At the Source E-Book

Gillian Clarke

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

At the Source reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets. Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet's imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer's year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.

Leseprobe

GILLIAN CLARKE

At the Source

Contents

Title Page

A LOCAL HABITATION AND A NAME

A Local Habitation and a Name

Beginning with Bendigeidfran

Cardiff

Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’

The Poetry of Stone: Pentre Ifan

Voice of the Tribe

A JOURNAL

A White Page

Land

Breaking Waters

A Spring Heatwave

In Oradour

Islands

Heatwave. Monsoon

Kite, Buzzard, Crow

The Brown Hairstreak Butterfly

The Lineage of Bees

A White-Collared Blackbird

Water like a Stone

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Sgwarnog

‘Tell me the names for the hare!’

‘Sgwarnog for its long ears.

Cochen for its red-brown fur.

Ceinach for its criss-cross course.

Cath y Mynydd, Cath Eithin,

Cat of the mountain, of the gorse.’

There, alive, over the hedge

In the field by the cliff path,

One of her kindle, her young,

A leveret alone stone-still in its cwtsh

Till she comes at dusk to suckle it,

Murmuring mother-tongue. 

A Local Habitation and a Name

A Local Habitation and a Name

Houses we’ve lived in inhabit us and history’s restless in the rooms of the mind1

Propped on a shelf in the old beudy (byre) at Blaen Cwrt is Ordnance Survey Sheet XXXII SW printed in 1953. Today the beudy walls are lined with books, and where the manger used to be, in a corner redolent of hay and the grassy breath of Marged’s milking cow, my computer and printer are neatly stowed, as pleasing a design solution as a good metaphor. In Marged’s days the wide doorway was open to the wind and the rain, its stone corners rounded to let the cow pass smoothly to her stall. Today, in place of the doorway, a window seat is set below a three-casement window. It looks over rain-washed cobbles that a hundred years ago would be sluiced clean with buckets of well-water veined blue with milk.

The view leads east down a garden that was once yard, stackyard, sty, orchard and kitchen garden, through sycamore and ash trees and an encircling hedge of laburnum. In May we live in a circle of gold. It’s said the glorious hedges of tresi aur, the golden chain that grows wild round so many fields and along roadsides in this part of Ceredigion, first rooted themselves from fencing stakes peddled by a travelling salesman before the First World War. Beyond the hedge, fields fall to the little river Glowan that flows into the Clettŵr and on into the Teifi, the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. A tributary of the Glowan rises in this garden – source, blaen – to be swollen a field away by Ffynnon y Milgwn. Whatever hounds met once by the fierce spring named after them it is impossible to pass it now without hearing their bloody cries. The stream flows south down a narrow valley in two strands, one either side of the bank that divides the slopes of Fron Blaen Cwrt from Allt Maen’s steep wood. The strands unite in a froth of shallow water over stones under the bridge and find a name: the Bwdram, llymru, source of the word ‘flummery’: thin beer, a pudding whisked from leavings; something insubstantial; a nothing.

The land framed by the map was surveyed in 1887, revised in 1904. Set just below the 900-foot contour line, Blaen Cwrt is marked as a tiny rectangle in the fork of two lanes on the boundaries of Fron Felen and Allt Maen. It’s a typical Cardiganshire single-storey longhouse – beudy, barn, two rooms, a croglofft (roof room) reached by a ladder from the larger of the two rooms, and a dairy. It was built two centuries ago from the stones of the fields, crammed into the north-west corner of its eighteen acres. It is set into the high bank under the rising land to the west, its rear wall hidden by a hedge-bank overgrown with laburnum, rowan and blackthorn. The two small original windows of the house squint eastwards, alert for arrows of rain and wind in the suspicious way of hill farms. Behind, to the west, Allt Ddu rises to a thousand feet. On rare, ice-clear days, the peaks of Pumlumon, Cader Idris and Snowdon can be seen to the north from the lane behind the house, and the long finger of Llŷn almost touching the island of Enlli (Bardsey) like Michelangelo’s Adam reaching for the finger of God. This is the high land known as Banc Siôn Cwilt, smuggler’s country. In the eighteenth century Siôn, his coat patched like a quilt (cwilt), stowed his contraband in sea caves along the coast six miles away. Twenty years ago I could have sworn I saw his ghost. From the cliffs above a small bay called Cwmtydu I watched a boat with an outboard motor chug ashore. Two men stepped out of a parked car. There was a transaction, a passing of money. Something was certainly smuggled.

Other ghosts have left their traces and their names. Some are benign ghosts whose lost habitations are marked only by the nettles and gooseberry bushes that show they were ever there: Ysgol Pwll-y-Pwdel, the old school by the river Glowan; Cae Gwreichion, the field of sparks where the plough still turns ashes and horseshoes from the black soil of a long-vanished forge; harp-shaped Cae Delyn. And Marged, Blaen Cwrt’s last long-term inhabitant, who took her own life one bleak winter in the 1930s; Mamgu, my grandmother-in-law, walked with Marged past the old school, up the lane, past Blaen Cwrt and over Allt Ddu to the Capel Cynon fair a hundred years ago, wearing, she told me on her hundredth birthday, her best button boots.

The poet Thomas Jacob Thomas, (1873–1945), his bardic name ‘Sarnicol’ taken from the house a mile away where he was born, often passed this way, along the ‘heol gul garegog’, the narrow stony track – now the B-road from Post Bach – through the farm yard at Blaen Glowan Fawr. One such morning the yard at Blaen Cwrt is empty. Where, he wonders, is Bensia, a giant of a man so strong he could catch a bull by the horns and throw it on its back. Minutes later he sees no sign of Pegi, Bensia/Benni’s granddaughter, in the clos – yard – at Blaen Cwrt. Was Pegi the young Marged? He does not see me, either, though I can see him, through the casement window of my study. Another day he stops to help Benni Blaen Cwrt break a pile of stones picked from the fields to sell as hardcore to the roadmakers. Benni advises the poet to stick to his books so that he won’t have to break stones when he’s sixty. Benni’s daughter Nani, grieving with ‘gweddwdod anobeithiol’,2 despairing widowhood, is tending the pig in the yard. She asks the poet when he’s going to get a wife.

These things happened here, outside this very window. Still, sometimes, we dig from the dark soil, along with rusty chains, horseshoes, fragments of earthenware and the bright, hopeless splinters of Nani’s china, the crescent moon of a pig’s jawbone.

A quarter of a mile past Blaen Cwrt the poet descends Rhiw Amwisg to the crossroads near his birthplace, Sarnicol. Half way down Rhiw Amwisg is a little quarry full of bluebells in late spring and rosebay willowherb in summer. You hurry by because it’s a blind bend and the banks are high and steep, because of its name, Hill of the Shroud, because of restless history, and because they say a man is buried there. Once, on a day of sudden spring, I saw a glistening cloud of insects on Rhiw Amwisg, airy nothings shaking out luminous wings in the warmth. The name takes into itself another defining association: a swarm of sunlight. People tell of a mysterious highwayman who robbed travellers on that road, the amwisg a cloak that entirely enveloped him. No one had ever seen his face, and suspicion fell on a man who suffered a disfiguring and fatal skin disease. It was never proved. An elderly neighbour, a ‘hedge’ poet now dead, who lived in a house whose lights we can see across the valley, used to walk this way. She would stop to talk, adding a ghost or two to the company of spirits on this hill. She once told me her grandfather was killed by a highwayman. Her story too haunts the lanes I walk.

Turn left at the Sarnicol crossroads by the slate plaque engraved with a few lines of the poet’s verse and set in the wall on the centenary of his birth.

          A dôf yn ôl i’r dawel fan

O bedwar ban y byd3

‘To come home to this quiet place /from the four corners of the world’: colliers from the South Wales valleys home for the weekend; sailors disembarking at Cardiff, Fishguard, Liverpool; soldiers on the Great Western Railway. Now the exiles come home on the M4 and the A486, or on a Great Western train from Paddington.

This lane leads everywhere. It treads unbroken to the horn of Africa, and crosses eleven time zones to the shores of the Pacific. It changes its name as it travels. Motorway. Autoroute. Silk Road. It begins quietly, leading downhill past Allt Maen to the bridge over the Bwdram where the unseen otter leaves its sprent on the stones. I leave the lane, climb up through larches to the gorse slopes where adders lie in summer, through the hanging oak wood where badgers have built a city, and where, for three weeks in late spring there will be nothing under the trees or on my mind but the scent and flooding colour of bluebells. Miles away Llanllwni mountain shines with snow. Far below is wetland, Site of Special Scientific Interest, breeding ground of the Marsh Fritillary butterfly. Down there the pingo hole is blue as sky, a pocket of glacial water left from the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, now easing again from its cage of ice.

A red kite circles the wood. For a month of frost and stars the barn owl has held us with her cold mythological cry. Now is the kite’s turn. His yellow eye burns a point on the land’s map until it smoulders in sunlight.

The sheep follow us, hungry. We will bring them hay cut from the fields that Benni, Nani, Marged and their forefathers and foremothers cut before us. We have planted hundreds of trees, restored and planted hedges, levelled a few lumps of their bit of old Wales, made a small lake for dragonflies and swallows, raised a big new barrel-roofed barn for the hay, the tractor, and the coming lambs, and settled into the old house and its linked buildings with our books, music, computers and comforts. Their barn is our bedroom, their dairy part of our big kitchen. The room they called the parlwr, with a cupboard bed and loft-ladder, is our cwtsh, a cosy winter sitting room. Guests who are young and fit still climb the ladder to sleep in the old croglofft. In the manger corner of their old beudy my words skitter on the screen’s ice.

‘Mynd at dy lyfre heddi,’ ‘Stick to your books today,’ Benni urges a poet who wants to avoid breaking stones tomorrow,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.4

1 Gillian Clarke, ‘Cofiant’, Letting in the Rumour (Carcanet, 1989).

2 Thomas Jacob Thomas, ‘Sarnicol’.

3Ar Fanc Siôn Cwilt: Detholiad o Ysgrifau Sarnicol (‘On Fanc Siôn Cwilt: Collection of Writings by Sarnicol’), ed. Tysyl Jones (Gomer Press, 1972).

4 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Beginning with Bendigeidfran

It seems to have begun with Bendigeidfran, the giant son of Llŷr, King of Britain, brother of Branwen. Calling into the dark cave of language brings his voice echoing back. His story, his rhythmic syllables, the imprint of his huge foot on the shore, and the rocking stone on the headland that was once an apple out of the giant’s pocket – these were the first stories located in a geography that was mine.

The sea lies a few hundred yards from the farmhouse door, just a breathless dash down the path, through a kissing gate and over a stile, and a final slide from the shelf of turf, too low to call a cliff, onto the shingle beach. The farm belonged to my grandmother’s family from before I was born until I was almost grown up. The path is a sandy track that winds between gorse and over two stiles to a small cove between cliffs that extend parallel arms northwestward into Cardigan Bay. Its black shingle, the grey Atlantic seals that swim in its translucent green waters, the strangely hollowed, footprint-shaped pool in a rock at the foot of cliffs close to the bay, and the story my father taught me to associate with it, have haunted me longer than almost any memory.

According to my father, the giant Bendigeidfran set off in a rage from the beach at Fforest to wade the Irish Sea to rescue his sister Branwen from the Irish court and her sad marriage to the King of Ireland. The stamp of his foot left a giant print in a black slab fallen from the cliffs. Those rocks lie broken on the shore and jut jaggedly from the sea. They still have about them an air of turmoil. Upheaved slabs of black strata from some ancient colliding and pleating of the earth’s layers, they loom out of dark times, bringing old tales of war and shipwreck, and bearing messages that seem to be coded or in languages I could not understand.

Seamus Heaney once said that his poetic imagination is rooted in childhood fear. When pressed, he added that every poem he had ever written arose from the sharp, new emotions of childhood. Most poets know that poetry is grounded in the earliest experiences, in memory too deep to name, stored in the senses rather than in the filing-system of the conscious mind. It is upon those feelings and experiences at the wellspring of language, where words are new born, that the poet needs to draw. No wonder Keats expressed a desire for a life of sensations rather than thoughts. To go back that far is to touch the source, where what is ‘real’ and what is imagined, what comes from lullaby, nursery rhyme or fairy story, and the white noise of the world that is way over a child’s head, on radio, television, in grown-up talk, is all tangled up, unsorted, untouched by understanding or prejudice. It is the pure spring of language. There the human being is brand new. Words store and offer back our memories, and in infancy, when body and mind are single, real and the imagined worlds are indivisible. So there must be a word for it. ‘Nothing is until it has a word’.1

For me, poetry is a rhythmic way of thinking. It is thought informed by the heart, informed by the body, by the rhythms of breathing, walking, moving. The cadences of poetry are nothing to do with counting syllables. It is breath, pace, gait, gesture. People often ask, does being Welsh influence you as a poet? Or, does being a woman make a difference? I must say yes, it must be, as well, I suppose, as being a whole lot of other things. Writing is informed by the whole self and the whole life lived. Welsh writers in both languages are connected by several common experiences: the relative classlessness of Wales, and the sound of two drums beating. Our placenames and our English speech are haunted by Welsh. We share history, ancestral connections with Nonconformism, farming, heavy industry, and an enduring respect for and ambition for education. There are striking biographical links between the writers of Wales. It is a small country, a place of coincidence and connection.

My parents were, in their different ways, both word people, despite the limited formal education available in their youth. Both were Welsh-speaking, both from families with their roots and culture in an old, rural Wales, my father from Carmarthenshire, my mother from Denbighshire. My paternal grandfather farmed and worked for the Great Western Railway. His forbears were Baptist ministers, farmers and preachers. My maternal grandfather farmed and milled corn, as had most of my mother’s known ancestors. My sister and I were the first members of the family to be brought up with English as mother tongue.

By the time I was born, my father had joined the BBC in Cardiff as an outside broadcast engineer, and my early childhood in that time of war was spent partly in Cardiff, then Barry, and partly at ‘home’ in Pembrokeshire at the farm to which my widowed grandmother had moved from her native Carmarthenshire. Both my parents valued words, literature, books. Both thought education the way forward for their daughters. My father treasured both his languages, but for my mother the way up and out of hardship was to speak and teach her children English only. A child of a tenant farmer, she noted that her father’s land lords were rich, privileged and English, and she made up her mind in bitterness to escape her own heritage. She went to one of those insidiously anti-Welsh grammar schools that destroyed the self-confidence of so many of her generation. She trained as a nurse, and gave it up to marry. Determined that her daughters would be educated, she spoke nothing but English from the day I was born, taught me to read before I went to school, and grudged the sacred place that Welsh held in my father’s life. I knew that he spoke it every where except at home, so for me Welsh took on the nature of a forbidden tongue, a language of secrets from which I at first felt merely excluded, and later learned to value as something stored away for my future by my father, against my mother’s wishes. It is a history very like that of many writers of my generation.

My mother taught me, by endless repetition and song, all the English nursery rhymes. She left the tall tales to my father. Song and story. What gifts could be greater than those? What child could want more?

The myth of Branwen and Bendigeidfran is not traditionally associated with Pembrokeshire. Though the imagination thrills to see and to name the very place, the stones, rivers, caves, islands or mountains as the grave or the birthplace of Branwen, Grainne or Europa, the true geography of myth lies in the mind. My father’s version of the tale gave me possession of what was rightly mine, and should belong to all children. It offered me a place in the myth, and gave myth and naming a place in my imagination. By the time I first saw King Lear when I was ten, I already knew the tragic story of Branwen/Cordelia, the beautiful daughter of Llŷr/Lear. My first bookcase was full of folk and fairy tale and the mythologies of several cultures, and my head full not only of Enid Blyton but also of the Mabinogion. However, I recall no real book of the latter, no illustrated collection specially for children, only my father’s version of the stories told to keep me happy in the car on the frequent journeys between Cardiff and Pembrokeshire, to keep up my pace on a walk, or to get me to sleep at night. In fact the stories kept me awake. I heard the giant Bendigeidfran breathe, cough, stamp and rage in the waterfalls, tides, winds and storms at Fforest, and in the rumours of war on the radio or in the headlines of newspapers. The fact that literature, from nursery rhyme and fairy story onwards, was so closely associated with the natural world, has played a strong part in making me a country person in my head rather than an urban one, even during the years of my life growing up in the city, and bringing up my children there. Literature hallowed the natural with the supernatural. It made the stones sing. It populated the countryside with animals, seen and unseen. It made natural phenomena reverberate with mythological meaning, turned a rocking stone to a giant’s apple, a rock pool to a footprint.

Childhood in the 1940s was dominated by a world war which even a child happily evacuated to the loving care of a grand mother, in what still seems like paradise, could not escape. My earliest memories of Fforest Farm coincide with the war years. To a child it was a legendary war, a giant’s war of stormy seas, shipwreck, armies that crossed rivers on the body of their commander, bombs that fell from the sky. There was a monstrous enemy leader, and could we but kill him we would all be saved. Bendigeidfran was on our side, but I was not at all convinced that he was a sensible friend. I was not keen on his policy of revenge under those black skies of the early 1940s. Like most children, I found the quarrels of adults painful and bewildering, and what was going on up there and out there was all too raw a re-enactment of the unease in my own parents’ marriage, symbolised by their difference over which language they should speak to their daughters. From all this turbulence Fforest was a refuge far safer than a bomb shelter under the stairs in a house in a south Wales port. In my grandmother’s house and yard, Welsh and English, birth and death, the real and the imaginary, were all equally natural and elemental and as necessary to each other’s definition as the sea is to the land.

That poetry is for me both a creative and a thinking process is illustrated by the very slowness of the thought-journey towards an understanding of these things that has taken place since I began to take poetry seriously in the 1970s. From first publication in Poetry Wales in 1971, I began to give poetry due attention, in days of intense work between months of devotion to other things, such as rearing children, and earning a living. At first it was the living moment and its present tense that informed the poetry, and the present was made up in those early days almost entirely of familial matters and domestic relationships, which were the subject of my first book, The Sundial.2 As in school geography, you begin with the self, then explore the local, before you draw a map of the world, the universe. You explore the world in widening circles, deeper understanding. I was curious about my forebears, the women of my past, so in later books I explored the subject of ancestry, first the women’s story in Letter from a Far Country, then the men’s in the sequence ‘Cofiant’ in Letting in the Rumour, in an attempt to find the meaning of the present in the past. Later, among a tangled personal mythology of literature and reality, of real childhood memory and story memory, of legendary and real war, of father country, mother country and the rich turned ground between, new subjects clamoured for attention. They seem objective and external, but they take their source and root from a lived past. All writing is based on experience.

We don’t live in the small, quiet worlds of the poets I read at school and university. We live in a big world made intimate by the media and by travel, its grief and beauty brought close. Far away things have moved in to live in our minds and they cannot be ignored. I write in a silent room, in a quiet countryside, on an almost-spring day. If I look up I see fields and hills stretching to the horizon. The radio is off, newspapers unopened, the phone metaphorically off the hook. For hours, days, I can enter the poet’s room of silence and privacy. But it can’t last, and it is not my role to be reclusive. The ivory castle, and its garret, and our illusions of isolation, were brought to rubble by the wars of the twentieth century, and the winged messengers, bringers of news from those far places. My generation’s first journeys were made by radio in the time of war, when wireless ‘let in the rumour, grief on the radio’.3 Insights into the mysterious adult world, awareness of the movements of history as it happened, glimpses of great emotions that would otherwise have been beyond the experience of a child, came as the family listened to news bulletins, and some came from radio drama, especially serialised novels. I associate Jane Eyre with winter evenings, my father absent, away at work in the reserved occupation of broad casting, which exempted him from war service. About thirty years later, when I had become a published poet, came the first real visits to other countries, literary festivals, poetry exchanges with Communist regimes keen to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the arts, and American universities supplementing their creative writing resources with visiting writers from the land of Dylan Thomas.

We were suddenly – it seemed overnight – made aware that the planet could become uninhabitable and that it could die. We all needed a new way to write about the natural world. No longer did it seem right for a poet to pause along the hedgerow to write an Ode to a Primrose. It was an emergency. It was time for a poet to warn. Would Keats, in the light of our knowledge today, have complained about the unweaving of the rainbow? Would he not have found a new nature poetry that praises the way a rainbow is constructed from the seven colours of light split and refracted by a water drop? To combine a curiosity for science with love of the natural world is how humankind must live on earth now, and poetry should speak of it. It is no longer just the concern of those described as ‘nature poets’ to protest at the spoliation of the earth, or of scientists to show curiosity and concern for the earth.

Reviews of my first collection, which appeared in 1978, spoke somewhat patronisingly of my concern for domestic issues and the natural world, and I and those who shared my concern were regarded as writing about marginal matters, away from the centre. Many of the writers most concerned with these matters were women, made alert to the danger and worried for the future of an increasingly sick earth by motherhood, and a passion ate desire for a good and wholesome tomorrow for their children. It was once seen as nonsense to fear nuclear war. It seems strange now to recall that the notion of the deterrent was popular, in the form of the school cane as well as the bomb. I left education largely in ignorance of science, but I know now that the seeds of excitement about the facts of physics, biology, mathematics, were sown on those westward journeys with my father when, between the stories, he taught me about electricity, gravity, how radio worked, how he sent messages in Morse code during his years at sea as a wireless engineer, where the weather comes from, what stars are. An interest in natural phenomena and the living world arises directly from our night watches for otter or badger, listening for curlew, or spotting a kingfisher, hunting for a rabbit or a trout to supplement wartime rations. New nature poems are scientific rather than lyrical, concerned but not romantic. They aim to match the precision of metaphor and word-patterns to the clarity of the fact. They relish the patterning of things, the connections between the worlds of nature and ideas. They are hard at work redeeming the new jargon and making use of every fresh discovery in search of an imagery to match the times we live in. As Eavan Boland writes in ‘The Journey’, ‘odes on/ the flower of the raw sloe for fever’ are all very well, but we must make poems to antibiotics too, lest ‘every day the language gets less/ for the task and we are less with the language’. R. S. Thomas, more than any poet I can think of in the English language in Britain, consistently used science and the new nature to warn us of the calamity the earth faced, long before it was fashionable to do so. ‘Over the creeds/ And masterpieces’, he has said, ‘our wheels go’.4

We need Bendigeidfran. He is a warning. He embodies the power and strangeness of natural phenomena. He provides us now, as he always has, with the myth we need to explain the world to ourselves. He and Concorde have gone, but their names, meaning and mythology remain, still standing for the connection between things more powerful than ourselves. Giants ‘are the metaphors that shift the world’:

Tonight as Concorde folds her tern-wings back

to take the Atlantic,

I hear a giant foot stamp twice.

You can still see the mark he made,

a black space in the stars.5

1 Gillian Clarke, ‘Llŷr’, Letter from a Far Country (Carcanet, 1982).

2 Gomer Press, 1984.

3 Gillian Clarke, ‘At One Thousand Feet’, Letting in the Rumour (Carcanet, 1989).

4 R.S. Thomas, ‘No Answer’, H’m (Dent, 1972).

5 Gillian Clarke, ‘Giants’, from ‘Radio Engineer’, ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’, The King of Britain’s Daughter (Carcanet, 1993).