First Words: How Poetry Began Y Gododdin
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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.