Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (10 page)
Read Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Online
Authors: Lynette Roberts
Dogs of Annwn
: The ghosts of dogs, heard and seen in the sky. Invariably connected with Hell and
Death omens. They appear in early triads, and in the first story of the Mabinogion,
(Pwyll Prince of Dyved). The legend is no doubt associated with Sirius and the third
sea-track of the Phoenicians which may have guided those people to our shore: with
Kerberos: and later to emerge as ‘Cŵn Ebrill’, when curlews crying at night are said
to hunt for the souls of the dead. I have used this image as an interpretation of
the raiders droning over estuary and hill; their stiff and ghostly flight barking
terror into the hearts of the villagers.
An attempt to apply the strict form of the Welsh englyn to the English language. As
far as I know Robert Graves, at the age of thirteen, is the only other poet to have
attempted this. Here is an example of englynion by R. Williams Parry, from ‘In Memoriam:
Morwr’:
Y Tom gwylaidd, twymgalon, – sy’n aros
Yn hir yn yr eigion:
Mor oer yw’r marw yr awron
Dan li’r dŵr, dan heli’r don.
O ryfedd dorf ddiderfysg – y meirwon
A gwymon yn gymysg.
Parlyrau’r perl, erwau’r pysg,
Yw bedd disgleirdeb addysg.
Halkin
: a village which was submerged near St Ismael, Towy Estuary, about 1606.
For the form in this poem and that of ‘The New World’ I should like to make acknowledgements
to Professor George Thomson: and in particular for the analysis in his ‘Book on Greek
Metres’ of the third and extended line of the sapphic stanzas.
Streanaeshalch
: Whitby, where Caedmon’s monastery once stood.
Hebankuningas
: old Saxon ‘the heavenly kings’ quoted from an MS found
in the Vatican Library, and now believed to be the original passage of Caedmon’s ‘Genesis’
from which the English poem in the book of ‘Anglo- Saxon Poetry’ was taken. In this
poem I have tried to revive an echo of the rhythm and syntax:… ‘not is the Kingdom
of Heaven like to such flames; this was of all lands the loveliest, that we two here
through our Lord’s grace have might… where thou to that one not heard, who for us
two this calamity has decreed. In that we two the ruler’s word have violated…’
Mimicrying
: from the n. mimicry. Here used as a verb, to convey the meaning of both sorrow and
mimicking. The butterfly, brazilian blue, is caught by waving a transparent net of
peacock blue attached to a long slender pole. This deceives it into the belief that
there are other butterflies flitting about on the outer edge of the wood so that it
is easily attracted and caught. The commercial use made of their wings; and the fact
that ‘certain members of the Lepidoptera possess a capacity for sound production’
(A.D. Imms, MA, DSc) permitted me to take this liberty.
Jabirú
: stork.
Ombú
: botanically a plant: but, to all outside appearances a tree. The fruit resembles
white mistletoe berries, the trunk is hollow, and the branches spread and hang like
old and young English Oaks. It is the only covering of shade which grows and spreads
naturally on the Pampas. There are two legends connected with it. That which W.H.
Hudson has dealt with: and the second explained to me at the Convent of the Sacred
Heart… where he or she who sits under its shade will eventually become crazy.
Ventevéo
: an evil and much feared bird whose call, like the human voice, draws men deeper
and deeper into the jungle from where they seldom return. The bird, perching high
on the tree at night, penetrates the conscience of the people… come I see you… come
I see you. It is said to be under the command of the devil; and its light frame of
bones a
receptacle
for the departed souls of sinners, who unable to find peace, return to flit about
restlessly on the earth.
Lake of pools
: and lion grass: are literal translations of the Patagonian lakes, Nahuel Huapi and
Traful.
Sun tied up
: Inca idiom from the Quinchua language.
Huaca
: consecrated objects preserved with the dead; transferred to the Spanish language
and now connected with any superstition attached to a small possession or particular
object.
Haravec
: Quinchua Language, the tribal poet, chronicler.
Piranha
: fish which attack cattle and human beings in large shoals and eat them alive. When
cattle have to swim across the river, the drovers (peones) usually send over the poorer
beasts first, so that if a shoal of piranha are present, they will attack and be absorbed
by these, while the healthier herds swim across in safety.
Pronounced Coom-kel-in, meaning ‘The Valley of Holly’. Quotation in Welsh from Revelation
ch: VI, v. 7–11.
A glyweisti a gant Avaon
Vab Taliesin, gerdd gyfion,
Ni chel grudd gystudd calon.
Brân a gant chwedl ar uwchder
Derwen uwch deuffrwd aber,
Trech deall na grymusder.
Gwna y goreu ym mhob angen,
O’r peth fo’n dy berchen,
Gwell no dim gwasgawd brwynen.
C
ATTWG DDOETH A’I CAN
T
This poem was written over a period of two years, 1941–3. Not liking varied metre
forms in a long poem, short-lipped lyrics interspersed with heavy marching strides,
and not feeling too comfortable within the strict limits of the heroic couplet (wanting
elbow room and breathing space), I decided to use the same structure throughout, changing
only the rhythm, texture, and tone
internally
. The use of congested words, images, and certain hard metallic lines are introduced
with deliberate emphasis to represent a period of muddled and intense thought which
arose out of the first years of conflict, e.g. Factory hands and repetitive lines
re-occur with the same movement as with a machine. For this I adapted the villanelle
(see page [47]). Towards the third year of war, clear, cold, and austere sight is
regained, and I have tried to control the stanzas in the fifth part of this poem under
these conditions. The subject is universal, and the tragedy one of too many. Here
I would add that my own, though part may be expressed, is outside the page.
The background is similar to any rural village: only the surface culture is superimposed
or altogether distinct. The sentences at the end of the book are to pierce any obscurity
which may arise owing to the isolation of localised folklore; or to make known the
legends which belong to this
particular
part of the world.
Finally, when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel.
The galley sheets on which I wrote the first draft may be partly responsible for this
occurrence. But the poem was written for filming, especially Part V, where the soldier
and his girl walk in fourth dimension among the clouds and visit the various outer
strata of our planet.
L
YNETTE
R
OBERTS
The Caravan
Laugharne
15
th November
1949
A synnasant oll, ac a ammheuasant, gan ddywedyd y naill wrth y llall, Beth a all hyn
fod?
Ac eraill, gan watwar, a ddywedasant, Llawn o win melus ydynt.
YR ACTAU. PENNOD I
I
The poem opens with a bay wild with birds and somewhat secluded from man. And it is
in front, or within sight of this bay that the whole action takes place: merging from
its natural state into a supernatural tension within the first six stanzas. War changes
its contour. Machine-gun is suggested by the tapping of a woodpecker which gives out
the identity of the gunner and provides his nationality, ‘a dragon of wings’. Soldiers
and armoured corps arrive: military parade and propaganda: factory workers and fatigues.
The rural village described within view of this estuary where soldiers wander during
the short hours of their leave. The gunners in action, and of one in particular. He,
belonging to a Welsh regiment reading a bill by gunlight, and a letter from his girl
in which she tells him they are to expect a child. Night falls, and with it comes
the wrecking of a plane.
Today the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay,
With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away
Cadence of sight and sound, poets and men
Rediscovering them. Saline mud
Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh as lime stud
Whitening fields, gulls and stones attending them;
Curlews disputing coverts pipe back: stem
Plaintive legs deep in the ironing edge, that
Outshines the shale, a railway line washed flat,
Or tin splintered from a crab-green cave.
This is Saint Cadoc’s Day. All this Saint Cadoc’s
Estuary: and that bell tolling, Abbey paddock.
Sunk. – Sad as ancient monument of stone.
Trees vail, exhale cyprine shade, widowing
Homeric hills, green pinnacles of bone.
Escaping from these, tomb and cave, quagmires
Migrate; draw victim eyes with lustre sheen, suck
Confervoid residue from gillette veins: who talk
Now yield, calling others, those who walk
From Llanstephan, Llangain, and Llanybri.
No watereyes squinting or too near madness
Could fail such a trek. In this same old soddenness
In deep corridor graves culverts open; their
Gates kedged in mud, preening feathered air
Elucidating shapes flecked with woolglints
And small affiliated tares. – So walk swiftly by,
For today,
pridian
, tears ravens wings to grate
The bay, and John Roberts covered with ligustrum,
Always sanitary and discreet, rows to and fro from
Bell house to fennel, floating quietly on the tide.
In fear of fate, flying into land Orcadian birds pair
And peal away like praying hands; bare
Aluminium beak to clinic air; frame
Soldier lonely whistling in full corridor train,
Ishmaelites wailing through the windowpane,
O the cut of it, woe sharp on the day
Scaled in blood, the ten-toed woodpecker,
A dragon of wings 1 6 2 0 B 6
4 punctuates machine-gun from the quarry pits:
Soldiers, tanks, lorry make siege on the bay.
Freedom to boot. C
ONCLAMATION
. C
OMPUNCTION
.
Kom-pungk’-shun: discomforts of the mind deride
Their mood. Birds on the stirrups of the waterbride
Flush up, and out of time a tintinnabulation
Of voice and feather fall in and out of the ocean sky.
A sanctuary taken – trenched underfoot.
For today, today, the simple bay pined for
Out of reach. The atmospheric bogfoot
Out of season: culverts close their gate,
Machine sets against clay; irons a new uniform.
Trees crisp with Maeterlinck blue, screen
Submarine suns and baskets of bees: but
Men nettled with pie-powdered feet, angry
As rooks on their pernickety beds ‘training
For another Cattraeth’ said Evans shop.
D
ISSIMILAR
. D
ISSUNDERED
. C
RANCH-CRAKE
CRANCH-CRAKE
A
SHIVER
. A
NHUNGERED ANHELATION
.
C
ERAUNIC CLOUDS CRACK IN THEIR BRAIN
.
Who was to be ring carrier for Jerrymandering
Gerontocracy. The officer yellow with argyria?
Soldiers seldom suffered from this; for silver
Scarcely smoothed their palm. C
ONGRIEVED
. C
ONSTRAINED
.
C
ONDEMNED
.
Subversive
(?) for humanity blast this
And much else besides. Hell would chill a chitter
Chatter at the sight of their conflowing misery.
S
HUN
.
Father Precipice of Denbigh Rock,
Mother Mild of Pembroke Streams, Have mercy on.
Cantation us to shoal deep winter
.
Men fall to arms. Men stemmed to die
For the century. Then leap fast to the bone
Take wailing bayonets from the ice of wound.
Emblaze your handrails. Men fall to arms.
Men purred to fight – each other. So can we foresee
Death. Set each life against time. Jagged bitterns:
Gradgrinds all. – Now we ruined in life, bound
For detention in field, again build on lime
And rubble. To what age can this be compared?
Men slave, spit and spade. Glean life pure.
Accelerate oxidised roads. Drill new hearts and hearths.
Impale the money-goaders’ palisade. And you
Of acetated minds, workers with xantheine
Faces, revolutionise your land; holding
The simple measures of life in your hand,
Remembering navies and peacocks never sail
Together in the aftermaths of disaster.
Into euclidian cubes grid air is planed.
Propellers scudding up grit and kerosene, braid
Hulls waled 5 miles hollow, spidering each man stark
On steelweb, hammering in rivets ambuscade
Interrupted by sirens screaming tirade.
With machine-strength wearing blinkers and mask,
Will of iron moulding surface to brain chained:
While below in well shafts soldiers squat and cark,
Shell and peel pods and spuds: girders craned;
Into euclidian cubes tempered air is planed.
The brown paper parcels of sappers who ask,
Shelling and peeling: ‘
How’s Jane to-day?
’ Barricade
Against blast and red-hot ingots; clatch
Of ricocheting wheels – hell’s dim decade
Interrupted by sirens, screaming tirade.
Where each day ingrained is a chained task,
A clatter of clogs, winding of nerves: Fatigues
Thinning into vocal farms, war-limed grey,
Stately as battleships heeled to cove: there forced
Into euclidian cubes carol air is planed.
When daily the water trudge with battering can,
Striding out of snail from sprockets of kale;
Where tractors, carts like nasturiums crack
The windowpane; to rattle of boiling buckets,
Sleeve of plane rippling over hedge:
To each striped tidy plot aproned women work,
Spadeing clay and coal dust into ‘pele’ jet. To them
To iron bedsteads; kitchens farms cut open
With grates. To calico; village scintillating
Like mothball white on a hill: cresting cascades
And red rock, throwing out a shower of birds,
Woodcutters, and harrowing of gulls. Where
Women titans are weathervanes who fetch
In the cows who wander the valley prints
Greening the squares of their eyes. To men
Ploughing strig and stubble: near geese full of
White ‘airs’ crisping out their quills, whose
Eyes and ears surrounded with orange cord
Detect and hear the running pads of spiders;
Or better round the slow-slipping dairy-roof
Where rabbits hang punched on the door. To chink
Of ceramic jugs glazed with the lead of years,
Brass and blue glister under paraffin pools
By which everything rubied glows, baize and lace
Curtained to night; intrinsic to seal light
Crouched black on summer sills. Until the watersky
Of dawn flickers a sail-wash shimmering aquamarine
Into TB and disinhumed rooms; where past
Is not dead but comes uphot suddenly sharp as
Drakestone. To them soldiers return; offer chickweed
Love; others scribble the same formula home –
All this cover with blue dome of glass
And engrave the village Llanybri ’42:
For OK saltates the cymric hearth and
BBC blares from Bermondsey tongue.
Fine gentle ways fill time’s Grave stone
From Stonehenge Blue to Granite’s sharp Black.
Old women die folded in skirts, their culture
Entombed: upstarts mock at what was gracious before:
Work out their crudeness on to change and cloth.
Out of whalebone huts gunners drone: ‘You,
With the gypsy slit on your ears Vaughan
What do you make of my lover’ (!) No answer.
‘Who’s there in the Chapel Yard who bends?’
Prophets warm in the shade sign black signatures
In the Red Book of Hergest and cross their toes
To confuse the Principality. ‘What’s that withered
Field?’ ‘England.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘What’s that purple pool
Of pansies lingering in so memorial
A town?’ ‘Culture of London.’ ‘Oh, so.’
‘Pull down the bastard.’ ‘Pull down the flag.’
The flag torn down. Emerald on
Unfortunate field and red flaw its great
Perfection; without sound crept back like myth
Into folds of earth: grew greener shafts of resilience.
Under the washing line of blue. ‘Who’s
Speaking now?’ ‘Who’s there in the Chapel Yard
Who bends?’ ‘Mari Ann is cleaning the graves.’
‘Where’s the “professor” he should know?’ ‘If the tide
Swept back for Saint Cadoc where was God
To smooth their corrugated mouths: strike a path
To the Laugharne Pubs?’ ‘Where’s John Roberts,
Old Charon and his Coracle?’ ‘Who’s there low
At the tide who blends?’ ‘Morgan the poacher,
Setting horsehair with broad bean and hook,
Sly old bugger snaring sheldrake. The State Trapper!’
Breaming boots: bay full of spitshine and brass
Sun splintered on waves – cupping up –
Clear as beer sparkle… ‘you’ve had it, mun’.
‘Where’s the “professor” he should know?’
He, who comes from Saint Cadoc’s Chapter
Giant or Legendary Prince, who loves
One and no other, turns in his mind
LEFT – RIGHT
L
EFT – RIGHT
, tapping boot wry in the dung
Coloured pool wonders which way and why?
Without chevron: yet born under that gyre
Astronomical sign: without chevron: kid
Crests his regimental badge. Poor callid
Cymru; unquestioning, unanswering,
Remaining just the same, braiding wire
With chilling hands,
stands
, under manurial
Showers, till the lurid sun spills across
The sky like a shot Indian. Then to read and relate
By gunlight indelible: ‘
We incarnate
,
Even if flesh rot you shall have Heaven,
I immured at your side. Serene latch
And cambric joy, floating above you shall
Still overlook pots and pans; yet patch
Your trousers willingly. This is no prodigal,
There is no madrigal but my ‘word’ cleaved
To your flesh. And you know it so need not fear
.’
Indigo, a green mist humouring Ajanta woe.
Cool palm lighting woodbine. Out of pocket: –
Red ink on pink lined paper: ‘Bryn Williams Carp
For wire netting and staples 2s and 8d.’
What setting moves mayors to play chess on rocks.
Guns stand manned.
Still stand.
Mind alone,
Knocks.
Senile coast beetle browed down to citrine
Rush of sea. Monster night strides up, grating
Rock to rib of death with hide of rusty knuckle.
A pinpoint glows, whirls, grows, whinnying
Larger wheels over the whole damn estuary.
Falling huge, dilating in the too close nightmare,
Their own eyes enlarging the mayors smash rock
Lift skirts and torques and wade out to sea. A whirrying
Of semitic wings. High cordite flash that
Cools the seaboard of the world. Bridling.
Of nerves,
THUD
Soundless,
Smoke fumes raise a black hearse that hovers in the sky.
Faces forged into icing bags, challenge
The chill fretting in waves to clear the plain,
Leave: crimson steam; scattering of pain on
Euripus wolds. Atonement of blood: seaflooded red.
Fighting scarlet minutes over immeasurable
Earth. Is reflected this day, by sodden
Arterial men crushed under magenta
Monstrosities, blood curdling into dog wail
.
How who then. Friend? Chine birds grip to black
Shining cliff, and wing, fowl-of-tar, to rift
In swivelling sea, cold hard as hand on rock:
Sea ride neither matched nor considered in flock.
Go down there far. Into groves of foreign
