The poem is 284 lines in length so for those who have busy lives here's a prose argument:
First Section: Recalls a persistent dream I had in adolescence of myself as an internally-exiled older writer, out of sympathy with the mores of his society, and allowing few visitors.
Second Section: Recalls the setting of the dream in the Rheidol Valley in mid-Wales where I spent childhood holidays with smallholding relatives in the 1950s/early 1960s. Recalls their hard lives and settled beliefs.
Third Section: Considers the state of the British now – destroying their own culture and religion, killing their young, living for materialism. Considers the inevitable effect of mass immigration resulting in the replacement of the indigenous culture, religion and society with those of the incomers.
Fourth Section: Considers the final fate of the British, marginalized and abandoned, identifying myself with them as an exiled figure trying to preserve what is left of the British ‘Great Tradition’, and draws the themes of the self-exiled figure in my adolescent dream, the sturdy folk of the Rheidol Valley in the 1950s, and the dispossessed and marginalized British, together in a final image of the isolated ‘sage’ giving audience to an enquirer seeking to understand the historical fate of a now dying people.
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I
Imagine, first, a sweeping valley, flattened
By age, patched with the strong-grass fields and climbed
By hawthorn hedgerows, combed complainingly
By the fresh west wind. Imagine, next, the steeper
Sides defiling back into the mountains,
With screes like builders’ rubble, with the crouchback
Hazel, and, far below, an intestine-folded
River scribbling its way towards the sea.
Imagine, last, a stone-built house with gables
And patterned chimneys, perching aloof on
The valley side, under the ridge but slapped
By the wind’s gruff hand. That was the bitter place
Which in an adolescent dream I saw
Persistingly; from which, a disabused
And long-toothed man of letters, I would send
Notes to suppliants seeking knowledge, harboured
In the damp town at the valley’s mouth: “Come.”
My novels, balefully delivered over
Many years, had scarified a portentous
Thin-root culture which, destroying icons
And cultic truths, attached instead to gods
Of self, big-bellied, had despoiled the temple’s
Vestments for gaudy party-wear. How I flayed!
Instead of brickbats, though, wealth and respect
Were piled on me by my excoriates
Until, heart-withered and repulsed, I fled
To my valley eyrie shrouded in a cloud
Both turbulent and turbid, forked by lightnings
Which clapped the rolling silence. There, refusing
All contact with the insurgent world below,
Provisioned by a live-in help and buoyed
By sight of the bleak high-wandering buzzard,
Fastidious and brutal, I composed
My jeremiads, fierce as mountain wind
Yet fresh as the jangling, rock-leaping stream.
Infrequently, someone with seeming sense
Would beg an interview, balked in the foot-
Of-valley town until my tardy scrawl
Released him to make pilgrimage these fourteen
Miles to my chilly, silent writing room.
Such was my aggrandizing dream! Mann’s Faustus,
Devoured in passion in my teens – its portrait
Of the cold, high-visioned Leverkühn in thrall
To purchased genius – was much to blame.
II
The
valley was the Rheidol in mid-WalesWith stony Aberystwyth at its mouth.
In Capel Seion on the southern flank
I spent my childhood holidays with folk
Who tended fields, kept pigs and fowl, and milked
A dozen cows. To make ends meet in fifties
Britain they worked by day on the county’s highways,
Tarmacing roads prayed over by the surpliced
Parsley and blessed by purple-vested foxgloves,
Which wound to hidden hamlets with their few
Stone dwellings, lit by gas and paraffin,
With privies at the fields’ edge and a chilly
Evening stumble. My folk would leave the milk
In dented nine-pin churns on a brick-built step
At the farm gate’s mud patch for collection by
A rattling lorry. Some they kept for use;
Parting cream and skim in a hand-cranked whirring
Gyro, or churning butter in a thumping
Hand-turned barrel. The butter, slapped to shape
With wooden platters, was pure marigold
And tart. The buttermilk, wash-thin but pungent,
Was fed to the desperate, gobbling pigs.
The folk were self-contained and self-reliant,
Chapel-goers whose Welsh song drifted stoutly
From the rain-wet stone and gleaming clear glass windows
Of the chapels greyly-squatting by the roadside,
With their carved-slate flock of gravestones huddling
Like chicks beside the mother hen’s wings. What sights
From flank to flank across the Rheidol’s shallow
Bowl! – the many greens of field and woodland,
Sheep on the steeps and piebald lazy cattle
Drinking in fields and meads jigsawed by the Afon
Rheidol; the strong blue sky, gone weather-stippled;
White weeds of cloud streaming across the coast
In the Atlantic wind, disbursing pennies
Of shadow on the farms on the valley floor
And shaking up the creamy butterflies
In lane-side brambles, tossing them like scraps
Of linen cloth. And at night to stand alone
In valley silence, isolate in darkness,
The wind-nudged moisture scraping its cold edge
Like a razor on your cheek, and staring up:
The emulsioned vastness of the Milky Way
Billowed in pointillist cloud emblazoned with
Shrill prides of light, as if a gossamer sheet
Were tumbled and illumined. At its base
The horizoned Aber lights were dancing, awed
By the galaxy’s pulsating architrave.
This was a boy’s Eden and like all Edens
It did not last, for Aberystwyth now is
A swollen place of getting, prolapsed in
The Rheidol valley like an ulcer; the hamlets
Have engorged with infill bright-brick housing, boasting
Their en-suite second bathrooms, and the chapels
Are brag apartments for young professionals.
At Capel Seion my uncle’s own-built cottage
With its asbestos walls and cow-shed kitchen,
Sunk in the valley side, has lost its roof.
The farms decay; my sturdy folk are dead.
III
What comfort may an old man draw from those
Vague insights made romantic by my callow
Dream some fifty years ago? Or from Rheidol’s
Taming to a place of “lifestyle choice”? I sit
In an upstairs London flat – a threadbare eyrie
For all the company I keep – and write
Like hap Ausonius unavailingly,
All but unable to express that coup,
That empire’s transmutation which depressed
His every sunny word to autumn; as if
His loved Moselle had sunk and a tidal wave,
Berserk as a shrieking North Sea storm, were roaring
At eye’s edge, a tsunami sweeping inland
With a violent confusion of smashed villas,
Of splintered water wheels, and a detritus
Of razed vineyards in its filthy, foaming snout.
Behind that inundating wall the waters
Flow smoothly, darkly, irresistibly,
Knotted like marble with blanched sodden bodies.
What then has toppled, this past half century?
What waters have dismantled the foundations
Of my writing room? The massive golden cross,
Its arms extended over the fractious city,
Has been roped and tumbled from its sun-lit dome
By stone-faced coteries in politicians’
Impeccable attire; with it is crushed
That lens of law and custom, polished by
Christian craftsmen, deriving moral truths
From frank-eyed query of the natural world,
Distilled in Moses’ Decalogue and Christ’s
Epiphany of longed-for human life;
A lens which focused Caliban’s brute light
Into a disinfectant beam which doused
The animal, enabling polities
To neuter tribes, creating citizens
With redress, substituting “ought” for “want”,
Responsibilities for threats, that all
Might safely sleep at nights. Alas, the Christ
Triumphant, euthanized by lawyers, is flung
Into His grave; women in corybantic
Glee kill their womb-held young, the torn first fruits
Of “self-empowerment,” gifting the bloody
Scrapings, like some dismembered soggy foundling,
To big-mouthed Moloch, his belly’s frenzied fires.
What culture can survive such slaughter of
Its young? Pushy pagans, fresh from workouts,
Lunch intelligently on grilled lean meat
And salad, texting the while; efficiently,
Dark waters flow, swamping the hollowed-out
Lands, bearing chattels of cultures and stark
Religions which insist on consequences.
Such glib, hard-jawed types, glossy as enamel,
Obsessed with sex though fearful of conception,
Avid for youth but puerile, cannot thrive –
Nor a society which boasts of them.
Those chattels having grounded lurchingly
On shingle banks and mud flats, then inveigling
Inland along the rivers and valley passes,
Will soon confront the towns of sluggish natives,
Cobbling their cramped encampments in some nettled
Neglected patch within the city walls.
Half-skilled at trades, though masters of behind backs
Tricks of hand, tribal and preferring sons,
Soon they establish neighbourhoods unfriendly
To doubtful citizens, and scratch together
The wherewithal to throw up schools and temples
Exclusive to their gods and harsh-sound tongues.
Determined in their faith, disdainful of
The preening self-regard of citizens
(Forever at their mirrors, forgetful of
Their God and shammying their flesh), they snatch
A blocking influence in city life.
Distractedly, the natives acquiesce
As long as Sunday shopping and their foolish
Gameshow culture, tearfully effusive
And shrieking-happy, are untouched. At last
A tipping point is reached, and spread throughout
The polity, their pious claims insistent,
A cultural displacement is effected
By this insurgent, swiftly-growing people,
Aggressive, young and unafraid to use
Their fists. Acquiring dominance in chambers
And halls of counsel, their demands infusing
The state’s affairs, excluding those of the God
The natives, now subdued, deposed as their
Last virile act, they hammer in place their Law.
IV
In
edge of town estates like reservationsThe natives, fatefully declining, now
Coagulate, daze-faced and self-destructive,
Like mournful remnants of the warlike Maori
Or mild, indifferent Aborigines –
It makes no odds. A waste of weedy streets,
Roiling with rubbish, battered shops and feral
Boys flinging by on stolen mountain bikes;
Front gardens crammed with untaxed cars, dust-thick
And dripping oil; houses a mess of unwashed
Clothes, cold takeaways and the smell of dogs –
Mother and boyfriend still in bed, her brats
Upending shelves at midday for their breakfast;
Pubs harbouring scabby dealers making brisk
Transactions, leeching crumpled notes from gaunt
And flat-eyed men, or women glumly scratching
Their pallid skin: such are my folk, unlovely,
Unlovable, but mine, and all that’s left
Of a rough-armed race who through the centuries built
Engagement in a fateful commerce with
The world’s far seas, its continents and empires:
Their culture, history, their faith, their core
Psychology, internalised from birth,
Confirming who they were with goading tales
Of folk success and a share in the pride
And fortune of the far diaspora.
All’s gone; the dregs watched over from a distance
By the mighty towers and the glittering domes
Of their supplanters’ grandiose new temples
With their sprawling busy hinterland of schools
And clinics, lecture halls and workshops, open
To those of the new faith (and where, sharp-suited,
The glossy ones find work in management,
Converting for career convenience).
Decrepit in a side street, where rough drinkers
Resort and dogs run wild, a dirty-windowed
Chapel, graffiti on its walls, moulders
Upon the Good News of the Cross. Likewise,
Washed up exhausted in some musty house
On that estate, I’d sit hoarding the chaff
From that disheartened skirmish which was all
The struggle offered in the great demise
Which dispossessed my folk and left me snatching
The books, the almanacs, the memory sticks –
Those fragments of a superseded culture –
Dismissively flung out by the successors
For whom they had no value but which held
So much of use to shore against the ruin
Of our once vigorous demesne, fruitful
Of works and things and acts, world-altering,
And one-time nursery of these estate
Residers who uncaring fling away
Their lives with thigh-itch fornication, theft
And brawling. Such is the depressive fate
Of those deprived of all foundation for
Their social thriving and interior being.
My thoughts return to Rheidol Vale and things
Come clear. Those grafting, canny pastoralists,
Thoughtful for every foot of land and grateful
For the year’s good gifts, as fated forerunners,
Wrong-footed by an agent’s probing patter,
His tales of safe retirement and new cars
Each year, sold off their land for new-build, cram-tight
Housing and thereby dispossessed themselves,
Rejecting their inherited penates,
That yielding mulch of soil and firm belief
Which made them wiry-strong, working their fields
In the gale’s teeth or burying their own
In the wet chapel soil, though even then
Losing their young to city life, its lure
Of well-paid jobs and “personal fulfilment.”
And now the city dwellers too are stripped,
Distrusted by the new theocracy,
And all’s destroyed. No, not as Leverkühn
Do I hunker in a scruffy kitchen, sipping
From a cracked cup and staring down the valley
Through the estate, its gardens overgrown
And fences rocking in the windswept evening
Gloom – not his world-possessing flushed embrace
Of the music of all things, heart-engorging,
His torn psyche made mad by knowledge; rather
Tiresias, not blind but shorn of hope,
Worse fate by far, unable to resist
The dissolution and forgetting of
A people and their self-respect, the crux
Which gives the very meaning to my words –
Disaster more complete than that at Thebes.
Even so, and as I dreamed, should some enquirer,
Humble for insight into this great smash –
Though merely credenced in the annals of
The victors – send me word soliciting
A meeting that I might, seer-like, expound
The entrails of my disconnected sweepings,
In sad gratitude I would text him, “Come.”
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© August 2013 (Revised September-October 2016)
