Read First Words: How Poetry Began - Y Gododdin by ... - StAnza

3The strange order of the words in this almost-sentence construction manages to expressawe - that close relation of fear - the wonder and doubt of an infant who did not understandwhat she saw. She had never seen a big mountain, but we had told her about them. Sheknew 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 ‘therocks looked unhappy.’ Snowdonia’s lofty, stony grandeur astonished our daughter. Shewas excited by what she saw. All the developing human mind with its questioning and itscapacity for awe is in that baby sentence. She had enough language to remember it. Shehad 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 trickytasks 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 tome. We sang -'Boys and girls come out to playThe 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 woodAnd 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 ourother bodily rhythms, our heartbeat, breath and gait, and to listen is to remember. We hadno need of print when we were infants, and when British culture as we know it was also in

5know all about it, and who are completely aware that what we call Welsh, and the practiseof 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, andthe Welsh language, are centuries older than English. The earliest poets in the islands ofBritain whose names we know were Aneirin and Taliesin, and their poems were written ata time when the British language, Brythoneg, or early Welsh, was spoken in all but thesouth and east parts of these islands. It was the language of Scotland as far as theHighlands. Welsh and cynghanedd grew together. Poets sang the language to life. Poetscreated the language it would become. This would be true of English too. Chaucer, andabove 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 theCynfeirdd (first poets) and the Poets of the Princes, cynghanedd was formalised during the14th century and is an integral part of the traditional Welsh 24 metres – the most commonbeing the cywydd (kind of rhyming couplets) and the englyn ( a four-line poem with verystrict rules for its construction) – practiced by the Poets of the Gentry. There are four maintypes 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 arerepeated 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 thesecond part there may be one or more unanswered consonants.Difyr / yw gwylio defaid (Edward Huws) (pleasant/ watching sheep) (d,f)We talked / (reserved) untactile (Emyr Lewis) (t,c,t)

63. In cynghanedd lusg (trailing cynghanedd) the rhyme at the end of the first part of the lineis repeated in the accented penultimate syllable of a polysyllabic word at the end:Bedwyr yn drist / a distaw (T Gwynn Jones) (Bedwyr is sad/ and silent)One brief arc / into darkness (Emyr Lewis)4. Cynghanedd sain (sonorous cynghanedd) rhymes and alliterates. Parts one and tworhyme, parts two and three alliterateLle bu’r Brython, / Saeson / sydd (anon.15th century) (Where a Briton is/ an Englishmanwill be)One fleeting / cementing / smile (Emyr Lewis)I like these two simple and familiar examples of cynghanedd sain, in English:’Hickory Dickory Dock’,and‘Lovely Rita, meter maid.’The latter gives me added pleasure because of the double meaning of ‘metre-maid’.In Wales today cynghanedd is still strictly used by many poets, especially in poemssubmitted to the chair competition at the National Eisteddfod. On the whole I do not likerules, so I have tried my own, rule-breaking versions, which my ear steals from Welsh, withno regard for the above definitions. To define can mean to restrict, and often does. It wasKeats’ perfect ear, not rules, that led him to write ‘fairy lands forlorn’, f, r, l, n in perfectcynghanedd order. Long ago, hearing the call of an owl across the Llŷn peninsula, Idescribed it as ‘Blodeuwedd’s ballad’, b,l,d in both words. In the poem I follow it with‘where the’…..for the pleasure of continuing alliteration. In another poem I describe the

8allow me this one.Dic yr HendreBard of birdsong, singer of harvest – thiseloquent elegistof farm, field and fold, silencedlike the blackbird in August.When the Romans left Britain in AD410, the Romanised Britons had to defend themselvesfrom the Angles to the south, the Picts to the north and the Irish Scotti from Dal Riata tothe west. All desired the fertile Forth valley. The era known to historians as the Dark Ageshad begun, that is, a period for which historians had a hard time researchingevidence. The period was far from being a cultural ‘dark age’. It was an era of warriors, inwhich the Gododdin, the Brythonic peoples known to Tacitus and the Romans as theVotadini, were a power to be respected among their neighbouring British tribes. A Welshpoet has called the Brythonic people and the lands they inhabited in south Scotland andthe north of what would become England, Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North, and still it is socalledin literature referring to those days, in recognition of the strong historical and literaryconnection between Wales and Scotland. We were one people.The great poem which connects us is Y Gododdin, a series of elegies and lamentscommemorating a disastrous battle. In the beginning of the 7 th century, about the year 600,after a year of feasting and mead-drinking in the Gododdin’s fortress of Din Eidyn - thecastle rock of Edinburgh - 300 trained warriors were ordered into battle against their paganenemies, the Angles. The warriors rode to Catraeth (Catterick) and attacked. All but threewere killed, according to one account. In another, all died but one. The bard, Aneirin, poet

10course, those poets without Welsh took their influences through the poetry of others,including Hopkins. Dylan Thomas picked up from Hopkins, but must have heard Welsh atFern Hill, where Welsh was the familial language. Think of Hopkins’ ‘Binsey Poplars’,My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,All felled, felled, are all felled;Of a fresh and following folded rankNot spared, not oneThat dandled a sandalledShadow that swam or sankOn meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.And Dylan’s ‘Fern Hill’,Time let me play and beGolden in the mercy of his means,And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calvesSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,And the sabbath rang slowlyIn the pebbles of the holy streams.I was asked to write a 62 word poem on ‘The Book of Aneirin’. Here is my scrap of a verse.Sorrow sharp as yesterday, a lamentpassed down and learned by heartuntil that momentwhen the scribe began to write.Fifteen centuries later,words still hymn their worth,young men, all but one slaughtered,lost in the hills of the Old North.Blood-balladof the battlefieldon quires of quiet pages, laid leafon leaf like strata of stone, Aneirin’s grief.

11The finest poem I know written in direct reference to Aneirin’s Gododdin is AntonyConran’s ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982.’ I will close with thispowerful poem. Below the title, he includes these two lines from the Gododdin.Gwyr a aeth Gatraeth oedd ffraeth eu llu;Glasfedd eu hancwyn, a gwenwyn fu.Men went to Catraeth, keen was their company.They were fed on fresh mead, and it proved poison.Men went to Catraeth. The luxury linerFor three weeks feasted them.They remembered easy ovations,Our boys, splendid in courage.For three weeks the albatross roads,Passwords of dolphin and petrel,Practised their obedienceWhere the killer whales gathered,Where the monotonous seas yelped.Though they went to church with their standardsRaw death has them garnished.Men went to Catraeth. The MalvinasOf their destiny greeted them strangely.Instead of affection there was coldness,Splintering iron and the icy sea,Mud and the wind’s malevolent satire.They stood nonplussed in the bomb’s indictment.Malcolm Wigley of Connah’s Quay. Did his helmRide high in the war-line?Did he drink enough mead for that journey?The desolate shores of Tegeingel,Did they pig this steel that destroyed him?The Dee runs silent beside empty foundries.The way of the wind and the rain is adamant.Clifford Elley of Pontypridd. Doubtless he feasted.He went to Catraeth with a bold heart.He was used to valleys. The shadow held him.The staff and the fasces of tribunes betrayed him.With the oil of our virtue we have anointedHis head, in the presence of foes.A lad in Tredegar or Maerdy. Was he shy before girls?

12He exposes himself now to the hags, the glanceOf the loose-fleshed whores, the deathsThat congregate like gulls on garbage.His sword flashed in the wastes of nightmare.Russell Carlisle of Rhuthun. Men from the NorthMourn Rheged’s son in the castellated Vale.His nodding charger neighed for the battle.Uplifted hooves pawed at the lightning.Now he lies down. Under the air he is dead.Men went to Catraeth. Of the forty-threeCertainly Tony Jones of Carmarthen was brave.What did it matter, steel in the heart?Shrapnel is faithful now. His shroud is frost.With the dawn men went. Those fortythree,Gentlemen all, from the streets and byways of Wales,Dragons of Aberdare, Denbigh and Neath –Figment of empire, whore’s honour, held them.Forty-three at Catraeth died for our dregs.Anthony Conran