All That is Wales
Page 30
to Oxwich’s cockle-strewn sands. (CP, 184)
And the lines in which he describes Taliesin’s actual birth provide us with a conveniently short and simple example of the richly syncretic character of his imagination, his love of fusing together myths and images from a wide range of ancient civilisations.
Music flows through me as through a shell …
My master from the rainbow on the sea
Launched my round bark. (CP, 353)
The shell is the coracle in which the legendary Welsh Taliesin was set adrift and Watkins was very aware that his own family had hailed from Carmarthen, where once coracles had plied on the Towy, as they famously continued to do at Cenarth on the Teifi. But the shell is also the shell in which Venus/Aphrodite floats ashore in the Platonist Botticelli’s world-famous image.9 Aphrodite is, for Platonists, the goddess of all this world’s beauty, and what is Taliesin the poet but the ‘beauteous-browed’ one, magically endowed with sensitivity to the spiritual beauty miraculously incarnate in this world of matter? As for the sea, well in addition to all its biblical associations, it is clearly the Platonist William Blake’s potentially destructive sea of space and time into which our immortal souls are plunged at birth. But over that sea hovers a reminder, in the rainbow, of God’s special covenant with man, an emblem of the otherworldly beauties that continue to shimmer within our fallen world. And of course, behind this use of the rainbow image is Watkins’s memory of the most celebrated passage on the subject by yet another Platonist, Shelley. ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/ Stains the white radiance of Eternity.’ And it is on this great, famous passage that Watkins so powerfully muses in his majestic ‘Music of Colours’ suite of poems, as we’ll see, which is dedicated to pondering the paradox of the Fortunate Fall – the human soul’s Fall from the white radiance of eternity into the many-splendoured colour of Life.
It is at Pwlldu that Bishopston Stream reaches the sea, and that stream fascinated Watkins because in spring it disappears from sight only to reappear in autumn. It was thus for him resonantly evocative of the existential condition of the spiritual world – running so deep beneath the surface of our temporal existence that it is invisible for most of the time but then suddenly manifests itself in some physical detail or in some poetic image. For Watkins the secret, hidden spiritual grammar of the world could not be grasped by rational consciousness. It could be grasped only by the means made available by the great arts, particularly by poetry. Poems were unique forms of human understanding. At their greatest, they were forms of anamnesis – that is, they enabled us to remember what we never knew we knew. And in the autumn reappearance of Bishopston Stream Watkins felt he was witnessing the kind of revelation that poetry alone could capture:
Crossing an open space, haunted in June by mayflies,
Into the gloom of trees you wind through Bishopston Valley,
Darting, kingfisher-blue, carrying a streak of silver
Fished from oblivion. (CP, 315–16)
In some of the very best of Watkins’s Gower poems one still feels the tremors, the distant aftershock, of that catastrophic psychic earthquake he had once suffered, a reminder that his imagination was still most authentic when it remembered that it had been originally quickened into poetry by terror and panic. Words had, after all, first come to him not out of light but out of darkness. So, by running his fingers along the ‘horny quill’ of a feather picked up from a Gower beach, he is given swift, deep, but safe access to his own existential angst:
Sheer from wide air to the wilderness
The victim fell, and lay;
The starlike bone is fathomless,
Lost among wind and spray
This lonely, isolated thing
Trembles amid their sound. (CP, 120–1)
Just for once, Watkins permits himself to see a world so precipitously fallen into loss, pain and suffering that it is beyond the consolatory hope of resurrection. Not that his poetry is always incapable of rendering that redemptive vision powerfully. He can be a spellbindingly affirmative poet, witness the Vaughan-like visionary sheen of lines like the following:
I praise God with my breath
As hares leap, fishes swim,
And bees bring honey to the hive.
The yew shuts out that sky
And the dumbfounded well
Hides within its stone
The colours’ trance; they shone
Pure, but the stones give cry
Answering what no colours spell. (CP, 102)
Watkins’s ‘stones [that] give cry’ surely belong to the same holy ground as the stones of Henry Vaughan that remain contrastingly dumb because they are lost ‘deep in admiration’; just as Watkins’s well, in its turn, is ‘dumbfounded’ by what the stones cry. But what is it that they cry? Here again the parallels with Vaughan are striking. The cry of the stones breaks the spirit-imprisoning trance of their own seductive, en-trancing beauty of colour. Because their cry is a cry of vision, a cry of spiritual self-realisation and release, a cry of revelation. It is the cry of primal recognition of that pristine source of all colour, that ‘original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan’, as Watkins puts it in his magnificent poem ‘Music of Colours: White Blossom’ (CP, 101). This is an example of Watkins’s metaphysic of sound – the attenuation of ‘swan’ to ‘wan’ verbally emblematises the difference between mortal and divine standards of purity and thus highlights man’s impoverished sense of what constitutes perfection. Man mistakes what is at best ‘wan’ for the authentic ‘swan’. ‘White Blossom’ is the first in the suite of three great ‘Music of Colours’ poems that so excited Ceri Richards into memorable image.
Like Vaughan’s, then, Watkins’s is a sacramental vision of a natural world in which bright shoots of everlastingness are so movingly ubiquitous. And Watkins seems even to share Vaughan’s love of turning rhyme itself into both a sonic and visual emblem of covert spiritual harmony. In the passage we’re considering, ‘stone’ is made to form an eye-rhyme with ‘shone’, thus transforming an inert physical object (‘stone’) into one that was energised (‘shone’) when it became instinct with spiritual luminosity.
Watkins’s deepest conscious need was to celebrate eternity’s love for the productions of time, as his hero Blake poignantly put it. Particularly compelling, because so arrestingly untypical, is the third and final poem in the series, ‘Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours’ (CP, 322–5). For me, this is one of the very few poems that make visible, and therefore make intelligible, Watkins’s surprising passion for Keats, rather than for the Platonist Shelley, even though this poem is about the gorgeous colours that stain the white radiance of eternity:
Where were these born then, nurtured of the white light?
Dragonfly, kingfisher breaking from the white bones,
Snows never seen, nor blackthorn boughs in winter,
Lit by what brand of a perpetual summer,
These and the field flowers?
All is entranced here, mazed amid the wheatfield
Mustardseed, chicory, sky of the cornflower
Deepening in sunlight, singing of the reapers,
Music of colours swaying in the light breeze,
Flame wind of poppies.
Aflame with the plenitude of its life, summer is here so gloriously full of itself that it is forgetful of all but the sumptuous abundance of the mortal present. But amid it all, a Watkins heady with high summer still persists in hearing,
Far off, continually, … the breakers
Falling, destroying, secret, while the rainbow,
Flying in spray, perpetuates the white light.
In other words, a Watkins drunk, as a poet must perhaps be, on the sensuous delights of mortal mutable existence nevertheless never forgets that it can never fully satisfy humanity’s essentially spiritual nature.
I’ve already characterised Cefn Bryn as a local landsker, a linguistic marker, a cultural boundary. But it is also the divide b
etween two dramatically contrasting landscapes, each with its distinctive beauties. To the north, as we know, the estuarine coast is low-lying marshland, waterlands and great tidal mudflats where Penclawdd cockle-pickers used, at least, to go for their rich pickings. To the south, the coastline is magnificently craggy, and each of the innumerable little bays seems to have its story of smugglers and of shipwrecks. Naturally native to this latter region is one of Watkins’s favourite poetic forms, the ballad, that had traditionally supplied whole communities and classes with an anonymous popular voice for commemorating collective experiences and truths. This isn’t the place to start detailing the extensive modern history of the ballad, from the eighteenth century’s fascination with supposedly primitive folk forms to the sophisticated concerns of great modernist poets like W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden. Suffice it to say that Watkins was as aware of this high literary tradition as he was of the local south Gower tradition of ballad composition. It seems clear he was attracted to it because it seemed to give unsophisticated, direct, unmediated expression to ordinary, general, universal human experience. The ballad form could thus be used to testify impersonally and authoritatively to the grand eternal truths of human existence, as Watkins, as we’ve seen, conceived them to be.
Many of his ballads are obsessed with the sea, its terrifying powers, its human wrecks. This is how ‘Ballad of the Equinox’ begins:
Pwlldu – an eternal place!
The black stream under the stones
Carries the bones of the dead,
The starved, the talkative bones.
There the great shingle-bank
Props a theatrical scene
Where guess the generous dead
What lovers’ words may mean.
When the sun and the moon are level
And the sky has a fish’s scales
I stand by the foxy foam
On that groaning shingle of Wales.
Beyond Hunt’s moonlike bay,
That pockmarked crescent of rocks,
White horses, dead white horses,
Priests of the equinox,
Deride my lonely curse,
And the moon rides over, pale,
Where the wicked wet dog in the hearse
And the devil in the wind prevail. (CP, 189–90)
Here, as repeatedly in the powerful series of Ballads, the sea becomes the dread realm of the dead, and Watkins’s mind becomes haunted by their clamorous, threatening ghosts. Those unappeasable, voracious ghosts, in their turn, are expressions of the psychic terrors that had caused the young Watkins’s cataclysmic and catastrophic mental collapse. The drowned are revenants, come back to mock Watkins with the possibility that life may be meaningless after all, matter totally devoid of spirit: it is the devil in the wind that threatens to prevail. But in other ballads Watkins fights back, struggling to reassert his Christian Platonist faith in a spiritually redeemed universe. As he writes in the very conclusion of ‘Ballad of Crawley Woods’,
Though long he lay in death’s embrace,
That tree and wall were true.
The rose in that rose-window
Knew every leaf that grew.
For him each single drop of dew
Trembled, a world of praise.
The secret of the dead he knew
None but their Christ can raise. (CP, 193)
Here, then, he lays the uneasy ghost of the drowned by summoning up an exorcising vision instead of the dead released from death and risen to new spiritual life by the great redeemer, Christ. This is how he summed up his mature philosophy in a prose note to The Death Bell:
unredeemed man, through acquisitiveness, wills his own perdition … but redeemed man, falling through time deliberately, is raised by loss. The resurrection of the body is assured, not by the instinct of self-preservation, but by the moment of loss, of the whole man’s recurrent willingness to lose himself to an act of love. (CP, 216)
After reading Watkins, I am left with the realisation that I would not wish to be without a dozen or more of the best poems he wrote; and that is surely a decent survival rate for any writer of quality. With all his limitations, he was a fine poet and deserves far better than to be ignored. When he died, Ceri Richards felt that the cliffs of Gower themselves had been stricken with grief: ‘Now that he is not there any more the landscape seems deprived and inarticulate.’ But as I tread those same cliffs in these later years, my neighbour’s poetry is for me still a cherished, abiding, landscape-altering presence, and he a figure whose continuing value is literally brought home to me by the print Ceri Richards produced in his memory and which now hangs in humble homage on my bedroom wall.
(Not previously published in this form.)
Notes
1All quotations are from Vernon Watkins, Collected Poems (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1986).
2See, for instance, Richard Burns, Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas: Keys to Transformation (Wellingborough: Enitharmon Press, 1981).
3For Richards’s response to Thomas, see, for instance, Ceri Richards: Drawings to Dylan Thomas’s Poetry (Wellingborough: Enitharmon Press, 1980).
4Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins (London: Dent, 1957), p. 38. See another of Thomas’s comments to Watkins on the opening of one of the latter’s poems: ‘all the wheels and drums are put in motion: a poem is about to begin. I see the workman’s clothes, I hear the whistle blowing in the poem-factory’ (p. 29).
5‘Taliesin in Gower’ (CP, p. 184), ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’ (CP, pp. 224–5), ‘Taliesin’s Voyage’ (CP, pp. 316–18), ‘Taliesin and the Mockers’ (CP, pp. 318–21), ‘Taliesin at Pwlldu’ (CP, p. 353), ‘Sea Chant: Taliesin to Venus’ (CP, pp. 354–5).
6Patrick McGuinness (ed.), Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 176.
7Charles Williams, Taliessin through Logres: The Region of the Summer Stars; and Arthurian Torso (London: William B. Eerdmans, 1974).
8See ‘Digging the Past’ (CP, pp. 381–4) and ‘The Red Lady’ (ibid., pp. 384–5).
9Watkins specifically links Taliesin with the birth of Venus/Aphrodite in ‘Sea Chant’ (CP, p. 354).
10
‘DUBIOUS AFFINITIES’: LESLIE NORRIS’S WELSH–ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Albert took up his flute and began to play.
‘You always play beautifully,’ Lucille said, ‘but the music is sad.’
‘It helps me,’ said Albert. ‘It’s instead of crying.’1
Albert is a little boy; Lucille, a dachshund (with chutzpah), his closest friend and confidante. Together they set out on a bewitching adventure to recover the best Christmas present Albert’s mother had ever had – a delicate gold medallion desolatingly lost when she was eight years old. Published when Leslie Norris was eighty, Albert and the Angels is a delightful story for children. Hardly central to his oeuvre, it is nevertheless the most charming late evidence of his consummate artistry as a storyteller (not to mention his special relationship with animals). It is also obliquely revealing of his generous, melancholy imagination. Death-haunted yet life-affirming, it was always preoccupied by, and therefore with, the past – to a dangerous degree, perhaps, for his well-being as a poet. A major project unfinished at Norris’s death was a verse autobiography loosely modelled on Words-worth’s Prelude.2 It was the celebrated ‘spots of time’ passages that had first ignited his youthful passion for poetry, thus instigating the growth of his own poetic mind. Therefore, in modelling the memorialising poetry of his final years on these passages that were not only precious relics of his memory but also intense retrospectives broodingly concerned with their own mysterious origins, he was suggesting the infinitely regressive, inherently elusive, nature of memory itself. In the process he was in effect sending his final, fond regards to Edward Thomas, the formative influence on his mature poetry. It was Thomas, after all, who had ended his superb poem ‘Old Man’ by confessing himself to be terminally baffled by his own most intimately formative past. H
is intense effort at recollection had succeeded only in locating ‘An avenue dark, nameless, without end’.
What is it, therefore, that we have in Albert and the Angels, with its dream of a recovery of a gold medallion lost for a lifetime, but an old poet’s wistful fantasy of impossibly perfect, total recall? Is this touching children’s story that, of course, ends happily, not haunted by the willed innocence of old age’s belief in the possibility of complete recovery of a lost past; of rendering it as palpable, as sensuously tangible, as when it was the present?3 And what do we have in most of Norris’s mature poetry but the sad flute song of adult experience that inevitably puts an end to such innocence? That poetry is the product of an adult consciousness for which only the sweetly elegiac and sensuously restorative music of verse can provide a measure of consolation for what is otherwise irrecoverable lost. Thus can a story like Albert and the Angels – work in a genre untypical of Norris and seemingly marginal to his most important achievements – prove unexpectedly revealing of his central preoccupations as a writer. Emboldened by such a perception, this essay will concern itself with another of his occasional and seemingly incidental productions: his translations of a small body of poems from the Welsh language.
* * *
Over the course of his career as a writer, Leslie Norris published fourteen translations from the Welsh. Of these, eleven were from the legendary golden age of the poets of the gentry (c.1285–c.1525), including ten versions of classic poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 1315/20–1350/70), who was not only the outstanding poet of his remarkable period but probably the greatest of all Welsh poets (not excluding Dylan Thomas). The eleventh poem in this ‘set’ was a translation of an elegy for Dafydd by his old sparring-partner, Gruffydd Gryg; and Norris himself elegised the poet after a fashion in his ‘A Message for Dafydd ap Gwilym’. The first of his translations to be published came from an even earlier period of the Middle Ages: ‘The Old Age of Llywarch’ is a powerful survival from the ninth century and may represent a fragment from a lost saga. And Norris turned to the twentieth century to complete his portfolio, translating two poems by Gwenallt, a searing poet of Welsh industrial experience.