The White Goddess (6 page)

But even after Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian Knot – an act of far greater moral significance than is generally realized – the ancient language survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language – a wild Pentecostal ‘speaking with tongues’ – rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary.

English poetic education should, really, begin not with the
Canterbury
Tales,
not with the
Odyssey,
not even with
Genesis,
but with the
Song
of
Amergin
, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet, found in several purposely garbled Irish and Welsh variants, which briefly summarizes the prime poetic myth. I have tentatively restored the text as follows:

It is unfortunate that, despite the strong mythical element in Christianity, ‘mythical’ has come to mean ‘fanciful, absurd, unhistorical’; for fancy played a negligible part in the development of the Greek, Latin and Palestinian myths, or of the Celtic myths until the Norman-French
trovèr
es
worked them up into irresponsible romances of chivalry. They are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons. Some myths of course have survived in a far purer form than others; for example, the
Fables
of Hyginus, the
Library
of Apollodorus and the earlier tales of the Welsh
Mabinogion
make easy reading compared with the deceptively simple chronicles of
Genesis,
Exodus,
Judges
and
Samuel.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving complex mythological problems
is that:

and that to know the name of a deity at any given place or period, is far less important than to know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was then offered. The powers of the gods were continuously being redefined. The Greek god Apollo, for instance, seems to have begun as the Demon of a Mouse-fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradually rose in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and fraud until he became the patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts and finally, in some regions at least, ousted his ‘father’ Zeus from the Sovereignty of the Universe by identifying himself with Belinus the intellectual God of Light. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, has a still more complex history.

‘What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?’ is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But ‘nowadays’? Function and use remain the same: only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.

Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contact with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine, whether directly as workers, managers, traders or advertisers or indirectly as civil servants, publishers, journalists, schoolmasters or employees of a radio corporation. If you are poets, you will realize that acceptance of my historical thesis commits you to a confession of disloyalty which you will be loth to make; you chose your jobs because they promised to provide you with a steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore valuable part-time service. Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest that you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds – as Don Quixote did after his failure to come to terms with the modern world – in remote unmechanized farms? No, my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine. I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession.

R. G.

Deyá,

Mallorca,

   Spain.

Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric. Prose has been my livelihood, but I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different nature of poetry, and the themes that I choose are always linked in my mind with outstanding poetic problems. At the age of sixty-five I am still amused at the paradox of poetry’s obstinate continuance in the present phase of civilization. Though recognized as a learned profession it is the only one for the study of which no academies are open and in which there is no yardstick, however crude, by which technical proficiency is considered measurable. ‘Poets are born, not made.’ The deduction that one is expected to draw from this is that the nature of poetry is too mysterious to bear examination: is, indeed, a greater mystery even than royalty, since kings can be made as well as born and the quoted utterances of a dead king carry little weight either in the pulpit or the public bar.

The paradox can be explained by the great official prestige that still somehow clings to the name of poet, as it does to the name of king, and by the feeling that poetry, since it defies scientific analysis, must be rooted in some sort of magic, and that magic is disreputable. European poetic lore is, indeed, ultimately based on magical principles, the rudiments of which formed a close religious secret for centuries but which were at last garbled, discredited and forgotten. Now it is only by rare accidents of spiritual regression that poets make their lines magically potent in the ancient sense. Otherwise, the contemporary practice of poem-writing recalls the mediaeval alchemist’s fantastic and foredoomed experiments in transmuting base metal into gold; except that the alchemist did at least recognize pure gold when he saw and handled it. The truth is that only gold ore can be turned into gold; only poetry into poems. This book is about the rediscovery of the lost rudiments, and about the active principles of poetic magic that govern them. My argument will be based on a detailed examination
of two extraordinary Welsh minstrel poems of the thirteenth century, in which the clues to this ancient secret are ingeniously concealed.

By way of historical preface, a clear distinction must first be drawn between the court-bards and the wandering minstrels of ancient Wales. The Welsh bards, or master-poets, like the Irish, had a professional tradition, embodied in a corpus of poems which, literally memorized and carefully weighed, they passed on to the pupils who came to study under them. The English poets of to-day, whose language began as a despised late-mediaeval vernacular when Welsh poetry was already a hoary institution, may envy them in retrospect: the young poet was spared the curse of having doubtfully to build up his poetic lore for himself by haphazard reading, consultation with equally doubtful friends, and experimental writing. Latterly, however, it was only in Ireland that a master-poet was expected, or even permitted, to write in an original style. When the Welsh poets were converted to orthodox Christianity and subjected to ecclesiastical discipline – a process completed by the tenth century, as the contemporary Welsh Laws show – their tradition gradually ossified. Though a high degree of technical skill was still required of master-poets and though the Chair of Poetry was hotly contested in the various Courts, they were pledged to avoid what the Church called ‘untruth’, meaning the dangerous exercise of poetic imagination in myth or allegory. Only certain epithets and metaphors were authorized; themes were similarly restricted, metres fixed, and
Cynghanedd,
the repetitive use of consonantal sequences with variation of vowels,
1
became a burdensome obsession. The master-poets had become court-officials, their first obligation being to praise God, their second to praise the king or prince who had provided a Chair for them at his royal table. Even after the fall of the Welsh princes in the late thirteenth century this barren poetic code was maintained by the family bards in noble houses.

T. Gwynn Jones writes in the
Transactions
of
the
Honourable
Society
of
Cymmrodorion
(1913–1914):