Posted on by Liam Guilar

Forest fantasy

Image: Leonhard Lenz. Wikimedia Commons

Seren of the Wildwood  

Marly Youmans, Wiseblood books, illustrated, hb., 72pps., US$16

LIAM GUILAR is beguiled by a dream of tangled trees

The Wildwood holds the remnants of the past, / Strange ceremonies that the fays still love / To watch – the rituals of demon tribes / Who once played havoc with the universe, / And everything that says the world is not / Exactly what it seems is hidden here, / But also there are paths to blessedness.

So begins Seren of the Wildwood, Marly Youmans’ narrative poem that drifts the reader through a tale that seems both familiar and strange.

Traditional fairy and folk tales have been a resource for many modern writers and film makers. The old story is usually rewritten to correct a perceived ideological bias, or to rationalise the magic, or to make it acceptable to modern audiences, whose ideas of story have been shrunk by mass market films. With notable exceptions, rewriting fails to produce anything that comes close to the originals in their ability to unsettle and entertain. Writers can study archetypes, read the psychoanalytical literature, immerse themselves in Joseph Campbell et al, naturalise Propp’s Morphology, and still produce a story that fails to hold an audience.[i]

The stories Walt Disneyfied are closer to inappropriate dreams that don’t care about your daylight ideology, or your preferred version of the world. They exist in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, recalling a time when the wolves were real and the forest was a dangerous place. Marly Youmans’ story moves bodily into that space, where nothing is quite what it seems, and never quite what it should be, where hope and disappointment are as commonplace as leaves and what we might label cruelty is just the way the world is.

Her poem is not a retelling of a previous story – but is rather a new story, inhabiting old spaces to make them new again. Seren grows up on the edges of the Wildwood, her childhood overshadowed by the death of her brothers, which the story ascribes to her father’s ill-chosen words. Constrained at home by her mother’s care, she is lured into the trees by the promise of friendship and adventure. She meets characters who harm and help her, moving through a dream-like landscape, made real by Youmans’ descriptions, until she finds her way home.

The poem is written in sixty-two stanzas, each consisting of twenty-one lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter ending with a ‘Bob and Wheel’. The Bob is an abrupt two syllable line, the Wheel four short lines rhyming internally. They break the visual and aural monotony even the best blank verse can produce over a long narrative; they can summarise the stanza, comment on it, or provide an opportunity for epigrammatic statement:

[…]Next, a King

Not young but middle-aged his curling beard

Gone steel,

His mind turned lunatic,

His body no ideal

Of grace and charm to prick

Desire: man as ordeal.

The Bob and Wheel, famously used in Gawain and the Green Knight, inevitably evoke medieval precedent, as does the walled garden Seren finds but can’t enter. Although the Wildwood is not the harsh landscape Gawain rides into before returning home, the Knight of Romance rode into the forest to seek adventures because the forest was the place where the normal social rules and expectations did not apply. There is often a didactic element to such stories, but fortunately Youmans avoids the temptation to turn hers into a sermon.

Her poem is full of good lines:

Like some grandfather’s pocket watch wound tight

But then forgotten, Seren moved slower

And slower.

The descriptions of the landscape anchor the fantastic story. In the following quotation Seren is heading towards a river she must cross and discovers a waterfall:

And so she travelled toward the roar of rain

With thunder, apprehensive as she neared

The lip where torrents catapulted free

From stone and merged into a muscular

And sovereign streaming force – the energy

That shocks the trembling pebbles into flight

And grinds the massive boulders into bowls.

Occasionally it is not easy to decide if a line is padded or what might be padding is deliberate stye: ‘It seemed satanic, manic, half insane’, but this is so rare that the fact it’s noticeable is a tribute to all the other lines where it isn’t.  

The poem is rich in images and incidents and packed with a diverse cast of characters, but what does it mean? This is the wrong question. In school we are taught ‘how to read a poem’. For ‘read’, understand ‘analyse’ and the purpose of the analysis is to explain ‘what the poem means’ or, in its most depressing formulation ‘what was the poet was trying to say’. These questions and the approaches they require have little to do with the experience of reading poetry outside the academy.

Stories, poems, and narrative poems especially, can be a way of thinking in and through language, in a non-linear, perhaps non-rational, associative way. The story works for the reader when it activates memory, prior reading, knowledge and experience. The question therefore should be, what does the story do for you while you’re reading it, and afterwards, when a phrase, an incident, or an image remains in your memory.[ii]

Youmans’ poem encourages such a line of thinking; there are numerous allusions to other stories, tying Seren into a network of intertextuality, (at one point she is helped in the story by remembering the stories she has been told), there are images, which evoke a host of medieval precedents, but Youmans avoids the simplification of neat equivalence or the temptation of a tidy conclusion.

In terms of traditional narrative arcs, if you believe in the importance of such things, the story ends abruptly and very little is explained. There are questions left unanswered and threads that were run out but not neatly tied together at the end. The reader is being treated with respect and left alone with the story. It is a book that invites and rewards multiple rereading.

Reading is made easier because the book itself is a beautiful object. Wiseblood books are to be commended on producing such a fine hardback at such a low price. Printed on good quality paper, one stanza to a page, Seren of the Wildwood is illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. His black and white images complement the tone and mood of the story.

[i] There are obvious exceptions to this generalisation and to be precise everyone who has told these stories has altered them; the Grimms were notorious revisers.

[ii] The undeniable consequence of this line of thinking is that the book that haunts one reader is the same book another reader can’t be bothered to finish, regardless of the reviewer’s praise or condemnation. This seems especially true of narrative poetry. 

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Taking Possession

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of the Brazen Head. His most recent book is A Man of Heart (Shearsman, 2023)

Normans on the great north road

somewhere in England in 1071.[i]

Hubert, lord of these grey riders,

fought at Senlac, and since then

has been useful to the King

His reward, the manor he rides towards,

larger than the home he left in Normandy.

Walter, his seneschal, riding beside him,

fought at Senlac with distinction,

rallied the savaged in the Malfosse .[ii]

Between them, non-armoured, long haired,

Aelfric, an Englishman. Their local guide.

Their translator. He makes them awkward

in ways they’d struggle to define.

If pushed, Walter might reply;

he has no scars: his hands are soft.

The manor is wooden, unfortified.

Too easy to attack and futile to defend.

All this, thinks Hubert, I will change.

After the automatic military appraisal,

the childlike revelation: this is mine.

All mine. A group waits, women, children,

men so old they can’t stand straight.

The lady of the manor steps towards him.

Hubert remembers that in the English time

she could have run this place without a husband.

Now she and it are forfeit to the crown,

the crown bestowed them both on him

and he has come to take possession.

That thought will take a long time growing old.

He examines her the way he will inspect the cattle,

fields, fish weir and the little mill.

Tall, straight, young, blonde: she will do.

‘Where are the men?’ Vague images 

of those long legs, fine hips and breasts

do not make him stupid. ‘Where are the men?’

He has lost friends who were not so cautious,

in this green folded landscape, where the trees

and ditches hide those desperate for revenge.

Aelfric translates the question.

‘Where you should be.’ He ducks his head

til he remembers he rides with the victors

and she’s the one who lost and all her pride

will not avert the fate that rides towards her.

‘Her brothers, father, uncle, nephews died

at Stamford bridge and Senlac hill.

Their tenants and dependants died with them.’[iii] 

The idea that Englishmen are long-haired,

beer swilling, effeminate, will creep

into the Norman mind but not in Hubert’s

even if he lived a long and idle life.

Those longhaired drunkards stood their ground,

all day. Charge after charge breaking

on that obdurate line of shields. 

Anyone who’d seen a horse and rider split

by one swing of an axe would think twice

about disparaging the man who swung it.

But Aelfric swung no axe. That much is obvious.

2

After inspecting the boundaries,

a wary country ride with scouts,

after the inspection of the manor house,

after the welcome meal, Hubert decided

it was time to inspect his human property.

The men at arms were organised.

Guards posted, tasks allotted.

Walter thanked, allowed to leave.

Hubert talking to his Lady through Aelfric

was reminded of those shields.

When he was polite, she seemed insulted.

When he had tried to show an interest

she had seemed offended. He sensed

that what he said was not the words she heard.

She was nobility, understood the world

and what would happen next and so he doubted 

his tame Englishman was being honest.

He would have to learn her language,

some words at least, while she learnt his.

Bed, he thought, could be his classroom.

He stood up, took her hand. She did not move.

‘If you don’t go with him’, said Aelfric 

he’ll strip you for his men at arms.’

It was a stupid lie. This Norman was no fool

who’d break his prize possession out of spite.

Aelfric ignored the look she cut him with.

Once she’d been too proud to notice his existence

now she was this Norman’s mattress

and whatever in his character was broken,

or unfinished, rejoiced at her humiliation.

The curtains closed behind them.

Aelfric edged towards the drapery,

heard the sound of fabric falling,

imagined the pale body emerging.

He heard Hubert’s belt and sword unbuckled 

then set down, heard them move together.

Imagined his hands, heard Hubert grunting,

then making garbled noises like a stricken pig.

A female hand, the curtain parted.

She was naked, radiantly naked,

white flesh tinged pink about the throat.

Aelfric moved. She was majestic,

desire erased the thought that he’d been caught

erased the room, erased his name

and everything except desire

for the body moving closer to him

small hands reaching for his belt.

Who knows a dead man’s final thoughts?

Perhaps he was thinking mine at last,

perhaps he heard her say, ‘You should have died

with all the others’, and perhaps, before the knife

sliced the artery in his throat and geysered blood,

he realised she had spoken flawless Norman-French.

She caught him as he fell, pulling him down

screaming in English, help, help, murder, help.

Walter, sword drawn, running, saw

the Englishman raping the frantic lady

thrashing on the floor, hauled him away

one quick blow striking off the head.

The woman, sobbing, pointing at the curtains.

Behind them Hubert’s naked corpse,

twisted, reaching for the knife stuck in his back.

While the bodies were removed

Walter held the shuddering woman.

The King still owed him for the Malfosse.

Perhaps this manor. He would need a wife.

Hands skilled in settling a skittish mare

gentled the shaking body

aware of its taut lines, soft curves,

its bloody promise. She would do

when he came to take possession.

[i] This date is entirely arbitrary.

[ii] When the English army finally broke and ran at the Battle of Hastings, a small group turned and savaged the pursuing Normans at a place the Normans called The Malfosse.

[iii] Fulford Gate, Stamford bridge, Senlac, the three battles fought by the English in 1066. Many of the victors at Stamford Bridge died at Senlac (Hastings).

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Uplifting falling

The Book of Falling

David McCooey, Perth, Western Australia: Upswell Publishing, 2023, 109pps. Aus$24.99

LIAM GUILAR says David McCooey’s poetry is intelligent, skilful, varied – and plain enjoyable

The Book of Falling is David McCooey’s fifth collection of poems, and if nothing else, gives the lie to the invidious myth that people who work on academic writing programmes can’t write.

He’s very good at what he does. His poetry evokes Bunting’s praise of Scarlatti:

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here…

Every well-chosen word in its place, and each word doing the necessary work. In the first four lines of the collection a sense of vague but threatening menace is swiftly evoked:

The unseen night creatures – scaled and feathered

for their occult ceremonies – rasp and call outside

in the dark beyond the half dark that

surrounds this marbled, half lit house

(‘Questions of Travel’)  

Such deft verbal economy is a feature of the wide variety of poems that appear in The Book of Falling and plays against often surprising content. The first three poems are conventional poetic monologues as though the poet were setting out his stall and proving his ability. At the same time the subjects are anything but conventional. Elizabeth Bishop packs to travel; Sylvia Plath looks at her life on her 80th birthday; Marilyn Monroe divines the future and amongst other things, ‘…see[s] who will be forgotten first/ Queen Elizabeth, Molly Bloom, or me.’

These are followed by word play, short sequences about family, a group of satires and elegies, poems about urban life, as well as ‘Three Photo Poems.’ The latter is a new genre to me: three sequences which juxtapose very short texts (one of the sequences is made up of ‘found poems’) and photographs. 

The juxtaposition of pictures, either of the mundane, as in the sequence about bathrooms, or the family photographs which on closer inspection look anything but mundane, with short pieces of text, lead to the second reason you should read the book.

On a first reading you can never tell what’s going to be on the next page. This is a defining characteristic of the other two books of McCooey’s poetry I have read, and unusual in single author collections, where formal and thematic similarities tend to be on almost every page. The variety here is held together by a unified view of the world, a laconic wit, which takes pleasure in the commonplace while recognising how strange it is. Take his ‘Rain Poem’:

And as if someone uttered the trigger word

rain begins without ceremony.

But it’s not ‘driving rain’;

it’s just sitting outside

engine idling over the neighbourhood.

The poem could stop there, but it turns into something more than a pun and a neatly turned image.

It doesn’t give a damn

And then, like a poem ending

you look out the window

and the rain has stopped.

The birds have returned and the wind

has begun its invisible cover-up job.

Many of the poems present the everyday and familiar, but alter the point of view just enough to destabilise the way you’re used to looking at the world – Freud’s Uncanny perhaps, without the baggage attached to that word.

When was the last time you thought about how strange bathrooms are? ‘Bathroom Abstraction #3’ begins: “Windowless bathrooms are the cave of modernity”.

What you encounter as reader is an intelligence moving through time, and recording the variety of experience, taking interest and pleasure in the world – and above all wanting to share it with the reader. There are numerous single author collections where the reader is left feeling his or her presence is not required – or perhaps only required as an anonymous cheerleader who proved their devotion by buying the book.

If a poem can be a space for thinking through and in language, McCooey’s poems invite readers to look without telling them what to think. A short example is ‘Australia’:

Dropping my son at school.

It is ‘Art Day’;

students are to dress up

as their favourite artist.

I see a kid dressed in white.

He has sunscreen on his nose,

And carries a cricket bat.

This is both bemused and amusing, but open to different ways of being read. There is the traditional art community criticism of Australian attitudes towards ‘the arts’ in a sports-mad country – a criticism of the arts community’s failure to penetrate the education system even on a school day ostensibly devoted to ‘Art – or a wry celebration of the artistry of Australian cricketers, who can flog a rock-like ball a long distance with enough balletic grace to suggest cricket is indeed an art form. The poem holds all these possibilities (and others) open for the reader.

And finally – this may be a heretical comment: poetry is a highly sophisticated form of entertainment. It provides unique pleasures. Reading book reviews, it can seem that enjoying poetry is a subversive activity. The reviewer usually makes great claims for its importance, significance, ground-breaking genre-bending, appropriate ideological stance on the burning issues of the day, but rarely admits to having enjoyed reading the book under review. McCooey’s books are skilfully written, varied, thought provoking, and above all enjoyable. You should read them.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart – Chapter 11: Things Fall Apart

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections including Lady Godiva and Me, From Rough Spun to Close Weave and, most recently, A Man of Heart

This is the last installment of the story of Vortigern. Chapter two onwards can be read on the Brazen Head site. Chapters One and Twelve appeared in Long Poem Magazine. The full story is published by Shearsman UK as A Man of Heart

The story so far. Fifth Century Britain. The legions have gone, leaving the Britons to fend for themselves.  Despite his success in uniting the province and bringing peace, Vortigern’s sons have led a rebellion against him. He now faces three problems: the remnants of his sons’ rebellion, the return of Aurelius and Uther, sons of the deposed King, and Hengist who wants revenge for his brother’s death during the rebellion.

Things Fall Apart

1

In the midnight forest,

in the moonstained tower.

the princess stares towards the morning

while her sleeping lord

dreams of a desperate hunt,

racing, branch whipped,

though the trees. His dogs,

white coats shining, red ears shining,

howling after a milk white stag.

The stag is walking, unconcerned, 

and his sweating horse

cannot close the distance.

Could you feel the moonlight on your skin?

She wanders the circuit of the room,

orbiting the bed, watching the sleeper

twitch, hearing him mutter orders

to the slavering pack

who pay him no attention.

Inside the winter forest of his dream,

the bored stag stops beside the river,

and turns to face the dogs

who cower from his indifference.

He’s standing on the river wall,

with London burning at his back.

The mighty silver river turned to silt.

The child with golden eyes

emerging from the smoke and shadows

holds the coin he’s worn around his neck

since he found it in the mud.

‘I know what lies beyond the ninth wave,’

says the child, ‘I know the age of the wind.

I know why Gwydion sang an eagle from an oak.

Why Math wouldn’t sell his mouse…’

on and on as the child grew older,

the mountains rising, like an insult,

to cut the road that fades into the fields,

the road to Lincoln, overgrown, baffled

by vertical grey stone veined by snow,

barriers of rock and ice blocking the horizon.

He is laughing at the boy, who hasn’t stopped.

‘Do you know why the gods allow humans to suffer?

Why wise men fail and fools succeed?

Why good men die and bad ones prosper?’

‘No,’ said the boy, flicking the coin

so it drifted like an ember in the smoke.

‘I do ,‘ he says, as they watch it settle in the silt

and the dirty waters swirl and cover it.

He wakes, feeling for the coin,

reassured, but it’s a dream within a dream.

‘You did come back?’ ‘Oh foolish man’

she says, ’when will you ever learn?’

He turns to the golden boy.

‘Because there are no gods,

only Fortune and her wheel

and she’s a brutal mistress

destroying all she favours.’

2

All winter Saxons from Thongcaester

and loyal northern tribes

had raided south, while Vortigern

from his own estates,

coordinating every detail,

had harried from the west,

‘til Vortimer’s writ no longer ran

north of Watling street or west of Dere.

They’d kept him bottled up and shaken,

watching his following dissolve.

The plan had been to wait ‘til spring

and then with Hengist sweep him off the map.

Yesterday the news. Keeping his promise,

Hengist had returned and landed fifty ships,

and then the twist: on the southern coast.

Hearing Gloucester had retreated to his own lands,

Hengist’s army was rampaging north and west,

undisciplined, voracious, hunting British heads,

like the Pictish horde that he’d been hired to stop[i].

There was death and destruction

to rival Boudica’s march on London.

Some of Vortigern’s supporters

had been mauled, their lands ransacked.

Another fleet led by Hengist’s sons,

had landed in the north

between the stone wall and the turf.

The Britons had sent a cautious embassy:

‘Your son, my lord is dead.’

‘My son died to me the day that he rebelled.’

He says the words again,

in private, surprised to find

wispy echoes drifting over nothing.

A dull sense of relief?

He will not humiliate his eldest son

destroying the rabble

he could not lead,

nor order his execution

after his inevitable defeat.

Their story is he killed himself,

playing the defeated Roman.

3

The ambassadors shuffle and fidget.

They won’t look him in the eye.

They say ‘He measures us for burial.’

‘Tell Gloucester if he comes to me,

and will submit, I will forgive him.’

It’s not the answer they expected.

They would have served him Adolf

on a golden platter,

stuffed and garnished to his taste.

‘As for the other matter,

I will reply tomorrow morning.

Until then, go, you are messengers,

you are safe, enjoy our hospitality.

Congratulations, gentlemen.

Tell your masters, when you return,

their folly has undone our wisdom.’

4

In the circular room,

at the top of their tower,

he curls against her

watching the rough-hewn stones

liquid in the fire’s light.

The way she moved could turn his world to water.

That nameless place where neck and shoulder meet.

This bewildering encounter with intelligence and affection.

Everything changes, nothing stays the same.

Unless you’re Vortigern the King?

Moonlight picking out a patch of floor.

We were sunlight dancing on water,

dazzling and scattered,

now gathered, still,

carried on a darker

gentle current.

The world can be forgotten.

He could drift along beside her.

But the day will have its answers.

‘If I accept their offer,

become again the ruler

of this fractured,

fractious province,

your father and I

must go to war

as enemies.’

‘How many times?

Your friends are my friends;

your enemies are mine.’

‘We don’t have the numbers

to stand against the force he’s raised.’

‘Adolf has an army.’

‘Adolf’s mob of whining British lords

will be fighting over precedent and office

after Hengist’s warriors strip their corpses

and leave them on the battlefield to rot.’

‘We have allies. They’ve stood by us all winter.

Why would they desert you now?’

‘Fear and Economics.

Fifty ships, a thousand men,

that rabble doesn’t care

for Hengist’s oath.

Without a commissariat,

he can’t feed a horde that size.

They’ll plunder every village

and estate and town

that’s on their route.

No one dares come south

with your brothers

camped between the walls.

Your father rides a tidal wave.

He can point it at his enemy

but it won’t discriminate

between the British lords

who joined in the revolt

and those who fought against it.’

The patch of moonlight fades.

‘He told me a story about your uncle.

Caught in a monster storm,

he turned his ship and surfed

straight down a wave face

three times higher than his mast.’

‘That sounds like him,

howling jubilant defiance at his Gods.’

‘His ship was overwhelmed.

The crew were drowned.

Your uncle swam ashore.

Hengist will crash into Gloucester and his army

and bury them. But The Boys have landed

and there will be a mighty showdown.’

5

Wylaf wers, tawaf wedy[ii]

She finds him on the roof,

staring towards the east.

‘They’re coming like the sunrise,

like a wave bearing down on a straw hut.

We have a month at most.’

Whatever he is trying to say,

she will not help him.

She watches night shapes

assume their daylight forms.

Waiting, knowing

there is cruelty in her silence.

He will not look at her.

‘Go to your father.

He will keep you safe.‘

In a hut ringed with body parts.[iii]

‘Hengist will trade me to the necessary ally.

Slightly soiled, one previous owner,

still worth fifty ships.

I will not become a sex toy for Aurelius.’

‘If you stay; you die.’

‘And you will play the Roman and fall upon your sword,

be Stilicho and go so quietly for the greater good,

dignified and honest in an age devoid of both?’

‘Hush lady…’

‘No. I will not hush!

I will not weep and then be silent!

I will not be the loyal wife

proudly watching as her man

acts with atypical stupidity.

What possible profit is there in your death?

Do you think they’ll tell your story straight after you’re dead?

They cannot, will not, do it when you’re still alive.

What does it matter what they think about you in a thousand years?

If bookish men still scrutinize your life, searching for the truth,

they will not find it. We will be figures dancing

on the limits of their comprehension,

simplified for story’s sake.’

She gestured to the hilltops to the west.

‘Who would bother chasing us?

There will be a place to raise this child.

We can carve ourselves a kingdom,

and if defeat becomes a fact

when there is no escape…’

A golden ampule in her palm.

‘There is enough for two.

We go to sleep: we don’t wake up.’

‘How do you know it works?’

‘Old Mother Gothel gave it to me,

before I sailed for Britain.

I made her prove that it was painless and effective.’

‘Who was Mother Gothel?’

‘You never met her:

she was honest.’

‘We will need bodies.

At least one must be a woman’s.’

‘There is a village in the next valley.

They have not offered us their help.

Anyone we cannot trust must die.’

‘Better dead friends than live enemies?’

‘For now.’

6

Ewch nawr[iv]

‘Go now,’ she said, ‘I set you free.

Go find my father, tell our story,

tell it straight.’ Keredic objects:

‘No lady, I have come this far

and I will stay with you.’

‘Do as I tell you, nithing.

It would sadden me to have you killed.

We cannot hold against an army.

But we will die facing our enemies.

We have been good to you.

Now go!’

7

For the ashes of your fathers, and the temples of whose gods?[v]

Dark rider on the riverbank at dusk;
he can smell how cold the water is,
listening to it hurry past,
a pale stain between the overhanging trees.
A stale moon behind sick clouds.
The flickering army on the other bank,
dead ancestors, mustering against his crossing.

Muttering: Duty, Loyalty, Reputation.

Go forward or go back? Dame Fortune
cranked her wheel to bring him here.

Tell me then,

what purpose does my death serve

at this point in the story?

I have been loyal to my oath of service,

faithful to all that made you great

when those I served were not deserving.

I have done everything I could

as well as I knew how.

Been honest in my dealings

held my office without guilt

I’ve done my duty.

held the line you drew

and seen the selfish,

the short-sighted

and the stupid destroy

everything you built.’

The massed ranks shift and mutter:

Loyalty, Honour, Duty.

8

The Boys

It takes time to land an army.

Mercenaries mostly, survivors of Chalons,[vi]

who fought beside Attila or against him.

Within the walls of Porchester,

in the clattering busyness, the rattle of voices,

the scurry of patrols, the interruptions of messengers,

the herding of the necessary horses,

The Boys wait for the British lords to come in;

for Gloucester and the army he has promised;

for loyal Britons to welcome their return

and for those who find their names on the wrong list;

dragged away and butchered,

their ragged heads raised on the wall,

staring slack mouthed at a desperate future.  

Trying to eat in the organised riot of the camp

at a long table under an awning, with the banners

the ceremonial armour, the purple cloaks,

the servants and all that is necessary to identify kings

to killers in their pay who wouldn’t recognise their faces.

Aurelius, fastidious with his food, was describing

his latest plan for Vortigern. ‘Of all men,

he is surely the most villainous.[vii]

How he will die I have yet to decide

but it will be slow and painful and terrible to behold.’

He’s got him blinded and castrated, flayed and crucified,

then burning when the news arrives to interrupt the catalogue.

According to Gloucester’s messenger,

Adolf had gone, unarmed, to parley

with the Saxons at the great stone ring.

They had drawn their hidden knives,

slaughtering the British lords. Heroically,

alone, Gloucester, had seized a log from a passing carter

and bludgeoned his way to the safety of his town.

‘The fool attempts Imperial diplomacy:

invite your federates to a feast,

wait ‘til they’re drunk,

then slit their throats?

Out thought. Out fought.

And then he ran.’

‘Talking was his only option.

But now we’re down an army.

We can still pick Hengist off,’

says Uther, ‘If we catch him

before he joins the northern horde.’

While they argue,

a man is bundled towards their table.

‘My Lords.’

He is trying to fold himself into nothing,

to become invisible and inaudible

at the centre of their attention.

‘If you bring bad news,

we will not harm you.’

Uther, who doesn’t lie,

often wonders why his brother is so good at it.

‘Merowch the Frank sends you greeting.

The leader of the scouting party?

The man you taxed to find the traitor?

He says, some of his auxiliaries,

over enthusiastic in their loyalty,

torched the tyrant’s fortress.

Soon there was nothing left.

Just cracked stone and charred bones.

They found the villain and his whore

or what was left of them.

As proof, this ancient coin,

the tyrant wore around his neck.’

The British lords are eager to confirm:

‘He’d take it off and stare at it

while making up his mind.’

‘Do you remember, how, before…’

Aurelius isn’t listening.

‘I want to see this tower.’

‘Hengist first,’ says Uther,

‘the tower can wait.

What is this obsession

with yesterday’s man?’

‘He killed…

‘I know who he killed.

But why hound the man who saved your kingdom.

Alive or dead, he’s now irrelevant.’

‘Because I want to see his charred remains.’

He wants to mutilate the bodies.

He’s spent years imagining his revenge.

But he also trusts his brother’s judgement.

‘What do we do with Gorlois?’

Thought is annihilated.

like a rabbit struck by a plunging hawk.

A dirty unkempt boy.

The ragged stinking fact of him

infecting the moment.

‘Greetings,’ he says

and smiles his dreamy smile,

blinking those golden eyes.

‘I am Merlin.

You need me.’

[i] See chapter four

[ii] I will weep and then be silent. See Chapter One.

[iii] As he does in chapter One

[iv] Go now. See Chapter One.

[v] A misquotation from ‘Horatio at the Bridge’ by Thomas Macaulay.

[vi] A battle between The Western Empire and Attila the Hun involving hundreds of thousands of combatants. Fought in 451, in modern France, a year or two after the traditional date for the landing of Hengist and Horsa’s three ships in Britain.

[vii] This sentence is a direct quote from Geoffrey of Monmouth. I’ve reduced the rest of his speech, which is almost a page long in Thorpe’s translation, to the next two lines.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart – The scribe’s story

The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send an embassy to restore the Church, and combat the Pelagian heresy. What follows is the second half of Chapter Ten. At Vortimer’s request, the Pope has sent an embassy to Britain to combat heresy, led by Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes.[i] The embassy finds Vortimer’s court shrinking, his rebellion a failure. The chapter begins with Vortimer’s death, by poison, then backtracks a few days. Rowena has arrived, seeking instruction in the Christian faith. You can find chapters 2-10a on the Brazen Head. The complete story has been published as A Man of Heart, by Shearsman UK (January 2023).

Lupus offers Rowena instruction in the Christian faith

Why should I love my neighbour

when he wants to rape me?

I do not think you love yours

when he burns your house, kills your friend,

uses your women, serves your children to his dogs.

I do not think you love him then.

You will not turn the other cheek.

You carry your pride like a glass bowl.

Your Jesus was no warrior king

but he said one perfect thing.

I was hungry, and you gave me food.

I was naked and you clothed me.

I was homeless and you sheltered me.

There are stories told amongst my people:

families, without weapons, seeking land

came to these shores. They were hungry,

naked, homeless, and your good Christians

let them scrabble in the waste land,

killed the weak, abused the women,

sold survivors into slavery

then went to church and prayed.

Germanus instructs Rowena in the Christian faith

We drift on a winter sea

in the middle of a hailstorm.

                                                           And your faith protects you?

No, that’s the pagan way.

The whining, selfish child

begging for new toys,

throwing good metal in a bog

to appease the local fog,

as though tree could think

or river grant a wish.

No, faith is the destination

that disciplines the journey.

Cattle are born, eat, shit, fuck and die.

You can live like that. But

reaching for the impossible

is what brings us closer to God.

And the fact of Incarnation,

gives the church the confidence

to lecture bandit kings on the Beatitudes.

                                                            A beautiful impossibility?

She could have smacked his face with less effect.

He had been thinking aloud

not expecting this girl to understand.

Before he could reassure himself

she’d fluked the answer she said;

                                                            Your faith is not a shelter in the storm

                                                            but a way of living through it.

He blinks her into focus

seeing a new species for the first time.

Rowena and Vortimer

She is ice underfoot.

A golden symmetry,

that aches his fingertips

as he resists the need

to reach and touch,

curve, fall and flare.

Stray hair across her cheek,

tightening his throat.

In another version of this story

they are friends and wary allies

helping his father rule the country.

In another version of this story

she is his queen.

                        But she is not smiling.

She scowls, because he is stupid,

because she asked a simple question:

‘Why do you hate my people?’

and his answer was inadequate.

She is ice underfoot.

But then she smiles, and rises

fills the goblet,

‘Leofue freond wæs hæil.

For þine kime ich æm uæin.’[ii]

Lips on the goblet’s rim.

Lips glistening with wine.

Their hands touch lightly,

shocking him.

Her breath on his cheek,

her lips

delirious proximity.

He drinks. ‘Drinc Hail.’

Kisses her on the mouth.

Lingering.

She steps back, smiling.

A child, pleased with herself.

Adolf and Vortimer

They are on the same page

singing to the choir

on a level playing field

where no one’s moved the goal post.

He’s there for you.

You’ve got his back

and the wine goes round.

Best friends forever,

boozing buddies,

veterans on a park bench.

And the wine goes round.

Vortimer waiting for the pitch

for the sudden swerve

this is Adolf, who admires

the Roman art of usurpation,

who thinks the Roman way’s

a zigzag path through shadows.

Words bend, mean only

what he wants them to,

‘devious’ a compliment

sincerity, simplicity,

synonyms for stupidity.

So the wine goes round.

Knowing Adolf thinks he’s stupid

provides the King with clarity.

It rankles that he’s right.

They should have waited till the spring.

They’d all heard Gloucester’s stories.

Snowed in on The Wall,

roads you could swim over,

mud you could drown in.[iii] 

But Katiger had stumbled over Horsa

and grabbed his chance at glory.

Both men had died.

The forces Gloucester

set to spy on Thongcaester

had heard the news of Horsa’s death,

thought the revolt was underway and charged the gates.

Beaten back, then annihilated.

The survivors of the southern Saxons

had made their way to Thongcaester.

The northern tribes had stood behind his father

and all winter raiders had brutalised the lands

of anyone who challenged Vortigern,

with the vindictive precision

of the Empire in its glory days.

In the west Gorlois was sitting on his hands

ignoring every summons and command.

They had claimed a victory.

How bright had been that morning.

The thrill of cheering crowds.

Hail King of nothing.

Hail nithing, King

of Britannia

south of Watling street

and east of Tamar.

Heads.

Bags of heads.

Riders bringing sacks of heads,

spilling them in front of him,

‘til his steward said,

‘My lord, we’re running out of coins.’

Gloucester had warned him against the bounty.

Warned him that many of those heads

were once on British shoulders.

The purity of his intent;

to clear the pagans from the land,

so Christ might rule again,

polluted by self-interest.

How many private scores were settled?

How many family feuds resolved

under the banner of his leadership.

He’s seen the devastated homesteads,

the burning villas. He’d stood

in the groaning aftermath,

the smoking shambles,

and heard his father’s voice:

‘You can’t go hunting with untrained dogs.’

Only now he understands.

Soon Hengist will return

with thirty, fifty, sixty ships.

Baptise the woman,

he can’t play the pagan card.

But the card itself is false.

He wanted to establish

God’s Kingdom in this island.

A purified, united, church.

A people ruled by Christ’s example.

In your dreams child. In your dreams,

not in theirs. In theirs,

the endless whine of ‘What’s in this for me?’

Stripped of religious fervour,

his rebellion is mere peevishness.

Already his supporters

have started to remove themselves,

deaf to summons or instruction.

Come spring he will not have an army worth the name.

They’ll scatter it like leaves before a gale.

The wine is a peace offering

as Gloucester tries to save them both.

Avoiding the topic of The Woman,

he’s making an effort,

trying not to be abrasive

but water’s wet and why

this foolish boy can’t see it

is a mystery beyond his patience.

There’s a limit to the number of ways

you can explain something:

‘Without coin or office,

your only reward is land.

If you give that to the church,

how will you reward your followers?’

                                                           ‘The weightier matters of the law,

                                                           are judgement, mercy, faith.’

‘The only choice you have

is whether to survive or perish.

Power has its own logic.

You can no more

change this system

than you can push a cart and sit in it.

We live in the world,

not a cloister. Friends and enemies 

will judge you by your actions.

Your intentions are irrelevant.’

And the wine goes round.

                                                           ‘Germanus led an army,

                                                           more than once.

                                                           He’s run a province.

                                                           We could ask for his advice.

                                                           We should listen.

                                                           We could learn.’

Bit late for that, thinks Gloucester.

‘A bit too ostentatious don’t you think:

the hair shirt, the hard bed,

the hand-ground horse food?’

Soon his failure will be obvious

He will be Vortimer Nithing.

And he cannot face his father,

on the field of battle, or later,

after his inevitable defeat.

What is left to him,

except the Roman Way

for the defeated rebel general?

Best friends forever,

two lads on the piss.

You’ll buy the hangman’s drink

before he snaps your neck.

Find the Pagan Woman

It’s dark and Germanus,

is flapping between the buildings,

like a giant moth, until he finds the scribe. 

‘Boy, where is the woman?’

                                                           ‘She has lodgings by the gate.’

‘Go to her now. Tell her she must leave:

immediately. It is no longer safe.

Tell her to get out before the gates are shut.

And tell no one where you go or where you’ve been.

Or that I’ve spoken to you. Go!’

The job not the title

He dreads their silence

it disrupts logic, qualifies sense,

suggests the worst while saying nothing.

‘For your skill with words

you will join the Papal mission

you will travel to Britain.

You will record everything,’

said his superior.

He had accepted, thinking

the place was his by right

of skill and knowledge.

Only now he understands,

it was curse not compliment.

They picked the one that no one liked;

the one they could afford to lose.

Germanus had confronted Gloucester

Who has to lean forward to hear him,

thinking of the breeze

coming in over gilded water.

‘The British Lords have been in council

and through them God has spoken.

They will ask Vortigern to return.’

Before Gloucester can object.

‘God sees through you, knows

your pride and your ambition

No service, humility, compassion.

There is no Roman order

without Roman discipline.

No discipline without obedience.

Who follows someone who will not follow?’

Gloucester says nothing.

The Papal embassy is leaving,

The Boys are on the move

and they have the Pope’s support.

Germanus to the scribe

‘We go north,’ said Germanus,

‘to confront the heretics.

We will visit the shrine

of the blessed Martyr Alban.

You…’

                                                           And then that pause.

‘You will go west, to Gorlois.

Give him this. Tell him,

we admire his loyalty.’

And then

                                                           another

                                                                            pause.

‘Your time with us is over.’

                                                           The scroll he’s holding

is shaking. Terror is eating

the sentences inside his head.

‘Gorlois has need of skills like yours.

If not, stay west, find a community.

Seek God in prayer and silence.

In these alarming times…’

                                                           Another

                                                                                                                      pause.

                                                           ‘In these alarming times

So many die, nobody notices

unless they’re royalty.

One more body by the road

won’t interest anyone.

The west is safe.‘

Departure

People invest the past

with qualities they feel

are lacking in the present.

But for once in history,

those Empire days

really were that golden.

The sea was calm,

the sun was rising

the crew preparing

for the channel crossing.

They had cremated the King,

ignoring his demented order

to bury his head overlooking the coast,

convinced no raider would bother the island

while he kept watch.

‘So?’ said Lupus, standing at the bow,

enjoying the breeze, the gentle rocking of the ship,

the promise of an uneventful passage home.

Germanus watches the crew securing the last of the cargo.

Admiring the easy way they go about their tasks.

                                                           ‘So, we confounded heresy.

                                                           And The Boys are on the move.’

The nearest sailor moves away.

No one has come to see them off.

Messengers had been sent north,

seeking Vortigern to offer him the crown.

‘I’ve met The Boys, and they can’t win.

Though they’ll reclaim the island,

they might stop Hengist, not his people.’

                                                           ‘They have outlived their time.

                                                           Cheating your way to power,

                                                           only works while there are rules

                                                           and the other players follow them.’

Slipping their moorings,

the sail, cracks, grows taut.

The ship pitches then steadies

into an easy forward movement.

The grey walls of Porchester shrink,

slipping off their starboard bow.

Moving out into the Solent,

the breeze strengthening.

                                                           ‘The last legion left from here.

                                                           Roma Fuit. Urbis conciditatus.[iv]

                                                           These Britons.

                                                           These proud, sniveling rebels.

                                                           Adulterers, fornicators,

                                                           parricidal, incestuous,

                                                           assassins,

                                                           refusing to be ruled

                                                           but whining to the Empire

                                                           help us, save us, pity our distress.

                                                           We who do not understand obedience,

                                                           who will not pay the asking price.

                                                           Mouth Christians who forget their God.

                                                           He has not forgotten them.

                                                           He will fall upon this generation

                                                           and his wrath will be remembered

                                                           til the rocks melt.’

‘Then we’re agreed,’ said Lupus. ‘Britain is doomed.’

                                                           ‘Oh no,’ said Germanus, turning

                                                           to look back at the mainland

                                                           and the white chalk slash in Portsdown hill.

                                                           ‘The Church is safe. We did what we set out to do.’

[i] Germanus of Auxerre is the most ‘historical’ of all the characters in this story. He did exist and he did travel to Britain to combat heresy in 429. His miracles, described in the first half of this chapter, are in the Life of Saint Germanus, written down in the late 5th century. Typically for the Legendary History, the chronology is wayward. If Hengist landed in 449/450 he arrived twenty years after Germanus had left.

[ii] See the Wassail ceremony in Chapter Six

[iii] See Chapter Three

[iv] Rome is no more, the city is ruined. I can’t find the source of this quotation.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Thomas Malory’s civilisation-shaping chivalry

Photo; Shutterstock
LIAM GUILAR revisits the too little-read Le Morte Darthur

According to the blurb for one Audible version of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur:

Comparing Batman, Superman, and Captain America to Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram, and Sir Galahad isn’t a huge leap of the imagination. Perhaps, for the 15th century reader, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were the equivalent of our modern day Justice League or Avengers.[i]

This is an excellent example of ‘dumbing down a book’.

At the end of Malory’s book, Arthur tells his one surviving knight, ‘In me there is no trust to trust in.’ The Arthurian experiment fails because the best of those involved in it may have perfected their craft, but as humans they still have to negotiate the problems inherent in being alive in their world. They are not superheroes, they do not have super powers[ii], and Malory was writing as an adult, for adults. Modern readers may have lost the ability to hold contradictions open to create a space for reflection; Malory’s text assumes this is exactly what the reader wants to do.  

When I was in primary school, memorising carols for the inevitable Christmas concert, I was convinced that ‘The first Noel the angels did say/was to certain poor shepherds’ meant that the doubtful shepherds were being ‘certained’. The purpose of so much modern writing, whether fictional or not, in film or print, seems to be ‘to certain’ the audience. Comparing Sir Lancelot to Batman might certain a prospective reader, suggesting they will encounter nothing unusual or unfamiliar, nothing requiring thought or effort, but it’s a gross misreading of the book.  

The book most people refer to as ‘Malory’ or ‘The Mort(e)’ was written by Sir Thomas Malory, and published by William Caxton in 1485. It is the last great work of medieval English literature and the first great work of modern English prose. It’s also the high point of the European medieval Arthurian tradition[iii]. It is a book that refuses to certain anyone.  

Malory took the sprawling mass of Arthurian tales which had been circulating in Europe for over five hundred years and translating them mostly from French sources, shaped them into a single narrative.

He wasn’t the first English writer to tell the whole story of King Arthur between one set of covers. But running from Arthur’s conception, to his death at the Battle of Camlan, Malory’s book contains everything you probably think you know about Arthur and his Knights – the magical conception at Tintagel, the round table, the sword in the stone, Merlin, the Lady in the Lake, Morgan le Fey, the love stories of  Tristan and Isolde and Lancelot and Gwenyvere; Tennyson’s Lady of Shallotte, Mordred, the Quest for the Holy Grail, the suggestion that Arthur doesn’t die and will return to save Britain.[iv]

We don’t know a great deal about Sir Thomas Malory, despite the strenuous efforts of scholars to track him through the surviving records. Given medieval assumptions about authorship, what we do know can’t add much to an understanding of his work. He’s not much more than his book and a trace in some legal documents. But when he lived his life is possibly more important than how he lived it.

He belongs to the last generation that could take the Romance version of Arthur and Camelot as historical fact. Caxton claims he printed the book only after he had been convinced that Arthur was real.[v]

The knight errant, the central figure of these stories, the young man who dons his armour, gets on his horse and rides out to fight for truth, justice and the Arthurian way, had been a popular figure in medieval storytelling since at least the 12th century. It’s an attractive idea and in many ways explains the popularity of the stories: leave the mess of your daily life behind and go seek adventures.

But it is an adolescent’s fantasy. All the knight’s problems can be reduced to a single enemy who can be defeated physically. He gets the gold, the glory, and often the bride, in a finite world utterly different from the mess and tedium of real life. It’s a world where problems are simple, figured as dragons and giants and evil lords dressed in black armour. In the hands of the best storytellers, it was more than that, but it was a world that never existed.

Malory enjoyed the fantasy. His book is full of knights who are free to roam the countryside looking for adventures. But his version of the fantasy is shaped by the times in which he was writing. He had participated in the Wars of the Roses. Men had swapped sides, sometimes in the middle of a battle. Primitive artillery was making an appearance on the battle field. Malory did not live to hear of Richard III’s failed charge at Bosworth. The last massed charge by mounted knights in a major battle on British soil happened in the year his book was published. The knight, who had dominated the battlefields of Europe for four hundred years, was finished as a military force.

Authors who live through ugly times don’t always avoid the temptation to escape into fantasy, but he did. He knew the reality of rich men with their castles and their private armies of armed retainers – a reality made all too visible in the civil and social disruption they caused, and at battles like Towton (1461), where anything up to thirty thousand men died hacking at each other in a snow storm[vi].

So what makes Malory worth reading, and what makes him more grown up than the majority of writers, was his understanding that while the landscape might have giants and dragons and witches and warlocks, the real challenges people face are always personal and rarely straightforward.

Photo: Shutterstock

His book begins and ends with a betrayal. ‘The Sword in the Stone’, Disney’s cute version of T. H. White’s retelling, obscures the darkness that permeates the early books. Born as the result of a trick, Arthur is a strange, impetuous figure, who unwittingly commits incest with his half-sister then orders all the boys born on one day murdered. Merlin warns him that the woman he intends to marry will be unfaithful with his greatest knight, and Arthur blithely ignores him.

To offset the darkness, Malory presents the great Arthurian experiment. The newly formed Round Table Fellowship swear an oath,

never to do outerage nothir mourthir; and always to fle treson, and to gyff mercy unto hym that askith mercy… and always to do ladyes, damsels and jantilwomen and wydowes soccour, strenghte hem in hir ryghtes and never to enforse them upon payne of dethe. Also that no man take no batyles in a wrongfull quarrel for no love ne for no worldly goods.

It’s a radiant ideal: the people who would benefit most from anarchy; armoured knights, lords with castles, are promising to fight against it. The people who could most easily exploit the weak are promising to protect them. And the best of them do all those things most of the time.

But balanced against this idealism, is the picture of a court stained with jealousy, resentments and memories of old wrongs.

Perhaps the most adult of Malory’s perceptions is that the world is not divided into heroes and villains, into ‘good’ people and their polar opposites. There are caricatures littering the edges of some of the tales, giants and renegade knights and wielders of magic, who are little more than plot devices, but they are the gaudy inheritance of the genre. The challenges facing Malory’s characters are moral and personal as they attempt to negotiate different and often contradictory codes of behaviour. People do things, often with good intentions, but with unintended, unforeseeable, disastrous consequences.  

This is presented most succinctly in ‘The Knight of the Two Swords’, the second section of the first book[vii]. It’s a mini tragedy which feels Greek in its inexorable movement towards catastrophe. It turns the adolescent fantasy of the knight errant into a nightmare.

In a story that turns on the problems of recognition, everything Balyn, the Knight of the Two Swords, does, he does with the best of intentions. But he leaves a trail of misery and destruction in his wake as he heads towards a fatal duel. He kills, and is killed by, his twin brother and they recognise each other only after they have dealt the killing blows. It’s the darkest of the stories and it sets the tone for what follows.

If the Round Table is the best humans can manage, the quest for the Holy Grail shows that measured against the highest of ideals, it’s not good enough. But the lesson of the Grail, characteristically for Malory, works two ways. That so many knights fail is a critique of the value of the Grail ideology as much as it as a critique of the Knights. Galahad is the least likeable of Malory’s heroes. He is born to succeed in the Quest, and it never feels as though he won’t. When he achieves the Grail, he is transported on a beam of light to Heaven. To be human, to live in the world, is to try and find a way home through the forest, and the attempt to overcome greed and lust and ego is what characterises the best of humans. Perfection offers no way of living in the world.

The greatest of the Round Table Knights, Lancelot, is also the greatest contradiction. When he dies Ector speaks his threnody over his body:

And thou were the curtest [most courteous] knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man, that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake with swerde. And thou were the godlyest persone that ever cam emonge prees of knyghtes. And thou was the mekest man and the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes, and thou were the sternest knyght to thy mortal foo that ever put spere in the reeste.

But Lancelot is an adulterer. In the moral framework of the time this means he’s going straight to an eternity of terrifying punishment in hell. In medieval terms, adultery with the queen is treason and the punishment for that was terrifying enough before he even got to hell.

And he fails. He fails in the quest for the Holy Grail because he can’t stop thinking about Gwenyvere. He unintentionally kills his friend, Gareth, who worships him ‘this side idiolatry’. And this greatest of knights arrives with an army that would have saved Arthur, but only after the final battle is over and lost. By simplified modern standards of heroism, Lancelot is a loser.

The idea of the ‘flawed hero’ is common enough. But it’s a simplistic way of reading, or writing: ‘Identify the tragic flaw in Hamlet’s character’. Ten points and a pat on the back if you answer ‘indecision’. No points if you try to argue that a character who only has one ‘flaw’ is less than human or that to argue there is a ‘flaw’ suggests there is a perfect personality which is not only attainable but identifiable. It’s symptomatic of a binary, all-or –nothing argument.

Sir Thomas Malory, knight, prisoner, is excluded by name from two general pardons issued by the Yorkist King. Even P. J. C. Field’s exhaustive study of the documents doesn’t bring to light who he had annoyed, and why. But he had annoyed someone with the power to keep him in prison and manipulate the judicial process, so he never came to trial. When scholars first discovered that a Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel had been accused of various misdemeanours, including breaking into Coombe Abbey, cattle stealing, roughing up the locals, and raping the same woman on two separate occasions, there was a reaction against this identification. Surely this couldn’t be the man who wrote the Pentecostal oath.

But it could be and if Field is right, it probably is. Malory probably died in prison. We should qualify ‘prison’: not the kind of dungeon you can visit in a medieval castle. Wherever he was he had access to an impressive library, and time to write and stay focussed on his story. The temptation to escape into his fantasy must have been very powerful. And he obviously enjoyed whiling away the hours imagining two armoured knights bashing away at each other, a delight it is hard to share as a modern reader. But the ending of his book suggests that Sir Thomas Malory, Knight prisoner, had a very clear headed view of human nature.

The ending of the Morte is one of the great adult endings in English Literature. Malory’s best fictional creation is the relationship between Lancelot and Gwenyvere. They have grown older together, and they bicker like a fond old married couple. It’s difficult not to speculate: if Lancelot is Malory, then who was the Queen? And why did Malory resist the very human desire to allow his main characters to live happily ever after?

When Lancelot arrives from France too late to save Arthur, England is anarchic. It’s not clear who, if anyone is in control. He sets out on one last quest to find Gwenyvere. Traitor he may have been, adulterer he certainly was, but as Ector says, he was true to his lady.

He finds the Queen hiding in a convent. They have risked so much to be together. He tells her that now they can go to his lands in France and live without fear or guilt.

And she says no. She intends to spend the rest of her life praying for forgiveness. She knows that they have been instrumental in the destruction of their world. A lesser man might see this as a betrayal. But he accepts her decision and says he will follow her example and spend the rest of his life in prayer. Before he leaves, he asks her for one last kiss. And she says no.

This is the bare outline of the scene. It does no justice to the dialogue. He found this ending in his sources, and there are many ways he could have written it, but he stays true to the characters he had developed and the dialogue is his. If there was any doubt, at this point, Gwenyvere’s final refusal, you realise Malory didn’t flinch.

The Morte has been my desert island choice since the 1970s. It’s a book that rewards many readings. But it does belong to a lost world. It can hold contradictions in balance, admire what is admirable and leave judgements to the reader. It will not certain anyone.

Reading the Morte – a suggestion

If you’re interested in reading Malory, I would suggest using a version that hasn’t been modernised. Malory’s prose isn’t that unfamiliar, it takes a little getting used to but it’s worth remembering he probably spelt words as he pronounced them.

Hit befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was kynge of al Englond and so regned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornewaill that helde warre ageynst hym long tyme, and the duke was called the Duke of Tyntagil.  

At times his vocabulary does show the influence of the French he was translating, so there are words that are no longer in use, but the trick is to commit to reading a number of pages, and allow the rhythm of the prose to carry you over the occasional phrase that’s unfamiliar.

His world is still medieval, with its casual acceptance of both brutality, cruelty and indifference: “Then he raced of his helme and smote off his head. Then they went into souper.” (p.517)

If you’re the type of reader who only reads what makes you feel comfortable, or you insist on your heroes being squeaky clean, don’t bother with this book.

If you just want to sample Malory, I’d suggest reading the final book. I think he learnt to write as he went on, and by the end he had mastered his craft.

Eugene Vinaver staked his critical reputation on his belief that Malory didn’t write one coherent book but eight ‘tales’. Whether he’s right or not can be left to the purists, but it does give you the freedom to pick what interests you in no definite order.

If you want to begin at the start and keep going you will need a relaxed attitude to Malory’s eagerness to describe, at length, every combat between individual knights, groups of knights, or armies, and his knights’ habit of levelling their spears and charging into each other at every possible opportunity.

First time through, you might skip the tale of the Emperor Lucius, which is where Malory dumped the Middle English alliterative Mort[viii], and perhaps the two long books of Sir Tristam, where Malory seems to have been dragged off course by his sources.

[i] This is from the publisher’s summary for the Audible audio book version of Le Morte D’Arthur read by Chris MacDonnell and published by Spoken realms. 

[ii] Gawain’s strength waxes with the sun’s rise towards midday, and wanes as it moves through the afternoon, but that’s it.

[iii] Until the 1940s, editions based on Caxton’s version of the text were the only ones available. In 1934 a manuscript was discovered in Winchester (these things do happen) which is one step closer to what Malory wrote than Caxton’s printed text. Detailed analysis shows it had been in Caxton’s workshop. The Winchester Manuscript was edited by Eugene Vinaver as The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. This became the scholarly standard.  Vinaver was convinced Malory wrote eight tales rather than a single book. The best single volume edition currently available is P.J.C. Field’s. (Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur. 2017, D.S. Brewer Cambridge.) Claiming to be ‘the definitive original text’, this also contains a summary of Field’s extensive research into Malory’s life. Page references are to this edition. There is a two-volume edition, also edited by Field, in hard back. Translations and modernisations are unnecessary evils and are best avoided.

[iv] Not everything, the poem Gawain and the Green Knight, recently brutalised in the cinema, is missing and was probably not in his sources. Nor does Malory seem to have known the early Welsh story Culuwch and Olwen, in which Arthur’s retainers do have ‘super powers’.

[v] He notes in his preface that he had originally decided against doing so because ‘dyvers men holde oppynion that there was no suche Arhtur and that alle suche bookes as been maad of hym ben but fayned and fables’ however, having listened to the counter argument, he affirms: ‘Thenne, al these thynges considered there can no man reasonably gaynsaye but there was a king of thys lande named Arthur’.

[vi] How many fought, and how many died, at Towton is ‘a matter for scholarly debate’. The traditional figure of thirty thousand dead might be an exaggeration, but it is still the deadliest battle fought in England and a lot of the scepticism about the figure seems driven by an unwillingness to believe more died at Towton than on the first day of The Somme in 1916.

[vii] ‘Balyn le Sauvage’ in Field (pps. 47-75).

[viii]It would be a pity to shipwreck as a reader on the language of this section, since the language of the alliterative poem was probably old fashioned when Malory was transcribing it.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Man of Heart – the scribe’s story

LIAM GUILAR continues his epic of early Britain

The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send an embassy to restore the church and combat the Pelagian heresy. What follows is the first half of Chapter ten which loosely follows the fifth Century Life of Saint Germanus . You can find chapters 2-9 on the Brazen Head. The complete story has been published as A Man of Heart, by Shearsman UK (January 2023), available here

At the court of Vortimer the King

Above, bare wooden beams.

The hall is badly lit, too many

shadows confuse the walls.

The candle complicates the page.

There’s a broken wreckage of a man

beyond the table, out of sight,

but he knows he’s on his knees,

the shadows can’t disguise

how uncontrolled his sobbing has become.

Two armoured men are looking carefully

at the wall behind him.

‘For your skill with words,’

said his superior,

‘you will join the Papal mission.

You will travel to Britain.

You will record everything.’

Only now he understands

it was curse not compliment.

Here words slither and slop,

like the entrails of a corpse

he has to carry to its grave.

‘Who saw the King today?’

the officer enquires.

The scribe indicates he cannot hear the man’s reply.

The guards move, the man sobs.

‘The pagan woman, the Earl of Gloucester,

slaves, attendant lords…

hand poised, aware the sentence is unfinished.

The officer leans forward. ‘Who else?’

Like a secret heard by accident,

so soft, if a voice could hide, his does:

‘Your masters.’

The two armed men stare at the wall

The scribe puts down his stylus.

They have questioned slaves

who revealed nothing before they died.

There are several court officials

who saw the King in their daily duties

but each swears he saw nothing

and no one saw him without others present.

There were still many wished to see him.

Not like that.

Remembering the last time he saw Vortimer,

writhing, frothing at the mouth,

fouling himself, screaming.

Lupus of Troies enters. ‘The King is dead.’

He indicates the scribe should write the news.

The guards remove the witness,

as Germanus of Auxerre re-enters;

Bishop, on an embassy to combat heresy,

ex-governor, ex-general, proto-saint.[i]

The scribe has travelled with these two,

has become alert to the way they rarely say

that water’s wet. Their silence has

so many meanings but they navigate

the alternatives and rarely get them wrong.

He is aware the words he writes dress

one version of the truth and send it

marching off towards the future

while other possible interpretations

loiter round the edges of the page

like unwanted slaves at an auction.

Germanus:

‘Every Lord who heard his welcome speech

has to be a suspect.’

‘It was poison.’

‘Domestic or foreign?’

‘Impossible to tell unless the vial is found.’

‘And that’s impossible?’

The drama of silence. How can there be meaning

without interpretation in what’s unsaid?

The words he writes across the parchment

have no spaces, but here so much happens in the gaps.

Face blank, he moves the words across the page

and later, perhaps tonight, perhaps at the ugly hour,

staring into nothing, curled into himself

a long way from his home,

imagining all the ways a boy can die,

he will wonder if he hasn’t just recorded a confession

and signed his name to his own death warrant.

He knows what wasn’t written down.

Germanus rests his hand,

so very gently on his shoulder.

If he touched the hand, the ink might blot,

might suggest to an observant scrutineer,

‘Here something happened.’

‘We came to root out heresy.’

They have been arguing.

Germanus is troubled by the inquest.

‘Pope Siricius debarred from holy orders

all who after baptism held administrative posts

or served in the army, the civil service,

or had ever practised as barristers.’

Lupus searches for the appropriate quotation.

He knows this man is closer to his Christ

than anyone he’ll ever meet.

But his literal reading of the gospels

is a cliff on which every ship must wreck.

His Christ never ruled a kingdom;

or had to deal with heretics and raiders;

or arbitrate between contenders for a throne.

He finds the appropriate quote

in his well-trained lawyer’s memory:

‘These powers have been granted by God

and the sword has been permitted

for the punishment of the guilty-

those who wielded it were not blameworthy.’[ii]

‘My Christ,’ says Germanus, quietly,

‘came to save the poor and wretched.

He bought a message of hope and charity.

How can I love my neighbour

and send him to be tortured?

What kind of lover sends their friends

to the executioner?’

‘A disappointed, saddened one?’

The ruthless governor, the iron fisted general,

the lawyer who could kill with words,

flashes to reanimate the bag of bones

and Lupus, despite himself, steps back.

‘Faith does not deal in dialectics.’

The scribe watches, wonders why this,

why now, and why this pause?

He watches Lupus, waiting, saying nothing,

until Germanus shrugs and they both smile.

He can hear the wooden walls

settle. He can hear the fire.

He can hear, outside, voices

and lamentations. Someone repeating:

‘The King is dead. Vortimer the King is dead.’

A gesture indicates the scribe should write again.

‘Where is the woman?’

‘Fled from the court my lord.’

‘And Gloucester?’

if you listen, and ignore the shock,

it’s there, the faintest trace?

Amusement? In the voices.

‘Outside, trying not to pace.’

‘Better bring him in then.’

Somewhere in northern France, months earlier

A young man on his knees

in the cold austerity of his cell.

Rare visitors, three much older men:

one white haired, chicken necked,

dressed only in a tunic and a mantle

despite the time of year:

his holiness, Bishop Germanus of Auxerre.

The other tall, solid, well-fed:

Bishop Lupus of Troies.

‘They are sent by our Holy Father in Rome

to combat the Pelagian disease in Britain.

They need a scribe to record their victory.

You have been chosen,’ said his superior,

who seemed small beside the others,

‘for your skill with words,

your beautiful calligraphy.’

And the sin of pride was his.

Thinking, of course, I am the best

and it is just that I am recognised

after the years of being slighted

by the other scholars.

They will watch me leave.

They will see I have been chosen.

He had not been outside his community

since he entered as a child. He had not seen

beyond the familiar sky line,

the terrifying open space

stretching before, behind, above.

They plodded towards the coast.

It was the ash end of the winter,

cold lurked in the morning

and a wind that shrank skin against bone

blew over the flat dead fields.

Reports of bagaudae made them cautious.

Incongruous discrepancies:

‘An historic Papal mission to save Britannia’s soul’

sounded grand on parchment, but

two old men, a boy, some servants

and a bunch of bored and scruffy soldiers.

They had sheltered in a ruin,

the walls liquid stains

on a darkness with no boundaries,

full of furtive noises. 

Shivering at the edge of light

scattered by their feeble fire,

he knelt for the comfort of prayer,

startled by a strange mewling sound

he recognised as his own voice.

The darkness split. Imploded.

A voice in his head screamed silence

and a vague stain appeared

suggestive of a man in chains.

Stones rose, began to pelt the travellers

who scuttled for shelter, except for Germanus.

‘What ails you? Why do you harm us?’

The stone storm falters into sounds of stones falling.

Germanus strides towards the ruin, passing the boy.

‘Follow child.’ He pauses at a pile of rubble,

speaks quietly, knowing the soldiers had come.

‘Bring light, dig here.’

Two rotted bodies, still in chains.

‘Thieves,’ said Lupus, ‘condemned men.

Dumped like the rubbish that they were.’

Germanus was offended.

‘Images of the Almighty, made in his likeness

should not be so mistreated. Find something

we can use for shrouds, bury them properly.

We will pray for their souls. ‘

The two bishops square off against each other.

One strong, virile, the other bent and old.

Neither speaks until Lupus smiles and bows.

Next morning the boy had stumbled over Germanus,

who was grinding barley for his breakfast,

dressed only in his hair shirt.

Lupus had servants to make him comfortable.

Germanus slept on the cold ground,

a faded military cloak for blanket.

But the old man was friendly,

keen to know the boy better.

‘My father left me with those monks

when I was barely five years old.

He would have sold me off to pay a debt

but couldn’t find a buyer in our village.’

Germanus sees,

bewildered, frightened and alone

a timid child in a hard bare cell.

‘God sees through you.

You were terrified of being wrong

so you learnt to be correct.

The library was home, the classroom

and the daily rituals offered certainty.

Applause substituting for affection.

Approval and your teacher’s admiration

as compensation for your peer’s contempt.’

Skewered, the boy looks away,

remembering the casual nastiness of boys

who had agreed he was the victim.

‘But you fell in love with words,’

continues Germanus.

‘The way they could be marshalled

to march away from ambiguity

and took a sour delight

watching boys who bullied you

being bullied by their teachers

because they were slow, and stupid

and didn’t know one case from another.

It’s alright child. You’ve done no wrong.

There is no grammar of divinity.

Language like the evening fire

only illuminates so much.

God exists beyond the pale glow

of human reasoning. Only fools

believe they understand his ways.

He had a plan for you and here you are.’

The boy looks beaten.

And because Germanus

can manage a robust kindness:

‘Do you have any questions?’

‘What is this Pelagius? Child, he was a British fool

who thought a man might find his way to Grace

without the help of God. Much that he said…

Much that he said was good.’ The old man’s

mottled hand moved the mortar slowly,

the rough barley crackling between the stones.

The disturbing bustle of their camp

distanced by the creased and speckled hands.

‘Pelagius said: A man must try to live a sinless life,

and if he fails, it is his own fault.’

‘But…’

‘Child, where is God in this? For Pelagius,

a man stands or falls alone. He doesn’t need

God or the Church. Nor can priest absolve the man

or give him penance. One sin damns you to hell.

Where is Christ’s charity in that?’

What manner of man is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?[iii]

First sight of the sea; a sullen border

between dark land and empty sky.

His shot nerves torn ragged.

The smell and noise and restlessness

of the wharves had no grammar, and then

the pointless rage of heaving waves

pushing and crashing and trying to erase their tiny ship.

He had clung to the rail and prayed

as the world lurched, rolled and staggered,

until, opening his eyes, he saw

right at the bow, Germanus

drenched in the rise and fall

like the saviour rising from death

shedding the green water,

hands raised, arms outstretched

and he will swear on the holiest of relics

on his chance of salvation

and on his faith in the risen Lord

that Germanus of Auxerre

ordered the sea to be calm.

And the sea obeyed him.

Arrival

They watched the riders coming down the beach

and he was frightened by the powerful grey horses;

teeth, hooves and sweating muscle,

and their armoured riders, more beastly than their mounts.

He knew their type; animals who could not reason,

or be reasoned with. A casual indifference to other’s pain.

He remembered men like this, riding through his village,

their arrogance, their twisted humour,

the ease in which they warped from indolence to rage.

Burnished armour, banners scraps of sudden colour on the breeze

and when the herald had established their identities

the riders moved aside to allow a young man on foot.

Dressed in gold brocaded silk; the kind of man, he thought,

who looks at home in silk. Not much older than himself,

but confident and eager. ‘Where is the King?’

asked Lupus, affronted by this lack of protocol.

‘I am Vortimer, ruler of this kingdom.

Vortigern is my father, a failed King his subjects drove away.

He brought in heathen people. They broke our laws,

defiled our women, corrupted our good customs.

We have destroyed their army, driven them to their ships.

In this new land we worship the true God.

With your help we will rebuild His church.

Every worthy man shall have his place,

and every serf and slave will be set free.

Church lands I will entrust to you.

Every widow will be exempt the tax

upon her husband’s legacy.

We will help you root out heresy

and crush all heathen practice.

Hengist, who will rot in hell,

has lead my father into folly, corrupted him,

used his daughter to confuse him,

until he turned his back upon the church.

You are welcome fathers,

together we will rebuild this battered island.’[iv]

‘I thank the Lord who made this world

and put such holiness herein,’ said Lupus.

But as they stumbled up the stony beach, the scribe

overheard him ask Germanus,

‘Did you see the reaction? His retainers?’

Germanus struggling on the shingle,

stopped and muttered, ‘A holy fool.

Not long for this world.’

Gloucester describing the rebels to Lupus of Troies

‘Champions of the church?

Don’t make me laugh.

Gobshites and wide boys

chancers on the make

jumping at an opportunity.

A patrician elite

suddenly without the power,

influence and prestige

their fathers had inherited

following a strutting fool

who talked a good war.

Men who squirm at discipline,

who dislike Vortigern’s desire

to protect the weak,

his willingness to deal

ignoring faith and place of origin.

They did not remember his ferocity.

How he stacked the corpses,

devastated towns, left nothing,

not a dog nor rat alive. They think,

he has outlived his usefulness.

Theirs is this new world

and they forget who made them possible.

They cluster round Vortimer,

like rot on an open wound.

His father’s son, and little more.

He owes his status to his name

donated, unrequested but

without that gift, incompetent.

A fool no one would tolerate.

Nice enough to have around

but not one to be followed.

The great men of the kingdom

no longer deferential,

no longer asking his opinion

have left him to his bitterness

and this pretence of a court.’

Vortimer, talking with a British bishop

‘The heretics will meet. They will debate.’

Gloucester entering the room like he’s storming a redoubt,

shattering the conversation. ‘She’s coming here?

With an escort and safe conduct?’

‘She comes seeking instruction in the Christian faith.

She asked for my permission to remain here with my father,

and for my father’s sake, I have agreed.’

‘Kill her,’ says Gloucester.

The bishop is still framing his response 

when Vortimer, sounding

so much like his father;

‘And that would be her introduction to Christianity,

if you were her instructor?’

‘She will ride through an avenue of severed heads

to reach your gates, and some of them were relatives.

You placed a bounty on her head. Is that yours?’

The bishop skilled in diplomacy,

tired of their bickering:

‘Your objection was her faith?

She comes here to be baptised.’

‘My lord the King

rebelled against his father

because he favoured pagans.

If she is baptised,

why are we fighting Vortigern?’

Vortimer, offended by Gloucester’s tone,

speaking in his own voice:

‘We will treat her with respect.

She will be baptized.

You will not harm her.’

To be continued

[i] Germanus of Auxerre is the most ‘historical’ of all the characters in this story. He did exist and he did travel to Britain to combat heresy in 429. His miracles, recorded below, are in the Life of Saint Germanus, written down in the late 5th century. Typically for The Legendary History, the chronology is wayward. If Hengist landed in 449/450 he arrived twenty years after Germanus had left.

[ii] Lupus is quoting Pope Innocent 1’s reply to an enquiry on this matter.

[iii] The Gospel of Mark, 4:41

[iv] Vortimer’s speech here, which follows Laȝamon, is one of  Laȝamon’s most astonishing additions to his sources.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A wasted ‘life’ of The Waste Land

Image: Derek Turner

The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem

Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20
LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem

If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is, an extraordinary poem. Stripped of all the accumulated analysis, commentary, criticism and fashionable condemnation of its poet, it remains as new and startling today as it was a hundred years ago.  

Its significance for many of the century’s literary developments cannot be underestimated. It has also been a fertile source and target for successive fashions of criticism and a starting place for an astonishing number of academic performances.

Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land – a Biography of a Poem promises to be just that. It isn’t. Instead of telling the story of the poem’s life after it was published, he narrates the lives of the Eliots and Pound up to its publication, reducing the poem to an incident in their lives.

The story of the poem’s creation has been known for fifty years. In 1914, T. S. Eliot had come from America to Europe to study. Instead of working diligently in the philosophy department at Oxford, he had married in haste and abandoned his Harvard PhD. He was determined to become the leading literary critic and poet in London, at a time when London was the centre of the English literary world.

By 1920 he had a secure, well-paid job at Lloyds Bank, a growing reputation as a reviewer amongst the people who mattered, and a circle of the necessary acquaintances. He was also struggling with the knowledge that he had written nothing outstanding since ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1911. He was keen to write a long poem. Great poets wrote long poems and he wanted to be a great poet.

Lurching from one illness to another, unhappily married, and ‘overworked’, his doctors had recommended he take time off and the bank had obliged by giving him three months paid leave. He went first to Margate, and then Switzerland. Soon after returning, having discussed his poem with Ezra Pound, The Waste Land was published to critical acclaim, scorn and baffled incomprehension. It divided the readership then and continues to do so now.[i]

The story was qualified when the manuscript resurfaced and was published in facsimile in 1971. It was then possible to see that the poem was initially twice as long. An assemblage of parts called ‘He Do The Police In Different Voices’, it began, not with ‘April is the cruellest month’, but ‘First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place’. There was a long section in rhyming couplets describing a woman, Fresca, getting out of bed, which reads like Swift doing Pope with all the disgust but none of the rage or energy. What would become the shortest section of the poem, ‘Death by Water’ was originally a long narrative about a sea voyage. It became obvious from the facsimile that Ezra Pound and Vivien Eliot had played a significant part in shaping the final poem. Pound had cut the draft by half.

T S Eliot. Image: Sneh Vatsa. WIkimedia Commons

By the late 1970s, one source put the total of published books and articles about Eliot, his poetry and criticism, at 4,319. A bibliography for the years 1987-2013 adds another 1,624 items. Neither figure includes unpublished dissertations, theses, book reviews and conference papers or lectures. Hollis’s own bibliography runs for over twenty pages. There are at least two biographies of Vivien Eliot and a recent three volume biography of Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot has been the subject of several, the most recent biography being Robert Crawford’s justly acclaimed two volume life. With all this information available, what hasn’t already been said? 

Hollis tells the story of the poem by tracking Pound and the Eliots through the years leading up to its composition, starting in 1918 but moving chronologically backwards and forwards. He writes eloquently, keeping his story moving, bolstering it with details and anecdotes to bring it alive, as when Eliot’s car breaks down and he must walk home “passed only by a wagon of Boy Scouts and pursued by a line of three ducks” (p.87).

Here, in one place, is a very readable version of many well-known stories. Hollis can make typing sound exciting.

“Eliot’s typewriter had seen better days. […] as he sat before it in the winter of 1921, he centred the carriage and depressed the shift lock. The strikers swung up from the type basket, prompting the escapement forward, letter by letter: a title, concluded as were all titles, with a terminal point.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

He rolled the platen twice for a two-line drop, and began to type the poem’s opening. But it was not ‘April is the cruellest month’ the line that would become synonymous with the poem, but something altogether different.”

pps.227-8

The dating and sequence of the manuscript’s composition are revealed – which typewriter was used, where, and when. One can only admire the patience that went into the study of typewriter ribbons and paper to excavate this information, while wondering what it adds to an understanding or appreciation of the poem. Hollis also tracks Pound’s editing, Eliot’s dithering over the final shape of the work and the negotiations leading up to publication.

The poem is returned to the human context which produced it: the sometimes spiteful, claustrophobic world of literary London in the years immediately after the First World War. Hollis quotes William Gardner Hale’s famous critique of Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ which ends: “If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide”. It stands as a good example of period criticism that could border on libel and be viciously personal. Such treatment humanises the production of literature, as does Hollis’s suggestion that Eliot cut the first page of the manuscript, not because it was tedious, but because it described a visit to a brothel, and he didn’t want to offend his mother.

However, the claim that Eliot was ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century’ rests to a considerable degree on the fact he wrote The Waste Land. The story of the writing of the poem, as told here, is not the story of an artist in control of his material. 

Neither Pound nor Eliot seemed to know what they had created. As late as March 1922, Pound was describing ‘The Waste Land’ as “a series of poems”. Having allowed Pound to hack the original in half, Eliot was worried the poem, as it then stood, was not long enough for stand alone publication. In January 1922 he was thinking of padding out the final poem and giving it this form: “(1) Sage Homme by E.P.-(2) Gerontion-(3) The Burial of the Dead-(4) A Game of Chess-(5) The Fire Sermon-(6) What the Thunder Said- (7-9 in order unknown) Song-Exequy-Dirge.” (p.361)

Eliot may have gone on to dominate the critical and literary landscape, but in the early 1920s he seems to have had difficulty evaluating his own work. He had tried to convince Wyndham Lewis to publish ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’, a rhyming obscenity which would not have been out of place sung in the communal bath of a 1970s Rugby Union club.

Robert Crawford records that in Margate, Eliot had been “practising scales on the mandolin”.[ii] Not picking out tunes, or singing songs and accompanying himself, but practising scales. It’s a telling image for Eliot the poet: a master of technique who at that time was struggling to find a use for it. The picture that emerges is of someone eager for fame and publication, but with no real idea of what he was doing other than trying to become famous and published.

For all Hollis’s entertaining eloquence, the book feels unbalanced and becomes frustrating as it progresses. The problem lies with the title. A biography which did not tell the life of the subject would not warrant the name. This is not the biography of a poem, which would have been an original contribution to celebrate the centenary.

Ezra Pound. Image: Alvin Langdon Coburn, NPG. Wikimedia Commons

The book ends triumphantly, with Pound vindicated, and Eliot beaming. The last chapter, a coda of sorts, ‘London 1960’, focusses on Eliot’s attempts to challenge Pound’s growing sense of failure. In the rush to the end and the desire to reconcile the characters, the poem goes missing. Eliot’s public ambivalence about it is brushed aside, and the mixture of astonishment and derision which greeted its publication is reduced to two pages of decontextualised quotations. There’s very little discussion of the notes Eliot used to pad out the page count. He helped fuel an academic industry by claiming:

Not only the title but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss. Jesse L. Weston’s book on the Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes do; and I recommend it (apart from the greater interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.

Whether he’d read From Ritual to Romance is a moot question Hollis skips over.[iii] Given the obvious lack of ‘plan’ in the poem’s writing and the late addition of the title, the statement is at the very least an impressive piece of misdirection.

To tie the poem to the poet is to divert attention from the poem and go ferreting in the dusty scandals of our grandparents’ lives. Instead of asking what the printed poem does, or why it is was so successful or so useful to a fledging critical industry, one can speculate pointlessly about who was the “Man from Cologne” (p.352) or how often, when and where Vivien Eliot “slept” with Bertrand Russell.  

Narrating the lives leading up to the publication of the poem creates a problem of relevance the book ignores. The text runs for 386 pages. 217 pages detail Eliot and Pound’s movements before the poem is begun. When Eliot begins his rest cure in Margate, Hollis has discovered how many days he spent there, whether he had a hot bath, what he spent his daylight hours doing, who he phoned and how much the call cost. We get a potted history of Margate as a tourist resort. The other stories are well known and entertaining but why, for example, does the story of Eliot, Lewis, Joyce and the second-hand shoes have to be repeated? What did the floor plan of the Pounds’ apartment in Paris, or the fact Pound enjoyed boxing with Hemingway contribute to the poem?

The same seems true for the historical excursions. Because they exist at the level of generalised context, Hollis could have picked any distressing incident from 1900-1920.

The first chapter, ‘Armistice’, begins with the story of the death in combat of the last allied serviceman in the First World War. Like the excursions to the Irish wars in 1920, the burial of the Unknown Soldier, and to various international calamities, the link to the poem is never made explicit. Hollis’s Eliot is far too self-obsessed to be affected by what the Black and Tans were doing in Ireland, and there’s no attempt to prove that he knew about them, let alone that their behaviour affected his thinking or writing. A Poundian editor would have cut the first two hundred and sixteen pages: ‘Interesting/ enjoyable/ been done before/ irrelevant.’

Or perhaps there is a sly Eliotic irony at work, and Hollis is undercutting the usual ‘Poor Tom’ narrative. How depressing to have a steady job in the 1920s, earning 500 pounds a year, with an employer willing to give him three months paid leave. How oppressive to have to leave the rural weekend cottage to go to work to earn a living. Robert Graves was more blunt: “Who forced him, during the Battle of the Somme, to attend London tea-parties presided over by boring hostesses?”[iv]

There’s also an inconsistency in the treatment of the material. It is now compulsory for any writer on Eliot to excoriate him for his antisemitism. Hollis does so at every opportunity, but while Eliot deserves the criticism, it’s a modern, retrospective interpretation of the views of a man who was the product of his class and place and time. It draws attention to the things Hollis doesn’t criticise from a similar perspective.

Much of the narrative moves smoothly over the surface presenting the official version which tends to minimise the strangeness of the story. He quotes admiringly from Eliot’s early criticism, but a century has passed in which that criticism has been picked apart. While Hollis sees the relationship between the criticism and poetry as unproblematic, the much more interesting symbiotic relationship between The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Waste Land goes unexamined. In a book about the poem this wouldn’t matter; in a book focussed on the poet it seems like a major flaw.

Far from being objective statements of scientific truth, as some readers were willing to accept, Eliot’s early criticism is a brilliant game of smoke and mirrors, in which T.S. Eliot, Harvard-trained philosopher, wielding an intimidating erudition, justified the kind of poetry T.S. Eliot wrote or wanted to write, and rationalised his inability to produce poetry with the facility of a W.B. Yeats. Hollis quotes approvingly from a letter Eliot wrote in 1927; “The only criticism of poetry worth noting is that of poets” (p.211). The phrase is representative of so much of Eliot’s early writing about literature. It cannot be accurate without the absent qualification: ’Often’, ‘Sometimes’, ‘For my purposes’, ‘In terms of…’. Once the qualifications are added, the statement is revealed as little more than a personal preference.

Ezra Pound is the real hero of this book. Here too the retrospective critique is absent. It is obvious from all the available contemporary accounts that Pound was a tempestuous character, a tireless and passionate advocate for writers he admired. But his criticism and poetry from this period have not aged well.

Pound’s antisemitism is appropriately chastised, but otherwise Hollis takes him at his own evaluation. The reader is positioned to see criticism of Pound’s poetry as misguided, if not driven by malice and envy. To read Hollis you’d think poor Ezra was driven out of London by a conspiracy of jealous mediocrities who simply didn’t understand his genius. The fact that he was a self-appointed expert on a range of topics he knew little about is passed over, as is the fact that much of his criticism from this period consists of aggressive statements of personal preference masquerading as objective truths. The myth of Pound the brilliant editor is based on the idea that he was able to see The Waste Land in the draft and, in his own phrase, perform the caesarean operation to bring to light the poem Eliot wanted to write. 

Joyce’s comment about Pound’s attempts to edit Ulysses is telling on two counts.

I never listened to his objections to Ulysses as it was being sent him once I had made up my mind but dodged them as tactfully as I could. He understood certain aspects of the book very quickly and that was more than enough then. He makes brilliant discoveries and howling blunders[v]

Firstly, if critics have seen method and intention in the manuscript, Pound either didn’t understand them or didn’t care. With The Waste Land manuscript he slashed away at the level of word, line, and passage, regardless of the effect his deletions had on the whole. It was the action of a man with a cast iron sense of his own infallibility and a complete disregard for the writer whose work he was cutting. He noted his reasons in the margins: “Georgian”; “verse not interesting as verse to warrant so much of it”. He either had no interest in, nor understanding of, Eliot’s intentions, which allowed him to hack away knowing that nothing essential would be removed, because as far as he was concerned nothing was essential.

Critics tend to assume that Pound’s editing was entirely disinterested and for the greater good of ‘Poetry’ because that was Pound’s version. However, as Hollis writes, the cutting of the original ‘Death By Water’ is more difficult to justify as “powerful passages had been sacrificed” (p.64). Hollis takes the time to note the similarities between the sea voyages in the original ‘Death by Water’ and the Canto Pound was working on at the same time. He avoids describing this as plagiarism while providing enough evidence to support the accusation. He’s too kind to suggest Pound may have demolished ‘Death by Water’ so his sea voyage Canto had no competitor. Hollis also records that Pound didn’t show the Canto to Eliot when he wanted someone to help him to edit it. Hollis prefers to believe “Perhaps it was Pound’s sense of selflessness that left him unwilling to disturb Eliot” (p.352) rather than an unwillingness to offer up a poem for criticism to someone who might return the recent favour and demolish it on the same grounds – or who might be so crass as to point out the similarities.

Pound’s motives are lost. The truth about the writing of a poem, especially a hundred years after the event, is unknowable, and was perhaps only vaguely understood by the people involved. Hollis’ approach raises so many questions that it cannot answer, at the same time softening the strangeness of this poem’s creation.

Many writers solicit comments on their drafts, but Eliot was eagerly soliciting comments on fragments of an unfinished long poem. This is strange, but the real curiosity, obscured in retrospect, is why he was so willing to put himself under Pound’s direction.

Hollis claims of Eliot’s 1919 Hogarth Press selection of poems that “more than any gathering they would bear the fruits of his [Pound’s] management of Eliot’s work” (p.79). ‘Management’ is aptly chosen. Pound liked to manage his discoveries. But as Hollis also explains, these poems are unimpressive compared to Eliot’s best work: “caricatures wearily reappear; predatory males, wanton females, unscrupulous outsiders, untrustworthy Jews”. The poems exhibit a “claustrophobic formality buttoned up in iambic tetrameter” (p.82). The reviewer for The Times wrote that Eliot was “laboriously writing nothing” and “in danger of becoming silly”. Except for The Waste Land, little that Eliot wrote under ‘Pound’s Management’ advanced his reputation as a poet.

Hollis ends one section of the book with a summary of Eliot’s debt to Pound before the latter left London in 1920. The mystery is not why Eliot felt indebted to Pound for his genuine assistance in getting his work published, but why he was so willing to submit his poetry to Pound’s literary judgement. Was it really so infallible, or merely human as the Joyce comment suggests?

Were the Fresca couplets such a bad imitation of Pope? Pound told him “You cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope-and you can’t.”[vi] Why did Eliot timidly accept this verdict? If he were following Joyce and using a range of historical styles, why didn’t he just shrug and follow Joyce in ignoring Pound’s dismissive comment?

The answer lies in the psychology of T. S. Eliot, and in his specific state of mind while he was writing the poem. Both are unknowable. What we do know is that he did not repeat the process and seems to have felt uncomfortable about the end product for the rest of his life.

If this really were the biography of the poem, then its life in the twentieth century should have been its focus[vii]. Eliot was born a year after the attempt to introduce an Honours school of English Literature at Oxford University was voted down. It was not until 1894 that resistance was overcome. If scholarship were replaced by criticism, how could the study of English Literature be more than “mere chatter about Shelley”?[viii]

The question haunted literary studies until they self-destructed in just over a hundred years. Poetry like Pound and Eliot’s, baffling to a contemporary reader bought up on Kipling, Yeats and the majority of poetry in the bookshops, supported the rise of the professional explainer and with it the cult of the ‘difficult poem’. If T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land did not exist, university English departments would have had to invent them to justify their existence.   

The Waste Land became an almost inexhaustible resource that could be quarried for allusions and biographical connections. It challenged established ideas about originality and plagiarism. Critics could announce that they had finally unearthed the poem’s meaning only to have their findings challenged by other critics. The notes provided starting points for careers. To be ‘The Greatest Living Eliot Scholar’ became a desirable title. With the inevitable reaction against Eliot’s perceived ideologies, the poem could be a target for every new fashion of criticism that could prove its own virtue by finding faults with the poem and the poet.

Yet despite all the critical attention, paradoxically, after The Waste Land, a single history of poetry in English becomes impossible to write. Despite Pound and Eliot’s insistence that their version was the only correct one, there are now many competing, sometimes mutually exclusive, assumptions about what a poem is and should be. The Renaissance or the Romantic Period mark definite shifts in the writing of poetry but the same cannot be said for the ‘Modernists’.[ix] Today, highly regarded poetry is being written which reads as though The Waste Land or the Cantos were never written. The temptation to naturalise all this could be resisted and a biography of the poem would have been a good place to start.

Despite all this chatter about Pound and the Eliots, despite the proof that the final version was an accident, The Waste Land remains: 433 brilliantly memorable lines. Whether Eliot knew what he was doing and whether Pound hacked away indiscriminately are questions that ultimately can’t be answered, and might not be worth asking.

Eliot’s undeniable ability to turn a memorable phrase and pack it with meaning – “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” – to create resonant images – “A woman drew her long black hair out tight/and fiddled whisper music on those strings” – and his superlative ability to manipulate sound and syntax (read the poem aloud for yourself) transformed what one admiring critic called “a cultural scrap heap” into a unique, never to be repeated or successfully imitated piece of writing. A hundred years after it was published, it still feels strange and new, still divides readers, and still rewards repeated re-reading. And its biography is yet to be written.

[i] On 29 December 2022 the New York Times published an article by a Mathew Walther entitled, ‘Poetry died 100 years ago this month’ with the line ‘I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

[ii]  P.389. Crawford, Young Eliot. From St. Louis to the Wasteland.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

[iii] “Eliot’s first edition of Jesse Weston’s book is in the Houghton Library in Harvard with his inscription ‘This is the copy I had before writing The Waste Land’. It is virtually unannotated. Pages 137-40 and 141-4 remained uncut.”, Crawford, Young Eliot, p.352

[iv] ‘These be your Gods Oh Israel’ in Collected Writing on Poetry, Paul O’Prey (ed.), Carcanet, 1995

[v]  Letters of James Joyce Vol. 1 ed Stuart Gilbert, New York, Viking Press 1957 p.249

[vi] Qtd p.127 in T. S.Eliot. The Waste Land. A Facsimile And Transcript Of The Original Drafts Including The Annotations Of Ezra Pound, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1971 

[vii] There’s a good summary up to 1995 in John Harwood’s, excellent, iconoclastic, Eliot to Derrida. The Poverty of Interpretation, St. Martin’s Press, 1995

[viii] The remark is attributed to Edward Augustus Freeman, then Regius Professor of Modern History

[ix] It’s obviously possible to argue about when the Renaissance or the Romantic period began and ended, but it would be wilfully obtuse to argue that the majority of poetry written after 1650 is not markedly different to the poetry written before 1550. And the same would apply to 1750 and 1850

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Verses for a vanished town

Ravenser Odd

Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7
LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding

This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet.  The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the text.

The story of Ravenser Odd deserves a poem. It was a settlement which lasted less than two hundred years at the mouth of the Humber on Britain’s eastern coast. A sand or gravel bank was created by storms at the mouth of the estuary in the early 13th century. By the 1230s, there is documentary evidence of people living and trading there and it was granted a royal charter in 1299. It became a very prosperous sandbank. At one point there was a chapel, warehouses, a jail and a windmill. There was a weekly market and two fairs a year. The town sent two MPs to Parliament.

The town suffered from a growing number of floods from the 1320s onwards, and the wealthier families began to move themselves and their money out. By the winter of 1356-57, Ravenser Odd had been abandoned. Then the land on which the town had stood was swept away in a final tempest in 1362. The storm, which inundated land on both sides of the North Sea, was so bad the Dutch gave it a name: the Grote Mandrenke[i].

It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it’s true. An internet search reveals its continuing fascination. “Yorkshire’s ‘lost Atlantis nearly found’ after 650 years under water” reads one strange headline from 2022[ii]. As a story it can obviously be read in different ways: the contemporary enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as divine retribution. Today, it’s easy to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns, or a warning for those living along the same coast which in some places is being eroded at 30ft a year[iii].  Rather than pushing an interpretation, Daniels lets the story speak for itself.

The booklet is a sequence of linked poems that move chronologically through the history of the settlement. They are all written in terza rima. A note tells the reader this was chosen because “Dante’s development of terza rima was contemporaneous with Ravenser Odd’s highpoint”. If this seems an odd reason to choose a form, anyone who voluntarily writes in terza rima must be admired for making his own life difficult. The success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.

From the start, the sequence announces that the specifics of the settlement’s history are also being used to contemplate the claims the dead have on the living. It begins:

What is it to be held in mind
by someone else, to dwell as ghost
or presence there? The drowned recline
in chambered mud, yet still we host
them in our heads, subdued and dim.
It isn’t us who need them most.

The link to The Divine Comedy inevitably evokes Dante’s concern with the dead, but it also illustrates an important difference. Dante’s dead are individuals with names and histories; Daniels are the nameless dead who remain undistinguished. “The dead know things we’ve never learned- / how hard it is to stay alive”.

The gardens they had tended went.

The cabbage rows were heaved and sloughed

as if the aching care they spent

to sow and plant was not enough,

as if the tilled and tidied beds

were cheap as salt and air. The rough

sea came and went all spring […]

Playing on the name, Ravenser Odd produces Odin’s ravens; thought and memory, who provide a bird’s eye perspective. They also appear as tiny pictures at the start of each poem.

The bird’s eye perspective means the poem deals with people, not individuals – the dead, not specific corpses. There is an unnamed feudal Lord; “…life was his to make the worse, / he was their breath, their bread, their meat”. Like most modern depictions of feudal lords, this one’s a sadist, but the strength of the writing means it’s unclear whether his story, and the story of the fishing vessel The Silver Pit which follows it, are retellings of chronicle events, or inventions of the poet.

The sea is the individuated character in the poem, and its restless power runs through the collection. When the end comes it ignores

such mortal dreams, but saved its breath

to asset strip the sinking town

of shattered timber, nail and lath-

The two ravens see the final calamity:

The people’s final prayer rose up,

petitioning their lonely god.

The ravens read their trembled lips

to scavenge scraps of uttered word,

then spat them back as raucous noise,

disemvowelling all they heard.

The pun in that last line is impressive, standing out in a collection where the diction is mostly conversational. The ruined voices of the dying and the dead are reduced to sounds the poet has been trying to hear, but which having been converted to noise, are lost. Even the final devastation of the land on which the town stood is a minor incident in a much larger tragedy. There is no conclusion, and if there is a moral to be drawn from the story Daniels thankfully leaves it up to the reader.

This is a small, impressive collection. The poet’s website (https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk) contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.

[i] The death toll is placed around 25,000.  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/jan/20/weatherwatch-grote-mandrenke

[ii] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ravenser-odd-yorkshire-medieval-town-b2037441.html

[iii] ‘The Holderness coast, on which Spurn Point sits, is Europe’s most rapidly eroding coastline, with some areas disappearing by more than 30ft per year.’ https://www.express.co.uk/news/history/1593410/Yorkshire-Atlantis-Ravenser-Odd-Sir-Ernest-Shackleton-ship-Endurance  

Posted on by Liam Guilar

The hunt for Merlin

The story so far (Chapters 2-8 inclusive have all previously been published on this site, starting here). The complete poem has just been published as A Man of Heart, by Shearsman.

Mid 5th century Britain. After the legions have withdrawn, the island is facing civil war, a growing number of external enemies and a steady tide of pagan migrants looking for land.

Vortigern has been appointed to protect what’s left of Roman Britain. The precarious balance of power he had established has been destroyed by a British revolt, led by his son. He retreats towards the hills with his wife and the remainder of the Field army.

At this point, the late 12th century narrative I’m following slides into a different version of the past, and any connection with History as understood in the 21st century is lost.  

LIAM GUILAR‘s continues his epic of post-Roman Britain

The Hunt for Merlin

Vortigern, his wife and retinue

have retreated to the green hills

with the grey mountains at their back.

The wizards tell him where to build.

Each day the workmen sweat to raise a wall;

during the night the walls collapse.

(Seven times, not three as you’d expect).

The wise-men mumble together then announce

they need the blood of a fatherless boy.[i]

Find him, they thunder, sprinkle his blood

and your fortress will be impregnable.

Rowena, astonished by stone buildings,

seeing magic in the masons’ every move,

understands the fact of sorcery.

Vortigern, patient, muses:

four centuries of Roman stone

and now we cannot build a wall?

He sends men hunting down the hill

into the wooded valleys.

In the unmeasured space between

an end and a beginning, along a ridge,

scraped drop on either side, to the summit.

Looked down at broken clouds, across to distant,

unknown, crumpled peaks. The valley;

inept geometry of distant fields,

a path falling off the ridge towards the track

that followed the scrawl of infant river.

Companions wearing mail,

thick woollen cloaks, dark red,

held at the shoulder with an ornate brooch,

only their eyes visible in the helmet’s gilded face,

reading the boundaries, a line of trees,

a stream, a standing stone.

Saw the rustler’s pathway peeling off the ridge

to meet the hammered track

leading to the cluster of round huts,

pointed roofs and sagging thatch,

fenced space, the drift of smoke.

The perfectly ordinary settlement.

Entering the village, they walk into a silence

abrupt as the chill slap of a breaking wave.

No child is playing. No woman singing at her work.

Painted figures, fading on the grey wall of the cloud.

No one runs away, or screams, or sounds alarum.

No one is reaching for an axe. They stop.

They watch. They follow, herding the strangers towards

the largest hut, white walls blotched

beneath the inept cone of sagging thatch.

The chieftain waits to greet them,

wrapped in a bear skin, the skull as hood.

The messengers stop to admire the skin,

trying to frame a compliment.

The old man nodded. ‘Old ways.

My dad took me down into the trees.

Gave me a spear, said, good luck son.

Come back with a bear skin or don’t come back.’

They step into the hut.

‘You have come for the child.

He says you will take him to his woman.’

Behind the fire, in the gloom,

a dark stain, small and indistinct.

Something catching the light flicks,

golden. ‘Do not deny your mission.

He knows what happened, what will happen’

-The shape moved, seemed larger-

‘could happen.’

This man, who as a child

went after bear, alone,

armed only with a spear,

is terrified.

A girl came to the entrance.

The boy stood up and left with her.

‘I have sent word to his mother.

She will travel to the King.

We have sheltered the abomination

and in return, he has shown us what we are.

True, he has given us dominion

over the peoples of the valley.

He has kept our cattle healthy,

our crops abundant. Terrified,

our neighbours pay us tribute,

sacrifice their daughters to his lust,

give us gold and precious things

from places far beyond

the eastern limit of the Empire.

Glass bowls, jewelled cups,

silk filigreed with gold.

At first we gloated over our success,

and wallowed in the excess of desire.

But then we realised the price we paid.

We have done foul things at his bidding.

But we have seen him part the clouds,

make running water turn to ice in summer.

He has raised a hand and brought down hail,

fist sized, to smash our enemies

and ten feet from them not one of us was touched.

We have done too much to keep him happy.’

Outside someone was sobbing.

‘You are the King’s men.

That makes you loyal and brave.

You stayed when all the others ran.

Take the boy to Vortigern the King

He rarely speaks, he seldom asks…’

The old man’s voice was melting.

‘I would rather face a bear again,

with only these old hands,

than risk the anger of that child.

But warn your King, tell him: take care.

The child will give him anything he wants

but his price will be beyond imagining.

When news spreads that he is gone

our enemies will devastate this village,

take not one slave, touch not one woman.

They will kill everyone and then

erase this stinking cess pit from the landscape.

When they arrive, we shall not fight.

Death will bring a fine forgetting.’ 

2

The villagers gathered in the fog,

the women clutching their children,

like failed approximations of the living.

The men stranded in poses of dejection.

The chieftain led them along the path

towards the rising hills. As the ground

sloped steeply upwards he left them.

‘You will need a week to reach your King.

By then, if your mind is still intact,

you will believe everything I’ve said.’

On the first day,

they followed the track upstream to the ridge

in fog so thick they never saw the sun.

The boy did not speak.

He didn’t greet them in the morning,

nor wish them well at night.

On the second day they picked their way downstream,

the slopes of scree like broken shards of fog,

scattered in shining fields that clattered away downhill.

On the third day he said;

‘We will go no further in this valley.

My enemies are waiting. 

We must climb that ridge.

On the other side is a village,

where there are horses.

You will kill their owners,

then you will take me to my woman.’

Vortigern had trained them well.

Their plan was clear and simple.

Entering the settlement, first

they would ask for horses

in the King’s name. Then

they would offer to pay.

If this was refused, then,

and only then, the killing would begin.

The boy had other plans.

Eyes closed, swaying, lips mumble,

hands move, an unexpected squall

drives rain against the window

and blurs a clear view. Or on high ground

the clouds move in so fast the outlines disappear

and there’s only vagueness and sudden dark.

Swinging axe and stabbing spear,

cutting through to the surprise

of scattered bodies, bloodied edge.

They were saddling the horses.

‘Where is the boy?’

‘With the women.’
‘I thought we killed them all?’

‘We did.’

There was the rain

and somewhere was the night.

Each man huddled in his own cloak

and endured the darkness

until the boy made a pile of sticks.

A movement of his hands, a black flame,

tinged silver at the edges,

sprang upward like an army

leaping from its place of ambush.

They huddled closer. No light,

but their sodden cloaks began to steam,

their frozen hands unclenched.

The wood was not consumed.

The escort saw the landscape

as passage, difficult or easy;

shelter, safety, risk. The boy?

Scree was the outrider of his enemies,

the scattered boulders sentries for his army,

waiting for the signal to advance.

Only the water was patron and friend,

escorting him towards his woman.

In the woods their passage slowed.

He must greet every tree he passed,

laying his palms flat on each trunk,

lips moving to shape words no one recognized.

If no blossom sprang beneath his hands

that was worse than the making of fire.

3. Merlin’s Mother

Care has worn her face into perfected sorrow.

But even in the habit of a nun,[ii]

she is sensuality incarnate,

a delirious possibility of carnal bliss.

‘Tell me lady, who is the father of this child?’

‘I am a King’s daughter, Conan was his name,

before the Saxon’s came, before they killed him.

I do not know the father of this child.’

‘You were raped? No? So tell me, lady,

tell me, how did you get this child?’

Rowena wraps her cloak around the sobbing woman,

leads her away from the armoured men,

settles down to listen, seeing images.

…summer flies in clouds above the shattered brightness of the pool.

Girl children playing: armoured guards like dirty statues in the shade

along the rocky shore.

‘Beneath my father’s palace a stream snaked between the trees

and upstream of where it cut the path leading from the fort

our childish secret place, a spring running from a carved grey stone,

with swirling snakes coiling around an open mouth

and a broken headless statue.

(We blushed the first time that we saw it, erect, enormous.

Imagine that? And other silly chatter).

My slave girl trying to be important,

told us pagans worshipped this forest god, this half-man, half-goat,

and if a maiden, toying with herself, close to this place of power,

spoke his name three times, he would appear and pleasure her.

No one believed her rubbish.

We were children,

girls in their white shifts splashing in a pool,

drifting through the summer heat.

A long hot summer.

Maybe five years after we had found the stone.

The river shrivelled to a chain of stagnant ponds.

 Unmarried, un-promised

with maids to the river bank.

Tents in the shade of the trees.

Guards? Of course.

On the hottest night,

aware of sweat beading and running

like grazing insects,

aware of my own body,

humming its lust.

 Images of a future husband,

a constriction in the throat,

the heat became intense.

I murmured the god’s name,

opened my eyes to the golden man,

the carving of Priapus come to life.

His eyes blazed golden in the shade.

The frost burn of pleasure.

All night delirium, the rhythms of flesh,

exhausted, weeping with delight, I fell asleep.

In the morning, in the river, trails of blood,

signs of the night’s excesses

but no signs anyone had slipped into my tent.

That afternoon I dreamt

church doors were shut against me.

I saw the priest and congregations

stone a woman in the field

and knew that she was me.

But until the Golden Man returned,

my body crooned for him.

 My mind a swamp of images of what we’d done.

3 nights the Golden Man appeared and played with me.

3 nights of ecstasy I’ll never know again.

Then no more.

I prayed for him. I prayed to him, but the nights were a rack

and I despised the sunrise confirming that he had not come.

I sickened. After three days, my clothes were tight

and food was hateful to me.

In three weeks I gave birth:

 a child with golden eyes.

As they laid it on my breast,

he smiled at me and said:

‘Daddy sends you greetings

You will not meet again.’

And that lady is how I got my child.

Must I stay ‘til it arrives?’

‘You fear your own son?’

‘Speaking his crimes would rot my mouth.

Remembering them is penance enough.’

Rowena let her go.

Vortigern asks: ‘Is it believable?

She wouldn’t be the first maid

who snuck away to meet her lover

and then made up such a story

when she found out she was pregnant.’

‘No. Her fear is genuine.

Whatever he did is so foul she won’t speak it.’ 

4. A Fatherless Boy

The messengers, staggering, 

bring the boy before the King.

Like a dead bird on a wire

animated by the breeze,

a stain gaining definition

as it strikes, the boy,

brushing aside the soothsayers,

swooping towards Rowena.

‘Blessed is the well below the valley.’

He strokes her breast. She recoils,

hands tying invisible knots, speaking

words that no one present understands.

The boy stumbles, recovers, laughs,

brushing flies from his face.

Reluctantly, he turns to Vortigern.

An old man’s voice,

with rust at its edges

and rot at its core.

‘I have loosed the bands of Orion.

I can summon leviathan.

He will make a covenant with me.

I have gone down to hell

and freed the rider in the clouds.

When he’s enthroned upon his mountain

he will bow before me as my slave.

I can harness the unicorn to the plough.

I can make you Emperor.’

‘Of what?

The Empire’s gone.’

‘It can be rebuilt.

For you.

For a price.’

‘And you want my soul?’

‘I wouldn’t wipe my arse on it.

I want your wife.’

Vortigern hears Rowena hiss,

senses she has stepped back,

holding seax in a steady hand.

‘She doesn’t want you.’

‘Look fool!’ Vortigern sees his province,

refined to a detailed map.

To the south, the shrinking stain

of Vortimer’s rabble and across the Channel,

the scum filled puddle of The Boys’ growing horde.

The black plague of uncountable ships,

swarm the coast, or burrow up river

like maggots attacking a corpse.

‘Give me your wife.

I will annihilate your enemies.

I will be a tempest in a field of corn.

The plans that they have nurtured,

their dreams and ambitions, I will ruin

as they watch, like patient farmers

as hail destroys their crops,

announcing their starvation.

Give me your wife.’

‘Child, she is not mine to give.’

Time thickens like a river freezing.

There is only the voice;

a wind from nowhere,

and the images of burning homes,

pestilence, atrocities, famine.

Vortigern sees his kingdom.

The dead lie where they fell,

crops rotting in the fields,

the starving cattle wander free.

He could see misery,

surging over the land and drowning it.

‘I can put an end to this.

That’s what you want;

peace, order, stability.

Give me your wife.’

He sees himself in gold embroidered silk,

seated on a marble throne,

in a many columned hall.

The cities flourishing again,

merchants on the roads,

ships safe in the harbour. He hears

the grateful people speak his name.

No enemies, assassins

outrage or complaints?

This time, he laughs.

The ice breaks.

The river moves.

‘Child, this is not yours to give.

There will always be wars. Always

people who starve while others feast.’

‘You will die alone.

The sky will rain fire.

You will be vilified

for eternity unless

you give me your wife.

They will debate your name

and your existence.

Your life will be obscure,

your death will be unknown

unless you give me your wife.

She is blessed amongst women.

The fruit of her womb will be the Messiah:

a Warrior King to end the Saxon threat,

reconquer Rome and found a Reich

to last a thousand years.

His name will never be forgotten.

Nor will mine.’

‘Child, she is not mine to give.’

Vortigern dwarves the chubby boy;

a foul vagueness slithered from a cave,

shrivelling in the unaccustomed light.

‘Go your way.

Take this gold,

my thanks

for the lesson.’

‘We will not meet again,

Vortigern Dead King.

I could have saved you.’

‘No,’ he says,

with the conviction of a rock.

‘No, you could not.’

5. The end of the province of Britannia

Morning, and the mist filling the valley below,

clouds streaking the sky like smoke plumes

streaming from the distant peaks. The sun

cold, bright and ruthlessly indifferent.

His officers accumulate around the wagon.

A baffled Rowena stands beside him,

leaning into whatever happens next.

The remnants of Britannia’s last Field Army.

Faces he remembers from the day they left for Lincoln[iii].

He knows them all; their families, their stories,

which one can improvise, who imitates a wall,

who plays it safe, who takes a chance. 

‘Some of you are angry. Some feel betrayed.

You think you would have danced

to your crucifixion if a comrade could be saved.

We have all lost friends who gave their lives

so we could live. You think I’m selfish

because I wouldn’t trade this woman to a child

to save the province.’ He heaved a sack towards them.

‘There is all the coin that’s left.’ He threw a second,

two malignant lumps shifting as they settled.

‘And there’s the plunder; gold rings, armbands, torques…’

the list is endless and irrelevant, dismissively

he waves his hand towards the chests beside him.

‘The royal treasury. The province. Britannia.

That’s all that’s left of what we swore to serve.

But what we swore to serve

meant so much more than that.

I will not sacrifice another life

for two bags full of shiny trash.

Divide it now amongst yourselves.

See that no man feels aggrieved.

Those who wish to leave: go home.

Or you can take an oath to follow me.

I will not ask you to do anything

I have not asked before,

but I will make you rich,

and give you lands for your old age.’

The sound of swords being drawn,

the rustle of kneeling men.

Later she finds him, on a fallen trunk.

The twisted branches of the stubborn trees

behind him like a web the boy had spun

to trap a king.

‘You are a strange man, Vortigern Cyning.

Locrin locked a woman up and lost his kingdom.

You risked the loss of yours to set one free.

The two sacks are untouched in the grass

and not one man has left.’

‘We’ve clung to the old titles;

adepts of a failed dispensation,

whose rites and formulas

belong to history, repeating

an incantation that’s familiar,

habitual, comforting,

when it’s obvious the gods

have long since left the temple

and the words no longer work.

It’s a strange new world

we’re stepping into;

clean, cruel and honest.

At least until we discover

new reasons for hypocrisy.’

[i] Laȝamon describes this advice as ‘leasing’ (lies.)  The shift from bishops and priests to wise men and soothsayers is in his text.

[ii] Another one of Laȝamon’s anachronisms. The story of Merlin’s birth and conception follows his version.

[iii] See chapter 4

More information about Laȝamon’s world and work, as well as the two published volumes in this project can be found at www.liamguilar.com