Llyr, by Gillian Clarke

A posting for Reyes ( Epiphany ), just back from North Wales.

Llyr.

Ten years old, at my first Stratford play :
The river and the king with their Welsh names
Bore in the darkness of a summer night
Through interval and act and interval.
Swans move double through glossy water
Gleaming with imponderable meanings.
Was it Gielgud on that occasion ?
Or ample Laughton, crazily white-gowned,
Pillowed in wheatsheaves on a wooden cart,
Who taught the significance of little words ?
All. Nothing. Fond. Ingratitude. Words
To keep me scared, awake at night. That old
Man's vanity and a daughter's "Nothing",
Ran like a nursery rhythm in my head.

Thirty years later on the cliffs of Llyn
I watch how Edgar's crows and choughs still measure
How high cliffs are, how thrown stones fall
Into history, how deeply the bruise
Spreads in the sea where the wave has broken.
The turf is stitched with tormentil and thrift,
Blue squill and bird bones, tiny shells, heartsease.
Yellowhammers sing like sparks in the gorse.
The landscape's marked with figures of old men;
The bearded sea; thin-boned, wind-bent trees;
Shepherd and labourer and night-fisherman.
Here and there among the crumbling farms
Are lit kitchen windows on distant hills,
And guilty daughters longing to be gone.

Night falls on Llyn, on forefathers,
Old Celtic kings and the more recent dead,
Those we are still guilty about, flowers
Fade in jam jars on their graves; renewed
Refusals are heavy on our minds.
My head is full of sound, remembered speech,
Syllables, ideas just out of reach;
The close, looped sound of curlew, and the far
Subsidiary roar, cadences shaped
By the long coast of the peninsula,
The continuous pentameter of the sea.
When I was ten a fool and a king sang
Rhymes about sorrow, and there I heard
That nothing is until it has a word.

Copyright Gillian Clarke, reproduced here with permission ( yes, Gillian Clarke wished me a Happy New Year - for Anglo-Welsh poetry geeks, this is a bit like meeting Justin Bieber ). Gillian Clarke's poetry is published by Carcanet.

For non-specialists, the poem plays off the first scene of Shakespeare's play King Lear, in which Lear announces he will divide his kingdom between his three daughters, only first they must declare how much they each love him. Cordelia, the youngest, is unable to put her feeling into words, and so is disinherited.

The Welsh for river is Afon - so Stratford, that centre of Englishness, carries through it's centre a memory of those "old Celtic kings". The whole poem washed through with water magic, the river and the sea.