1 First Words: How Poetry Began

Y Gododdin

I want to make a connection between our own first human words, when we learned to talk, and the birth of poetry in the islands of Britain. For me, all writing, but especially poetry, is a way of thinking. To write first words on a white page, at the tentative beginnings of a poem, and to hear them sing, is to experience a thought making its way into physical and rhythmic being.

Seamus Heaney has said that all his poetry springs from powerful childhood feelings of fear. When I heard him say that, I asked him, was it really just fear, or all strong early emotion. He said that all childhood feelings were at the core of his poetry, but the strongest of all was fear.

I have noticed that those who talked early record very early memories. I believe memories are kept by words, and that even if, at that memory's date, a child has acquired only words and phrases, but not yet sentences, the language is sufficient to the task of collecting memory. First words are first building blocks. Certainly, first experience of any kind lays down all that we need to become human, and, for artists, to create from that good, deep, layered compost-heap of memory. To generalise, perhaps, I observe that girls tend to learn to talk sooner than boys, and they report much earlier memories. I can remember napping in a garden in a pram - I know from photographs that it was an old-fashioned pram. I remember a tree, the sky, a white fringe moving in the wind. I have a clear memory of the funeral of my Taid – that’s Welsh for grandfather – an occasion which can, of course be precisely dated. I was not three years old. I remember the weight and texture of shining white gravel I collected from a grave. More than twenty years later, looking for a rag in the 2 duster drawer in my mother's house, I pulled out a scrap of the dress I had worn that long ago summer day, and the whole memory opened. Wondering about the weight Heaney gives to childhood fear, as I prepared to talk to you about language, poetry and childish matters, I checked the poem I wrote on the day I found the rag in the drawer:

Taid’s Funeral

From a drawer, a scrap of creased cloth, an infant’s dress in yellowed Viyella printed with daisies. And a day opens suddenly as light. The sun is hot. Grass grows cleanly to a chapel wall. The stones are rough as a sheepdog’s tongue on the skin of a two-year child. They allow a fistful of white gravel, chain her wrists with daisies. Under the yew tree they lay Taid in his box like a corm in the ground.

The lawn-mowers are out. Fears repeat in a conversation of mirrors, doll within doll; that old man too small at last to see, distinct as a seed. My hands are cut by silver gravel. There are dark incisions in the stalks made by a woman’s nail. A new dress stains green with their sap.

I had forgotten the fear, and puzzlement, that were so obviously part of the feeling that fired that long-ago poem. Maybe Seamus speaks for us all in his marking of a child’s fear as the life-spark of poetry. I was an early talker, an early reader, as was my daughter. She uttered her first sentence at about 18 months old. We were on holiday in Snowdonia, and we had stopped the car by a lake. She woke suddenly, sleepy from the journey, and said:

'Oh! Look at all the mountains I think.' 3

The strange order of the words in this almost-sentence construction manages to express awe - that close relation of fear - the wonder and doubt of an infant who did not understand what she saw. She had never seen a big mountain, but we had told her about them. She knew mountains from picture books, and stories, and homelier, green hills close to Cardiff.

Her father, as a child, told his mother that he didn’t like the Brecon Beacons because ‘the rocks looked unhappy.’ Snowdonia’s lofty, stony grandeur astonished our daughter. She was excited by what she saw. All the developing human mind with its questioning and its capacity for awe is in that baby sentence. She had enough language to remember it. She had nursery rhymes, the first poetry, with all their song and mystery, singing in her mind.

They were our first communication with her. We had played our way through the tricky tasks of baby care with the help of nursery rhymes. We had cut her finger and toe-nails to

'One little piggy went to market, One little piggy stayed home...' as my mother had done to me. We sang -

'Boys and girls come out to play

The moon doth shine as bright as day' , before climbing the ‘wooden hill’ to bed, and when she was tucked up I recited

'There was an old woman who lived in a wood

And an owl at the door for sentinel stood', and I sat on her bed as we listened to the tawny owls in the wood beyond the garden, calling, as we say in Welsh, 'Gwdihw! Gwdihw!' Theirs was the going-to-sleep poem.

Poetry remembers with words, imagery, rhyme, rhythm and tune. The beat is like all our other bodily rhythms, our heartbeat, breath and gait, and to listen is to remember. We had no need of print when we were infants, and when British culture as we know it was also in 4 its infancy, verse was used to remember, to pass a story on. The first bards of the sixth and seventh centuries, in the early culture of the islands of Britain, before the English language was, were our historians, story-tellers, genealogists, mythologisers, remembrancers, celebrators and elegists. Anon made up the nursery rhymes in which so often a gleam of history shines from the far past among the nonsense. Plots, plagues and poisonings, wars, floods, fires, assassinations and disasters of history hide among their playful sounds. While such stories made the round of the taverns and fairs, shifting a bit with every rendering, heard, remembered and passed on, it was probably a cunning idea for the lords and princes to appoint a court bard, a laureate, a makar, in the hope of an enduring account of courtly matters, preferably about the power of princes, the heroism of our warriors, the brave blood of battles won and lost, and, no doubt, to put the deeds of court and king in a good light. Long before scribes got to work in the scriptoria of the monasteries, the prifeirdd, appointed to the princes and lords, were reciting their odes to the harp in the halls of great houses, while the minor bards and troubadours carried their verses in their minds to recite on the road to the populace in taverns and fairs, and, if they were let in, to the minor gentry in their halls.

From the work of the chief bards, recited, repeated, performed to the harp, there began to emerge a sophisticated pattern of sound, paying particular attention to consonants, that is practised by many Welsh poets to this day. The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and

Poetics describes cynghanedd as ‘the most sophisticated system of poetic sound- patterning practised in any poetry in the world’.

I think those of you who know little or nothing about cynghanedd deserve a definition, and

I will try to explain it as simply as possible in a minute. Forgive me, those who already 5 know all about it, and who are completely aware that what we call Welsh, and the practise of cynghanedd, belong as much to the place we now call Scotland as it does to Wales, because we were once a single people, and we spoke one language. Cynghanedd, and the Welsh language, are centuries older than English. The earliest poets in the islands of

Britain whose names we know were Aneirin and Taliesin, and their poems were written at a time when the British language, Brythoneg, or early Welsh, was spoken in all but the south and east parts of these islands. It was the language of Scotland as far as the

Highlands. Welsh and cynghanedd grew together. Poets sang the language to life. Poets created the language it would become. This would be true of English too. Chaucer, and above all Shakespeare, sang into life the lovely muscular syntax of English poetry.

Based on the complex alliterative patterns and internal rhymes found in the poetry of the

Cynfeirdd (first poets) and the Poets of the Princes, cynghanedd was formalised during the

14th century and is an integral part of the traditional Welsh 24 metres – the most common being the cywydd (kind of rhyming couplets) and the englyn ( a four-line poem with very strict rules for its construction) – practiced by the Poets of the Gentry. There are four main types of cynghanedd. I quote from the website of Literature Wales.

1. In cynghanedd groes (cross cynghanedd) the consonants in the first part of the line are repeated in the same order in the second part:

Bara a chaws, / bir a chig (Goronwy Owen) (bread and cheese,/ beer and meat) (b,r,ch)

You silly blue-eyed / whistle-blower (Twm Morys) (w,s,l,b,l)

2. Cynghanedd draws (traversing cynghanedd) is similar, but at the beginning of the second part there may be one or more unanswered consonants.

Difyr / yw gwylio defaid (Edward Huws) (pleasant/ watching sheep) (d,f)

We talked / (reserved) untactile (Emyr Lewis) (t,c,t) 6 3. In cynghanedd lusg (trailing cynghanedd) the rhyme at the end of the first part of the line is repeated in the accented penultimate syllable of a polysyllabic word at the end:

Bedwyr yn drist / a distaw (T Gwynn Jones) (Bedwyr is sad/ and silent)

One brief arc / into darkness (Emyr Lewis)

4. Cynghanedd sain (sonorous cynghanedd) rhymes and alliterates. Parts one and two rhyme, parts two and three alliterate

Lle bu’r Brython, / Saeson / sydd (anon.15th century) (Where a Briton is/ an Englishman will be)

One fleeting / cementing / smile (Emyr Lewis)

I like these two simple and familiar examples of cynghanedd sain, in English:

’Hickory Dickory Dock’, and

‘Lovely Rita, meter maid.’

The latter gives me added pleasure because of the double meaning of ‘metre-maid’.

In Wales today cynghanedd is still strictly used by many poets, especially in poems submitted to the chair competition at the National Eisteddfod. On the whole I do not like rules, so I have tried my own, rule-breaking versions, which my ear steals from Welsh, with no regard for the above definitions. To define can mean to restrict, and often does. It was

Keats’ perfect ear, not rules, that led him to write ‘fairy lands forlorn’, f, r, l, n in perfect cynghanedd order. Long ago, hearing the call of an owl across the Llŷn peninsula, I described it as ‘Blodeuwedd’s ballad’, b,l,d in both words. In the poem I follow it with

‘where the’…..for the pleasure of continuing alliteration. In another poem I describe the 7 row on row of terraced houses in the South Wales Valleys as: ‘the et cetera of terraces’. I enjoyed finding that in my head, though the t,c,t,r of the first is echoed by t,r,c in the

‘wrong’ order in the second. In a poem about a seal coming ashore to feed a cub on the beach, I use a Welsh word for ovary, hadlestr, which literally translates as a dish of seed. I hope you can hear the h,d,l,s,t,r repeated in the last line, as well as seeing the metaphor, in this, one of seven poems in a sequence called ‘Blood’.

Equinox

Month of the high tides. The small bay brims, and there, far below us on the shore at Strumble, not wave, not old rags, but a seal and her newborn, the afterbirth’s ruby clean among the stones.

The children call ‘Look, seal, a seal!’ We hush and look, lifting them to see from the lighthouse wall, while far below she rolls her slippery body in its pulse of milk and need and afterpains to that blind, crying mouth.

She sees us, nervous, then lollops to the sea to become wave, sunlight, salt, ‘to quicken skies and oceans from her dish of seed, hadlestr’s huddle of stars.’

And here is my rule-breaking version of the englyn, written as an elegy for a fine farmer- poet - in Ireland he might have been known as a hedge-poet - Dic Jones, known as Dic yr

Hendre, named after his farm. It is a tribute to the form of the englyn, using rhyme and alliteration where English and sense allow, though the strict adherents of the form won’t 8 allow me this one.

Dic yr Hendre

Bard of birdsong, singer of harvest – this eloquent elegist of farm, field and fold, silenced like the blackbird in August.

When the Romans left Britain in AD410, the Romanised Britons had to defend themselves from the Angles to the south, the Picts to the north and the Irish Scotti from Dal Riata to the west. All desired the fertile Forth valley. The era known to historians as the Dark Ages had begun, that is, a period for which historians had a hard time researching evidence. The period was far from being a cultural ‘dark age’. It was an era of warriors, in which the Gododdin, the Brythonic peoples known to Tacitus and the Romans as the

Votadini, were a power to be respected among their neighbouring British tribes. A Welsh poet has called the Brythonic people and the lands they inhabited in south Scotland and the north of what would become England, Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North, and still it is so- called in literature referring to those days, in recognition of the strong historical and literary connection between Wales and Scotland. We were one people.

The great poem which connects us is Y Gododdin, a series of elegies and laments commemorating a disastrous battle. In the beginning of the 7th century, about the year 600, after a year of feasting and mead-drinking in the Gododdin’s fortress of Din Eidyn - the castle rock of Edinburgh - 300 trained warriors were ordered into battle against their pagan enemies, the Angles. The warriors rode to Catraeth (Catterick) and attacked. All but three were killed, according to one account. In another, all died but one. The bard, Aneirin, poet 9 of the court of Urien of Rheged, part of which extended kingdom was in modern Scotland, lived to tell the tale in the great epic lament known as Y Gododdin, written in what is now known as Welsh. In the poem we read the earliest known mention of Arthur, giving us a hint that Arthur was already a figure of great importance in Brythonic/Welsh/Scottish culture. The hero Gwawrddur is compared to Arthur in two, tantalisingly brief lines of the great poem:

He brought black crows to a fort's

Wall, though he was not Arthur.

The crows, birds of carrion, the poem tells us, came to the very wall of the Angles’ fort to feed on the dead that Gwawrddur left there, ‘though he was not Arthur’. Although the legends of Arthur have been placed in the South West of Britain, he was clearly known to the people of the Gododdin.

The poem was carried down the centuries by repetition and recitation, just as we carry in our minds the nursery rhymes of childhood, until it was written down in two versions, by two scribes, in the 11th century. The finer of the two manuscripts, a beautiful illustrated text, known as The Book Of Aneirin, has until recently been held in the old Cardiff Library, unavailable to public view. It is now in the National Library of Wales, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol

Cymru, supported by the Welsh Assembly/Senedd, the relic of Rheged in the safekeeping of the Welsh language, cherished by our poets and scholars. The continuing influence of those first words - of cynghanedd, and of what began with Y Gododdin - is immense. From

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Robert Minhinnick, Tony Conran to

Carol Ann Duffy, and many others, poets are writing in the wake of our first great poem. Of 10 course, those poets without Welsh took their influences through the poetry of others, including Hopkins. Dylan Thomas picked up from Hopkins, but must have heard Welsh at

Fern Hill, where Welsh was the familial language. Think of Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’,

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

And Dylan’s ‘Fern Hill’,

Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.

I was asked to write a 62 word poem on ‘The Book of Aneirin’. Here is my scrap of a verse.

Sorrow sharp as yesterday, a lament passed down and learned by heart until that moment when the scribe began to write.

Fifteen centuries later, words still hymn their worth, young men, all but one slaughtered, lost in the hills of the Old North.

Blood-ballad of the battlefield on quires of quiet pages, laid leaf on leaf like strata of stone, Aneirin’s grief.

11

The finest poem I know written in direct reference to Aneirin’s Gododdin is Antony

Conran’s ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982.’ I will close with this powerful poem. Below the title, he includes these two lines from the Gododdin.

Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth oedd ffraeth eu llu;

Glasfedd eu hancwyn, a gwenwyn fu.

Men went to Catraeth, keen was their company. They were fed on fresh mead, and it proved poison.

Men went to Catraeth. The luxury liner For three weeks feasted them. They remembered easy ovations, Our boys, splendid in courage. For three weeks the albatross roads, Passwords of dolphin and petrel, Practised their obedience Where the killer whales gathered, Where the monotonous seas yelped. Though they went to church with their standards Raw death has them garnished.

Men went to Catraeth. The Malvinas Of their destiny greeted them strangely. Instead of affection there was coldness, Splintering iron and the icy sea, Mud and the wind’s malevolent satire. They stood nonplussed in the bomb’s indictment.

Malcolm Wigley of Connah’s Quay. Did his helm Ride high in the war-line? Did he drink enough mead for that journey? The desolate shores of Tegeingel, Did they pig this steel that destroyed him? The Dee runs silent beside empty foundries. The way of the wind and the rain is adamant.

Clifford Elley of Pontypridd. Doubtless he feasted. He went to Catraeth with a bold heart. He was used to valleys. The shadow held him. The staff and the fasces of tribunes betrayed him. With the oil of our virtue we have anointed His head, in the presence of foes.

A lad in Tredegar or Maerdy. Was he shy before girls? 12 He exposes himself now to the hags, the glance Of the loose-fleshed whores, the deaths That congregate like gulls on garbage. His sword flashed in the wastes of nightmare.

Russell Carlisle of Rhuthun. Men from the North Mourn Rheged’s son in the castellated Vale. His nodding charger neighed for the battle. Uplifted hooves pawed at the lightning. Now he lies down. Under the air he is dead.

Men went to Catraeth. Of the forty-three Certainly Tony Jones of Carmarthen was brave. What did it matter, steel in the heart? Shrapnel is faithful now. His shroud is frost.

With the dawn men went. Those fortythree, Gentlemen all, from the streets and byways of Wales, Dragons of Aberdare, Denbigh and Neath – Figment of empire, whore’s honour, held them. Forty-three at Catraeth died for our dregs.

Anthony Conran