All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  That last phrase is devastatingly accurate. And yet, as Thomas also acknowledged, there are in Watkins dazzling passages that suggest an undeveloped gift for sensuousness: ‘Lizards on the dry stone; gipsy-bright nasturtiums/ Burning through round leaves, twining out in torch-buds’ (CP, 323).

  I must myself come clean. I would strongly advise against trying to read Watkins in bulk – his Collected Poems runs to almost 500 pages. To overdose on Watkins is not a pleasant experience – the symptoms, I find, are first irritation and then numbness. When he trundles up the Big Bertha of his rhetoric once again, you know he’s about to vaporise the sensuous, material world. Meant to be spellbinding, his rhythms are not so much mesmeric as narcotic. And as for his symbols, well, the mind ends up feeling it has been force-fed with candy-floss. Addicted to a self-enfeebling rhetoric and besotted with the ineffable, Watkins sometimes seems to be an ostrich burying its head in Gower sands. He could have done with meeting Marianne Moore’s famous creature, the ostrich that ‘digesteth harde yron’. I say all this somewhat reluctantly, aware of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man; of appearing to be the Victor Meldrew of critics. With friends like me, what enemies could Watkins possibly need? But irritability is the mood in which I am able to get closest to the root of my mixed feelings about Watkins. What I’m irritated by is his failure, not to be a different kind of poet, but to be consistently his own best self, as that is prefigured in a handful of poems that seem to me not negligible in quality or character.

  For me, Watkins is at his best when one senses an undercurrent of anxiety, of fear underlying his luminous affirmations of trust in a constancy of spiritual truth at the core of all life’s headlong chaotic change. I find his poetry most compelling when I feel it functions as an urgent coping mechanism, as a stabiliser of a mind forever on the point of tipping over into horror at the mere nihilism of existence. That, it seems, was what occasioned the terrible breakdown Vernon Watkins experienced in early manhood, shortly after leaving Repton, the public school where he’d been a pupil. And it is to that breakdown that I would look for the source of his subsequent lifelong devotion to poetry, his trust to its restorative, psychically redemptive powers. ‘Always it is from joy my music comes’, he wrote, ‘And always it is sorrow keeps it true’ (CP, 285).

  During the Second World War, Watkins wrote several poems that endeavoured to address the horrors of war directly, and was intensely distressed by the bombing of Swansea in 1941, recalling those three nights’ Blitz (February 19–21) ‘when memory was shattered’ (CP, 87) and he witnessed ‘All the villainies of the fire-and-brimstone-visited town’ (CP, 86).

  Here, like Andersen’s tailor, I weave the invisible thread,

  The burnt-out clock of St Mary’s has come to a stop,

  And the hand still points to the figure that beckons the house-stoned dead. (CP, 86)

  Addressing his little god-daughter, born in Paris at that very time, he notes how

  Through the criminal thumb-prints of soot, in the swaddling-bands of a shroud,

  I pace the familiar street, and the wall repeats my pace,

  Alone in the blown-up city, lost in a bird-voiced crowd

  Murdered where shattering breakers at your pillow’s head leave lace. (CP, 86)

  These are lines from a twenty-page poem Watkins wrote in an unsuccessful attempt to come to terms with the destruction of his home town. But, like his compatriot Henry Vaughan, he was really at his best when dealing obliquely and figuratively with devastating experiences. I am particularly fond of ‘The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’. The poem was first drafted in 1938, but actually published shortly after Watkins’s beloved Swansea had been razed to the ground over three nights of German Blitz, an experience that hurried him again to the edge of a nervous breakdown. With its liminal experiences, this ghost-haunted poem with its premonitions of war is, then, Watkins’s equivalent of ‘Little Gidding’. In the ‘Ballad’ he, too, in his anticipatory imagination is desolately wandering the disfigured streets of Swansea, treading the pavement in a dead patrol: the work deserves to be recognised as one of the powerful war poems of the Second World War. The Mari Lwyd is a mysterious disturber of the peace, invader of homes, intercessor for ghosts, would-be mediator between the disquieted living and the unquiet dead. It is we who live who have need of protection, because

  Out in the night the nightmares ride;

  And the nightmares’ hooves draw near.

  Dead men pummel the panes outside,

  And the living quake with fear.

  Quietness stretches the pendulum’s chain

  To the limit where terrors start,

  Where the dead and the living find again

  They beat with the selfsame heart. (CP, 47)

  Such lines exactly capture the potent, ambivalent character of dangerous traffic with the ghosts of one’s own past, even as they capture the uncanny atmosphere of wartime. ‘The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd’ is one of the very few of Watkins’s poems – and those are among his very best – where one seems directly to feel the after-tremor of the mental catastrophe that had befallen him in his youth. ‘I, a man walking, alive to fear’ (CP, 149), Watkins once memorably wrote, accurately identifying the surest source of his own poetic power.

  Very occasionally, indeed, the underlying fear of the nihilistic annihilations of time is even allowed still to peep starkly through, as in these lines that turn the kestrel into the bleak antithesis of Hopkins’s windhover:

  A gloom you make

  Hang from one point in changing time

  On grass. Below you seawaves break

  Rebellious, casting rhyme on rhyme

  Vainly against the craggy world

  From whose black death the ravens climb. (CP, 244)

  There’s a sombre magnificence to these lines, and a tragic overtone, too, since Watkins seems here to be casting the sea in the role of a futile rhymester, attempting in vain to turn the dark destructive matter of the craggy mortal world to harmonious order. And it is the permanently unexorcised fear of that failure that surely lies at the heart of Watkins’s own compulsive repetitive actions as poet, his lifelong casting of rhyme on rhyme against ‘black death’ like some charlatan sorcerer.

  And that’s where his key image of himself as the Taliesin of Gower comes in. Who then was Taliesin? Well, there are two Taliesins in Welsh legend. The first is indisputably a historical figure – the great sixth-century poet, who stands alongside Aneirin as one of the two founding figures of the ancient, majestic Welsh tradition of strictmetre poetry. And the second Taliesin? Well, he is a figure of folklore and legend, a magician, a shape-changer, a shaman. The most famous mythic account of his birth is that in the Mabinogion which concerns the witch Ceridwen, who assigns to her little serving-boy, Gwion Bach, the task of stirring a cauldron brimful of a potion that will bestow magical powers on whoever imbibes it. Gwion slyly takes a drop for himself and is instantly endowed with remarkable powers. Pursued by a furious Ceridwen, he changes himself into a goose and she becomes a fox; then he metamorphoses into a sparrow and she into a hawk; and finally he transforms himself into a grain of wheat, whereupon she becomes a hen and gobbles him up. Nine months later she gives birth to an extraordinarily graceful little boy, whom she names Taliesin – or beauteous-browed. She immediately sets him adrift at sea, but he is rescued by Prince Elphin and raised as his own son.

  Taliesin the poet; Taliesin the shape-changer; Taliesin the beautiful – these merge over time, because in ancient society the poet, the bardd (whence ‘bard’), was after all regarded as endowed with magical powers to transform language and through it the world. And given the pathology of his own imagination, Watkins became understandably fascinated by a legendary creature in whose miraculous tale was figured his dream of the unique power granted to the artist to track every twist and turn and transformation of the changeful world, yet to recognise that in its spiritual essence that world remained ever the same. This was the core of the vision that had rescued him from his bre
akdown and it was this vision that made him a Christian Platonist artist for the rest of his life:

  Come, buried light, and honour time

  With your dear gift, your constancy,

  That the known world be made sublime

  Through visions that closed eyelids see. (CP, 260)

  As is known, Watkins identified strongly with the figure of Taliesin. He wrote no fewer than six poems on that subject over a period of fifteen years.5 And it’s pertinent to remember that there was a curious mini-cult of Taliesin in English poetry before and after the Second World War. Did time permit, it would be interesting to explore the wildly eccentric, if not mad, use that Robert Graves makes of him and of Welsh materials in The White Goddess. And in her fascinating correspondence with Graves the Argentinian-Welsh experimental modernist Lynette Roberts assures him that his treatment of the Taliesin figure has real scholarly weight compared with the facile attempts of that hapless ignoramus Charles Williams.6 The reference is, of course, to the eminent Oxford University Press editor who was a bosom buddy of J. R. R. Tolkien and of C. S. Lewis at Magdalene College, Oxford and who in 1938 had published his Taliessin through Logres, later followed in 1950 by The Region of the Summer Stars.7 And in Affinities (1962), the Anglican Watkins included Three Sonnets for his fellow Anglican Charles Williams (CP, 291–3), whose verse he admired because it, too, was dedicated to the Christian mysteries of the incarnation and the Second Coming.

  Like the lyrics of Watkins, Williams’s time-consuming poetry is spiritually and symbolically concerned to reconcile mortal pain with immortal healing. But to a modern Welsh reader Taliessin through Logres may seem less compelling as religious allegory than as a fascinating example of the age-old English self-serving cultural practice of appropriating Welsh myth for the manufacture of an Anglo-Britain. For Williams, the Taliesin of Celtic and Welsh legend needs to be removed from his wild, Druidic, pre-Christian Welsh tribal background and to be sent to Byzantium to become a true Christian. As C. S. Lewis’s commentary blithely puts it, ‘He comes out of Wales and legend and old Druidic poetry into the geometric world of Byzantium and only by so doing becomes useful to Logres.’

  Lewis, like Williams, glosses Logres as Arthurian Britain. But I’d prefer to trust to my own Welsh ears, and to them Logres sounds perilously like Lloegr, which is of course the Welsh world for England. In other words, a provocative case could be made that in relation to Wales Taliessin through Logres is a colonial poem. And Watkins’s own ambivalent relationship to Welsh tradition is reflected in his at once identifying with Williams’s Taliesin and Arthur while also creating an alternative Taliesin of his own, whose grounding in specifically Welsh soil and legendary matter is much firmer and more specific. So if there are colonial aspects to Watkins’s Taliesin, too, they coexist with ambivalently post-colonial, or anti-colonial aspects of the same figure, as if Watkins did, if only in uncertain part, want to reclaim legendary native ground lost to the English. But it is also useful to think of both Williams and Watkins as, in essence, war poets – members of that generation of artists who, faced with the real threat of the invasion of England (and I use England advisedly), sought reassurance and refuge in the concept of an ancient, and therefore invincible, Britishness. And from Graham Sutherland to David Jones, such wartime artists and writers were, under these conditions, irresistibly attracted to the idea of safely ‘grounding’ their Britishness in the ancient land of Wales, to whose mythical landscape they therefore entrusted the survival of their English national identity.

  And what, in all of this, of little old Wales itself? Well, it’s worth briefly noting that the Celtic antiquity of Wales was an imaginary construct actively operative in Welsh literary culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Watkins’s Celticism may fruitfully be set in the context of the calculated Celtic paganism of his friend Dylan Thomas’s surreal Jarvis Hills stories of the 1930s and of the writings of Rhys Davies in the same period. This Anglo-Welsh Celticism served several historically specific functions, including offering an alternative to the contemporary, accurate image of modern Wales as home to one of the great early cosmopolitan industrial cultures of the world and the image of recent Wales as the preserve of a supposedly anti-life Nonconformist religion. And to see Watkins in this bifocal vision – as intimately related at once to Charles Williams’s English Celticism and to the distinctively Welsh Celticism of the early Dylan Thomas – is to appreciate the ambivalent character of Watkins’s poetry, culturally considered.

  There is no mention of Gower in any of the legends attached to Taliesin. But for Watkins it was here that his Taliesin – the Taliesin of his own imagination – had been washed ashore. That was because it was his experience of Gower, I feel, that had enabled Watkins to recover full mental equilibrium. Here it was that he’d been able to compose his mind – and by that I mean two things: he had been enabled to recover mental composure, and he had been enabled to do so specifically by the act of ‘composition’, that is by writing poetry, ‘magically conjuring words against chaos’, weaving sound and texture and rhythm and sense into singular verbal icons, emblematic of endurance. There is in Watkins’s work a powerful sense of the sacramental dimensions of poems and a corresponding sensitivity to the sacred aura of place.

  What had Gower to offer him? Well, it provided him with the exact configuration of contrasting elements out of which his imagination could fashion a new, precarious balance. Here enduring rock survived the raging ebb and flow and concussion of water. Here, stone had been worn down over aeons yet still survived as sand. Here raucous ravens built their spindly yet wiry nests in the very teeth of gales – ‘Art holds in wind’, he was to write, ‘the way the ravens build.’ Gower was for him a magical, liminal space, a mysterious zone between time and eternity, and he felt that nowhere more strongly than at Rhossili, ‘Turning-place of winds, end of Earth, and of Gower’. For him Worm’s Head was ‘the rock of Tiresias’ eyes’ – Tiresias being, of course, the ancient, blind prophet of Thebes endowed with the power to penetrate the secrets of time and space. And on Rhossili’s cliffs he prostrated himself – ‘Flat on my face I lie, near the needle around which the wide-world spins’ (CP, 118). Because here was the very axis of the world, the very navel of the universe.

  Gower cliffs are limestone and, like W. H. Auden, Watkins was a passionate lover of limestone landscapes. They were the veritable landscapes of the soul, honeycombed by secret caves and cavities, and carrying deep within themselves underground pools and streams that occasionally glinted unpredictably and mysteriously to the surface. The map of such a landscape’s deep interior was nothing like its familiar geographical surface appearance. Limestone landscape thus emblematised temporal mortal existence, which also carried in its secret depths perennial truths that occasionally manifested themselves to the initiate and could be expressed only through the esoteric vocabulary of image uniquely available to art. This vocabulary was the great carrier of a perennial philosophy, universal to all civilisations, surviving by metamorphosing anew from millennium to millennium. These myths, symbols and images belonged to the deep grammar of the human soul. Watkins therefore felt that the ancients of all ages and cultures were his closest contemporaries. And Gower helped him to feel this – after all, wasn’t it in Paviland Cave that the bones of the supposed ‘Red Lady’ (the oldest skeleton to be unearthed in the British Isles) were discovered?8 And wasn’t there an ancient drowned plain beneath the Bristol Channel, just as there was an ancient spiritual wisdom permanently lurking deep within the human unconscious? Ceri Richards was likewise famously attracted by legends of drowned lands, producing a great suite of paintings on the theme of La Cathédrale Engloutie. Here we see the submerged forms of ecclesiastical columns and pillars. While Richards was drawing on a Breton legend, he couldn’t have failed to have been reminded of the parallel Welsh legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod in Cardigan Bay, nor could he have forgotten the drowned land off the coast of south Gower. After all, towards the end of his life he spen
t most of his summers at the house he’d rented on Pennard Cliffs, near Watkins’s home.

  And then for Watkins there was the bicultural character of Gower. For almost a thousand years, the ridge of Cefn Bryn had constituted a local landsker, a boundary dividing a Welsh-speaking north Gower from the Englishry of south Gower. Strictly speaking, Watkins was not a Gower poet: he was a south Gower poet. Like so many Welsh-speaking families of the day, the Watkins family had achieved upward social mobility by abandoning the Welsh language that had been native to it in favour of the cosmopolitan language of English. Moreover, Watkins had been educated at thoroughly English prep and public schools specifically intended to anglicise him. And anglicised to a highly significant degree he had duly become – indeed he had been deliberately fashioned into a genteel member of the influential English lower-upper middle class. And as such he may have felt completely at home in some south Gower circles. But his was a complex cultural inheritance, and to some extent he seems to have been a psychically dislocated and culturally displaced person. He knew little, if anything, about contemporary Welsh-language culture. Instead, in his work he seems to have viewed that world stretching north and west of Cefn Bryn through the eyes of English neo-Romanticism and regarded it as ancient and Celtic. And it was on those terms he felt strong affinities with it – so much so, as we have seen, that in imagination he chose to bring Taliesin himself ashore on a Gower beach:

  Ceridwen’s prey,

  Child of the sea,

  I was cast that day

  On wild Pwlldu. (CP, 317)

  Late I return, O violent, colossal, reverberant,

  eavesdropping sea.

  My country is here. I am foal and violet. Hawthorn breaks

  from my hands.

  I watch the inquisitive cormorant pry

  from the praying rocks of Pwlldu.

  Then skim to the gulls’ white colony,