability to react to other objects. Trees and plants are also not regarded as conscious, though in this case there are clearly identifiable response mechanisms. Animals have consciousness, but not in the way that humans do. That’s it. All cut and dried. So the experience that a stone is responding to a human is delusional. Is it? If the experience is one of relationship, that is if I report that I have a relationship with a stone or a tree, it is difficult to see how anyone could deny my feeling of relationship. But they could, of course, deny that the stone or the tree is reciprocating.

What evidence might there be that non-animal objects could have consciousness, could, that is, be subjects capable of reciprocating a relationship? The philosopher Galen Strawson has advanced an argument which he claims emerges logically from materialist premises. He presents a carefully argued case that physicalism (the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical) entails panpsychism (the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being). His view is set out – together with the views of both detractors and those who are sympathetic to the argument – in THIS BOOK

The basis of Strawson’s argument is the premise that the facility of experience is a quality possessed by all physical matter. To those who think this is nonsense he counters that the idea of consciousness emerging from unconscious matter is even more nonsensical. On this basis he asserts that it makes better sense to suppose that all matter is conscious as a condition of its existence. He acknowledges that there are problems with this view. How conscious elements combine to produce super-consciousness is by no means clear, especially if they retain their ‘elementary’ consciousness at the same time (am I composed of multiple centres of consciousness that are simultaneously ‘me’ and ‘not me’?) But Strawson insists that these problems are far less serious than the problems associated with the idea that consciousness just evolved out of unconsciousness.

A survey of the arguments for and against Strawson’s view appears in a thorough review of the book available HERE . For those who do not choose to follow such specialised philosophical debate, it might be enough to consider the implications of Strawson’s ‘panpsychism’ for the nature of experience, and, perhaps, Jung’s stone experience. He says that “pure panpsychism has only one kind of thing in its fundamental ontology: subjects of experience … each of which is at the same time an experience, and experiencing”. The implication of this is that the experience and whatever is having the experience are [is?] literally identical. So the ‘monist’ view that matter is all there is paradoxically incorporates the ‘dualist’ view that there is also spirit. But the two are not separate. The author of the review cited above suggests that, as a result of Strawson’s demonstration of the implications of materialism, dualism might begin to look more coherent. Does this dissolve the ‘materialist -v -idealist’ dichotomy or reinforce it? I would opt for the former. But only because my experiences tend to point me in that direction.

Basil Bunting : Briggflatts

2010-01-27T13:17:00.000Z

Basil Bunting is a poet known primarily for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’. When the critic Donald Davie came to write an account of British poetry in the second half of the 20^th century he called it Under Briggflatts. It is, in fact, a rather late poem, published when Bunting was 66 and after he had returned to his native Northumberland after spending much of his life abroad, in particular in France and Italy where he was part of the circle of Ezra Pound (who published much of Bunting’s early verse in his Activist Anthology). He also lived in what was then Persia and counted Persian poets amongst his influences. Like many of the Poundian modernists he was learned and sought to make new his many influences from Classical and other literature. He was particularly interested conveying musical cadences in verse and also used the analogy of sonata form to structure some of his longer poems. The keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti provided a particular model in this respect. The brief notes to his Collected Poems are occasionally informative, often tetchy and sometimes puzzling. One note on some poems from classical authors states that “It would be gratuitous to assume that a mistranslation is unintentional”. Or the information that “as a native of Paphos, Venus was until recently entitled to a British passport”.

‘Briggflatts’ is written in a distinct though accessible Northumbrian dialect. But sound is important here and he expressed the view that “Southrons would maul the music of many of its lines”. Any ‘southrons’ (or others) who wish to know how it should sound can listen to the clip attached above. This is taken from a film made about Bunting by the BBC not long before his death in 1985. It shows him in the Northumbrian landscape and at the old Quaker Meeting House of Briggflatts (he expressed the view that silent Quaker worship is “pantheistic”, finding God in everything : “By God with whom I lunched! / there is no trash in the wheat / my loaf is kneaded from.”). The whole film is now available HERE on a DVD, together with a CD of Bunting reading the poem, the text of the poem and some other background material all packaged in a cover showing a page from the Lindisfarne Gospels. In this poem ‘objectivism’ is much more than a technical exercise. His lines here vividly evoke an experience of the physical environment:

Under sacks on the stone

the children lie,

hear the horse stale,

the mason whistle,

harness mutter to shaft,

felloe to axle squeak,

rut thud to rim,

crushed grit.

It is the intersection of experience with the things that are experienced that delivers the poem’s charge. But the objective world is also enacted as an emergence into consciousness and relationship in the early part of the poem. The staging of the erotically charged account of young love is particularly vivid:

He has untied the tape

of her striped flannel drawers

before the range. Naked

on the pricked mat

his fingers comb

thatch of his manhood’s home.

As the poem develops, wider perspectives of landscape and history come into play, back to Norse and Celtic tribes inhabiting this land on the Scottish border. He names St Cuthbert, Eric Bloodaxe and the Brythonic tribes to the north:

Clear Cymric voices carry well this Autumn night,

Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls

for whom it is never altogether dark, crying

before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game.

Some have felt that the world evoked here succumbs to that ‘pedant’s game’ in the mannered conclusion of the poem’s coda : ( “ … Who, /swinging his axe / to fell kings, guesses / where we go?”). But this is demanding criticism and does not detract from Bunting’s achievement.

Burns Night

2010-01-25T15:40:00.001Z

Address to the haggis:

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin', rich!

Here is an hilarious account of a Burns night Supper with a rather tongue-in-cheek health & safety warning:
"The honoured reader now seizes their moment of glory by offering a fluent and entertaining rendition of To a Haggis. The reader should have his knife poised at the ready. On cue (His knife see Rustic-labour dight), he cuts the casing along its length, making sure to spill out some of the tasty gore within (trenching its gushing entrails).
Warning: it is wise to have a small cut made in the haggis skin before it is piped in. Instances are recorded of top table guests being scalded by flying pieces of haggis when enthusiastic reciters omitted this precaution! Alternatively, the distribution of bits of haggis about the assembled company is regarded in some quarters as a part of the fun...

The recital ends with the reader raising the haggis in triumph during the final line Gie her a haggis!, which the guests greet with rapturous applause."

The BBC have currently got this link up for a reading of 'To a Louse' by Burns:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/robertburns/works/to_a_louse/

Well worth a listen with a tot of whisky, even if you have no haggis to eat with it.

‘Bewildered in the Mists’

2010-01-22T14:45:00.000Z

Mountains Above Grisedale

Dorothy Wordsworth wrote this in her Journal in January 1802:

On Saturday January 23rd we left Eusemere at 10 o clock in the morning, I behind Wm, Mr C on his Galloway. The morning not very promising - the wind cold. The mountains large and dark but only thinly streaked with snow - a strong wind. We dined in Grisdale on ham bread & milk. It rained all the way home. We struggled with the wind & often rested as we went along – A hail-shower met us before we reached the Tarn & the way often was difficult over the snow but at the Tarn the view closed in – we saw nothing but mists and snow & at first the ice on the Tarn below us, cracked and split yet without water, a dull grey white: we lost our path & could see the Tarn no longer. We made our way out with difficulty guided by a heap of stones which we well remembered – we were afraid of being bewildered in the mists till the Darkness should overtake us – we were long before we knew that we were in the right track but thanks to William’s skill we knew it long before we could see our way before us. There was no footmark on the snow either of man or beast. The Vale of Grasmere when the mists broke away looked soft & grave, of a yellow hue – it was dark before we reached home.

Dorothy also records that later in the evening they settled down by the fire and read tales of the Alps where people were lost in the mist. Was this by way of comforting themselves that they were safe? In February of the same year Dorothy’s Journal notes that three men, coming the same way in the dark, were lost and found dead. This was danger that was lived with routinely. Not, as today, by recreational ‘hill walkers’ but by people going about their everyday business. Dorothy’s account of the walk is in one sense unremarkable, but it provides an evocative glimpse, as does much else in the Journal, of the everyday realities of life at the time and a felt identification with the landscape. The only intended reader was William who often consulted it to remind him of incidents which he then wrote about in his poems. Essential reading.

The Magical Quest of John Cowper Powys

2010-01-17T17:09:00.000Z

John Cowper Powys

“ … it is possible to find your life-cult and pursue your life-cult in complete independence of the community in which you have been thrown.”

So said John Cowper Powys in his Autobiography – surely one of the most extraordinary autobiographies ever written. The idea that everyone has a ‘life-illusion’ is not an uncommon idea, but only Powys, I think, took this to such self-conscious extremes that he made its realisation his personal life quest as well as embodying it in the characters of his novels.

But is the statement above true? Can we really have a life that is completely independent of the society in which we live? There are various ways of approaching this question. If we take it as a version of the nature –v- nurture argument we may well conclude that, certainly, the personality, sexuality and other aspects of a particular individual may challenge, or be challenged by, the conventions of some historical/social contexts more than others. So it might be a matter of luck for particular individuals, with particular predilections, to be born into one society or historical period rather than another. But, if they then find themselves outside the ‘mainstream’ it is, at least in reasonably tolerant societies, possible to become part of sub-cultural communities without ceasing to be part of 'mainstream' social life.

I think Powys had something rather different in mind. His ‘life-cult’ was a peculiarly individual thing that wouldn’t necessarily be shared with anyone else. In some ways it is like a secret life that is lived alongside the public life and completely independent of it. Like solipsism, this is an attractive proposition but one which is difficult to maintain (a difficulty which did not defeat J C Powys it must be said). There is no recourse here to psychological theories which suggest a shadow self or unconscious mind operating beneath the everyday conscious self. Powys’s secret life is a fully conscious affair, lived to the full, and mediating the outer life rather than operating at one remove from it.

That most of us have such a life is not in question. But the elevation of that life to a fully-conscious and deliberate ‘life-cult’ to be lived out regardless of public approval or disapproval and, indeed, not in any way dependent on social processes or even any other individual, is a remarkable assertion of individual human potential, characterized by Powys elsewhere as a ‘magical quest.

I will leave readers of this blog with the following further quote from the Autobiography:

“To believe nothing, to be a Pyrrhonian sceptic down to the very bottom of your nature, and yet to put into practice – if not actually to feel – many of the most subtle emotions which have been from time to time immemorially linked up with the idea of a saint, does not that strike your mind, reader, not only something for which irony, with all its nuances, is only a rough-and-tumble synonym, but something which a real step forward in that planetary casuistry with the difficulties of which all higher intelligences are forever struggling?”

Does it?

***

There is a lively assessment of J C Powys's life and literary achievements by Margaret Drabble

HERE

C. S. Lewis: Story and Religion

2010-01-10T00:02:00.001Z

C.S. Lewis
1898 –1963

“the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism”. (§)

So wrote C.S. Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greeves in November 1931. Lewis, of course, went on to become not, as his fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien desired a convert to Catholicism, but a proselytising member of the Anglican Church. The sense of ‘story’, of what may be called the mythological background to religion, can be distinguished from the aspiration for religious experience or the experience of deity, which may result from direct personal revelation. Lewis’s attitude to liturgical practice, if not averse in this way, was also less than enthusiastic. He remarked that the form of religious worship is not in itself as important as the need to know what it is: “Our business as laymen is to take what we are given and make the best of it. And I think we should find this a great deal easier if what we were given was always and everywhere the same.”(‡)

It seems that he never lost the sense of the vibrancy of pagan stories and so, in his writings on Christianity, laid the stress on religious experience: “The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” (‡) He might as well, one would have thought, have done without liturgical accessories altogether and become a Quaker! Except that he was also propelled by other social contexts to make his conversion from atheism one that gave him a role to play in the public religious life represented by the Anglican Church. At the same time, the lack of attractive story (he found the Gospels uninspiring) was remedied by his own creative work. His early science fiction and the later Chronicles of Narnia (of which Tolkien disapproved), if not quite Christian allegories, nevertheless allowed him to create congenial narratives in which the moral precepts of the Church could be embodied.

I share Lewis’s sense of preferring the narratives of paganism. But when it comes to the competing claims of private revelation and public religious life, the issues become more complex. Lewis never thought religion could be a completely private matter. For him the Church was a Body and each of its members organs of that body, differently composed but contributing in their own special way to the whole. He distinguished this from the secular distinction between the individual and the collective, seeing the erosion of the value of solitary experience in modern life as something to be regretted: “We live in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” (¶) But he saw this as proceeding alongside a process of defining religion as a ‘private matter’ and therefore unimportant in a world in which only public experience is valued.

Lewis thought of himself as an individual member of a body performing a particular role in mediating the stories that body told itself. Such defining narratives are ways in which the body makes sense of itself to itself. In refusing Christianity’s story, Lewis might be seen to be adding to the breadth and range of available versions of that story, or he might be seen as part of a modern process of re-integrating some aspects of paganism into a body that in many senses has become increasingly disconnected from its defining story. Then he would have to be seen, I suspect from his own point of view unwillingly, as an agent in the process of redefinition.

Stories do matter. They are fuel for the imagination. No experience is culture-free, even experience of the ineffable although it might be in its nature to appear so. It is pretty fundamental, at least for the monotheistic faiths, that their foundational stories are part of their bedrock. To take a position of embracing a faith, and to proclaim an ambivalence about its story together with an indifference to the precise nature of its forms of worship is something that only an intellectual like Lewis could do consciously, though doing it unconsciously may not be uncommon. I think that we need to be true to the stories that inspire us, and to take that inspiration as given when it comes to our spiritual life. Forms of observance are a different matter. They change as societies change and, in our own time, are differentiated across many denominations adhering to a common story. But if the story changes, that’s fundamental. You’ve not just changed your clothes, you’ve changed your wardrobe.

References:

(§) = quoted in :The Inklings Humphrey Carpenter

(‡) = C.S Lewis Letters to Malcolm

(¶) = C.S. Lewis Fern Seed and Elephants & Other Essays

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C.S Lewis's personal library is currently being catalogued HERE:
http://www.librarything.com/profile/C.S._Lewis

The Philosopher and the Wolf

2010-01-06T00:03:00.000Z

In his book The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands presents a mixture of popular philosophy and personal memoir from a time when he shared his life with a wolf. This leads him to speculate on the different ways that simians and lupines experience time. He concludes that while humans and, he asserts, other apes think in a linear way and experience time as something passing, so that they live as much in the past and in the future as they do in the present, his wolf, and he suggests other dogs, look at rather than through the moment.

He concludes that we have much to learn from the wolf in this respect, that our superiority in being able to think about the past and plan for the future is bought at the cost of our inferiority in not being able to fully inhabit significant moments of the present. The moment of the present, as he points out in one of his philosophical asides, is an abstract concept that can never be captured as it is always passing. We may follow Husserl and see the present as an experience composed of the immediate past and the anticipated future (if I raise a glass of wine to my lips, I remember what was poured into the glass and anticipate the taste before beginning to drink). Even a wolf must experience the present in this way, but the wolf is better equipped than humans to take such moments for what they are rather than looking past them and so never seeing them clearly.

It struck me that what Rowlands defines as a quality that makes wolves superior to humans is pretty much what religious thinkers and poets such as R.S. Thomas and Waldo Williams have defined as the supreme transcendent experience of humans, though he does not mention these writers. R.S Thomas’ “we have no business here but to disprove certainties the clock knows” is a major theme in his work:

….. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, not hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to the brightness
that seemed as transistory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

'The Bright Field'

This theme recurs again and again in his poems as well as his occasional prose. But of course he has to worry about it (or at it) as the wolf never would. And Rowland’s point is that, for the wolf, ‘eternity’ is now. It is also Thomas’s point in some expressions of the idea, but framing it in the context of the Christian expectation of eternal life rather takes it into the realm of what Rowlands calls the human tendency to live on hope rather than immediate experience.

What might come nearer to Rowlands’ living in, and looking at, the moment is Waldo Williams’ poem in Welsh ‘Yr Eiliad’:

Gwyddom gan ddyfod yr Eiliad
Ein geni i’r Awr

We know when the moment comes
We are born to the hour

If the book is a vehicle for such musings on the meaning of life for different species, its main attraction has undoubtedly been the account of a relationship between a man and a wolf. This is interesting in itself and at times quite moving, though I didn’t always share the total identification with Rowlands’ narrative that it has elicited from some reviewers. Clearly, developing a relationship with a wolf takes some commitment (he used to take it into the lecture room with him when on the staff of the Philosophy departments of Alabama and Cork universities) and he claims that it was the intensity of his relationship with his ‘brother’ that led him to various philosophical conclusions about animals and humans (he also wrote Animal Rights : A Philosophical Defence). Could he have come to the same conclusions by owning an ordinary dog or even a cat? Probably. But he wouldn’t have sold so many books.

Of Hearth and Home

2010-01-03T20:05:00.000Z

Soft sunlight falls on the white bathroom tiles and provides a restful atmosphere for a long convalescent soak in the bath. Outside it is clear and bright but the snow that fell a few days ago still lies frozen in some places. Not that I have been able to go out. Flu has confined me to the house for several days now. Easy reading (Keith Donohue’s The Stolen Child; Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf), occasional web browsing, but mostly dozing has given a feeling of retreat to these hirlwm days as the new year gathers its energies.

I had hoped that the menthol bath soak would help clear my head and chest but, sitting making these notes a little later, there is no evidence of that happening. Though better, I still feel too fragile to venture out along the icy woodland paths along which I usually beat the bounds of my home territory.

So, confined to the pleasures of the hearth, I watch the flames blazing up the chimney and keep to the house for a day or two more.

The Ballad of the Outer Dark

2009-12-31T17:19:00.003Z

from Clive Hicks-Jenkins' 'Mari Lwyd' Series

Come to me, Mother of God, come down as the old year ends,
Frost-Mother, Mother of the Stars, and the white, wave-beaten sands.
I hear the seawave fall like a knife, dividing exiles and friends.

So wrote Vernon Watkins in his Ballad of the Outer Dark, a sequel to his Ballad of the Mari Lwyd. Written in the 1960’s, more than twenty years after the earlier ballad, it was never published in his lifetime. The later ballad in one sense picks up where the earlier one left off, the inmates of the house going out into the night bearing the horse’s head, taking the interpretation of the custom a stage further as if the Dark itself needed to be confronted for a full resolution of the traditional appeasement of that which is outside the circle of Light.

The fire we loved, the hours we lived
Are snatched away by thieves.

says one of the voices. While another voice responds:

We are ourselves the shafts of white
Those men of firelight mock.
And we must drift like flakes of snow
That know not where to rest,
So soft upon the night they go
Whom none will take for guest.

The final lines of this ballad:

Who bears the midnight Mari
Has Poverty for Bride.

suggest a consequence of the lack of resolution of this struggle between Light and Dark as the New Year is born. The horse’s head is, in fact, brought in and prosperity assured, but the later ballad in some ways completes the earlier one in transcending the rejection of the ‘Outer Dark’. This seems a much more plausible application of the custom of carrying the head of the Mari Lwyd from house to house at New Year while the earlier ballad seems to fit better the coming of Winter in November.

The Voice in the Well

2009-12-29T00:02:00.002Z

Fair maiden, white and red,

Comb me smooth and stroke my head

And thou shalt have some cockle bread.

Gently dip, but not too deep

For fear thou make the golden beard to weep.

Fair maid, white and red,

Comb me smooth and stroke my head;

And every hair a sheave shall be,

And every sheave a golden tree.

I first encountered that verse many years ago in an anthology and was intrigued. What could it mean? Then I located its source in George Peele's play The Old Wive's Tale, published in 1595. Peele was one of the 'University Wits', the generation of playwrights who preceded Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The play itself has received a mixed response. It is often dismissed as a jumble of folklore stitched haphazardly together. Others see the design as intentional and suggest we should see it in the context of this intent. Going further still, Northrop Frye found it "one of the loveliest plays in the language". The differences of opinion may reflect each critic's attitude to folklore itself.

Folklore may be regarded as the worthless and superficial entertainment of naive members of an otherwise uneducated populace, or it may be regarded as embodying a deep and archetypal wisdom of its own. It is possible that both of these things could simultaneously be true. Certainly the experience of reading a good many folk tales (as I have) often reveals a naive set of aspirations (poor folk invariably gain great wealth or marry a prince/princess as a result of performing some deed). They are often crudely constructed and, when given in the verbatim orally-collected 'pure' form, disconnected, though the published versions are often redacted to a more literary shape by the editors of collections of tales. But they also frequently contain motifs, images, and themes which recur with superficial variations across different tales and across many cultures. The Wicked Stepmother, the Ogrish Father, the Young Hero, the Helper on the Path might all be regarded in the light of primitive psychology, the tales as embodying psychic truths about life and the obstacles in the path of those who live it.

But where there are voices in wells, animal helpers and magical transformations, something deeper still seems to be going on. The tales themselves may at one level be little more than pre-literate versions of popular soap operas, but the material they manipulate, more or less skilfully, often speaks of things that resonate beyond the details of the plot or even their representative imagery. Is that what Northrop Frye finds so 'lovely' in the Old Wive's Tale?

✣

A version of the story 'Three Golden Heads' upon which the verse is based can be found HERE

A good source for orally-collected tales, as well as many 'literary' versions is Katherine Brigg's four-volume Dictionary of British Folk Tales (Routledge, 1970)

Peele's play is available in a number of modern editions.

Great Nights Returning

2009-12-21T00:07:00.001Z

It's a while since I've revisited the magnificent poem below by Vernon Watkins. I was moved to do so by the frosty nights we have been having and the array of stars on display. Looking up at the stars in the clear sky the other night, in one of those synchronous moments where an event links with a memory, I just thought I had to come into the house and read the poem. It seems perfect for the Winter Solstice.

Portrait of Vernon Watkins by Alfred Janes

Great nights returning, midnight's constellations
Gather from groundfrost that unnatural brilliance.
Night now transfigures, walking in the starred ways,
Tears for the living.

Earth now takes back the secret of her changes.
All the wood's dropped leaves listen to your footfall.
Night has no tears, no sound among the branches;
Stopped is the swift stream.

Spirits were joined when hazel leaves were falling.
Then the stream hurrying told of separation.
This is the fires' world, and the voice of Autumn
Stilled by the death-wand.

Under your heels the icy breath of Winter
Hardens all roots. The Leonids are flying.
Now the crisp stars, the circle of beginning;
Death, birth, united.

Nothing declines here. Energy is fire-born.
Twigs catch like stars or serve for your divining.
Lean down and hear the subterranean water
Crossed by the quick dead.

Now the soul knows the fire that first composed it
Sinks not with time but is renewed hereafter.
Death cannot steal the light which love has kindled
Nor the years change it.

Mathafarn and the Dyfi Forest

2009-12-15T17:11:00.000Z

Mathafarn

... and on that day I walked up behind Mathafarn, an eighteenth century farmhouse built on the site of the home of the same name of Dafydd Llwyd ap Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. This fifteenth century poet and prophet predicted the revival of Welsh fortunes and the defeat of the English. Legend has it that Henry Tudor stayed at his house in 1485 on his way across Wales to Bosworth in England where he defeated Richard III and so became Henry VII of England. Dafydd died not long afterwards probably thinking that his prophecy had been fulfilled. History knows differently.

It is said that some of the barns and other outbuildings still remain from the original house. But they were hidden from view as we climbed up from the valley of the River Dyfi to the forested hills above. The sun remained low, not far above the trees even at Midday, but the day was bright and cold as high pressure kept the air still and the temperature low. Clearing the conifers of the Dyfi Forest for a while, the open hillside has scattered trees with bare branches to contrast with the drab green of the Douglas Firs and Sitka Spruce of the forestry plantation. Here the twiggy outlines merged to a reddish mist on a distant hillside. In the far distance the distinctive ridge of Cadair Idris dominated the horizon. Such clear, cold weather in December, with the sunlight angled low, gives a particular quality to the light and the perception of colour. Everything seems so pellucid, as if the bright but subdued light is shining through the components of the landscape rather than reflecting off them.

Back amongst the enclosed conifer forest the suffused light is more densely poured over - and absorbed by - the green branches. The path winds down steeply through the trees and meets a forest road. Ditches and puddles glisten half way between a frozen and a liquid state. The Sun is behind the hills and the light begins to fade. Separate objects begin to cohere. We pass a ramshackle farm as we descend further to the valley floor and leave the forest behind. A dog barks. Light ebbs away as we pass Mathafarn. It is lost in the dim past. Did Henry Tudor stay there?

An unlikely piece of doggerel ascibed to Dafydd suggests he sent him on his way with a blessing:

Harri a fu, Harri a fo

Harri y sydd, hiroes iddo!

(Henry who was, Henry who will be / Henry who is, long life to him)

But all is now dark.

Dorothy Wordsworth : this day in 1801

2009-12-12T00:01:00.000Z

Grasmere in the Snow

From the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth Saturday 12th December 1801:

A fine frosty morning - snow upon the ground ..... Helm Crag rose very bold and craggy, a being by itself, & behind it was the large ridge of mountain smooth as marble & snow white - all the mountains looked like solid stone on our left going from Grasmere i.e. White Moss & Nab Scar. The snow hid all the grass & all signs of vegetation & the rocks shewed themselves boldly everywhere & seemed more stony than rock or stone. The birches on the crags beautiful, Red-brown & glittering - the ashes glittering spears with their upright stems - the hips very beautiful & so good!! & dear Coleridge - I ate twenty for thee when I was by myself. I came home first - they walked too slow for me. William went to look at Langdale Pikes.

[.....]sate up late. The moon shone upon the water below Silver-how, & above it hung, combining with Silver-how on one side, a Bowl-shaped moon the curve downwards - the white fields, glittering Roof of Thomas Ashburner's house, the dark yew tree, the white fields - gay & beautiful. Wm lay with his curtains open that he might see it.