Author Archives: davidjsutton

Week 537: Gwladus Rhys, by W.J.Gruffydd

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William John Gruffydd (1881-1954) was one of a generation of very fine Welsh-language poets in the early twentieth century, and was also a notable scholar, who did his best, for example, to hack a clear path through the tangled mythic undergrowth of the collection of mediaeval Welsh stories known as the ‘Mabinogion’. I think this is one of his best poems: a bleakly powerful portrait of a young woman trapped in what Gruffydd saw as the stultifying world of Welsh Nonconformism, with no outlet and no escape.

The translation that follows is my own. The poem contains terms with specific meanings in Welsh Methodism – Oedfa, Seiat, Dorcas – that are not easily translated; I have simply approximated these.

Note: ‘iaith y nef’, meaning the language of heaven: this is what the Welsh like to call their own language, contrasting it favourably with ‘the thin language’, English.

Gwladus Rhys

Seiat, Cwrdd Gweddi, Dorcas, a Chwrdd Plant;
A ’nhad drwy’r dydd a’r nos mor flin â’r gwynt
A’r gwynt drwy’r dydd a’r nos ym mrigau’r pin
O amgylch ty’r gweinidog. Ac ’roedd ’mam,
Wrth geisio dysgu iaith y nef, heb iaith
Ond son am Oedfa, Seiat, Cwrdd a Dorcas.

Pe beth oedd im i’w wneuthur, Gwladus Rhys,
Merch hynaf y Parchedig Thomas Rhys,
Gweinidog Horeb ar y Rhos? Pa beth
Ond mynych flin ddyheu, a diflas droi
Fy llygaid draw ac yma dros y waun,
A chodi’r bore i ddymuno nos,
A throsi drwy’r nos hir, dan ddisgwyl bore?
A’r gaeaf, O fy Nuw, wrth dynnu’r llen
Dros y ffenestri bedwar yn y pnawn,
A chlywed gwynt yn gwyno ym mrigau’r pîn,
A gwrando ar ymddiddan ’nhad a ’mam!

Rhyw ddiwrnod fe ddaeth Rhywun tua’r ty,
A theimlais Rywbeth rhyfedd yn fy nghalon:
Nid oedd y gwynt yn cwyno yn y pîn,
A mwyach nid oedd raid i’m llygaid droi
Yma ac acw dros y waun. Daeth chwa
Rhyw awel hyfryd o’r gororau pell.

Mi dynnais innau’r llenni dros y ffenestr,
Heb ateb gair i flinder oer fy nhad,
A gwrando ‘mam yn adrodd hanes hir
Cymdeithas Ddirwest Merched Gwynedd: yna
Heb air wrth neb eis allan drwy yr eira,
Pan oedd y gwynt yn cwyno drwy y pîn,
A hithau’n noson Seiat a Chwrdd Dorcas.

Am hynny, deithiwr, yma ’rwyf yn gorwedd
Wrth dalcen Capel Horeb, – Gwladus Rhys,
Yn ddeg ar hugain oed, a ’nhad a ’mam
Yn pasio heibio i’r Seiat ac i’r Cwrdd,
Cyfarfod Gweddi, Dorcas, a phwyllgorau
Cymdeithas Ddirwest Merched Gwynedd; yma
Yn nyffryn angof, am nod oedd y chwa
A glywswn unwaith o’r gororau pell
Ond swn y gwynt yn cwyno yn y pîn.

W.J.Gruffydd

Gladys Rhys

Prayer meetings, services, the Sunday School;
And father day and night, cross as the wind
And day and night wind in the pine-tree tops
Around the manse. And mother, trying to learn
The language of heaven, and yet having no words
But those of church stuff, service, Sisterhood.

What was I to do then, Gladys Rhys,
The Reverend Thomas Rhys’s eldest daughter,
Minister of Horeb upon Rhos?
What but in weary longing turn my eyes
Now this way, now that, across the moor
And wake up in the morning, wanting night,
And lie throughout the long night, wanting day?
And winter, oh my God, to draw the curtains
At four in the afternoon across the windows,
And hear the wind lamenting in the pines
And listen to my father and my mother.

One day Someone came towards the house
And I felt Something strange within my heart:
Not the wind lamenting in the pines,
And now I did not have to turn my eyes
This way and that across the moor. There came
A breath of some sweet air from far horizons.

I pulled the curtains back across the window
Not answering my father’s cold displeasure,
Hearing my mother telling some long tale
About her Temperance Society: then
Without a word I went out through the snow
When the wind was lamenting in the pines,
And this a night of prayer and Sisterhood.

Traveller, so it is that here I lie
Beside the Chapel at Horeb – Gladys Rhys,
Thirty years old, and father and mother passing
On their way to their conventions and assemblies,
To prayers, Sisterhood, committee meetings
Of North Wales Temperance Society; here
In the valley of oblivion, because
The air that once I felt from far horizons
Was only the wind lamenting in the pines.

Week 536: The Horses, by Edwin Muir

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It is a little odd now to think that when it was first published back in the early nineteen-fifties this poem probably seemed quite cutting edge and daring in its vision of a world after nuclear war. That was a time when apocalyptic visions were much in vogue, and the poem has a certain kinship with such prose works as Nevil Shute’s ‘On The Beach’, Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ and some of John Wyndham’s books. All worthy stuff and good reads in their day, but now a little dated, a little decorous – it’s not that the future has necessarily got any less apocalyptic, more that visions of it have got a lot nastier, as, for example, in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. I think few now would take the line, as Muir does, ‘OK, that’s the end of civilisation as we knew it, but never mind, we can just go back to horse-drawn ploughs and be the better for it’. But this ties in with Muir’s perpetual yearning for a vanished agrarian Eden such as he knew in his Orkney boyhood. If his vision comes across now as dated and impracticable, and if it seems rather quaint that the humble tractor should be seen as the archetype of the evil Machine (shades of R.S.Thomas!), then I guess that such is the risk poets take when they try to build on the shifting sands of current affairs and current technology. Yet for all that I think the poem is interesting not just as a period piece but for a quality of wistful innocence that still has power to move.

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll moulder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
                                         And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir (1952)

Week 535: The Seed Shop, by Muriel Stuart

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My least favourite time of year, these bleak rain-sodden days of January, still early dark though slowly lightening, but at least the bulbs are pushing through in the garden and the first snowdrops appearing in the lane, and I am put in mind of this quietly sensuous poem by Muriel Stuart (1885-1967), a poet of Scottish ancestry praised by Hugh MacDiarmid among others and sometimes associated with the Scottish Renaissance, though in fact she lived all her life in England.

The Seed Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry –
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

Dead that shall quicken at the call of Spring,
Sleepers to stir beneath June’s magic kiss,
Though birds pass over, unremembering,
And no bee seek here roses that were his.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams,
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century’s streams,
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.

Muriel Stuart

Week 534: A Dream Or No, by Thomas Hardy

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In 1987 I was on holiday with my family in Cornwall and on the way back from a drive with my wife, youngest son (a football-obsessed thirteen year old) and new baby daughter happened upon a sign to St Juliot’s Church and dived down a narrow lane, just as Hardy must have come more than a century before to find his Emma, the girl with the corn-coloured ringlets who once and later was all to him.

A grey and silver evening, wind in the sycamores; the square-towered battlemented church empty except for a woman arranging flowers, who cooed over the baby while I slipped outside and went down the path to a stile made of a thin slab of slate upright like the blade of a guillotine, and stood there looking at what to him must have been a familiar sight: a field of rough grass, sloping down to a line of trees, and beyond that the land rising again, long-shadowed and suddenly golden as the sun dropped below the cloud line, then turned back to see the churchyard with its silent headstones and nettles and an ivy-covered stump, that perhaps to him had been a sapling. My son came up and seeing my mood was very understanding: ‘I know what it means to you, I’d feel like that if we went somewhere Bryan Robson and the Man. United team had trained together.’

I’m not sure that it’s proper to equate a mere poet with the mighty Captain Marvel, but yes, that was the general idea. Anyway, here Hardy looks back wistfully on that first time together in a poem of 1913 in which he is drawn to the place and that remembered first happiness despite the doubts and pain that it now occasions in him.

A Dream Or No

Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me?
    Some strange necromancy
    But charmed me to fancy
That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,
    And a maiden abiding
    Thereat as in hiding;
Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,
    There lonely I found her,
    The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)
    That quickly she drew me
    To take her unto me,
And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;
    Can she ever have been here,
    And shed her life’s sheen here,
The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?
    Or a Vallency Valley
    With stream and leafed alley,
Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

Thomas Hardy



Week 533: Rain, by Edward Thomas

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A lot of wet weather lately – one of our local ponds that was bone-dry in October is now brimming over and home once again to a family of mallards. For me the poet of rain has to be Edward Thomas, especially in this piece, written in early 1916 while Thomas was undergoing military training in a camp near Romford. This is actually one of the poems where I part company with Thomas spiritually, since I have always rather liked the sound of rain at night. I remember lying awake one night in the Ogwen Valley in North Wales, listening to a torrential downpour on the roof above my bunk, thinking how it would be falling all over the dark countryside, turning the already wet soil to a black peaty sponge, and thinking how it would overflow, because the country could take no more: the trees had taken up great draughts, and the mosses could drink no more, and the rocks would have nothing to do with it, being no obedient chalks and limestones but hard grits and slates. So droplet would turn to drip, and drip to puddle, and puddle to rill, and rill to rivulet, until the hillsides would be alive with moving water… for some reason I found an exquisite pleasure in the thought of that soft wearing, that sleeking and slicking, gentler than ice but just as powerful in the end, and certainly the rain seemed part of an immense aliveness rather than anything to inspire thoughts of death.

But now for Thomas’s very different take on the matter…

Rain

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Edward Thomas

Week 532: Question, by May Swenson

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I confess that there is much in the work of more recent American poets that I feel not quite attuned to, as if it were written in a language that is clearly more or less English yet whose words, as in a dream, won’t quite come into focus. But I do like this poem by May Swenson (1913-1989), that reflects the difficulties that those of us most rooted in the physical have in conceiving of an existence independent of our body: our fleshly house, our faithful steed, our good bright questing hound.

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

May Swenson

Week 531: The Gay Goshawk, by Carole Pegg

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It should be said first that this week’s poem has nothing to do with the Child ballad of the same name, instead it is an original song to be found on the 1970’s folk-rock album ‘Mr Fox’, by a group of the same name formed by Bob and Carole Pegg. The group was short-lived, producing only two albums, and never enjoyed the repute and commercial success of their contemporary folk-rock bands Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, yet they had a very original style that drew on a mix of traditional sources and in particular the musical culture of the Yorkshire Dales. I think this eerie magical ballad is one of their best efforts.

The goshawk’s threat to use supernatural powers, which could be seen as a touch coercive, brings to mind legends attached to mediaeval wizards like Michael Scot, who was reputed to have defeated an indefatigable demon by challenging it to weave a rope out of flying sea-salt.

Note: the first word in line 15 is hard to make out: ‘jasmine’ seems odd but seems to be what people hear.

The Gay Goshawk

The gay goshawk came to my window-sill.
The snow it fell fast and the stars stood still.
‘O won’t you take me in from the storm,
Won’t you take me between your sheets so warm?’

Gold was the colour of his wings so fair,
His eyes they were bold and of silver so rare
And I laid his brown body upon the pillow.
He became a man, lithe as a willow.

‘Don’t breathe a word, don’t scream, don’t shout.
I can turn the whole world round about,
Lay the moon flat on the land,
Twist a rope out of flying sand’.

Whispering women, so happy beguiled,
Now that he’s gone she must care for the child.
Jasmine’s the colour of his hair,
A nut-brown boy with a silvery stare.

The nights have grown cold and the seasons slip by
And knowing seducers still give me the eye,
But on cold winter’s evenings alone I walk,
I watch and pray for my gay goshawk.

Carole Pegg

Week 530: BC:AD, by U.A.Fanthorpe

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‘And is it true, and is it true,/This most tremendous tale of all…’ run lines from a John Betjeman poem on the Nativity. To which I suspect that many these days will, like me, answer well, no, probably not, at least not in the sense that it did actually happen and happen in that way, which is our preferred definition of ‘true’. Yet we will be happy to concede ‘true’ in the sense of being a good story, reflecting some of humanity’s deepest hopes and desires, and powerful enough to have resonated down the ages.

I’m not sure how far in this week’s poem by U.A.Fanthorpe the author means to go along with the more literal aspects of the Christmas story, but it’s an entertaining take on the tale and it does for me go some way to capturing the true wonder at the heart of the Nativity which remains even when one strips away such mythic accretions as shepherds and angels, stars and wise men, and which should surely be something that those of all faiths and none can celebrate equally: I mean the sheer miracle of any human birth, this fragile chance to be alive on a green planet orbiting a vast ball of fire in the void.

My thanks to my followers for all their comments and encouragement over the year, and may they feel in whatever way seems right to them the warmth of this ancient glow at the heart of midwinter.

BC:AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of Heaven.

U.A.Fanthorpe

Week 529: A Christmas Childhood, by Patrick Kavanagh

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This week’s seasonal offering is one of Patrick Kavanagh’s best-loved poems, full of frost and glitter and childhood wonder, and wistful for that wonder. I don’t actually think it’s one of his very best poems – to me it rambles a bit and could do with tightening up – but it certainly has its moments, and even flawed Kavanagh is still better than most poets’ best.

Note: water-hen. A name used here and there for various water-birds, but here I take it to be the moorhen.

A Christmas Childhood

(I)

One side of the potato–pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

(II)

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon – the Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk –
The melodion’. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

Week 528: Office Party, by Alan Brownjohn

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This week a very funny seasonal poem. Well, I say funny – really it’s a bit sad and possibly I shouldn’t laugh, but it does capture rather brilliantly the horrors that we inflict on ourselves in the name of jollification, in this case the annual office party. Ah, Alan, did you learn nothing from Larkin’s ‘Vers de Sociėtė’?

Office Party

We were throwing out small talk
On the smoke-weary air,
When the girl with the squeaker
Came passing each chair.

She was wearing a white dress,
Her paper-hat was a blue
Crown with a red tassel
And to every man who

Glanced up at her, she leant over
And blew down the hole,
So the squeaker inflated
And began to unroll.

She stopped them all talking
With this trickery,
And she didn’t leave out anyone
Until she came to me.

I looked up and she met me
With a half-teasing eye
And she took a mild breath and
Went carefully by,

And with cold concentration
To the next man she went,
And squawked out the instrument
To its fullest extent.

And whether she passed me
Thinking that it would show
Too much favour to mock me
I never did know –

Or whether her withholding
Was her cruelty,
And it was that she despised me,
I couldn’t quite see –

So it could have been discretion
And it could have been disgust
But it was quite unequivocal,
And suffer it I must:

All I know was: she passed me,
Which I did not expect
– And I’d never so craved for
Some crude disrespect.

Alan Brownjohn

Postscript: So why did the young woman pass him by? When I first read the poem, my initial theory was that she instinctively felt it would be wrong to violate the aura of quiet dignity that I liked to think surrounded poets. This theory did not survive contact with poets.