Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus — Happy St. David’s Day — to all who have reason to celebrate!

Sunset over Cardigan Bay, seen from Aberystwyth sea-front, 8th October, 2023.  “Machlud tawel, halen yn yr awel” (“Silent sunset, sea salt in the air”), wrote local schoolboy Gwenno Haf Thomas in 2012, aged fourteen; his words were set down in lettering on the Promenade.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

 Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!  Happy St. David’s Day to one and all.

… The same sea breaks
on the same shore and is not
broken. The stone in Llŷn
is still there, honey-
coloured for a girl’s hair
to resemble … 

— R.S. Thomas, from Pen Llŷn (Mass for Hard Times, 1992)

An eastward view from cliffs near Porth Meudwy on the Llŷn peninsula, Gwynedd, 29th March 2022; Ynysoedd Gwylan-fawr and -fach (Big and Little Seagull Islands) are to the right.

No Disgust in Tunbridge Wells

Today it was an honour and a pleasure, after several years of correspondence, finally to meet up with my friend, the Irish writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, author of the blog Irish Papist (irishpapist.blogspot.com) and of the book ‘Inspiration from the Saints’.  This historic and auspicious meeting took place in Tunbridge Wells, of all places, in weather that we both declared to be our favourite — cold and crisp, with the far sun throwing slanted light goldenly against façades, deep down the lengths of streets, and delicately through the last leaves of tangled trees, touching even cobwebs on the ground to brilliance.  First in a coffee-shop, over cups of hot chocolate that were things of beauty, then in a pub over a hearty sandwich, and finally out in the clear Wealden air — right up to the moment we began an unwonted dash to the railway station when I found it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and Maolsheachlann’s train was due in five minutes — we discussed the things that matter: poetry, music, railways, archives, libraries, Chesterton, Belloc, the state of Britain, the state of Ireland, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Middle Ages, the way of the world, the times we live in, the strange and unlovely religion of secular progressivism, the strange and wondrous religion of Christianity, and (by way of Kent and Kentish oast-houses) beer.  Yeats was recited on Tunbridge Wells High Street this afternoon, as was R. S. Thomas, in an act of resistance against banality, and of victory for poetry!  And I even managed to get Maolsheachlann onto his train, by a margin of about fifteen seconds…

Maolsheachlann’s blog is essential reading.  You do not have to be Irish, or a Papist, or even to agree with anything he says, to enjoy his writing.

Estuary Thoughts

Coming down England by a different line the other week, aiming south-west for Wales, I had an excuse for a journey over a stretch of railway I have long wanted to travel.  The train, bereft of most passengers at Cheltenham and after Gloucester nearly empty altogether, turned to wind on towards Newport along the far, western bank of the river Severn (the far bank from my point of view), with the Forest of Dean unseen to our right, and the widening water always somewhere, sometimes immediately, on the left.

A glimpse of Broadoak, with the A48 road and the river Severn meeting in the distance.

This stretch of Gloucestershire, between the county city and the Welsh border at Chepstow,  belongs to the corner of England that produced, in the early twentieth century, a great flourishing of art and music, and some of our greatest poets and writers.  The railway runs straight through the land of Herbert Howells, Ivor Gurney and Frederick William Harvey, three friends who came of age in that brief sunlit window of the early twentieth century that was shattered by the First World War.  Gurney, the poet and composer whose life had such a long and sad ending, was born in the city of Gloucester itself.  Howells was a son of Lydney, through which we rushed non-stop; it was this line that took him, by way of Gloucester, to the heights of his musical career.  And perhaps some of the depths, as well — it was also along here, a century before my own journey, that he had managed to leave the first score of his Piano Quartet on the train by mistake.  F. W. Harvey, too, was of this earth — not long after Gloucester, the train had skimmed past his birthplace at Minsterworth, and, a few miles downstream, cut straight through the hamlet of Broadoak, where he recorded winter’s ending in his psalm-like, rhapsodic poem ‘Spring 1924’:

     Spring came by water to Broadoak this year,

     I saw her clear.
     Though on the earth a sprinkling
     Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
     Bright curve of the Severn River
     Was of her gospel first giver […]

In the unthinking safety of those years on the eve of the Great War, this landscape was not simply the setting but in some ways the foundation of the trio’s friendship.  It was their native Gloucestershire that led them into artistic and temperamental sympathy with each other, and Gloucestershire that moved each to their arts: Howells to music, Harvey to poetry and Gurney, remarkably, to both, with equal passion.  Hence Gurney’s Gloucestershire Rhapsody; hence  the melody of Howells’ Chosen Tune, whose line on the staves mirrors the shape of the same hills of which Harvey exclaimed, ‘Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain! / My hills again!’.  (Harvey was incidentally a Catholic convert, though Anthony Boden’s generally excellent biography does not shed much light on this aspect of his life).  So in tune were these men with each other that when Gurney and Howells heard the first performance, in Gloucester Cathedral, of Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia, the piece had the same effect on them: it so overwhelmed them that had to spend the whole night pacing round the city’s streets in deep conversation to work it out of them.  I struggle to imagine this depth of companionship and artistic togetherness of spirit between any two people, let alone men: it seems foreign and almost incomprehensible only a century later.  Though their friendship — which is also described in a superb documentary on Gurney, The Poet who Loved the War — never failed, it was to be transformed by forces that had lain unsuspected beyond the Gloucestershire horizon, but called them out of their home county and into new lives.  Who knows how else their lives and careers would have gone on, had Gurney’s mind held out, had Howells not lost his son to an ambush of meningitis in 1935, emerging from the trauma a changed man and a composer of changed music, and had the war not cost Harvey some of his prime years in a German prison camp.

The ‘Sanctus’ of Herbert Howells’ monumental Missa Sabrinensis (Mass of the Severn)

When I came past on my incidental pilgrimage the weather was murky and damp, with the tinge of nearing dusk.  My sight was not nearly as clear as Harvey’s was when he beheld spring heralded in the Severn.  But certainly visible, as we persevered towards Chepstow, was the grey expanse of river, with the tide in, cutting off this part of England from the rest and, I like to think, leaving it benignly open to Welsh influence, both in landscape and mood.  Then the train, parting company slightly with the main estuary, slowed to a pace stately enough for a fitting, dignified passage across the Wye flowing in from the north, and over the border into Wales.  (Chepstow station, not far beyond the bridge, was a riot of Welsh signage amid the drizzle).

After Chepstow the line shadows the Wye all the way to its confluence with the Severn.  Gloucestershire, on the opposite bank, has tapered away to the curious Beachley peninsula, a last stubborn sliver of England between the two rivers.  Here the white parabola of the first Severn Bridge hurtles serenely in to land from across the main estuary, which is two miles wide at this point.  The BBC’s excellent Timeshift series includes a thoroughly enjoyable documentary about the construction of this bridge (Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge was Built), chronicling the colossal undertaking year by year from the start of work in 1961 to the opening in 1966.   It combines superbly-chosen archive film with recent interviews of some of those actually involved: I was struck by their literate, measured speech — engineers, workmen and locals alike — and by their boyish octogenarian grins — and by the clarity with which they explained the fairly complicated principles and mechanisms by which the bridge was made to stand.  Due time was also given to those who died in its construction: six men, which I think may still fairly be called a relatively small number for a project of this scale, not least given that it was generally the water, rather than the structure itself, that claimed their lives.  It must have taken a good deal of research and editing to put the programme together, though somebody has clearly enjoyed compiling an early Sixties sound-track to set the mood.  I have known this bridge all my life, and watching this programme I was fascinated to learn in so much detail how it was built, and by whom.

Gathering pace again, we converged with the Great Western main line as it emerges at Caldicot from the Severn Tunnel (an earlier triumph of engineering, opened in 1886) and thence ran along the flat towards Newport.   But there is something about estuaries: once in mind they will drain away only sluggishly.  The previous Sunday having been Pentecost, my thoughts drifted to someone else’s memorable journey by rail, involving another river’s ‘level drifting breadth’, which had been made on the other side of the country.  Philip Larkin’s intricate and atmospheric poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ — one of my ‘Desert Island’ lyrics — begins, like the journey it describes, in Hull (‘all windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone’) and gathers pace alongside the Humber estuary ‘where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’.  Its description of a ‘sunlit Saturday’ in 1955 — when Whitsun was a known, universal holiday — when it was customary to marry on Whitsun — when it was the custom to aspire to marriage at all — stirs up in me the same momentary ache or dizziness as I feel when looking at the 1947 series of one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, at the sight of those lost expanses of untrashed, unmotorwayed England.  Yet perhaps it was all already slipping away, as slowly, massively and unstoppably as the ebb of an estuary tide.  Perhaps what moved Larkin to his symphonic utterance of sights and sounds was the urge to record and capture not only the ‘frail travelling coincidence’, but the whole civilisation in which it took place.  I who come later am glad he did.

Like many modern buildings in Wales, Newport’s recently rebuilt station was not wearing well.  While sensible terraces of older, hardier houses climbed sturdily uphill in the distance, the station’s futuristic ceilings and space-age gutters were dripping with rain and the Thunderbirdsesque roof was smudged with moss.   Hadn’t they known there is no present in Wales, and no future; there is only the past?  But that’s another poet, and another country, for another time…

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went into the making of the wild sky,

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses…

Ten Poems for National Poetry Day

Since it is National Poetry Day, there is no excuse not to compile a list (though inexhaustive) of some favourite poems that I think are worth sharing.  I think they might also appeal to any readers who consider themselves new to, or unfamiliar with poetry… or even ‘averse to verse’!  If they can be read online, I have given links to them.  Here they are:

1. ‘Moonlit Apples’ — John Drinkwater.  A poem to be whispered at midnight… ‘And quiet is the steep stair under.’
2. ‘Paddington: Mother and Son’ — John Masefield.  Perhaps the simplest and the greatest war poem I know; its whole weight rests on the slow and remorseless beat of the four final words.  It is not online but is included in this anthology; a good local library ought to have a copy.
3. ‘The Trees’ — Philip Larkin.  Why is it that only Larkin’s sour poetry ever seems to be quoted?  He was capable of sincerely beautiful poetic utterances: this is an example.
4. ‘In Memoriam: Easter, 1915’. — Edward Thomas.  Another war poem whose weight rests upon a few words, ‘left’, ‘should’ and ‘never’, and whose meaning drops into the mind slowly but catastrophically.  I have written about it more here.
5. ‘A Chorus’ — Elizabeth Jennings.  This poem sets off with great momentum and soaring majesty but gradually lowers its voice until, in the last lines, both its subject matter and its register are intimate and almost confessional.
6. ‘The Old Liberals’ — John Betjeman.  It can be read about half-way down this page.  I find this poem very moving, even though I still don’t completely understand it and am not sure how seriously to take it.  ‘Sad as an English autumn, heavy and still’ is one of the truest lines of poetry I have ever come across.  And there is something about the easy conversational glibness of saying ‘Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square’ that is also powerfully sorrowful.
7. ‘Pilgrimages’ — R.S. Thomas.  It is about Bardsey Island, the ‘island of twenty thousand saints’, just off the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of N. Wales.
8. ‘Love bade me welcome’ — George Herbert.  Another intimate poem: its gentleness has survived intact for nearly four centuries.  ‘But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in […]’ is a line so light and so even that its gentle beauty could easily go unnoticed.  And neither has time diminished the anguished remorse and disbelief in the protest ‘I, the unkinde, ungratefull?’.  Ralph Vaughan Williams also set it to music.
9. ‘Woolgathering’ — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.  It can be read halfway down this page.  A whimsical utterance in plain English which can easily be learnt by heart.
10. ‘A Gable Wall’ — Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh.  This poem, full of movement, lifts up ordinary life in order to celebrate it, as does most of his poetry.  I always enjoy, and strongly recommend, the rest of his blog as well.

There are many other poems that I could have mentioned… doubtless I will find an excuse to post them in the future!