In Dewisland

Traethmawr Odyssey

Did that wave-cast wanderer feel like this when he awoke
upon that splayed Phaeacian shore?
Did sand and sunlight filter through his fingers
and did he see a sideways world
of crashing salt and sparkling foam –
this spinning, stilling, many-coloured,
sunny, sandy, shimmering world?
The plaint of gulls, the lull of waves play lilting in my ears –
I hear the things he must have heard.
Must I run the gauntlet
of Scylla and Porthstin… but that in no way fits!
Ramsey and Charyb… my senses, sleeping, still… that isn’t it…
Those low black islets – waiting: Mercy! They could… I know they house
for all their innocence, a Circe!
O Gods! I must break free! No siren song
will lure me should I wake!
Arise, fresh winds to lift me high
and fetch me to some other place – yes, look! There’s lonely Gwales’ isle –
I could go there – though for, I fear, no longer than a spell –
just biding till there’s time to spread these flashing, newborn wings
I feel will spiral me elsewhere!
Soar, man! Fly, though startled, scattered gulls protest and stare you in the eye.
High and higher still – plunge on
through rafts of cloud to airy, unimagined heights
till, when near its tented end the sky’s exultant breeze
will leave you laughing loud and clear!

Look! All Dewisland spread out!
This is my dominion: I am lord and king
of this below to shape it how I will, as suits my hand!
Five Argive ships, their sails unfurled,
windbillow in a wine-dark sea…
Carn Llidi sprawls adream, reclining giant-like
below. Will no man stir him from his counting sheep?
In scattered stones about his flanks
my fairy forts are marked out in the sun as neat as on some magic map;
and from the spreading, mazy miles of turf and tilted slab beyond
come faintest echoes of that fair folks’ lovely, long-forgotten song,
and the sweep of time-stilled harp-strings lingers on.
My mounds of gorse bloom heady gold
as far as can be spied. Where Gwyddno’s sunken kingdom rests
the lazy kelp swings with the tide. And, lo! Far at the end of the gleaming sea
all Erin’s ancient kings have sighted me and, shouting out, amazed,
are proffering brimmed cups of heather ale!
All ears and scuts the rabbits rush in distant Skomer’s ferns;
its cliffs at once a couchant, cruising and exploding mass of guillemot and tern,
and look, there’s heraldry high-perched – the parrot of the sea’s emblazoned beak.
But closer by on Ramsey’s open ocean side disguised as elongated, storm-flung stones
the morlo mermaids catch my eye when, now and then,
they shift a mite or turn, or obey the aeons’ urge to slip and slide on bellies
to the rough inviting surge.
Small crabs climb briskly over pebbles in Melgan’s rock-bound cove
while Lisgi guards the silent, passive lives that fill his tidal pools.
Concealed beneath the tablecloth, the outspread jigsaw leagues of hedge and field I hold in sway,
a thousand furry little long-tailed fellows run, and climb,
and play alongside bright-shelled snails that very slowly slide; and sharing in this
richest soil and tangled green I see the busy millions of my winged, thin-limned and fragile,
humming, spinning subjects toil: and toil away the fragments of their secret, hectic lives.

And now, aloft by many a mile, to marvel at my fiefdoms, great and small –
I poise.

But… Silence!
Do I fly or fall?

A reeling head, a sickened heart.
Held, stricken dumb and terrified,
aghast and frail and small –

I fall!

Wind rends! My breath escapes and screams!
My shattered senses fail!
A weighted sack of raven’s wine,
hurtling down, hell-bound to meet
an unsung end in the senseless deep –
a sea, a sea with my good red blood
a stain in the drifting tides!

Three miles, two – one only – still dropping like a stone!
Gods! White-caps shock the splintered rocks below…
incisors and the maelstrom both whirling round and round.
Yes, Scylla and that other one – I see you clearly, now:
Some knavish laugh-crazed look-out in my mind shouts ‘Land Ahoy!’
So the Bitches will have me after all.
Then let it be… Make space there, Icarus, my boy!

Then – gentleness. No rushing near,
no blinding sear, but – gentleness.
And a world of crashing salt and sparkling waves,
spinning, stilling, many-coloured,
sunny, sandy, gladly wakening world
in Ithaca that’s Wales.



(From ‘Memories, Moods, Reflections’ )



Note: It was intended that this dream sequence be accompanied by a hefty raft of words, but in these days of long-honours on the chin and creaking in the jimmers, I’ll  be glad for once to give all such addenda a pass. Suffice to say it’s trusted that the scattering of classical/mythological puns and innuendos, whether Hellenic or Cymric, won’t be missed, nor the intimacy of homed-in topological detail. The anointed will need no clues. To get most out of the poem it’s best if the reader is familiar with that magical peninsula where the very stones of the shore are an episcopal purple – that Dewisland which is bordered in the east by the sprawled dyke of Ffôs y Mynach, and by the wild ramparts of Penmaen Dewi in the west. There is much more that the poem could say of that land of castellated upthrusts of grey-white dolerite, and brooks which fret and gurgle to the sea, and the whole capsized calligraphy of its landscape; there are some dozen lines, I’m sure, which need still to be included.

This is an extended and reworked version of a poem written all of sixty years ago, bar one. It appeared in Wales’ premier literary magazine of the time, and this then young pen-pusher was pleased as Punch to see that it was nicely placed in the table of contents as the third entry, immediately below two poems by R.S. Thomas and Alun Lewis’ letters to Robert Graves. Those were the days.