Vernon Watkins 1906-1967: A Bard of Bards
Pantycelyn Ceiriog Taleisin. These strange Welsh words were mere street names to me elevated only by their positions high on Townhill overlooking the city of Swansea. Beneath The Round Top Byron and Shelley held their own pinnacled crescents and therein lies the clue to the names.
Poets all: Taleisin was a 6th Century Bard whose name means 'shining brow'. Taleisin's
work was passed down in oral tradition and “The Book of Taleisin" only written down around the 12th Century by which time he was a subject of as well as a writer of legends. William Williams of Pantycelyn is a name from the hymnal -- writer of “Arglwydd arwain trwy'r anialwch " known to most as “Guide Me Oh Thou Great Jehovah." John Ceiriog Hughes apparently wrote a Welsh version of “The Ash Grove." The taking of Bardic names is a tradition amongst poets writing in Welsh; a tradition that encompasses song as well as verse and maintains a strong connection is maintained between the two.
Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins were participants in a group of creatives known as The Kardomah Boys (poets Charles Fisher Dylan Thomas John Prichard and Vernon Watkins composer and linguist Daniel Jones artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy Mabley Owen and Tom Warner) who met in The Kardomah Cafe which was bombed in WWII and rebuilt on a different street but with its original décor. You can still go there today. They both wrote in English but the Welsh like the Irish and the Scots speak a different English and one can discern the tensions between the two language patterns in their written works. Those tensions are quite deliberate. We like our own words and rhythms. It is part of what makes us Celts.
Watkins who was one of Bletchley Park's code breakers also spoke French German Spanish Italian and Magyar and translated poems from those languages. He thought it important that the translation be of a lyrical quality that defined it as an art form in itself. Meanwhile Watkins having been prevented from completing his studies at Cambridge because of financial constraints worked many years as a teller in Lloyd's Bank in Swansea and my husband remembers seeing him there -- as one of the teachers described him -- a real live poet! Watkins said that Swansea was “the enemy of reputation" and that it made artists “renew themselves". Swansea is hard to impress. It's Bay has been compared in loveliness to the Bay of Naples but Swansea is a rainy unpretentious town and it doesn't let its people get above themselves.
Dylan Thomas said of his friend Vernon Watkins that he was “the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English."
And Watkins wrote after Thomas’ untimely death: “The man I mourn is gone he who could give the rest so much to live for till the grave and do it all in jest. Hard it must be beyond this day for even the grass to rest."
Each valued the other's work enormously and to me it seems a pity that the name Vernon Watkins is not equally widely acclaimed today. It is not as if Vernon Watkins went unsung in his lifetime. Indeed he won the Levinson Prize in 1953 and the inaugural Guinness Poetry Award for “The Tributary Seasons". He also received travelling scholarships from the Society of Authors and was made Doctor of Literature from University College Swansea. And both men were celebrated and died in America. In 1967 Watkins became visiting professor of poetry at the University of Washington but died of a heart attack playing tennis shortly after arriving to take the post.
Watkins wrote in praise of Taleisin several times and in these poems he honoured the bardic tradition: Taleisin wrote much as one might expect on religious topics and in praise of kings and lords so it is fitting that he should be the subject of another poet's praise. In one of Watkins' poems “Taliesin and the Mockers" he lauded the Bard as a bringer of light:
“I am as light
To eyes long blind I the stone
Upon every grave."
And one can see in the section below how he emphasises the religious themes in the psalm-like structure of the poem as well as giving voice to the eternal truths that the poet embodies.
“I was a lamp
In Solomon's temple; I the reed
Of an auguring wind.
What do you seek
In the salmon river
Caught in the net
What living gold?
What do you seek
In the weir O Elphin?
You must know
That the sun is mine.
I have a gift
For I have nothing.
I have love
Which excels all treasures."
At the end it says:
“Mock me they will
Those hired musicians
They at Court
Who command the schools.
Mock though they do
My music stands
Before and after
Accusing silence."
Extracts from Taliesin and the Mockers by Vernon Watkins
That last stanza is very telling. For Watkins as for Tallesin the poet is very much part of the eternal. He not only saw poetry as a bringer of light but as part of God's glory; a sign of divine creation within man. This brought to my mind some of the first 'studied' lines of poetry that impressed me as a schoolgirl and which I remember underlining in my book. They are from Wordsworth's ode Intimations of Immortality:
“The Soul that rises with us our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:"
So in "Woodpecker and Lyre-Bird" Watkins writes:
“Taleisin body and soul
Compelled his muscular song
To gather glory unborn
From glory already old."
Watkins described himself as a Christian poet.
Questions of life death and transience recur over and over in his work.
“In all good poetry the transience of human life becomes an illusion " he wrote. He said that poetry ought to be addressed simultaneously to the living and the dead. “If a poet dismisses the living he becomes morbid; if he dismisses the dead he ceases to be a prophet."
He deals with the subject of childhoods cut short by war cities changed by war and memories altered by war in this extract from The Broken Sea by Vernon Watkins.
"My lamp that was lit every night has burnt a hole in the shade."
What is it about that line that is so right that it burns into the soul? The bringing of light -- of destruction--juxtaposition of the two in an innocent act --the sheer domesticity of it? It has a certain inevitable quality
--that the light is bound eventually to burn a hole in the shade. Light must necessariily expel darkness. “A sea-wave plunges. Listen. Below me crashes the bay."
This line speaks of natural change; the daily and very visible change in a town that boasts some of the lowest to highest tidal sweeps in the world. But in this poem an untimely destruction builds throughout the lines in images like smothers; the christening cup that was never given; the invisible thread; the criminal thumb-prints and swaddling shroud; the blown-up city; murdered; shattering.
“The rushing greedy water smothers the talk of the spade.
Now on the sixth of November I remember the tenth of May.
I was going to fly to your christening to give you a cup.
Here like Andersen's tailor I weave the invisible thread.
The burnt-out clock of St Mary's has come to a stop
And the hand still points to the figure that beckons the house-stoned dead.
Through the criminal thumb-prints of soot in the swaddling-bands of a shroud
I pace the familiar street and the wall repeats my pace
Alone in the blown-up city lost in a bird-voiced crowd
Murdered where shattering breakers at your pillow's head leave lace.
For death has burst upon you yet your light-flooded eyes do not tremble"
(extract)
The poem touches on myth and legend and is a cry for the loss and pity of war.
In “Three Harps" which is perhaps my favourite what are the three harps? The harp is an instrument of heaven. It echoes the Holy Trinity. The harp used as a creative device is here a shining inspiration. It represents the need to create: the need for flight: an arpeggio perhaps towards the light like Icarus' flight towards the Sun. This instrument of heaven is within the reach of man. The youthful ambition to take over from the father is strong yet almost unattainable:
“A harp at arm’s length."
and is constrained by human limitations:
“A harp a hand away
Held by a human cord.!
That human cord is a broken thing and not musical. It gives us life and life teaches many lessons. One of those is that creation is not easy -- it takes pains. It requires craft:
“The second word of day; The second word:
he repeats. Poetry like life has three stages; inception work completion.
And these three harps appear to have three woods too -- cypress representing grief for youth laurel representing fame and yew representing death -- again mythical references.
“By cypress taught and yew
My soul I made
Write old ambition new
And qualify the laurel’s shade.â€Â
Life ultimately teaches humility.
He speaks of lying down. In Bardic legend the poet would retreat to a dark place and lie down to contemplate his work so the harps become a celtic symbol here also and there are three celtic nations in the British Isles; three harps; three voices. But we lie down too in death and in the creation myth (and this poem is all about creation) God made Adam lie down and took one of his ribs to form woman but all born of woman must die at last and so Watkins fulfils his idea of writing also for the dead in these lines:
“I set one grave apart Gave speech to stone:"
and in recognising:
“The end of birth’s enterprise And death’s small crime.â€Â
Death's crime is 'small' because we all die and so in a way death is only doing its job. Birth's enterprise has always been finite. This is the manifestation of “the shrouded harp†through poetry. And when he says:
“I began
To touch though pain is sharp
The ribs of the man.â€Â
This is visceral. Think how the unfleshed rib cage resembles a harp! It is painful to acknowledge that all the works of man no matter how inspired or crafted come to nought unless the man becomes the harp himself – a willing instrument of the divine. And so he pleads:
“Come back to my sad heart
And play this harp of bone.â€Â
So Vernon Watkins is indeed a Bard for the living and the dead. An eternal.
Three Harps
by Vernon Watkins
“Ambitions playing:
The first inseparable
From gold-edged printing
On Daedalus’ table.
Desire for flight: Chariot-usurping skill.
The god of light
Torn from the godlike will.
What tears of amber What pre-natal force
From dawn’s dark chamber Fired me on my course?
Three harps: one
From emulation drew its strength.
The rising sun:
A harp at arm’s length.
The second word of day;
The second word:
A harp a hand away
Held by a human cord.
By cypress taught and yew
My soul I made
Write old ambition new
And qualify the laurel’s shade.
I set one grave apart
Gave speech to stone:
“Come back to my sad heart
And play this harp of bone.â€Â
Little for the sun I cared
Little for renown.
I saw the unknown unshared
True grave. So I lay down;
Lay down and closed my eyes
To the end of all time
The end of birth’s enterprise
And death’s small crime.
Then at once the shrouded harp
Was manifest. I began
To touch though pain is sharp
The ribs of the man.â€Â
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I hope my little tribute will encourage you to seek out his works.
Oonah wishes to acknowledge: McCormick Jane L. The prose ofVernon Watkins.--. Diss. Theses (Dept. ofEnglish)/Simon Fraser University 1969. as a source for quotations by Vernon Watkins used in the writing ofthis article.