Posted on by Liam Guilar

“Once upon a time I was a poet”

Basil Bunting. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence
Letters of Basil Bunting
Selected and edited by Alex Niven, Oxford University Press, 2022, £35
LIAM GUILAR welcomes new insights into a little-studied modernist’s mind

Basil Bunting died in 1985. Despite having been praised as one of the twentieth century’s ‘greatest poets’ critical attention to his work has been rare. A reliable biography didn’t appear until the publication of Richard Burton’s A Strong Song Tows Us in2013; an annotated collected poems, edited by Don Share, not until 2016. Now, with the publication of Alex Niven’s much anticipated edition of Bunting’s correspondence, it’s possible to eavesdrop on one of the twentieth century’s most interesting conversations about poetry[i].

In his eighties, Bunting looked back on his life:

Once upon a time I was a poet; not a very industrious one, not at all an influential one; unread and almost unheard of, but good enough in a small way to interest my friends, whose names have become familiar: Pound and Zukofsky first, Carlos-Williams, Hugh MacDairmid, David Jones, few indeed, but enough to make me think my work was not wasted.[ii]

If you recognise the names of his friends, that ‘good enough in a small way’ is an excellent example of the English art of understatement. But it’s not a popular list and despite the excellence of his poems, Bunting remains a marginal figure. No one reviewing the letters of T. S. Eliot needs to explain who T. S. Eliot was, or why he is of interest. 

The life

Born in 1900, Bunting was imprisoned as a conscientious objector immediately after leaving his Quaker school in 1918. He studied economics before drifting to Paris where he met Ezra Pound and worked, alongside Ernest Hemingway, for Ford Madox Ford. Following Pound to Italy, he met W.B. Yeats and Louis Zukofsky in Rapallo and began a life-long and life altering affair with Persian literature.

His first published poem, Villon, is one of the finest long poems of the 1920s[iii], but by the end of the 1930s Bunting’s career as a poet had stalled: his first marriage had failed, he was out of work and separated from his children. The war rescued him. He discovered he had skills that others valued. He rose through the ranks to Squadron Leader, worked for British Intelligence, then after the war, returned to Persia, first as a diplomat, before resigning to marry a Persian and becoming the Persian correspondent for The Times.

Expelled from Persia and then unceremoniously dumped by The Times, he struggled to find work in post war Britain.

Despite the excellence of his poems, the story could have ended here, with Bunting as a footnote in histories of literary modernism, remembered as one of Pound’s ‘more savage disciples’[iv], but in his sixties, spurred on by his meeting with a young Tom Pickard, he wrote Briggflatts; at 700 lines a short long poem, praised as the ‘finest’, ‘greatest’ or ‘most important’ long poem either of the twentieth century or ‘since The Wasteland’. He enjoyed a brief period as ‘Britain’s greatest living poet’ before fading away in a series of university jobs and poetry readings.

Poetry

From such a long and varied, life Niven estimates only about 800 letters have survived, of which approximately 600 relate to Briggflatts and the period after its publication. He has selected almost two hundred and thankfully decided to print complete letters rather than extracts.

Divided into three sections, the bulk of the book is devoted to the 1960s and afterwards. For anyone interested in poetry, rather than Bunting’s biography, the core of the book may be the pre-1960s letters to Pound and Zukofsky.

Briggflatts was praised by critics of the stature of Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie and poets as diverse as Thom Gunn, Allen Ginsberg and George Oppen, but Bunting’s status in the critical hierarchy has never been secure.

Perhaps his version of poetry is too austere to be popular. In a letter to Poetry Chicago (not printed by Niven), he wrote:

We are experts on nothing but arrangements and patterns of vowels and consonants, and every time we shout about something else we increase the contempt the public has for us. We are entitled to the same voice as anybody else with the vote. To claim more is arrogant.[v]

Throughout these letters and in later interviews he repeatedly stated the belief that politics, philosophy and theory harm poetry. The poet’s job is to write good poems.

What I have tried to do is to make something that can stand by itself and last a little while without having to be propped by metaphysics or ideology or anything from outside itself, something that might give people pleasure without nagging them to pay their dues to the party or say their prayers, without implying the stifling deference so many people in this country still show to a Cambridge degree or a Kensington accent. [vi]

It’s possible to go through these letters and compile a list of quotations to show he had little time for academics or literary criticism. He was publicly dismissive of creative writing courses and poetry competitions, while working on the former and once, memorably, judging the latter. He didn’t think poems should be explained; if a poem requires footnotes it’s a failure and tying the poem to the poet is a fundamental mistake.

What characterised Bunting and his correspondents was the intense seriousness with which they applied themselves to writing. Poetry was a craft and writing it involved ‘sharp study and long toil’. The ‘study’ involved arguing into existence a standard of excellence selected from poems going back to Homer. Once tentatively established, they attempted to excel their models, supporting each other through stringent criticism.

Bunting’s criticism, shown here in his letters to Zukofsky, was not for the faint hearted, but it was driven by the belief that some poets, Pound and Zukofsky explicitly, were ‘entered without handicap against Dante and Lucretius, against Villon and Horace.’ In the same letter, he explains: ‘At least for my part, I’d rather have somebody who is thinking of Horace call my poems bloody bad than to hear them praised by somebody who is thinking of-who-Dylan Thomas?’ (p.194).

Two other reasons for Bunting’s odd position in the critical hierarchy stand out. In some quarters he is tainted by his association with Pound, especially where Pound is only known, vaguely, for his political and racial opinions. The other is the insistence that ‘All Roads lead to Briggflatts’[vii] which condemns him to the role of a minor poet who pulled off one great poem and consistently ignores the quality of the rest of his work.   

The letters qualify the first of these, while Niven’s editing and commentary seem driven by the second. If there ever was a tribe of Ezra to match the tribe of Ben, with Rapallo replacing the London taverns, Bunting was always too obdurate an individual to be anyone’s acolyte. [viii].

The explosive end of the pre-war correspondence with Pound is well-known, though the full text of the letter hasn’t been available until now. What becomes obvious is that from the late 1920s and through the 1930s the letters show Bunting becoming increasingly resistant to Pound’s politics. Bunting’s repeated statements that poetry is hampered when it tangles itself in philosophy and politics became focussed in his insistence to Pound that banging on about ill-informed economic theory was a waste of Pound’s time and literary talent, although Bunting himself isn’t adverse to sharing his ‘theories’ with Pound.

Initially refusing to believe Ezra was writing for the British fascist movement, he finally reached the limits of his patience when he learnt that Pound was ‘spilling racist bile’ in his letters to Zukofsky. His angry letter to Pound ends:

I suppose if you devote yourself long enough to licking the arses of blackguards you stand a good chance of becoming a blackguard yourself. Anyway, it is hard to see how you are going to stop the rot of your mind and heart without a pretty thoroughgoing repudiation of what you have spent a lot of work on. You ought to have the courage for that; but I confess I don’t expect to see it. (p.136)[ix]

It says a lot about the robust nature of their friendship that despite this, Pound would continue attempting to promote Bunting’s poetry, and Bunting would continue to acknowledge his debts to Pound. After the war, when Pound was incarcerated in Saint Elizabeth’s hospital for the mentally ill, Bunting picked up the correspondence, encouraged by the news that a letter from Basil brightened up Ezra’s week. Pound’s letters to Bunting, by turns abusive and incoherent, didn’t put him off.

As he wrote to Zukofsky: ‘The difficulty is how to avoid being involved in the network of fallacies while profiting from his illuminate faculty for verse and enjoying his energy and kindness.’

The same problem faces everyone today: how to see beyond the politics and racism to profit from what any poet in the past had to say about poetry and learn from what he or she achieved as a poet. Bunting managed it with his two closest friends, one a communist, one a fascist. It seems an important precedent.

Anyone interested in Basil Bunting or twentieth century poetry owes Alex Niven a great debt for the time and work that must have gone into this project.

How different the picture would be if this were a complete edition of the letters, only he knows. When Jonathon Williams published a selection of his letters from Bunting, he wrote: “What a stern, serious, funny, extraordinary ‘literary’ (LETS HEAR IT FOR LITERARY) North of England person he was’ (Williams, p.252).[x]  The Bunting of those letters, watching the birds and wild life in his garden, is absent from Niven’s collection, as are the descriptions of Persia that suggested to Burton that Britain lost a major travel writer to the Official Secrets Act.

The book’s sense of its reader is uneven. Niven explicitly describes a model reader who knows the outline of Bunting’s life and is not put off by occasional difficulties (p.xxvii). This model reader has a positive effect on his annotations, but seems to have been forgotten when he came to write his commentaries.

Why Niven thinks such a reader needs to be told what to think about the letters and how to interpret them, is a mystery. You buy an edition of a poet’s letters, wanting to read the poet’s words, and find a portion of the book contains the editor’s personal opinions and interpretations which you will never reread.   

Based on his model reader, Niven’s annotations are usually deft and show a shrewd judgement of what this reader could be expected to know. He assumes that anyone reading these letters won’t need a gloss on Dante, Swift, Winston Churchill, or others. He is also unwilling to overload the letters with commentary, assuming, (rightly), that anyone who wants to follow Bunting’s detailed responses to Pound’s books; ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchure, will have a copy.

In his letters, Bunting could be crudely dismissive of poets he didn’t like. It’s disappointing to see his editor join in: ‘Philip Larkin (1922-1985) hard right British poetaster and trad jazz critic.’ (n.277 p.384).

Sometimes the annotation strays a long way from objective facts: ‘It must be said that Briggflatts faintly resembles certain of [Dylan]Thomas’ work in form, subject and (marginal sense of) place’ (p.194). Briggflatts probably ‘faintly resembles’ a lot of things, but it also must be said it’s hard to imagine Bunting admiring Thomas enough to be influenced by him.

The introduction includes a clear and necessary discussion of editing methods. Whether an introduction to a selection of letters needs a dramatic retelling of the first reading of Briggflatts, or is an appropriate place for a summary and critique of existing criticism, depends on the individual reader. As I don’t agree with his evaluation of Don Share’s edition of the Collected Poems, unless ‘the book’s only major limitation’ is intended ironically, or his criticisms of Burton’s biography, and I think he misreads the Pound-Bunting disagreement over Bunting’s translations of the Shahnemeh, I’m suspicious of his statements about literary matters where he strays from simply providing factual biographical context.

He uses his introduction to stake out his version of Bunting’s life, at times in explicit opposition to other published versions. I’m not convinced this is the right place for it. His dissent from Burton’s views of the significance of Bunting’s Quakerism is pointed, but his dismissal of Burton’s biography as ‘relatively light on critical explication’ is baffling. Eager to point out that book’s ‘shortcomings’, he seems to be criticising Burton’s biography for being a biography while temporarily forgetting just how problematic and limited letters are as biographical evidence.

The trust in the reader, obvious in the annotations, is not evident in the editorial commentary running between the letters. I think there’s too much. Rather than let the letters speak for themselves, he interprets the evidence and intrudes his opinions, unnecessarily:  

For all that his language and actions often fell a long way short of today’s ethical standards, Bunting certainly thought of himself as a determined anti-racist-and this letter would seem to support that view. In the context of his historical moment, Bunting’s basic philosophical views about race were, to put it mildly, considerably more progressive than Pound’s. (p. 134-135)

Comments such as this one and less lengthy interventions like ‘even if the age difference of over thirty years was problematic in more ways than one (p.140)’ seem to miss the point that adult readers are capable of coming to their own conclusions.

Sometimes the comments have nothing to do with the content of the letters: ‘There is a pressing need to apply more and deeper scrutiny to Bunting’s colonial phase than has been evident in previous scholarly and biographical treatments. But whatever its unexamined moral and political complications’ […]. (p.139)

Superfluous in terms of contextualising a letter, this manages to suggest something sinister without being informative. Even for a reader who knows the biography it’s not clear what the unexamined ‘complications’ are, or how ‘scrutinising’ them would add to the enjoyment of the poems or why or to whom such a need is ‘pressing’.

Letters encourage the tendency to tether the poems to the poet. The results of failing to distinguish between the two is a depressing characteristic of contemporary discussions of poetry, obvious in attitudes towards writers as diverse as Ezra Pound, Phillip Larkin (see above) and most recently, Dorothy Hewett[xi].

As Bunting wrote to Zukofsky:

Letters are meant to be written to affect one bloke, not a public. What is true in the context of sender and recipient may be a bloody lie in the context of author and public…secondly: the bane of the bloody age is running after remnants and fragments and rubbish heaps to avoid having to face what a man has made with deliberation and all his skill for the public’. (June 1953 qtd in Burton, page 354 Ellipsis in Burton.)

There’s nothing anyone can do to prevent that, it’s still the bane of this age, but its sad inevitability is outweighed by the opportunity to eavesdrop on one of the century’s most interesting conversations about poetry. Hopefully, Niven‘s suggestion that a complete collection of the Pound Bunting correspondence should be published will be taken up sometime soon (preferably with the letters to Zukofsky). What they had to say about poetry transcends their time, politics and personalities.  

‘Long awaited’, ‘much anticipated’ and ‘ground-breaking’ are cliches of the blurb writer.  For once they can all be applied honestly and accurately to Niven’s work in making these letters available. The good news is that the long wait and the anticipation have been generously rewarded.   

[i] Page numbers are to Niven’s book. Richard Burton’s Biography, A Strong Song Tows Us is referred to throughout as Burton.

[ii] I transcribed this from Peter Bell’s film, Basil Bunting: An introduction to the work of a poet (1982). He seems to say something after ‘David Jones’ but I can’t understand it.

[iii] The poem was written sometime in the 1920s but first published in 1930. As Niven explains, the letters cast doubt on the standard dating and chronology of some of the poems.

[iv] The description belongs to W.B. Yeats. He surprised Bunting by reciting one of Bunting’s poems from memory when they met.

[v] Poetry, Vol. 120, No. 6 (Sep. 1972), pp. 361-365 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20595781

[vi] Another transcription, this time from a talk Bunting gave in London, in Keats’ house, in 1979.  From ‘The Recordings of Basil Bunting’ with thanks to the late Richard Swigg who looked after ‘The Bunting tapes’.

[vii] Julian Stannard. Basil Bunting Writers and their work.  p.88

[viii] Consigning Bunting to the role of ‘Pound’s disciple’ is to misrepresent him as badly as Tom Pickard is misrepresented when his own excellent poetic output is ignored and he’s remembered simply as the boy who midwifed Briggflatts.

[ix]  Zukofsky’s response to this letter and whatever Pound had written that offended Bunting so much, can be read in Pound/Zukofsky Selected letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky ed Barry Ahearn.  

[x] Williams, Joanthan, ‘Some Jazz from the Bazz: The Bunting-Williams Letters’ in The Star you Steer By. Ed, McGonigal and Price.

[xi] For Hewett and a recent example of this problem of confusing poet and poem see the remarks in https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/04/the-whole-canon-is-being-reappraised-how-the-metoo-movement-upended-australian-poetry

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Highwire poetry

Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light
Reagan M. Sova, First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages, US$17
LIAM GUILAR takes a ringside seat for a dazzling extravaganza

‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

Set in the first decades of the twentieth century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, and in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW) and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the Festival of Light for his dead relatives.

A lot happens.

At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission

the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J

i had the song in hand but i

could not do it without the right guitar

nor the Locksmith keys

not even the rabbis have them

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW. Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names – Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs – and recognisable conditions and historical events, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitative hucksters and frauds. His is an American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and good guys find friendship and love, and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm.  

When Alf, the circus master, asks the thirteen years-old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle

i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight

i have seen bob’s jar of brandy

i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster

i have seen the blood trickling

from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating

i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness

i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for 250 pages. Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating an unforgettable story world.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

A Queen in the Wilderness

LIAM GUILAR‘s epic of post-Roman Britain enters its eighth chapter

The Story So Far (Chapters 2-7 inclusive have all previously been published on this site, starting here). The complete poem will be published as A Man of Heart in 2023, by Shearsman.

Mid Fifth 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. Following standard imperial practice, he has employed Saxon mercenaries led by Hengist. Together they have defeated the immediate threat of an army of Picts and a Northern rebellion and stabilised the province. Vortigern has married Hengist’s daughter.

Part two begins with Vortigern leading the Field Army towards a meeting of the Northern Lords, hoping to convince them that a unified province is in their best interests. The precarious balance of power he has established is about to be destroyed.

1

Damp woollen clothes,

the itch and stink of them,

never dried, except when smoked

acrid by the heat of a fire.

Rain falls, drifts, batters,

the wind skins the rocks

or drags mist from the hollows

while the clouds smother the hill tops.

Ragged local guides thread

the mounted column

through unmapped valleys.

Occasionally the mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

curves the northern horizon.

Riders keeping below the ridge,

following the main party.

Like guilt, thought Vortigern,

not enough to stop his progress;

a persistent qualification

intent on being noticed.

Confrontation seemed inevitable.

He rode towards it.

The lead rider, Hengist’s latimer,

dismounted, knelt and greeted him.

The second removed the gilded helmet

shook out her hair and said:

‘Wæs hæilVortigern Cyning.’[ii]

The drab hillsides patched with torn cloud,

the finest of drizzle-intensified colours,

the brown horse, the green, rain darkened cape.

Her hair, like dull gold, shaking loose.

Hengist’s delighted chuckle.

A sound so rare,

he turned to see who was behind him.

Dull gold of her hair.

Finger tipping an impossible softness.

He claws for his mind but undressing

            a marvel

                        green eyes

            watch

like a diver

assessing the risk

before

committing herself to gravity.

Fingertipping, soft

            a marvel but

it’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

                        Green eyes

wide open, watching?

‘Lauerd king wæs hæil;

For þine kime ich æm uæin.’

It’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

‘This is no place for a Queen.

I left you safe, with your uncle.

We ride towards a confrontation.

Go home.’

‘My home is with my husband.

I have come to see the lands you gave me.

You are riding I think to a council,

a gathering of the northern tribes.’

‘Go home, lady.

This is no fit place for a Queen.’

He turns back to the valley floor.

The riders follow,

keeping just below the ridge line.

Like guilt, he thinks.

The column camped beside dark water.

He approved the choice of ground,

checked there were skirmishers along the heights,

made sure the baggage train was safely in,

waited for the rear guard to arrive.

See him talking with his officers,

noticing their discipline

making time to hear their stories,

in the bustle of the camp,

where behaviour is defined

as clearly as the perimeter

he rides out to inspect,

ignoring the presence

dragging at his attention.

Tents pitched, guards posted,

before the light began to fade

he wandered through the lines,

through the susurration

of tired conversations

stopping to talk to weary riders

commending them on the care

they gave each other, their arms and horses.

His world, where he was most at home,

contaminated by their shadow,

stopped on higher ground,

erecting simple shelters.

She sits beside the latimer

watching the busy camp below.

‘I stopped counting things I’d never seen before.’

‘There were too many?’

‘Yes. The way

water spills from the cliff top and wavers as it falls.

Clouds and birds below us, in the valley.

My uncle hates mountains,

says they remind him of a heaving sea.

What is the best word to describe

how stray clouds drift across the hillside?’

‘Drift is good.’

‘They remind me of assassins.’

‘In daylight?’

‘Not all assassins wait for darkness.’

Small figures

scrambling towards them,

become Vortigern

and his guard

slithering in the scree.

Keredic removed himself.

A man can turn a hill into a mountain;

an evening stroll into an epic climb.

From the valley floor

he could see a band of rock,

her tethered horse cropping the grass,

the shadow of a cave.

Then the damp fog became the world.

Smooth stones skittering behind him,

stalled in a dreamlike lack of progress.

She was sitting inside the cave.

She did not rise or greet him.

‘Lady. This is not wise or safe.’

‘Not safe? Here?

In the green world, in the wind and rain.

There are no dangers here that can’t be faced.

But stranded in a hut, hedged

by brutal threats and body parts?

No reason to greet the day

or welcome the night?

This is not safety but burial,

alive, behind locked doors

until the stallion calls to rut. 

I am not ‘Hengist’s daughter’

live bait to trap a wary fox.

I am myself. And I chose you.’

When he had finished,

she waited for him to leave

but he lay beside her,

on one side of the causeway

looking to the mythic landfall

on the other side.

He had heard the stories

of the cottage in the woods.

A stand of body parts

and heads that shrieked

if anyone approached.

What had she recognised in him?

He had done nothing to earn

this devotion.

2.

The rain intensifies.

A man is speaking quietly,

someone laughs.

Keredic is singing.

His song sounds older than the rocks.

She is no longer Hengist’s daughter.

Or the wife of Vortigern the King.

She is like rock, tree or river,

as certain as the mountains

and as patient, waiting

for his act of recognition.

Half way across, and no more stones. 

He can go back, he’s always done before.

Rise, fumble for his clothes.

Or he can brave the distance to the other side.

If it’s a choice?

A man stands in the cathedral ruins

looking at the sky.

The bombed reality softened by a memory

of upright walls, unbroken roof.

Even if ghosts and stray dogs

scuffle in the garbage

he can remember people in the pews,

the drift of sacred music,

the certainties of ritual.

Easier to live here,

where the shattered past

still feels like home than leap into a world

that’s blank and waiting to be born?

No maps, no rules, no precedent.

When a Queen rides, armed, in the wilderness

this is an unimagined world.

‘Lady, may I stay with you tonight?

And tomorrow, would you ride with me?’

They say: her smile is like the sunrise;

the slow spread of light and promise

after the horrors of the night,

but she never smiled at ‘them’ like this.

And later, she says, ‘But tomorrow night

we find a bed with fewer stones?’

3

Teetering over the river

the complex was scattered,

across the flat hill top

like bad teeth in a jawbone; 

great hall like a strange squat wooden tent

with a scattering of huts

surrounded by a ditch and palisade.

A growth on the land,

like hanging smoke,

beside a barrow

where the ancestors slept.

A chaos of temporary shelters

festering down the slope;

banners and stacked spears,

horses, mules, carts.

Men clustered around small fires,

watching as they pass.

After days in the dripping quiet of the hills,

they were ambushed by noise and movement

crashing the private space she had begun to craft. 

The bellowing of slaughtered cattle.

Carpenters hammering and sawing

as huts went up to hold guests;

the smiths at work. Everyone

with a job to do and a place to be

swirling them into public routines.

She watched the Lords accumulate to greet him.

Then he was gone, as though the sea had surged

and dragged him off the beach into the rip

that sped him out towards the sky line

leaving her bereft and stranded.

Wives and daughters came to greet her,

took the bridle, set off in procession,

leading her towards an isolated hut.

Slaves brought silver bowls

with steaming water,

sweet smelling oils;

the women bobbed and fussed,

admired how beautiful she was,

then left and closed the door.

Next day, in the great hall,

Vortigern accepted homage,

dispensed gifts, discussed plans,

handed down judgements.

Alone in a hut that smelt

of smoke and fresh cut timber,

she was prowling from wall to wall.

Dressed in the finest silk

provided by their hosts,

hair dressed, jewels shining,

a predatory goddess

no slaughter could appease.

The silver dishes

scattered to the corners,

fine white towels thrown across the room,

the servants fled in terror.

She was waiting for the horns

that would summon her to the feast

when Keredic entered

to escort her to the hall.

Wall hangings flicking the firelight.

A tripod burning something fragrant.

No loom, no Mother Gothel.

I will hone my knife and hunt him down.

‘If I am Queen: this is my country?

Should I not be there when they discuss its future?’

Impossible to explain,

not one man in ten thousand

would have taken her to the gathering

and of that number, not one in a million

would have listened to a word she said.

‘Twenty four paces from hut to hall?

The door shut and guards all round.

Twenty four paces from where I should be.

I might as well be stranded on an island

staring at the cliffs and cut off by the tide,

locked here until he wants to fuck

his princess titznkuntnhair.’

4

If you were listening,

you could hear Dame Fortune

spin her wheel

and smile.

‘Chieftain,’ said his host,

‘God smiles on you.

Lords of the North,

retinues like honed blades

ready for war,

secure in their indifference

came here to talk.

Bishops and book-learned men

recording their agreements.

3 weeks, and not one death.

You have sold them an idea:

the priest safe with his flock,

the famer will go to his field,

the merchant to the market.

Ships bringing goods to our ports

and our roads busy with trade.

Chieftain, you are truly blest.

3 weeks we’ve feasted.

The bards of the north

have come to compete

for praise and honeyed mead.

Magnificent stories,

music to gladden the heart

and the last three nights

your wife as my companion at the table.

On God’s wide earth she has no match

for wit and wisdom. She knows

more stories than my poet.

Tells them better too.

No wonder men will follow you.’

Commotion at the gate.

First the messengers. Then the refugees.

Confusion, contradiction, disbelief.

Vortimer had slaughtered Hengist’s men.

Britons had crowned him King.

Horsa was dead. Vortimer this,

Vortimer that, massacre and murder.

Saxons hunted like wild pigs.

A bounty of ten silver coins for every Saxon head.

Its weight in gold for Hengist or his daughter’s.

            Slack mouthed the heads still speak:

            This will be our second child…on a stick;

            We were desperate, we were lucky…on a stick;

            He’d go off to work, and then come back…on a stick;

            If a man steers clear of strife, his children have a chance….on a stick.

Those considered loyal had died.

            You’re the best man for the job.

            The house smashed, the bodies…on a stick.

Pogroms and purges and a rising body count.

Vortigern thinking he had underestimated his son

until the name of Gloucester or his men

were noticed in every successful action.

But what was he doing? Vortimer, upright Christian boy,

exasperated by the heathens, wanting to protect his church,

deluded, predictable. But Gloucester

had both eyes open and could see

this was a war he couldn’t win.

The last messenger to arrive knelt before his King.

‘Speak up man, we do not punish the messenger for the message.’

But he muttered on, so Vortigern leant forward

and they all heard the oath,

saw the blade, saw him lunging for the King.

The host leapt between them.

Hengist’s seax stabbing the assassin’s throat.

Both men fell; Vortigern unhurt.

Rowena entering, breathless,

as the corpse was dragged away.

The assassin’s knife had skidded

off the King’s mail shirt

and pricked the host’s arm.

‘The knife is poisoned,’ said Rowena,

who knew about such things.

‘Lord,’ she said, ‘you have my gratitude

but find a priest and come to terms

with whatever God you worship.

You will be dead before the sun sets.’

Saxons preparing to ride, grim and resolute.

Experts in the rules that govern vengeance.

Rowena standing by her father, dressed to travel.

Despite the foul weather, there are ships beating north,

to risk the crossing and take them home.

As his world unravels.

Hengist making plans, seeing the scale of the disaster.

‘I will return with fifty ships of first rate fighters.

I will avenge my people and this insult to your rule.’

Vortigern walks the perimeter.

The short day is coming to an end.

His men are waiting his instructions.

The northern lords are waiting for instructions,

already wondering if they can be ignored.

There are no answers in the landscape.

It is as dull and littered as his mind.

As blank as the coin he’s turning in his hand.

All year watching Vortimer, Gloucester and their friends.

Sifting rumours of revolt, looking for sinew under insolence.

But the rebellion should have happened late in summer

or in the early spring next year. When the summer faded

they’d left Horsa on the coast, in striking distance

of any army mustering in the south. How could

he have been so wrong? He walks amongst the details,

picking over the pieces, asking why the building fell.

Since he was old enough to understand

he knew one day would find him:

Shipwrecked, broken and alone.

But that was not today.

This was another problem he could solve.

He had stumbled to the clarity beyond,

like the survivor of a shipwreck,

washed overboard,

surprised by solid ground,

looks back to see the surf that trashed him,

doesn’t break the skyline

and his tattered ship’s still floating in the bay.

He still had the field army.

They had no need of Hengist

to trash a mob of lordlings

and their reluctant, ill-armed tenants.

And he hadn’t been alone.

Trust someone because he can,

not because he has to?

In what language do those words make sense?

Dixit Dominus Deus

non est bonum

esse hominem solum

faciamus ei

adiutorium similem sui.[iii]

The sentry on the wall

will swear he heard the Thin One

repeat a Latin phrase

then laugh.

He lies of course, there was no laughter.

‘And I will make an help meet for him.’

It is easier to say ‘he laughed’

than accurately describe the small sound

a stranger made acknowledging

that understanding is redundant

when it’s delivered past its use by date.

5

Rowena sitting straight backed

staring at her fire.

We see her from behind.

Then her face in profile

as the sound she’s waiting for

breaks.

Vortigern straightens,

entering the room.

Stalled. Baffled. Wondering.

She rises. ‘Oh foolish man,’

she says, seeing his surprise,

‘when will you ever learn?’

The sound of a door being closed.

Perhaps he managed,

‘I watched you leave’

or, ‘I’m so sorry.’

An awkward blur of mouths,

hands, her hands, his hands, hard to tell.

Nose to nose,

he asks the golden lady,

‘What would you do?’

She had waited for this door to open.

But now the gate’s swung wide,

invited in, she pauses on the threshold;

‘I can taste winter; smell it on the wind.

Ice darkens the edges of puddles,

the thick mud hardens into rut and fold

and the wind tests the walls.

Outdoors everyone has begun to hurry.

The space from dwelling to hall becomes an ordeal.

Soon only the numbed sentry,

counting the cursed hours of his watch,

will stay squinting into the hazed light,

knowing no army moves in winter.’

‘Gloucester knows the northern winter.

He was trapped here on The Wall,

searching for his legion.

We’ve all heard his snowbound stories;

roads they had to swim across,

mud so deep men drowned in it.’

‘They were impatient,

their timing is inept.

Why are you smiling?’

‘Because incompetence is unpredictable.

They went too late or far too early.

The gods look down,

indifferent to our careful planning

and give their blessings to stupidity.’

‘I would go deep into the hills,

find a place we can defend

with half the men we have.

Then wait for Hengist to return.

And if I couldn’t find that place,

I’d build it, quickly.’

‘They‘ll expect us to go north.

We will go south and west and then

prey upon those who have betrayed us.’

‘We’ll plague the sleeping lords,

drunk by their cosy fires.

Burn their homes, steal their cattle,

kill their friends and families

and then come spring,

with Hengist’s help,

brush the remnants off the map.’

Vortigern called his officers together,

explained the friends and places lost,

named those who stood beside them.

‘You have been loyal. Now,

we travel to high country,

hard travelling, constant vigil.

From the mountains in the west,

we will fall upon the rebel lords,

we will reprimand their insolence.

They will learn the price of disobedience.’

The northern lords knelt before him.

‘Send for us when you are ready:

we will ride beside you.

Take our sons as hostages and guides.’

Local guides thread the column

through unmapped valleys.

The mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

leans forward to embrace them. 

[i] Old English Cwēn meant both ‘woman’ and ‘queen’.

[ii] Cyning, Old English for King, is pronounced ku-ning.

[iii] From The Vulgate. Genesis 2:18: ‘The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’

Posted on by Liam Guilar

The good old days?

This is chapter Seven of LIAM GUILAR’s almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three, Four,  Five and Six in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, see www.liamguilar.com

The story so far. Mid Fifth Century Britain. After the legions have withdrawn, the island is facing civil war and a growing number of external enemies. It is also experiencing a steady tide of pagan, Germanic migrants looking for land.

Vortigern has been appointed to protect what’s left of Roman Britain. Following standard imperial practice, he has employed Saxon mercenaries led by Hengist. Together they have defeated the immediate threat of an army of Picts and a Northern rebellion and stabilised the province. Vortigern has married Hengist’s daughter.

A united province could withstand any invader, but Vortigern faces growing resistance from his own people, potential betrayal by his own officers, and a simmering threat to his leadership from the exiled sons of Constantine. Before travelling to a meeting with the Northern Lords, he has to ensure the South West is safe. He uses his travels to gather information about his province. 

This brief chapter ends part one of the book.

The Britons object

‘Now listen to us, our lord the King,

listen to the advice of your councillors,

Bishops and book learned men,

chieftains and their men at arms.

You have bought disaster and evil upon yourself.

You have favoured heathens, abandoned God’s laws,

and fornicated with a foreign, pagan woman.

We beg you, for the sake of peace,

and God’s favour to your people,

cast them off, drive them out.

If you will not do so, we will drive them from the land

and cut them down, or die in the attempt.’[i]

Vortigern took the speaker’s sleeve,

gently between his thumb and finger.

‘Such fine brocaded silk.

Boots of finest Cordovan.

I see your wealth: I see no scars.

How will you fight with Hengist and his people?

You could not stop the rabble

who plundered your homes,

stole your wives and daughters,

dragged your sons to slavery.

You ran away and hid,

then crawled back on your bellies,

sniveling round your huts

as though your tears could put the fires out.

How will you fight these people,

when you could not fight without them?

No raider dares come south.

The crops are in, the cattle fed.

Where there was famine we have brought relief.

The traders bring the wine you drink,

the silk you wear. Men go to sleep

expecting they will see the morning.

What else do you require?’

‘We want them gone. They are a plague

corrupting everything they touch,

a filth that should be scoured from our land. 

When they exhaust their pigs, they chase our women.

Their women whore themselves for pleasure,

leading our young men to perversion and damnation.

Their grunting language hurts our ears.

Their disgusting customs foul our country.’

Keredic helps Vortigern to collect stories

Wondering what atrocity I’d be forced to witness,

I followed the Thin Man at Hengist’s insistence.

A slave does not demand an explanation.

Nor does he ask what’s in the cart

that slows armed riders to a painful crawl.

A scattering of huts,

angular and box like,

not the usual beehives.

There was no ditch or palisade.

They did not run away.

A tall blonde man, an axe in hand

strode towards us; Wes Þu hal.

He hadn’t heard of Vortigern

or was a brave man who didn’t flinch.

The cart is brought forward.

Inside there’s the carcass of a pig

and jars of wine and mead.

‘Tell him, if he cooks this,

I will share it with him.’

The man is impressed.

‘What does he want?’

Vortigern replies: ‘Stories’.

The pregnant girl

This was my family’s land, but my brother went with Constantine.

We never heard from him again. Mam died soon after.

One day this old man and his two sons appeared.

Tad was glad to have some help about the place

even if we couldn’t understand a word they said.

The boys worked hard. The old man knew his stuff

where sheep and pigs and cattle were concerned.

When the coughing sickness took their father,

tad asked the boys to stay. When he was dying,

he left our land to them. This bump will be our second child.

Their cousins are arriving soon. More workers in the fields.

More arms when neighbors try to filch our cows. 

The wife

We were desperate.

First year we grew nothing.

The rain was late, the frost came early.

Scrabbling on marginal land

I’d have whored my starving bones

for the leavings from their table

to feed the children.

But the local big man gave us food,

suggested we move here.

Fed us through the winter.

We’ll repay him with a pig this year.

And when it comes to fighting

my man’s arm will pay our debt.

We were lucky.

My sister and her daughter went begging at another villa’s door.

They stripped them both and beat them to the boundary.

She died soon after, but not before

they burnt her house, enslaved her children,

killed her man then went down on their knees

to thank their loving god.[ii]

At first I couldn’t understand

I jumped at any sudden noise.

At night it was so quiet

I couldn’t sleep.

He’d go off to work

and he’d come back!

Days, then weeks and months,

when no one died.

Vortigern asks questions

Inside their well-built house,

Vortigern admires the skill

of the woman’s weaving;

the well-made cloth.

He touches the solid jointed wood,

admires the functional designs

sees that an age of wood

might have its own attractions.

Curiosity is an appetite he can’t appease,

like the golden lady,

asking questions about everything.

Nothing is beyond his interest.

‘What is his name?’

It is not a slave’s place to disobey,

but I do say If I ask him that

he will recite his genealogy all the way to Woden

and the pig will be burnt before he’s finished.

‘Call him hlāford, it is an honorary title.’

‘And the woman?’ ‘Hlǽfdige.’

‘Ask him why he came to Britain?’

‘He says, my children.’

But he knows that’s not enough.

‘There was only so much land;

bad for crops and worse for cattle.

We’d heard the ground is fertile here

and if a man stays clear of strife

his children have a future.’

We left them to their pigs and fields.

The Thin Man paused on the hill,

overlooking the farm. Now, I thought.

Now they all die. But he said,

to me, to the slave,

to the less than nothing;

‘You can teach a soldier to be brave.

Train him well, he’ll stand his ground

when his drinking partner from the night before,

is split open and his guts are tangling his feet.

But you can’t teach the heroism of parents

faced with a sick child or a failed crop,

or the courage of migrant families.

Why should these people be my enemies?’

The broken work of giants[iii]

Vortigern moves around the country,

listening, making others listen.

Heading west after the wedding,

with Hengist and Rowena,

to visit his estates.

Her reaction to his villa.

How easily she was lost indoors;

hesitation entering any room,

hand reaching for her knife.

The way she was confused by corridors.

He heads off track towards

the largest building he had ever seen.

But the portico, with its broken columns,

its neck-wrecking upward reach,

was an immediate affront.

He overheard her muttering with her father:

‘Wrætlic is þes wealstan’

‘Wyrde gebræcon’

‘Burgstede burston’

‘brosnað enta geweorc.’[iv]

Hengist had remained outside.

She crept into the building, dwarfed and daunted.

Her escort, Hengist’s hand-picked, finest killers,

like frightened dogs nosing into a bad place.

Where the walls had fallen,

they left the escort and went on alone

over rubble and shadows,

hearing the scrabbling echoes of startled beasts

in the rattling echoes of their footsteps

‘till they emerged into the great pool;

the vast chambered emptiness of it.

Steam rising from the dark grey waters,

ribboned silver where the sunlight,

streaming through the broken ceiling

fifty feet above their heads,

patterned the water’s surface, flicking the walls.

He heard her muttering ‘giants’ and ‘magic’.

Ignore the memory of her body,

and the knowledge she had used that knife

to carve more than her meals.

He saw that he had frightened her and was ashamed.

Sit on the steps that lead down to the water,

explain, the way your grandfather explained,

how Baldud King, doomed by the rotting of his flesh,

came here, and bathed, and was made beautiful and whole.

How Romans came and bult a temple to Minerva

and prayed to her then let their slaves

scrape, pummel and then massage them clean.

Take her hand, explain the building and its functions.

Evoke the voices and the rituals,

memories from your granddad’s childhood,

and learn your explanation is another fairytale

no more credible than her mutterings

of vanished giants and sorcery.

He wanted to take her in the pool,

watch her wide-eyed wonder at its warmth,

but there was no time for self-indulgence.

Stepping into daylight, Saxons standing upright,

shaking away the shadows,

Hengist’s hand-picked killers once again.

They parted ways, Rowena, for her safety,

returning to her uncle in the east,

while Vortigern and Hengist headed west

to meet the man who had united

Dumnoni and Durotriges

and was now acknowledged as their leader.

Enter Gorlois[v]

Clean upright walls, no tiles missing on the roof,

memory made real in the present,

the strangeness of it lost in its familiarity.

The floors had been repaired, the garden tended.

The water feature was still working.

The room he waited in was someone’s library.

His hands hovered near the scrolls

but he resisted the urge to take one out,

drift on the beauty of carefully chosen words.

God save all bookish men, thinks Vortigern,

perhaps their time will come again.

A time for Latin poetry and dinners,

evenings in the garden, making plans,

knowing talk of literary sinners.

Gwendolin mustered Cornwall,

trashed her husband and his army

then ruled Britannia with an iron fist

disguised as women’s hands.

Has he fallen for the story?

Is he looking to the west

for a saviour who will rise?

So enter Gorlois.

A neat man, a tidy man.

A pious, praying man.

Gloucester said he looks so young

he could be taken for the 12 year old

he’d married to secure his future. Now

the western tribes acknowledge him as leader.

But the western tribes are so much landfill

if Vortigern decides they need to be subdued.

Given small commands, he’s been methodical,

imaginative and ruthless. Trustworthy,

obvious, but vague around the edges.

Impatient with stupidity. Often tactless.

Ambitious. Capable. But Loyal? Possibly.

Gorlois waits, doing his version of inscrutability.

Impassive as a figure painted on a wall:

‘Loyal soldier waiting for his orders.’

‘You can read? Good.’

Vortigern hands him two sealed scrolls.

‘Not now. Later. That one first.’

‘We head towards a gathering of the northern lords.

I’m giving you the land south of the Severn’s Mouth.

All forces west of Tamar are under your command.

You are to fortify the land and keep the raiders out.

Make sure the trade routes to the continent

stay open.’ He stops. There’s nothing else to say.

If Gorlois is intelligent he knows what needs be done.

If not, then telling him just wastes the time.

But the wall painting doesn’t speak.

Vortigern can hear the small unhurried sounds,

the breathing of his guards,

knows he cannot laugh, not now.

God save me from these amateur theatricals.

Gorlois kneels. And he could say;

Screw you, the West’s already mine;

Thank you, I’m honoured;

I am too young. I am not worthy;

I will repay your trust. Instead, he says

‘I accept.’ As though he had a choice.

Gloucester to his messenger

Take this to The Boys.

You will find them in Gaul,

where rivers flow uphill, springs geyser blood,

the dead walk home from battle fields

and mad dogs gambol in their wake.

Take my message. Tell them: soon.

End of Part One

[i] This first section is a close version of Laȝamon’s lines. He doesn’t identify the speaker. Vortigern’s reply is not Laȝamon’s.

[ii] See ‘The Landowner’ in A Presentment of Englishry. 

[iii] The idea that Roman ruins were the work of Giants, ‘enta geweorc’, occurs in Old English poetry.

[iv] The first two lines of ‘The Ruin’. Literally: This stone work is wonderful/ fate broke it/the fortified place is broken open/ the work of giants, decaying. (A less literal translation would do justice to the music of the lines.)

[v] Gorlois’ story is told in part three of A Presentment of Englishry.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Images of Bacon

Francis Bacon, by Reginald Gray. Wikimedia Commons

After/Après Francis Bacon

Alexander Adams, Bristol: Golconda Fine Art Books, 2022, 60 pages, £10. English and French (French translation by Peggy Pancini)

LIAM GUILAR follows an influential artist’s flamboyant trajectory through verse

Some years ago, the Canadian critic, Hugh Kenner, in conversation with Charles Tomlinson, lamented the disappearance of the ‘documentary tradition’ in poetry. He was referring to poetry where the verse functions primarily as a carrier of information. He was not making the false distinction between form and content, but describing a type of poetry that could be read for information the way one would read a newspaper, text book or biography. In Kenner’s view, such poetry had all but disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century, to be replaced by the egocentric poetry of the Romantics, and the poetry emptied of significant content written by those who followed. Alexander Adams’ new book, his seventh, After/Après Francis Bacon, proves the book length documentary poem is still being produced, despite its unfashionable nature.

Adams, an artist as well as a poet, takes as his subject the life of Francis Bacon (1909-1992).  The poems follow the trajectory of Bacon’s life, from his early years in Ireland, via his time in Paris and London, to his death in Madrid. There is a facing page French translation by Peggy Pancini.

The book’s twenty-one numbered but untitled sections read like stills from a documentary film. The sequence begins in Ireland, appropriately with colours:

Surrounded by duns, olives, sages,

grey browns of trampled paddocks

the alcohol blue flame of asphyxia

burns with all the vignetting of unconscious

darkening and diffusing the periphery. (p.4)

Moving to London in the blitz:

Down from the ruin [Sic] ramparts

men grey with dust pass bundles

and expressionlessly scrape up

former people with their shovels. (p.14)

To Tangiers:

Sweet mint tea on the terrace,

hashish smoke wafts over.

Sea is flat as a strip of paper.

Endless warmth, dry air.

Paint dries fast but ideas come slow. (p. 34)

The writing evokes place and time, and like any biography contains snippets of social history: Paris after the Occupation; London rebuilding after the war, later a lost world of dilly boys, when homosexuality was still illegal, and where, in the saloon bar of The Grapes, ‘where men commune’:

The only woman is Marie,

behind the counter, beehive hairdo,

artificial nails, counting shillings,

menthol cigarette at the

corner of painted lips. (pp. 47/48)

The artist’s development is sketched into this trajectory. From his first excitement at seeing Picasso in Paris, which ‘broke you out of Edwardian airs/-dainty portraits, potted ferns-/and shaped you modern’ to an early exhibition where the punters, faced with ‘ostrich bodied, Buchenwald cadavers’, walked out in disgust ‘glad to be out of/their unwholesome presence’. To fame, drink, drugs, and finally death in Madrid.

The danger inherent in a poetry where information is the focus is that the writing can read like notes for a story that hasn’t been written. Details accumulate, but without context or effect and the possibilities of rhythm and sound are sacrificed. Section ten begins:

Men bending, lifting a heavy weight

Paralytic child crawling

Mastiff walking slow

Woman throwing a stick, three quarter view (p.28)

and continues like for this for the rest of the section’s mostly unpunctuated seventeen lines. It could be an exhibition catalogue, a summary of works produced, or it could be a young artist noticing the world around him, or all three. As information it is confusing; as poetry it’s flat.

Adams usually avoids this trap. His clipped declarative style keeps the story moving and creates deft images. The blank canvas is

-a mute mirror to perfect order

refuting the composite imagery

that grows so richly elsewhere.

At night,  the canvas stands unchanging

like a locked door without a handle. (p.48)

The overall experience of reading After/Après Francis Bacon, is very similar to walking through a gallery hung with large pictures. Moving through them in their numbered sequence suggests they are related. However, the connections between the pictures are left unstated, and at times continuity and coherence are suggested solely by the fact that one picture follows the next.

It’s obvious that the Model Reader of this book knows as much about Francis Bacon as Adams does, and for that reader little will be obscure. Leaving aside the question whether the poems offer such a reader any new insight on Bacon’s life, what about the reader who knows nothing about Francis Bacon the artist?

It’s possible to enjoy the poems as poems. Adams provides enough information to suggest a biography. Relationships are hinted at. Names occur: Eric, Peter, George. However, there are sections where a lack of background knowledge makes the writing obscure.

Next day, the apartment was wrecked,

plaster gouged by chair leg at head height,

wine bottle dashed upon the tiles,

a canvas is rent open in a frayed V

lying on its side, cockeyed. (p.36)

Are we witnesses to a raucous drunken night or domestic abuse?

In passages like these, Adams makes no attempt to cater to the visitor to his exhibition who has strolled in out of curiosity. In section XV, if you don’t know who George was, then the seventeen lines listing some of George’s actions are just a list and the writing doesn’t make the list interesting.

George climbing a set of steps.

George cycling, double exposure

George seated on a stool

George seated on a chair, legs crossed (p.38)

However, even if, like me, a reader knew nothing about Francis Bacon before reading After/Après Francis Bacon, there is enough of his life in the poem and enough life in the poems to sustain and reward the reader’s attention. The writing, which is mostly vividly impressionistic, is guaranteed to make you want to know more about Bacon and his art.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Chapter Six. The Wedding

This is chapter Six of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, see www.liamguilar.com

The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain where they have been taken on as mercenaries by Vortigern, the newly appointed leader of the Province. Having defeated an army of Picts, Hengist has tricked Vortigern’s son into giving him land where he has built a stronghold.

Holding a feast to celebrate its completion, he intends to use the opportunity to introduce his daughter, Rowena, to Vortigern.

At which point I part company with the Medieval Story Tellers. I don’t believe a hard-headed war lord would throw away everything he’d worked for in his rush to get his hands on his servant’s daughter. While the story of the King who throws away his kingdom for ‘the wrong woman’ repeats throughout medieval versions of the Legendary History, it’s hard to find an historical ruler of Britain before the thirteenth century who did it.

The Wasshail ceremony, central to the story of Vortigern, is possibly a memory of a very old English custom. 

Set up

Hengist’s hall, the feast raucous.

New arrivals at the long benches;

long haired, eager, boastful,

beside their wary British guests.

Behind a door, a room in candle light[i].

Shadows, female laughter. The maids

circle, bob and fuss, like dull moons

orbiting a blazing star. Rowena the still

pensive centre as clothing is adjusted.

They have sprinkled gold dust in her hair.

A jewelled necklace drags attention to her breasts.

A golden belt shows off her slender waist

and amplifies the outward flare of hips.

Hengist, watching from the door, sees her

for once, as any man sees any woman.

Knows lust will strangle Vortigern

and side step all his calculations.

Swats the unwanted images

that flicker bodies rutting on the furs.

What father wouldn’t trade his daughter for a kingdom?

What daughter wouldn’t for a crown?

But when she leaves this room,

she is no longer Hengist’s daughter

but the Wife of Vortigern the King.

Time to take the jewelled cup.

Surprised by her own fear,

thrown from this busy room

alone on the anticipated shore.

The boat has gone and left her here

in darkness. In the distance

Aestrild’s ghost grows restless[ii].

Her hands betray her, spilling wine.

The maids cower, apologizing.

While they clean the cup she will not look at him.

The second time her hands don’t shake.

No words. She moves towards the door.

If you would call her back, now is the time.

Hall-noise heralds the death of Hengist Father.

Who knew this could be so painful?

That she was beautiful,

no one who saw her will deny.

That it was beauty in excess

of human expectations,

all who saw her will attest.

That she was clever,

brave and loyal,

is yet to be revealed. 

As she entered the riot of the hall,

she infected it with silence.

A ripple of turning heads,

abandoned conversations.

Every man who saw her wanted her

but as she moved towards the King,

through the swamp of their desire,

their lust was spittle on a white-hot blade.

And though she moved with the grace of a swan on still water

he was a scarecrow staring at a golden avalanche

and she was the tidal wave bearing down on a mud brick wall.

She kneels before him and lifts the cup:

‘Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin.’

He looks up and she is sunlight exploding in his face,

shattering thought, making everything background 

only except her face in focus, the world its dull penumbra.

Turning to Keredic, who mistranslates shock

as linguistic incompetence

and launches into cultural explanations:

‘It is a custom, in the Saxon’s land

where ever a company gathers to drink,

friend greets friend and says:

Dear friend, be well. The other says, Drinc hail.

The one that has the cup, he drinks it up.

The cup’s refilled. He gives it his companion

and when the cup is brought,

they embrace each other thrice.

This is the practice in the Saxon’s land.

and thought a noble custom throughout Germany.’[iii]

Take the cup, kiss her, drink.

Her breath brushes his cheek.

Her soft lips taste of wine and metal.

Four story tellers all agree[iv]

this is where the Devil puts in an appearance

to mess with Vortigern,

overwhelming his common sense

with lust for a pagan girl.

It’s the adjective that horrifies.

A different Vortigern, emerging from his private earthquake,

green eyes, watching him, soft lips, another drink.

Stumbling out of incoherence,

he understands the myth of the medusa;

how looking at a woman can turn a man to stone.

Negotiations

He has to ask for something he could take:

his servant’s daughter. The power inversion

obvious to both of them, so to preserve the niceties

they pretend this was an accident,

that both of them are taken by surprise.

(No laughing please, this should be serious.)

My daughter? You want to marry her?

Vortigern pretends it is desire that speaks:

how beautiful etc, how desirable etc…

(As if it mattered what she looked like.)

Who would have thought, at his age,

he would be honoured.

Hengist pretending he must ask his brethren.

Then the haggling when they both know Kent

and Thanet are her bride price.

But Vortigern rejects the script.

Her Morning Gift, lands in the west,

in the hill country to its north.

Fine cloths, jewels from the east,

horses, saddles, oils. ‘Kent

is not mine to give.

Thanet’s already yours.

But if your sons will follow me

I will give them all the land

between the turf wall and the stone.’

And that shocks Hengist.

Wedding celebrations

Master Wace wrote: ‘He desired her in the morning when they met,

and had her that same night.’ Our Priest, horrified;

‘There were no Christian rites, no priest nor bishop,

he had her in the heathen fashion

took her maidenhead, defiled himself.’

But you don’t expect twelfth century clerics

to sympathise with physical desire.

Or recognise a business proposition.

They will always blame the woman. 

There will be a celebrant and a venue

appropriate for the ritual.

After the prayers and public promises;

feasting, dancing, speeching, drinking,

obligatory fornication with or without an audience.

‘After the feast they slept together’

is how Welsh story tellers described a wedding.

Was she frightened?

Embarrassed by your greed,

or did her own lust

shade the colour of her eyes?

Did you come to trade?

Or did you come to conquer?

There was a door, there must

have been a door. A room

with fittings, shapes, colours.

There was her body, a blur of

detail, memories, green eyes.

Reduced to naked ape with thumping heart.

The gravity of need, the greed of flesh for flesh.

Then clothed, walking in the daylight world

to find the keys to the castle have been pawned.

Bank, ditch and palisade redundant

and in the inner room, behind the locked door,

watched by the sleepless guard who lets no body enter, 

there’s a stranger in the dimmest corner

and a version of yourself you do not own.

Maelgywn of Gwynedd murders every woman

who shares his bed, refusing to accept

the obligations the act implies.

(And still finds willing takers

convinced the risk is worth the prize).

Cunnedagus of the Demetae 

gives such women to his retinue.

He was petrified.

Then she stepped out of her clothes,

stepped towards him,

breaking one spell

casting another.

Aubade

Familiar words in unfamiliar accents,

soft, golden, fragrant, warm.

We are not children playing in a sandpit

ruling our private universe

with plastic armies that can be replaced,

where cities made of sand can be destroyed

and then rebuilt, forgetting that the adults

will call us in and put an end to all our games.

The world won’t wait for us.

While bodies are engaged,

the mind in search of answers

slips into the darkness

where the Latin titles drift

like burnt pages on the breeze,

past broken statues of dead men

whose names have been forgotten;

through ruined halls and shattered walls:

discarded answers that no longer satisfy.

No matter how delirious the frenzied shoving match

(soft, fragrant, warm) the mind drifts on alone,

in the high passes above the snowline,

looking down into the valleys

to the interminable journey

and fading fast the certainty

that there is an end to travelling

where the answers can be found

soft fragrant adequate and warm.

Stay with me?

He leaves the golden marvel on the furs

and searches for his clothes.

She stretches, mutters, ‘Stay with me.

Sleep here.’ He hesitates.

Locrin tightening his belt,

steps outside the earth house

into the frost of a winter’s morning,

as the whalebone doors slide shut

on his desire.

The great gates of Tintagel grinding shut

behind a man who runs

before his lover can discover who he is.[v]

Both wanting to say, take me back,

before the fog has lifted from the river

or the ice has melted on the castle gate.

Their minds are filled from dawn to dusk

with fantasies of welcome;

blinking, baffled, overjoyed,

as the great gate swings open

the whalebone door is moved aside,

as if the hind will greet the hound

that runs it down to rip its throat out.

He is not suffering from their disease.

Flesh calling to the memory of flesh,

promising oblivion and pleasure.

But there are things he has to do.

[i] This scene, where Hengist watches his daughter being decked out in her finery, although expanded here,  is Laȝamon’s addition to his sources.

[ii] Aestrild’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2020). Rowena hears it in Chapter one and  it haunts her.

[iii] From ‘It is a custom’ to ‘Germany’ is a loose translation of Laȝamon. Even in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s earlier Latin version the words of the ceremony are given in a form of English. It’s possible the custom is very old and also possible it is the origin of ‘wassailing’.

[iv] Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Laȝamon. The implication in all four is that had Rowena been baptised first, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Vortigern makes this point in the previous chapter.

[v] Locrin’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry, Uther’s in the next part of this project. Both men endanger their kingdoms through their infatuation.

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Chapter Five – An age of wood

This is Part Five of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Part One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three and Four in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, visit www.liamguilar.com

The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain where they have been taken on as mercenaries by Vortigern, the newly appointed leader of the Province. Their immediate, shared problem is an army of Picts. In the long term, Hengist’s desire to establish a kingdom must bring him into conflict with the Britons. He is scheming to ensure the conflict will be fought on his terms. Vortigern’s desire to save the Province will bring him into conflict with Hengist, but also with Vortimer, his eldest son and those Britons who resent his even-handed rule, while happily benefitting from it. The story of Thongcaester in this chapter marks the continual shift in the Legendary History between possible history and the world of folk tales.

Snap shot of Hengist

‘Fuck me’, said Horsa,

‘that’s a lot of paint.’

The Pictish horde, a festering

howl of painted bodies, surging

towards the silent lines,

stopping, stepping back,

closer each time,

building the rhythm

of their final charge.

‘We should pray now to Woden, god of all battles?’

‘If you wish’, replies Hengist. ‘I’m betting on our Roman.’

No speeching, no boasting,

no threats of discipline.

Vortigern had explained what needed to be done,

trusting his soldiers would do it.

And wonder of wonder, they trust him.

Hengist admires the choice of ground.

The limited front negates the Pict’s numerical superiority.

The lack of slope, conventionally a disadvantage,

leaves the cavalry who loiter on the flanks

an open field to move across.

The pitch perfect voice steeling the ranks.

In an avalanche of noise, the Picts attack.

‘Hold your lines!’ says the voice.

The Picts shatter like glass hurled against a wall. 

Brothers in Arms

After they destroyed the Picts

and massacred the survivors,

after they hunted raiders in the west,

after the spoils had been divided.

‘You’re staring at your spear,’ said Hengist, ‘is something wrong?’

‘It would look better’, says his brother, ‘with his head on it.‘

Hengist smiles. ‘The Picts and Scotti, they are worthy enemies?’

Horsa thinks about it, nods, ‘Bold fighters, yes, strong warriors.’

‘In every battle that we’ve fought’, says Hengist, tiptoeing,

‘we’ve been outnumbered but we’ve held the field,

yet lost so few in doing so?’ Horsa, still imagining his spear

adorned with Vortigern’s head, nods, admitting this is true.

‘We gave him our word that we will serve.’

‘Was it still our word in their birdy babble?

We told our people we would find a home.

How is this home if we don’t give the orders?’

‘Everyone but god takes orders.

Fifty of the best fighters these islands have seen

are sparrow fart in a thunderstorm

if we inherit his enemies and turn

his former friends into our foes.

Either we finish off his enemies

and slaughter all his friends

so you can decorate your spear.

Or we serve him well,

bait our trap and when he’s caught

the hired hand becomes the master’s equal

and our grandsons give the orders.’

‘So we’re sending for my niece?’

‘Soon’, says Hengist, ‘soon,

I’ll be sending for my daughter.’

Vortigern lectures his eldest son on recent history

‘Four hundred years the legion kept us soft.

They broke the tribes, removed

their expertise with point and edge.

Head hunters once, we worried about status,

cultivated roses, practised Latin,

patronised the makers of Mosaic floors.

The legions kept the peace and fought the Empire’s wars.

They were the turtle’s shell and we the soft

delicious flesh barbarians dreamt

of feasting on. Now the legions have gone over

and left us on our own. The forts are empty,

the watchtowers home to nesting birds.

The weapons we kept hidden, heirlooms,

are a language we’ve forgotten how to speak.

Time washed us up, defenceless and alone,

like a turtle stranded on its back.

Now the predators are moving in.

Until we train an army, we hire muscle.’

‘These men are pagans, father.

What kind of world will you build with their help?

We should exterminate them all

and build God’s kingdom on their bones.’

‘Oh child, your Jesus loves us all?

He cares and is compassionate?

He is a just and loving God?

Did your mother deserve her fate? 

What terrible crime could she commit

to earn such terror and such pain?

Do you believe the Gods are even handed?

Prayer will not drive the raiders back.’

‘You favour them.

I have no land. I have no income.

I have no household of my own.

They point at me and say,

There goes Vortimer nithing.

His father does not trust him.’

‘What is there in what I’ve done

suggests I do not trust you?’

‘You will not let me fight beside you.

You are keeping me from glory.’

‘There is no glory fighting pirates.

I want you to gather Britons

who are willing to fight.

I want you to help Gloucester train them.’

‘Help him? I am your son.’

‘And you have no experience,

no skill, no proven aptitude.

What do you know of training fighting men?

Survival depends on our success.

This is not a time for-self-appointed experts.

Do this and I shall give you land:

and income for your household.’

‘And should I refuse to second Gloucester?’

Vortigern, saying nothing, leaves.

Snap shot of Hengist #2

Gods roll their dice, or fortune cranks her wheel.

You choose your metaphor to regulate the chaos.

Despite the fragile palisade and ditch,

it’s just another village; the usual beehive huts,

wattle fences, pigs, angry dogs. Hardworking adults.

Dirty children looking up to see the sky collapse.

It’s in Vortigern’s path, where and when it needs to be.

Held by some sad fool who calls himself a King,

who thought he could defy the call to Lincoln.

A stash of weapons and some looted goods

are all excuse he needs to make this place a name

to go before the army to infect his enemies with fear

and curdle resolution. The name will mean,

terrifying cruelty; it will translate annihilation.

Warriors slipped off the leash are happy to oblige.

Vortimer sits on the hillside, with two bound captives.

They will carry the news. They will spread the virus.

Horrified, he had protested to his father:

‘You’re letting pagans murder Christians.’

‘Treason is a crime that must be punished,

regardless of the gods they claim to serve.’

Hengist, bloodless, arriving with Keredic.

‘He has a wife and daughter.’ The irrelevance

confusing father and son into baffled silence.

‘He wants to know if the King is married?’

‘My mother is with God and all his saints.

She worshipped Christ.’ ‘Where was He then

when I buried what was left of her?’

‘Raiders? Saxons?’ ‘Britons,

scratching at old tribal sores.

She wasn’t British.’ Hengist bows.

‘He says he’s sorry for your loss.’

Sincere, but qualified,

even in translation.

Thongcaester

Success following success, the age of stone

gives way to wood. See Vortigern the King,

now seated on his wooden throne,

in a wooden hall, smoke filled and dim.

The shadows threaten. The council has dissolved,

he is the one the people look to for solutions

But they remember their grandfathers despised the younger man.

Those who were punished forget how they had sinned.

The sons of those rewarded forget their loyal fathers bled

to earn the lands and titles they inherited.

Vortigern can hear death sharpening her scythe,

scraping in his dreams, the endless ‘help me’.

The whining of the privileged, the weeping of the poor,

silenced as Hengist went down on one knee.

‘Lord’, he said, ‘we have served you well.

We have wives, children, but no home.

We have kept the promises we made.

I ask for land to settle as our own.’

Vortigern, touching the coin he wears,

‘You will dig a ditch and build a palisade.

You will invite your family and your allies

you will forget the promises you made.’

‘We gave our oath that we would serve.

We served, we all bled, many died.

I do not ask for much.’ ’Good dog’,

I’ll give you land,’ Vortimer replied.

The understudy claiming the performance.

He is stepping out to claim the light.

The assembly shoals. Some out of curiosity,

some keen to see the son and father fight.

The King, enthroned, watching,

inscrutable. His silence a surprise.

Gloucester tugging the boy’s sleeve,

whispering, ‘My lord this is unwise.’

‘If it is my land’, this to his father,

‘then I can give it to your dog without your leave.

He only needs enough space for a kennel.

I will give you’, and he pauses,

like a comedian anticipating his applause,

‘as much as you can cover with a flayed bull’s hide.’

Hengist, ignoring insult and insulting laughter,

listening to Keredic, asks: ‘Covered by?

Repeat his promise, but contained in.’

No one notices the switch of verbs.

‘Now make him swear, on all that he holds holy,

that he will give to me as much land

as can be contained within a flayed bull’s hide.’

This nit picking, detracting from his moment,

infuriating Vortimer: ‘I swear by God

and all his saints, by Holy Mother Church,

upon my mother’s grave and on

God’s wounded hands and feet and side

I will give this heathen as much land

as can be contained within a flayed bull’s hide

and freely give him leave, to host as many

as can stand or sit and shit in it.’

Smirking applause from the sycophants,

who may live long enough to learn that Hengist

should not be underestimated.

Or insulted. Nor should Vortigern.

Adolf picking at his cloak

won’t look at anyone.

Hengist, his brother, and their retinue

trailing a growing entourage of British Lords

who thought the joke too good to miss,

wander through Vortimer’s possessions

with a calculated insolence

that worried only Gloucester.

Until they found a hill, wrapped in a river bend,

with steep slopes falling to the water

a fresh spring, clear views, a wood nearby.

While the others camped and drank,

and waited for the punch line to the joke,

the brothers sauntered down the river to the sea.

When they returned they flayed a bull,

to Vortimer’s confusion gave the hide

to the most skilled of all their leather workers,

who sharpened his knives,

and cutting the thinnest of lines,

made a single, long, unbroken thong.

As the onlookers grew silent,

Hengist marked out his new property.

Saxons were soon digging a ditch

building a palisade, hauling timber,

hammering together a fine high hall

for fire and feast and fellowship

and huts, for families, for the ale maker,

a smithy with a forge, wattle fences for the kine.

With a speed the Britons would ascribe to magic,

the Saxons to their own hard work and skill,

the hill was cleared and Hengist’s new home built.

He called it Thongcaester, lest Vortimer forget.

It was not as big as Pevensey or Porchester.

but big enough. Then he sent for his wife

and his sons and his daughter.

Before the wedding

There’s thunder in the east.

Gloucester walks with Vortigern

through the ruins of a villa

and the flicking of the first drops

of a welcome summer shower.

Given jobs that he does well,

Adolf has been generously rewarded,

the benefits of obedience

outweighing the temptation to rebel.

The journey here, past ruined temples,

ruined homes, strung together 

by ruined roads reminding Vortigern of Ovid.

So much changes; so little stays the same.

But he is wary of bad metaphors.

Landscapes are not people. 

Gloucester is a stouter version

of the up and coming man

most likely to succeed.

Translating his personal ambitions

to devotion to the public cause;

the restoration of the Council,

the unification of the Province.

But hard to tell if he has changed

or if his new clothes are just old clothes

dyed and cut a different way.

‘The Boys?’[i]

‘Are not a problem, yet.’

‘They blame you for their brother’s death.’

‘His retinue got drunk and slaughtered everyone.’

‘A retinue of Picts that you had trained.

‘He sent me away.

When he realised

I‘d stand beside the Council.

When he couldn’t pay,

they killed him.’

‘They claim it was a ruse

to make the Picts afraid,

to force them to rebel.

Because you wanted to be King.’

‘And then I killed them all?

I cleaned up the mess, remember?’

‘To cover up your crime.’

‘That’s not what happened.

What other news?’

‘Hengist’s wife and daughter have arrived.’

A silent Vortigern admires the broken wall

where a rose bush has grown wild.

‘He’s going to pitch her at you.

At this great feast in his new hall.’

What would the owner of this rose

think of the incomers

who built their cooking fires

upon his mosaic floor?

‘We pay him for his service: he’s our servant.

I marry his daughter: he becomes our ally.

My father in law. Our equal.’

‘If you turn her down, he’ll revolt.

The word is fifty keels have landed.’

‘Seventeen. I had them counted.’

‘Seventeen or fifty. Fifty Picts did Constantine.’

The tide rolls in.

There is no dam, dyke, ditch

will keep it back.

What’s seventeen keels,

each day twice as many land

scattering incomers along the coasts

families moving inland

some intent on mayhem

others looking to settle.

If we do not find a way

to make them part of us

they will make us irrelevant.

Take the title, become the title.

The obligations of the office

before personal desire?

‘He will expect a Morning Gift.’

‘Then give him Thanet. It’s already his.

It’s not like she’s deformed,

or old. They say she’s stunning.

You get to break her in.

Teach her a trick or two.’

Golden hair incongruous

against the bishop’s bony knees.

‘I’m marrying a woman or a horse?’

His awkward attempts at blokiness rebuffed

Gloucester withdraws, hurt and baffled,

like a puppy that’s been kicked.

Vortigern watched as summer rain

streamed off the roof. Someone

loved this garden. I had a wife.

The daughter of a Roman General

who had no time for flowers.

She liked things, pretty things.

She married me to guarantee

the hard bright pretty things

and we could have grown old

in comfortable indifference.

Take the title, be the title.

Do what needs be done.

‘And the Church, and the British Lords?

When they hear their King is fornicating

with a heathen, when they see the pagan,

Hengist treated as their equal?’

‘What they think won’t matter when we’re safe.’

‘Outrage is a pastime for the lazy.

A wedding will be one more faggot

for the funeral pyre.

She converts before we marry.’

‘The Bishops won’t baptise a Saxon.’

‘How long would it take

to dunk her in a river

and mutter the usual spells?’

‘Marry the girl. Hengist won’t revolt.

When The Boys return, we’ll have an army.’

How beautiful a garden after rain.

The intensity of colour, the clarity of scent.

Gloucester’s red cloak shrinks into the dusk.

An army I can trust? Unlike the one you’re training?

The word is Gloucester, you’re talking to The Boys.

If you make me choose,

I’d rather stand by Hengist than against him.

Vortigern returns to the rose bush.

Sweet smell of sadness and regret

after the rain, with the light fading.

[i] The sons of Constantine the King, who fled to Britany after their father and eldest brother were assassinated.

Posted on by Liam Guilar · 2 Comments

Adolf of Gloucester goes to the Wall

This is Part 3 of LIAM GUILAR’s still-being-written epic of Britain. Chapter 1 was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and you can read Chapter 2 in the previous issue of The Brazen Head.

The story so far: 449 AD. The Roman province of Britannia is tottering. The Legions have long gone and raiders and civil war are becoming endemic as central authority breaks down. The Ruling Council has sent Adolf of Gloucester1 on a mission to establish contact with the new war lords in the North and call them to a meeting. After that he is to continue further north to investigate the rumor of a lost legion. The Council intend to use such an army to protect the province. Adolf has other plans. Adolf’s main rival is called Vortigern. You can find out more about Vortigern and the Legendary History at www.liamguilar.com

Chapter Three: Playing Dress up in the Ruins.

Gloucester goes north

Ghosts on the great north road

moth-eaten capes, tarnished brass:

pretend Romans on a fading track

its edges blurred, the landscape

creeping back, erasing the affront.

The old Cursus Publicus.

No one waited with a change of horses

to speed them on their errand.

No patient slaves were waiting

to lead them to a bath house.

Stunned groups struggling south,

unable to say where they were going.

Some with belongings. Some

begging for food, or running

at the first sight of armed men.

The worst were those too tired to run

who simply stood or sat and waited.

All day darkness, and the sky fouled with smoke,

as though the north itself were burning.

They were grateful for the rain.

An abandoned temple gave them shelter.

Gloucester imagines ordered lines

stepping towards the incoherent mob.

Discipline against barbarian chaos

the grateful blood stained victors

chanting their general’s name.

A legion at his back? Why not?

It worked for Constantine.

His men are camped outside.

More scared of ghosts than rain.

But in this world of broken shadows

even the ghosts are now afraid.

You’ve met these two before:

History’s statistics.

They are there to prove how great the victory

how terrible the defeat. Until recently

nobody bothered with their stories.

They’ve been around since wars began.

They’ll grumble on until there are no wars.

Two faces in the firelight, sharing food.

Veterans of the service, though the service

in their eyes, is looking very shabby.

‘All punishment and no discipline.

Innocent or guilty, capable or clumsy

makes little difference to this Adolf.’ 

‘When that rider came…’

…’The gibberer?’ ‘Him.’

‘What did he say?

A raiding party running for The Wall?’

‘Burdened with loot and captives.’

‘Wagons loaded down with loot he said.’

‘Pushing wagons loaded down with loot.

But Gloucester says They’re heading east.

Our orders take us west.’ ‘That’s true though isn’t it?’

‘Yes, indeed it is, but consider this.

Can you imagine Vortigern letting them escape?

Or being insulted at that hill fort

and turning tail? He’d have burnt it round their ears.’

Two days earlier….

The hill fort had been recently reoccupied.

The path rose, cutting a labyrinth of bank and ditch

until they were confronted by a well-made wall.

Everything was squared, trim, and even.

They waited in the shadow of the gate house

Then a voice, like the north wind coming off a glacier,

speaking British in defiance of their uniforms and banners.

‘Is Vortigern the Thin amongst you?’2

‘I am the Magister Militum,

Count of the Saxon Shore.’

‘Pretty titles for these ugly times.’

‘The Council summons you to London.’

‘Whatever your titles meant

when you left home,

here you are unwelcome.

There is no legion at your back,

nothing to ratify your idle names.

We can slaughter you and no one

no one, will come to bury you

let alone avenge your deaths.

Turn back, we will not follow.

Go home, we know the place

to break a column of toy soldiers

but we have better things to do.

…

‘We should have burnt it down around their ears.

They have sent a boy out on a man’s errand.’

The Risen Christ

Gloucester continued north.

Torch light and candle light

lamplight and firelight

and never enough light

to stop the darkness

infecting everything

so the edges blurred.

A marching camp, smoke rising,

the usual signs of occupation.

The bank is sagging underneath the wooden wall.

The platform like a discarded party streamer. 

No man could hold his ground on such a footing.

From a gate tower creaking in the breeze,

the watchman said, ‘No more than four.’

Gloucester and the Proconsul

are escorted to a timber building

with not one right angle in the joints.

In the middle, facing the smouldering fire,

whoever calls himself king of this rank and smoky space. 

A cloak of raven’s feathers, bright rings, armbands, native paint.

The protocols of embassy and messenger are swept aside.

He insists they kneel. When they refuse, he rises:

‘I am the risen Christ and you will worship me!’

Only the years of discipline stop Gloucester’s laughter.

This silly little man in this squalid little barn:

Christ how the world has shrunk

if fools expect such folly to be taken seriously.

The women are attractive, desirable but hesitant.

Eager to please their messiah. The apostles

are playground bullies in patchwork armour.

The proconsul is a bald, grey bearded man

who in his youth…etc. etc.

But now has the power…etc, etc.

It’s all implied and understood.

‘We’re all familiar with the law.’

‘This is the law,’ said the kinglet,

his fist smashing the bewildered face.

He asks the sprawling body:

‘Who will enforce your law?’

He knifes the writhing man.

‘I will’, he says, in the bloody silence

that is so profound, you can hear it

hold its breath and bleed.

Until

Gloucester grabs a log from the woodpile

and swings it hard against the Saviour’s head.

Blowing the hunting horn around his neck,

his men break through the flimsy wall.

The risen Christ and his disciples

soon lie scattered on the dirty floor.

The Wall

Impressive but redundant marker,

of a boundary the land ignored.

Camped at a central fort,

Gloucester waited for his scouting parties.

Men sent out along the roads

or following The Wall in both directions.

Stopping in the little villages.

Abandoned huts,

cooking fires still smouldering.

Rarely a furtive native,

perhaps an ancient man or woman

left behind when all the others

had taken to the heather.

Gloucester, in the rain,

supervising his fort’s repair

imagines ranks stepping into incoherent mobs.

The disciplined advance into barbarian chaos.

The grateful victors chanting their general’s name.

His command is leaking men.

Even here, snuggled into winter quarters,

riders don’t return, and patrols sent to find patrols

find nothing. No one. The land is empty. 

Did you dream about the other

who would solve your problems?

The pay rise you deserved

to cancel out your debts.

Did you clasp the lotto ticket

dreaming of your new life

if they called your numbers?

Did you throw it in the bin

and swear you’d never bet again?

Or did you keep on betting

long after common sense had called a halt,

and there was nothing in the bank

to fuel the fantasy but a bruising desperation.

Another party rides towards the turf wall further north,

along a broken road no one has bothered to repair.

The surface fractured by the travellers’ wheels

is best avoided. On the hills, blocked culverts,

force the streams to flood and wash away the terrace

and the road it balanced. Beyond all that

right on to the end of marching

past the broken watch towers and abandoned forts

to ditch and bank and sometimes rubble

where squatters huddle in the outline of a camp,

sheep graze and the indifferent, stupid cattle

trip on the remnants of a barracks floor

that once held 30,000 men

and housed the Emperor himself.

Standing on The Wall,

waiting for patrols,

he scans the bleak upland.

It doesn’t roll, it heaves.

The burnt look of moorland

the gullies and abrupt valleys

too untidy for his taste.

No straight lines except the roads

confidently heading south.

Here, at its northern limit,

the whole ruined empire echoing behind him.

Over there the chaos that slighted Rome,

source of the tidal surge threatening to drown them all.

News from the South.

Vortigern this. Vortigern that.

His fifty Germans had erased a raiding party

then seized their ships.

He’d want a Triumph next.

What were fifty tribesmen to his Legion,

forcing the channel crossing,

following their choice of Caesar.

It worked before.

The Western Empire could be saved.

The sun crawls over the horizon,

then slides, embarrassed, to the west.

Winter, immobility and failure,

creep towards him, deaf to threat or reason.

Days when the demented wind

battered them, assaulting roof and wall

while the horizontal rain trashed

anyone who dared to stand outside.

The world was dissolving in rivers of slime.

His soldiers slithered and flopped

as if some magic had removed their bones.

Soon winter would invest the fort,

forcing them indoors to brood beside their fires

and analyse his failures. 

Vortigern this. Vortigern that.

Questions. Disappointment.

The patrols encounter roads

that fade into the heather,

ruins in the glens, tracery of walls,

fear and incomprehension

and neither had an answer.

No violent opposition.

Until one shepherd, caught on the run,

shaking with fear, stammered:

there was a fort in the north west:

it had been repaired.

‘In Wood or stone?’

So much hung upon the answer.

He didn’t know. It was a story he’d been told

by a drover he’d been drinking with.

He wouldn’t even swear that it was true.

Far from any road, overlooking a river

that drained hills to the north.

Playing dress up in the ruins

They watched, while rain was turning into sleet,

the great gate shaking in the wind.

There were guards on the wall.

So they retreated to the ruined vicus                                                                                          

where traders and camp followers had sold their wares

unwrapped their eagle, donned their fathers’ uniforms

and moved in line towards the gate.

It opened, men in armour moving out

a legion on the march. Adolf saw the future:

the roads busy, the towns thriving,

but no legion ever staggered,

ragged arsed into a line that bent.

He rode closer playing Roman.

There was nothing Roman or Imperial on view:

patchworks of rust and improvisation.

Someone whose faded plume suggested rank

stepped forward. Braided hair leaked

from the badly polished helmet.

Only the little gimlets of his twinkling eyes

broke the bearded, tattooed face.

He spoke a mix of Pict and Legion

Gloucester struggled to translate.

Inside the fort, the walls contained a rubbish tip.

Once neatly ordered barrack blocks were patterns in the mud.

Dirty children squabbled in the wreck of the Principia.

Dirty women moved amongst the dirty huts.

Removing bits of armour with relief,

the garrison was every other native they had met.

‘They said that you would come for us,

the oldies.

They said: “The bastards sailed without us.

They’ll return.’’

We buried the last of them so long ago.

My father’s father. Take us back to Rome.

Take us to the bath house and the forum.

The oldies said that Caesar would reward our loyalty.’

They celebrated in the wooden barn

that once had housed the grain.

Perhaps they thought it was a feast.

Perhaps, they thought that this was how

the legions honoured their important guests.

So Gloucester lied about his errand. Pretended

Rome was still unscathed, the Empire

sound but still in need of loyal troops.

Would they drill for him tomorrow?

Those who weren’t too drunk turned out.

He counted less than fifty,

some too old to stand up straight.

Echoes of empire in mangled Latin.

Their drill was comically inept,

like little boys playing dress up

in a misremembered game.

They were no use to anyone.

He couldn’t take them with him.

But they wouldn’t let him leave.

So Gloucester gave instructions.

They rode away.

The wooden buildings smoking in the rain.

The bodies piled into a heap.

The glory that was Rome

left for the raven and the wolf.

  1. Adolf is one of Laȝamon’s oddities. Although he is a British hero, he has a very German name [↩]
  2. He is ‘Vortigern the Thin’ in Welsh tradition [↩]
Posted on by Liam Guilar · 9 Comments

Britannia in peril – an extract from an epic

Brazen Head Poetry Editor LIAM GUILAR is writing a Legendary history of Britain. Chapter One will appear in Long Poem Magazine in June 2021. This is Chapter Two from the story of Vortigern; Chapter Three will appear in the Summer issue. Further details about the Legendary history can be found at www.liamguilar.com

The story so far

In the fifth century, the Roman province of Britannia is now isolated from Europe. A combination of external threats, internal squabbling and two botched coups has left the Province on the verge of ruin.

But it was not only fornication that characterised this time,

but all the vices to which human nature abandons itself:

The people were abandoned by the Romans,

then led astray by vanity and error into a trackless place.

After Gildas, De Excidio, etc. para 20-21

Chapter Two – A Man of Heart?

A Royal Funeral 

…and the rain began to fall

on the polished armour of the honour guard

ornate, ceremonial and useless.

The wind mangling the bishop’s words

threatened to drag the flame from the torches

before they were touched to the pyre.

Vortigern in the place of honour.

You’re looking at the wrong man.

That shining burnished dazzle

is Adolf, Earl of Gloucester.

Breastplate’s modelled on a statue of Augustus

though which campaigns he’s fought in is a mystery.

He’s Magister Militum material.

Just ask him when you’ve got an hour or two.

Thinks his red cloak should be purple

and doesn’t care who knows.

He’d climb a dung heap

to crow above the competition

and call his stinking pile a kingdom

so he could call himself a king.

Vortigern the thin, the grey fox,

stands beside him. Primes inter pares.

Official speak to smooth the ragged fact

that nobody’s in charge.

They say that once this party’s over

the Vicarius will appoint his successor.

Look at the corpse of the King on the piled wood.

The senators in their windblown finest,

the priests and bishops, the civilian crowd

waiting expectantly for the spectacle.

Brigantes, Atrebates, Cats,

still scratching at old tribal sores.

You’d think four centuries of Pax Romana

would have softened the edges.

So you know we’re in for it my friend

the depth and spread and stink of it

when they’re so scared

they put aside their cherished

self-defining hatreds

and try to work together.

Vortigern framed the elegy he’d deliver,

had anyone asked, and honesty were possible.

Let us now praise Constance the King

Ruler of Britain, Father to us all.

Before we light his funeral pyre

before the flames consume the corpse

let us rehearse his virtues:

Son of a murdered usurper,

dim-witted in council, lacking in wisdom

useless in battle, cowering behind a shield

he could barely lift.

When his father was assassinated

the council ripped him from the monastery

because he was a Descendant of Brutus,

last of the Trojans, ‘legitimate rulers of Britannia’.

Not caring that he was indifferent to the law,

despising the church, a drunkard at the feast,

a sly despoiler of other men’s women:

Incompetent, untrustworthy, dead.

His much younger brothers

bundled to Gaul

where their mother will school them

in the arts of resentment.

Now those old men facing the pyre,

will preside over the death throes of Britannia.

These are the Good Old Days

(Name your drug of choice,

power, land, office, sex,

before the evening’s out

someone will make an offer.)

After the incense and the ritual incantations,

after the prayers and the sermonising,

after the God of Love has been

importuned for military victory,

a party to celebrate these coming men:

friends to drink to their success

who’d known them all their lives

although they’d never met, 

hoping to be remembered, hinting at

a son or protégé who might serve

in a minor capacity on their staff.

Then daughters, decorous and decorative,

well-briefed and drilled for the engagement.

Gloucester, good looking, single,

with the gift of the gab,

a tall figure circled by adoring females

pressing him with their attractions

while Vortigern is steered towards a corner

where members of the council

discoursed upon Britannia’s future. 

These old men, hungering for clues,

competing for his gratitude,

or the revelation of a weakness.

(Name your poison, power, titles, office, sex,

if it’s too embarrassing, just hint at it,

someone, with a mainline to the source,

will make an offer before the evening’s out.)

They want to be his friend

despite their previous contempt. 

Confident enough for hints, innuendo.

He’s not looking well, our aging leader.

The times do need a younger man.

Has a successor been appointed? No?

Walk around inside the pauses

and see the possibilities.

Implications dangling bait

for conspiracy or betrayal.

That’s not what I meant at all…

The council, the council must expand.

Of course, become inclusive, reach out

beyond the city walls, reflect the tribal

distribution, equality of representation?

We’ll need a leader everyone can trust

That rules out the Brigantes. And the Cats.

And the army? An imbalance in the leadership

to be addressed…Taken aside by senators,

passed around in a game of confidential whispers.

I’ve been watching your career with interest

please don’t misunderstand of course we

The Brigantes, after all I was only joking.

Men who would have lost their lunch

at the thought of living in a hut

now sought security, identity, community,

in a rediscovered tribal heritage

they were busily creating for themselves

made attractive by ignorance and nostalgia.

As though ‘culture’ was a buried hoard

that could be excavated, reused untarnished

not made irrelevant by time.

Their bad jokes advance scouts of a civil war.

What do you call fifty drowned Brigantes?

A good start? One hundred Saxons? Not enough.

Soon they’d rediscover druid lore.

invoking hailstorms against their enemies.

There’d be rumours of strange rituals

in forest clearings, and murders for the right

to put on silly clothes and be ‘Archdruid’.

Men protective of their privileges

their rank, their wealth, their family histories,

so proud of their rhetorical skills,

how they were Romans first and Britons second.

Soon they’d be daubing themselves

and trading their sophistication for survival.

Lamps were lit, slaves ghosting between the diners.

Forced female laughter, twining around Gloucester’s voice,

erupted arrhythmically from the other corner of the room.

Vortigern was wondering how long he had to stay

until an older woman at his elbow said:

‘As if any of them cared.

Did they not see the empty streets?

The ruined houses?

We’ll all be dead within the year

and still they play the same old games,

betting long odds on a future

that ceased to exist before most of us were born.

I’ve heard you read?  Do you study Caesar’s wars?

take notes on Onasander? Who’s your favourite author?’

‘Ovid.’

The most accomplished actress

can be startled into honesty.

The Art of Love? She’s too surprised

to hide her disbelief.

Freed of obligations by the insult,

he laughs at her reaction.

‘’The Metamorphosis. A poem for our times.’

‘Everything changes, nothing stays the same’

‘So much changes; so little stays the same.

More accurate; less memorable.’

Next morning there would be a slave

outside his lodgings with a scroll:

or a rare copy of his favourite text

left discreetly on a table.

Name your poison?

He had nothing she could want.

They chatted about literature,

two educated diners waiting for Ovid 

to come posturing through the doors

and scandalise the rich and bored

four hundred years too late.

‘At least’, she said, before she left,

‘one can choose how and when to die.’

After the ladies and the elderly retired

someone produced ‘the girls’:

courtesans who had been paid

or lesser daughters and more desperate wives.

These two men were poised

before the ladder’s upper rung.

When Survival’s on the auction block

you’ll bid with what you’ve got

even if your daughter’s splendid tits

might be your only asset,

hoping they’d be remembered

if one of these two men succeed.

The evening blurring into heaving flesh

scenes for a fresco on a wall in hell:

two prelates spit-roasting a German slave

the girl’s blonde hair incongruous

against the bishop’s bony knees.

A pretty face, well-practised,

In the amatory arts,

her manoeuvres mindlessly

but expertly performed. 

The Matron’s words:

‘I will not watch my daughters

whore themselves to the barbarians.’

She’d call it family politics

and therefore no lost dignity

if she pimped them to a Latin speaker on the rise?

‘One can at least choose how and when to die.’ 

All evening she had sought for an analogy, 

as though precision would validate her suicide.

The lights had faded, the room

a roiling sludge of limbs.

In the foul smoke of oil lamps

a different thinner face,

dark curls plastered to her forehead.

Shut eyed, languid, sinuous,

movements stuttering to her own satisfaction.

Her final version: ‘We’re players

who turn up to find the theatre

has burnt down, and no one’s left

to watch our well-rehearsed performance.’

He gathered up his clothes

stepped his way towards the door.

The bodies on the floor moved fitfully,

scum on the edges of a stagnant pool

shrugging as the ripples died.

Stepped out into the clarity of early morning.

He would not remember them.

There were far too many dead

already begging his attention.

Vortigern in London

The past’s a broken mirror

making the present looked deformed;

the crook backed limping child

of disappointed parents.

The age of iron rusted out,

our age of stone is almost gone.

Now comes an age of wood

where everything can splinter, rot or burn.

The horizon’s clear of smoke,

nor dotted by wheeling carrion.

But the city is dying into itself.

Here there was noisy spectacle.

Stone humanised by speech

now stone without story

is simply broken stone.

Your ancestors’ most sacred site,

or random spillage of disjointed rock.

This coin he’d rescued from the mud,

portrait erased; inscription illegible.

Behind him reeking tidal mud.

The wall he stands on killed the port.

Where his grandmother played

burnt timbers, blackened roofs.

The cart tracks overgrown.

This is what time will achieve

when no one bends a back against it.

Late in this afternoon. A merchant ship

backlit by the golden river,

the slow drift of it at odds

with the frantic scurry of the crew.

The bridge has been maintained

but there are few ships on the Thames.

Few traders skirting down the coast,

fewer coming from the continent.

The evening is turning cold,

the city shrunken, huddled

against its inevitable night.

To his left on the hill,

the amphitheatre’s a piece of wall,

water glinting in the ponds

filling the robbed-out pits

between the piles of weed grown rubble.

There have been bad times before.

But the danger was no longer out there, beyond the walls.

It was in the civil men and women pretending

to be outraged by the new graffiti:

‘Romani non Germani!  Britanni non Barbari!’

As though the idiots who daubed those words

didn’t have at least one grandparent

born somewhere in the empire’s furthest reaches.

Aurelius and Uther, fled to Brittany

after their father then their eldest brother

botched their coup, now proclaiming

they could trace their bloodline back to Brutus.

A standard move to add legitimacy and lustre

to a power addicted family on the make.

Ironic given Brutus was a Trojan immigrant

who slaughtered the indigenous inhabitants.

But when did logic play a winning hand in an election?

When a man like Constantine, caught in his lies,

shrugged and claimed the words he’d used

meant only what he wanted them to mean,

then law became impossible, and titles empty.

The steady rumble that replaced the traffic noise was fear.

Not just fear of incomers and raiders

fear of people who had once been neighbours

and were now ‘others’ to be hated.

Any other, anyone who was not a friend

and trust in friend and family was rotting

because when incompetence and talent

are equally dangerous, look to yourself.

One day he wouldn’t hear the assassin

or see the bowmen hiding on a roof

but he has heard Adolf of Gloucester,

coming along the wall.

Count of the Saxon shore.

Man Most Likely to Succeed.

Gloucester coughs, speaks.

‘He’ll see us now.’

It’s meant to be affable,

drinking buddy confidante.

‘What do you think he wants?’

Vortigern shrugs.

Rude or reticent, it’s hard to tell.

He’s wondering why here?

The roads still spin out across the country

but it’s a long way from the danger zones.

An uncharacteristic nostalgia?

Or a final gesture of farewell?

No one alive remembered the Vicarius

in the days of his youth

His parties were notorious

for excessive decadence.

Perhaps that was nostalgia

for another fabricated past,

the court of Caligula and Nero

when any vice was possible

‘Why not’ sufficient reason

and ‘no’ was not an option.

He is dying without an heir.

He has outlasted Constantine and Constance

and sent the Boys to brood upon their rocky headland.

Word is, he’s going to choose.

Why else call the two contenders

for a private meeting?

Cain and Abel taking their offerings to God.

And we know how badly that turned out.

If you define your progress

by the titles you accumulate;

you measure your success

by your graded movement

along a string of words.

What makes them more

than complicated echolalias,

meaningless as infant babble?

Count of the Saxon Shore,

Magister Militium, Consul,

Heir-Apparent, King?

Vortigern, if pushed, defines success

as battles won, problems solved, lessons learnt,

might have asked ‘Heir to what?’

40 emperors in a hundred years

God for a month, then erased

like the portrait on the coin.

Council members shoaling from the building

form self-important, self-regarding groups

who nod to both the soldiers as they pass.

Overseers of the death of meaning,

Peddlers of cancerous euphemisms,

revelling in the endless crisis of definition

that passes for meaningful debate.

Still busy fighting over granddad’s privileges.

Pay attention now and watch how they react,

trying to pick the winner before the dice are rolled.

Some greet Gloucester. He’s done terrible things

to earn their gratitude. But he speaks when spoken to,

can be counted on to say the right things at the right time

and pay his dues when his debts are called.  

Some acknowledge Vortigern.

See how wary they become?

He’s in no-one’s pocket.

But they all know he’s the silent go to man

when the shit’s on the fan.

In this tired world, titles and positions

are still the gifts of slack old men:

ancient relics twinkling in the wreckage

like stagnant ponds in the ruined amphitheatre

catching a fading sun.

But not this man, not Ambrosius.

He is the ghost of whatever made the Empire great:

devious, unpredictable and dangerous.

Authority regardless of his titles or his clothes.

Neither clumsy copy nor conscious fake,

the steady pilot who would face whatever storm

to bring the Ark to safety, with Noah’s indifference

to the millions drowning who were not on board.

They bend over a map of Britain.

Gloucester finding this foreplay tedious

wanting to hear the job is his

or know the details of their final test.

Ambrosius, between coughing fits.

‘We asked the Western Emperor for troops.

His Master of Horse tells us to look to ourselves.’

Vortigern.

‘There’s rumours that the Huns are on the move.

A half a million men. Attila claims the empire

his by right of promised marriage to Honoria.

If even half that number enters Gaul

the Western Empire’s gone for good.’

Ambrosius.

‘In Britannia Secunda our writ no longer runs.

We summon them and they refuse.

North of the Humber the cities are abandoned,

two bad harvests and constant raiding have brought famine.

They have begun to squabble for the scraps.

A few armed men, a bit of wall, a tribal hill,

a man’s reach might stretch to the tribal boundary.

There’s no tax collection, so no distribution.

So many starve.’ (More coughing)

Gloucester:

‘Picts from the north, overland 

through the ruined gates of the wall.’

Vortigern Interrupts.

‘Some of those Picts are Britons painted blue.

They think it best to hide themselves.

Soon they will forgo pretence.’

Why this might be significant

is lost on Gloucester who continues:

‘Irish slavers down the western coast.

Germanic pirates in the east and south.

If we go east, the west is burnt

If we go north they sack the coastal towns.

Strike and run and be long gone

before a rider brings the news

We need three legions, at the most.’

But no one laughs. 

They remember their grandfather’s stories.

How the forts stapled law and order onto the wilderness.

The map still shows the roads

linking fort to town, town to port,

port to other towns and other forts

on and back across immensity to Rome.

Well-kept roads loud

with merchants and soldiers

messengers, supplicants, embassies

crunching the heartbeat of empire. 

Ambrosius:

‘We are like a goodwife swatting spot fires,

growing weaker with each victory.

Either we train a national army

or recruit more mercenaries.

One will take time we do not have.

The other, when the pack’s too big

the dogs turn on their master.’

The awkward map confirms their lack of options.

Adolf: conversational, exploratory.

‘You’ve heard the rumour of the legion

that was left behind?’ Vortigern waits,

wondering what revelation is at hand.

‘If they retained their discipline

they will have instructors.’

No revelation, no solution

just the gambler’s dream of the winning card.

‘Limitanei gone native?

Somewhere along which wall?

There were so many forts and marching camps.

and even if we had the time,

we’d never find them all.’

Did the old man change his mind

or had he planned what happened next?

He turns to

Gloucester.

‘If you think it’s worth the risk

after our envoy has delivered his messages

take whatever men you need.

Take Eagles too, and trumpets,

search out your fathers’ uniforms.

Appear to them as Roman as they were.’

Gloucester thinks he is the organised man.

A lover of maps, a maker of lists.

Now caught by this unexpected switch,

trying to impress with plans he’s making on the fly.

‘I’ll head to Lincoln, there to meet my scouts.

…we’ll take the inland road.

From York’….and Vortigern, unimpressed, lost interest. 

Three thousand men? How could they be hidden?

Garrisons along the wall had gone native,

and whether you called the garrison commander

Tribune or King made little difference.

Everyone who’d been that way

had met such useless bastardised communities.

When Gloucester left

the old man, staring at the map

keeps Vortigern waiting.

It’s easy for a map to lie.

These forts have long since ceased to function.

The roads are overgrown or braided to confusion.

This is a tidy memory of a dead world.

Not even accurate when it was made.

Ambrosius

‘Your father-in-law was my good friend.

He and your father were both honest men:

hard working, loyal, at a time

when all those qualities were out of fashion.’

‘My father-in-law lead an army against the Empire

and left this island undefended.’

‘Your father-in-law led an army

against corruption, greed and inefficiency.

He planned to hold the Rhine and make Britannia safe.’

‘He thought he would look good in purple.’

‘Resentment is an easy hand to play for very little profit. 

Three Saxon ships have landed on Thanet.

They’re asking to be taken into service.

Go there, you’ve dealt with them before.

Use your judgement. Offer the usual conditions.

They might be more useful than a phantom legion.’

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Rewriting the Middle Ages

LIAM GUILAR likes a radical reimagining of a venerable Welsh work

Isolated in Aber Cuawg

Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher Press, 2020, 19 pages

‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun, means a sick person, a patient or a leper1. Abercuawg is an area of north Wales. There is an ‘I’ who looks out at the landscape and speaks about it and his isolation.

This pamphlet contains an English translation of 32 three line stanzas, a short introductory essay, placed significantly after the poem, and some textual notes. The essay is a concise, necessary introduction to the differences between this poem and a modern English one. The pamphlet is visually attractive, robust enough to handle the rough usage it has received, and overall very good value for money.

The opening line announces the poem’s difference: “My mind’s requirement, to be sat atop a hill”.

In the 1970s, Glyn Williams translated this as “To sit high on a hill is the wish of my heart”2

Superficially, Williams sounds more natural, and perhaps immediately preferable. But the differences in word choice and order reveals the strength of Gilonis’ translation.

Generally3 the contemporary trend seems to be to assume that the people of the Middle Ages were modern people in funny clothes, suffering from bad ideologies and severe technological deprivation. The consequences of such assumptions are numerous and they are all bad. The logic runs that because these people are us, then their stories can be presented as we think they should have been written, or would have been written if the original composers weren’t so clumsy. And because they are ‘like us’ then they should have known better. Therefore, the things modern observers find reprehensible in medieval behaviour and ideals can be easily condemned and preferably erased, because both are easier than trying to understand the essential alterity of the period.

The most invidious and invisible form of this domestication is when a translator surreptitiously converts a medieval text so it operates to modern, post-Romantic assumptions of how poems should function, and how a modern person would behave or think in that situation.

Gilonis, to his credit, avoids these traps. Ironically, part of the effectiveness of this translation lies in what he hasn’t done. “My mind’s requirement” does not sound like modern English. But it’s grammatical and makes sense. He walks the fine line between respecting the alterity of the original and turning the poem into something that works in English. He does this without domesticating the original, or turning it into a museum piece.

The translation, as translation, can be compared with different translations. Here are three versions of the last verse; Gilonis’ is the third.  

The Leper was a squire; he was a bold warrior

In the court of the King

May God be kind to the outcast.

Jenny Rowland4

A youth was Leprous; once a bold leader

In the royal palace.

God be kind to the outcast.

Joseph P. Clancy5

Isolated, once a warrior, once a champion, daring

Once in the court of a king

May God be kind to the outcast.

I prefer Gilonis’ version, but the key objective difference is the disappearance of ‘leper’. While Jenny Rowlands goes to some length to show how the speaker of the poem is indeed a leper, she’s also aware that it is not the only option (pp.191-193). The original poem would not have excluded other interpretations. As she points out, the solitary figure in a hostile landscape, well-known to readers of Old English, is as much a symbol of life on earth (with or without God) as a literal character. But translating claf as ‘leper’ would be to choose one option and for the reader of the translation to limit those other interpretations. It also throws the poem into the distance.

Gilonis defends his decision not to translate claf as ‘leper’ in the notes. The poem isn’t distanced from the modern British or American reader and the other possible readings of the text remain open.

Obviously the idea of someone isolated due to illness has an immediate contemporary relevance. The temptation would be to push the point, the use of deliberate anachronisms being a popular technique. Gilonis writes: “The resonances, in 2020, don’t need ramming home” (p10).  In 2020, ‘isolated’ was such a loaded word it should resonate without ventilators or prayers for vaccines turning up in the translation.

One of the strangest features of this poem is that, as in Old English poetry at this period, the speaking ‘I’ is an empty space anyone one reading the poem can step into. It’s merely a subject position, not an historical or fictional character, nor the product of autobiography. This is emphatically not a dramatic monologue in the Browning/Tennyson tradition, nor an ‘I’ in the tradition of English poetry from Wyatt onwards. While some speakers in the ‘saga poems’ of medieval Wales are characters in a fuller story, the speaker in this one exists only in this poem.

Some early Welsh verse, like this, simply don’t operate to the rules we assume govern modern poetry in English. There’s no clearly developed progression from an opening to an ending. There’s no ‘internal coherence’. The poems operate to their own rules, and those rules, leaving aside the complicated metrics, simply aren’t post-Renaissance or classically inflected English. There is description of landscape, but whether it’s meant to evoke the speaker’s mood or describe a place is questionable, and whichever answer you pick in one instance will be undermined in another.

Description is jammed against statement: but the relation of the two seems marginal, and the statements, as in the second line below, might be gnomic wisdom or just statements of fact. Either way, their relevance is never obvious:

Bright are the tops of the valleys; long the small hours.

Expertise is always praised.

Am I not to be granted the sleep due to the ill?

Temporally the poem hops around, sometimes in the same stanza. The overall effect is that the poem is swirling, but the swirl isn’t spiralling to any conclusion, just to the last word, where the poem stops. Gwyn Williams only translated ten of the 32 verses, but the ’extraction’ (his term) doesn’t seem to damage the poem in any way.

For general readers of English poetry, the pragmatic value of early medieval poetry, treated honestly as it is here, lies in the challenge it makes to the learnt reading practices of the school room and the lecture hall. A poem like this one, that obviously works, but not to ‘our’ rules, is a confrontation with the limits of our reading practice, and our assumptions about what a poem is, does, and can be.

This difference between what worked for a medieval Welsh audience and what a modern reader of poems expects gives the translation another level of interest. The original might have been written over 1,000 years ago, but this translation wouldn’t be out of place in something like Harriet Tarlo’s 2011 anthology of ‘radical landscape poetry’6.  

As such, it’s a blunt reminder that any claims made by ‘avant garde’, ‘experimentalist’ or ‘postmodern’ poets in the 21st century for the ‘innovative’ or ‘ground breaking novelty’ of their work is undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by the history of poetry. Whatever ‘it’ is, ‘it’ has usually been done before. This should negate the familiar excuse for writing abstruse nonsense – ‘But it hasn’t been done before’ – and focus the question on ‘Was it worth doing?’

  1. http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html [↩]
  2. Welsh Poems Sixth Century to 1600, Faber and Faber, 1973, p.23 [↩]
  3. ‘Generally’ in terms of popular culture, films, books, and public discussions [↩]
  4. Early Welsh Saga Poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion, D. Brewer 1990. p. 497. This is the essential encyclopaedic text, commentary, study and translation of these poems. Rowland makes no claim for her translations as ‘literature’ [↩]
  5. The Earliest Welsh Poetry, Macmillan 1970. p.94. Clancy reverses the order of the last two verses so this is the penultimate in his translation [↩]
  6. The Ground Aslant. An anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011 [↩]