The White Goddess (102 page)

Then Suibne thought again of Éorann. The story goes:

Suibne resumed his fruitless wanderings, until befriended by a cowman’s wife, who would secretly pour a little milk for him into a hole she had stamped with her heel in the stable cowdung. He lapped the milk gratefully, but one day the cowman mistook him for her lover, flung a spear, and mortally wounded him. Then Suibne regained his reason and died in peace. He lies buried beneath a fine headstone which the generous-hearted St. Moling raised to him….

This impossible tale conceals a true one: that of the poet obsessed by
the Hag of the Mill, another name for the White Goddess. He calls her ‘the woman white with flour’ just as the Greeks called her Alphito, ‘Goddess of the Barley Flour’. This poet quarrels with both the Church and the bards of the Academic Establishment, and is outlawed by them. He loses touch with his more practical wife, once his Muse; and though, pitying such misery, she admits to a still unextinguished love for him, he can no longer reach her. He trusts nobody, not even his best friend, and enjoys no companionship but that of the blackbirds, the stags, the larks, the badgers, the little foxes, and the wild trees. Towards the end of his tale Suibne has lost even the Hag of the Mill, who snaps her neck-bone in leaping along with him; which means, I suppose, that he breaks down as a poet under the strain of loneliness. In his extremity Suibne returns to Éorann; but her heart has gone dead by now, and she sends him coldly away.

The tale seems to be devised as an illustration of the
Triad
that it is ‘death to mock a poet, death to love a poet, death to be a poet’. Suibne found it death to mock a poet; and death to be a poet; Éorann found it death to love a poet. Only after he had died in misery did Suibne’s fame flourish again.

This must be the most ruthless and bitter description in all European literature of an obsessed poet’s predicament. The woman-poet’s predicament is described in an almost equally poignant tale:
The
Loves
of Liadan
and
Curithir,
discussed above, is as sorrowful as Suibne’s.

But let us not wallow in these griefs and flying-madnesses. A poet writes, as a rule, while he is young, and has the spell of the White Goddess on him.

In the result, he either loses the girl altogether, as he rightly feared; or else he marries her and loses her in part. Well, why not? If she makes him a good wife, why should he cherish the poetic obsession to his own ruin? Again, if a woman-poet can get a healthy child in exchange for the gift of poetry, why not? The sovereign White Goddess dismisses both deserters with a faintly scornful smile, and inflicts no punishment, so far as I know; but then neither did she praise and cosset and confer Orders on them while they served her. There is no disgrace in being an ex-poet; if only one makes a clean break with poetry, like Rimbaud, or (more recently) Laura Riding.

Yet, is the alternative between service to the White Goddess, on the one hand, and respectable citizenship, on the other, quite so sharp as the Irish poets presented it? Suibne in his tale has an over-riding obsession
about poetry; so has Liadan in hers. But was either of them gifted with a sense of humour? Doubtless not, or they would never have punished themselves so cruelly. Humour is the one gift that helps men and women to survive the stress of city life. If he keeps his sense of humour, too, a poet can go mad gracefully, swallow his disappointments in love gracefully, reject the Establishment gracefully, die gracefully, and cause no upheaval in society. Nor need he indulge in self-pity, or cause distress to those who love him; and that goes for a woman-poet also.

Humour is surely reconcilable with devotion to the White Goddess; as it is, for example, with perfect sanctity in a Catholic priest, whose goings and comings are far more strictly circumscribed than a poet’s, and whose Bible contains not one smile from
Genesis
to the
Apocalypse.
Andro Man said of the Queen of Elphame in 1597: ‘She can be young or old, as it pleases her’; and indeed, the Goddess reserves a delightfully girlish giggle for those who are not daunted by her customary adult marble glare. She may even allow her poet an eventual happy marriage, if he has taken his early tumbles in good part. For though she is, by definition, non-human, neither is she altogether inhuman. Suibne complains about a snowstorm that caught him without clothes in the fork of a tree:

Yet his sufferings were by no means the whole story. He enjoyed life to the full in better weather: his meals of wild strawberries or blueberries, the swift flight that enabled him to overtake the wood-pigeon, his rides on the antlers of a stag or on the back of a slender-shinned fawn. He could even say: ‘I take no pleasure in the amorous talk of man with woman; far more lovely, to my ear, is the song of the blackbird.’ Nobody can blame Éorann for asking Suibne politely to begone, when he had reached that stage. What preserved her, and what he lacked, was surely a sense of humour? Éorann’s earlier wish for a feathered body which would let her fly around with him, suggests that she too began as a poet, but sensibly resigned when the time for poetry had gone by.

Can the matter be left at this point? And should it be left there? In our chase of the Roebuck:

like the Three Jovial Huntsmen. But is it enough to have described something of the peculiar way in which poets have always thought, and to have recorded at the same time the survival of various antique themes and concepts, or even to have suggested a new intellectual approach to myths
and sacred literature? What comes next? Should a practical poetic creed be drafted, which poets might debate, point by point, until it satisfied them as relevant to their immediate writing needs and in proper form for unanimous subscription? But who would presume to summon these poets to a synod or preside over their sessions? Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office which the ancient Irish called the
tugen
?
Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated metres. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising; yet families of ollaves tended to intermarry; and among the Maoris of New Zealand where a curiously similar system prevailed, the capacity of the ollave to memorize, comprehend, elucidate and extemporize staggered Governor Grey and other early British observers.

Again, if this hypothetic synod were reserved for poets whose mother tongue is English, how many poets with the necessary patience and integrity to produce any authoritative document would respond to a summons? And even if the synod could be summoned, would not a cleavage be immediately apparent between the devotees of Apollo and those of the White Goddess? This is an Apollonian civilization. It is true that in English-speaking countries the social position of women has improved enormously in the last fifty years and is likely to improve still more now that so large a part of the national wealth is in the control of women – in the United States more than a half; but the age of religious revelation seems to be over, and social security is so intricately bound up with marriage and the family – even where registry marriages predominate – that the White Goddess in her orgiastic character seems to have no chance of staging a come-back, until women themselves grow weary of decadent patriarchalism, and turn Bassarids again. This is unlikely as yet, though the archives of morbid pathology are full of Bassarid case-histories. An English or American woman in a nervous breakdown of sexual origin will often instinctively reproduce in faithful and disgusting detail much of the ancient Dionysiac ritual. I have witnessed it myself in helpless terror.

The ascetic Thunder-god who inspired the Protestant Revolution has again yielded pride of place to Celestial Hercules, the original patron of the English monarchy. All the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the Son or the Mother, not with the Father, though prayers for rain, victory and the King’s or President’s health are still half-heartedly addressed to him. It is only the pure allegiance of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, that has kept the Father from going ‘the way of all flesh’ – the way of his predecessors Saturn, The Dagda and Kai
1
– to end as chief cook and buffoon in the mid-winter masquerade. That may yet be the Father’s end in Britain, if popular religious forces continue to work in their traditional fashion. An ominous sign is the conversion of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children whose feast properly falls on the sixth of December, into white-bearded Father Christmas, the buffoonish patron of the holiday. For in the early morning of Christmas Day, clad in an old red cotton dressing-gown, Father Christmas fills the children’s stockings with nuts, raisins, sugar biscuits and oranges; and while the family are at church singing hymns in honour of the new-born king, presides in the kitchen over the turkey, roast beef, plum pudding, brandy butter and mince pies; and finally when the lighted candles of the Christmas tree have guttered down, goes out into the snow – or rain – with an empty sack and senile groans of farewell.

This is a cockney civilization and the commonest references to natural phenomena in traditional poetry, which was written by countrymen for countrymen, are becoming unintelligible. Not one English poet in fifty could identify the common trees of the Beth-Luis-Nion, and distinguish roebuck from fallow deer, aconite from corn-cockle, or wryneck from woodpecker. Bow and spear are antiquated weapons; ships have ceased to be the playthings of wind and wave; fear of ghosts and bogeys is confined to children and a few old peasants; and the cranes no longer ‘make letters as they fly’ – the last crane to breed in this country was shot in Anglesey in the year 1908.

The myths too are wearing thin. When the English language was first formed, all educated people were thinking within the framework of the Christian myth cycle, which was Judaeo-Greek with numerous paganistic accretions disguised as lives of the Saints. The Protestant revolution expelled all but a few saints, and the growth of rationalism since the Darwinian controversy has so weakened the Churches that Biblical myths no longer serve as a secure base of poetic reference; how many people today could identify the quotations of a mid-Victorian sermon? Moreover, the Greek and Latin myths which have always been as important to the
poets (professionally at least) as the Christian, are also losing their validity. Only a severe Classical education can impress them on a child’s mind strongly enough to give them emotional relevance, and the Classics no longer dominate the school curriculum either in Britain or the United States. There is not even an official canon of two or three hundred books which every educated person may be assumed to have read with care, and the unofficial canon contains many famous books which very few people indeed have really read – for example, Langland’s
Piers
Plowman,
Sir Thomas More’s
Utopia
and Lyly’s
Euphues.
The only two English poets who had the necessary learning, poetic talent, humanity, dignity and independence of mind to be Chief Poets were John Skelton and Ben Jonson; both worthy of the laurel that they wore. Skelton, on terms of easy familiarity with Henry VIII, his former pupil, reckoned himself the spiritual superior, both as scholar and poet, of his ecclesiastical superior Cardinal Wolsey, a half-educated upstart, against whom at the risk of death he published the sharpest satires; and consequently spent the last years of his life in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, refusing to recant. Jonson went on poetic circuits like an Irish ollave, sometimes with pupils ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’, and spoke with acknowledged authority on all professional questions. As one of his hosts, the second Lord Falkland, wrote of him: