The Ballad of the Outer Dark

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.

Great Nights Returning

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.

Vernon Watkins

Vernon Watkins is a much neglected poet. Living most of his life in Swansea where he worked quietly, in marked contrast to his friend Dylan Thomas, his seven collections of poems from Faber between The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd (1941) and Fidelities (1968) represent a lifetime of dedication to poetry as a craft. His highly formal style and neo-platonic themes made him an unfashionable voice as he grew older but he never deviated from the view that a poet’s only concern should be “with metaphysical truth”. His exploration of that truth through, for instance, his ‘Music of Colours …’ sequence which explores themes of Light and Dark, was conducted with an intensity that made no concessions to popular taste. He sought, beneath the colours of the world, a purity of whiteness: “O but how white is white, white from shadows come,/ Sailing white of clouds, not seen before/ On any snowfield, any shore;”. But Light and Dark always interact: the white swan, Jupiter, in ravishing Leda, is “ … a great down/ Of thundering light” but “The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies/ In the soundfall’s great light, the music in the eyes,/ Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,/ Utterly secret. I know you, black swan.”

His poetic mentor was Yeats and he sought to parallel the Irish poet’s use of native material in his own re-working of Welsh themes. He believed that “rhythm and cadence are born in the blood” and that this made him a Welsh poet. His re-working of the Taliesin theme in ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’ represents the poet as one who receives inspiration from the Muse and is able to transcend Time but who must “adapt … to the limitations of time” in order to communicate with others. He corresponded with friends like the artist Ceri Richards and the writer and artist David Jones about these things and referred to these and other artistic associates in his poem ‘The Forge of the Solstice’. Here are the two final stanzas of that poem:

And out of it now falls the winter sun,
Leaving a ceaseless myth of moving waves,
Till darkness quiets all things. Man is one:
The identity survives its many graves.
First was the hunter, then the prophet; last,
The artificer, compounding in one ghost

Hunter and prey, prophet and witness, brought
Into that circle where all riddles end.
Love gives their art a body in which thought
Draws, not from time but wisdom, till it bend
The solstice like a bow, and bring time round
White with young stars, quick from the forge they have found.



Selections of Vernon Watkins poems are available from Golgonooza Press and from Carcanet (with an introduction by Rowan Williams)