Narrative Poetry and the Critic

I tell stories. I don’t think of it as writing poetry.

 

Poetry is T.S.Eliot, W.B.Yeats, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, R.S.Thomas, Wyatt, Shakespeare...it's an endless list.

 

OR 

 

If you prefer your poets alive then Jeremy Hooker, John Mathias, Jo Balmer, Jenny Lewis, Leslie Saunders... They write poetry, and I wouldn’t be able to define ‘poetry’ any more than most people, but like Graves’ honest housewife, I know the genuine article when I read it.

 

But I’m not trying to do that. My models are the adults I remember who told stories as a form of entertainment; the rhythms of the liturgy, with the congregation chanting in unison; traditional stories, be they folk or fairy tale; the story songs of the tradition, stripped back to bare bones and beautiful; voices round a campfire shaping the day into a narrative, and of course, the medieval storytellers. 

 

What I write is historical fiction. But it’s sold as poetry because the lines don’t go all the way to the right margin. 

 

The people who would normally read historical fiction are put off by the layout and the label. The people who read poetry are used to reading short verse, and have a set of expectations about what that verse should and shouldn’t do and are therefore put off by a book length narrative.

 

It's a problem facing everyonewriting narrative verse. 

The critic and reviewer are lost, a vocabulary developed and designed to talk about ‘poetry’ and what ‘poetry’ is supposed to be and do, flounders. 

 

Or they buy into Kinney’s ‘doubling’ even if they haven’t heard the phrase: the idea that verse narrative can be separated out into verse and narrative, forgetting you could just as easily separate prose narrative into prose and narrative. And then the verse can be considered on its own and the critic can play the usual ‘poetry review’ games while ignoring story. 

 

It’s as though someone reviewing American Psycho discussed nothing but sentence structure and word choice, or made a great deal of fuss over another writer’s preference for similes over metaphors.

 

And because in a verse narrative the intelligence should be in the architecture, the inability to discuss this means no one notices how plot and character can be constructed so that they (can) work differently in some ways then they do in (some kinds of) prose, or how some prose writers can create stories that work more like verse narratives.

 

Translating Culhwch and Olwen, final thoughts.

And as long as he lived, she was his only wife

 

I love this story, I have known it for decades. I wouldn’t like to live in it.   

Translating it, I have become very pro-giant and sympathetic to boars and witches. I doubt this was the storyteller’s intention, although he obviously admired a good horse and dog, and knew the boar was a worthy opponent. 

 

The material probably felt archaic when it was written down. Throughout the story there is an indifference to suffering, stripped of all pretence of ideological or theological justification. In a world of talking animals and men who have been punished by being turned into animals, the distinction between humans and other animals is slight. Twrch Trywth, the great boar, and his piglets are as brave and as admirable as the heroes who hunt them. Men kill without remorse or compassion. They throw their lives away with flamboyant indifference. To get two strangers into bed, the death toll is enormous and nobody questions this, at any point in the story. 

 

Those outside courtly society; giants and witches, or those in possession of desired objects, are there to be used, exploited, and killed. The powerful will take what they want or need. They might ask first, but ‘no’ is never a safe option. 

 

It's a story, nothing more or less. But perhaps the storyteller understood that stripped of pretence, this is the way the world has always worked. He doesn’t condone or condemn. He reports. Ysbadadden, shaved and about to die, speaks the truth. Culhwch has earned nothing; learnt nothing. Without Arthur, he didn’t have a chance. 

‘And that’ says our author, ‘is how Culhwch won Olwen.’ 

 

A Presentment of Englishry, A Man of Heart, The Fabled Third

I started writing these ten years ago and now they are finished and I can hear the Grateful Dead singing; 'What a long strange trip it's been'.

Narrative poetry, or Historical fiction, or historical fiction in verse. I think of it as storytelling, 

From a prehistoric tin trader visiting the island to the struggle for power at the end of Roman Britain and the coming of the English.

The stories of Locrin, Gwendoline and Aestrild; Vortigern and Rowena; and Uther and Ygrayne are taken from Laȝamon‘s late twelfth century version of the legendary history of Britain. The Fabled Third also contains versions of three stories from The Mabinogion. 

Laȝamon‘s own story is sketched in A Presentment of Englishry and he returns to close the books at the end of The Fabled Third in Laȝamon‘s Last Interview. 

Information and samples on Shearsman UK’s website, Information, Samples and background at  www.liamguilar.com.    

Nu biddeð Laȝamon alcne æðele mon;

for þene almiten Godd.

þet þeos boc rede; & leornia þeos runan.

þat he þeos soðfeste word; segge to-sumne.

for his fader saule; þa hine forð brouhte.

& for his moder saule; þa hine to monne iber.

& for his awene saule; þat hire þe selre beo. Amen

The Fabled Third is now published

 

The Fabled Third is now available directly from the publisher: Click Here  and from the usual online outlets. Take advantage of a weak Australian Dollar and buy direct from my website: Click Here where you will also find samples and background information.

Summary.

Following the outline of Laȝamon the priest’s late twelfth century version, The Fabled Third is the story, in verse, of Uther Pendragon’s attempt to rule what’s left of the Roman province of Britannia in the late 5^th /early 6^th Century. His British subjects are more interested in squabbling over their privileges than in working together against the increasing numbers coming to plunder the ailing province. 

 

Gorlois Duke of Cornwall, a survivor of the previous regime, resents Uther, is resistant to royal authority and is looking for an excuse to renounce his oath of allegiance and go to war. An equally resentful Merlin, banished from the court, is plotting his revenge.  

 

The women are caught in a struggle for precedence and power, knowing the consequences of failure are horrifying. Ygrayne, the wife of Gorlois, has seen what happens to the wives of defeated rulers. Knowing that her husband can’t beat Uther, she too is plotting. 

 

The book begins when Gwydion, a British storyteller, arrives at Uther’s court. Uther is in need of a bard. He challenges Gwydion to tell three stories, for three different audiences.  Versions of Gwydion’s stories will later be collected in ‘The Mabinogion’ but as he becomes involved in Uther’s struggle to rule the province, the first two stories are easy. 

The third is the problem. 

John Masefield's versions of the story of Arthur's conception.

(King Uther and Igraine after Gorlois's death, from Uther and Igraine by Warwick Deeping, illustration by Władysław T. Benda, 1903)

Now that I’ve finished writing about Uther, I have been reading other people’s versions. 

 

The story in its early medieval versions operates on the ugly edges of desire, where obsession lurks and destroys both the object of desire and the person doing the desiring. If ever there was as story to illustrate the idea that identity is fluid, and if desire is desire for the desire of the other and we are willing to transform ourselves to become the object of that desire, this is it. 

 

In ‘Midsummer Night And Other Tales In Verse’ (1928) John Masefield (1878-1967) provides an example of the problem caused by rewriting a story to make it acceptable for ‘modern’ sensibilities. Interestingly, he tells the story twice. 

 

 In ‘The Begetting of Arthur’, the longer of the two versions, there is no magic, no Merlin there is no transformation, there is no deception of the woman, and the lovers are married before they consummate their relationship (ain’t euphemisms lovely?).  

 

In this version, Uther is trying to unite Britain. He goes to Cornwall to try and talk the King, Melchyon, into joining him. Melchyon is ‘aged savage mean and grim’ and baron Breuse the Heartless ‘of all men the worst’ lives with him. The king dismisses Uther. As he’s about to leave, he meets Ygern, the King’s daughter, and they fall instantly in love. Uther turns around and goes back to ask the king for her hand. Her father refuses his request, thinking Uther’s simply trying to ‘win my power through a bride’. As Uther and his two companions ride away, Ygern’s sister catches up with them, and tells him that Ygern is to be married that night to Breuse the Heartless. 

 

To save her, Uther concocts a plan to sneak back to Tintagel, wearing a disguise of  ‘crown and scarlet and a sheep-wool beard.’knowing the Porter is old and will be half asleep. He gets in, finds a waiting Ygerne, they immediately escape to the old Hermit (Bran the Blest) who immediately marries them. 

 

They flee Cornwall, riding day and night, until out of Merchyon’s land,  before consummating their marriage in a suitably romantic outdoor spot ‘in this orchard of the fairy queen’ but  Merchyon and Breuse  catch up with them and murder Uther while he’s sleeping. Ygern is taken back to Tintagel to await the birth of her son.

 

Give Masefield his dues, it enjoyable, he was an a skilful narrative poet. It reads like a literary version of a ballad. It’s reminiscent of The Eve of Saint Agnes as the lovers creep out of the castle and make their escape, except it’s more dramatic than Keats’ poem. 

 

But the story itself, stripped of magic and made decent for the moral reader, is as dead as Uther’s fake woollen beard. He is heroic and moral and utterly forgettable. 

 

In the same collection, Masefield tells another version of the same story. ‘The Old Tale of the Begetting’.  He introduced the poem: The men of old who told the tale for us/Declare that Uther begat Arthur thus’.

 

It’s much shorter, 10 rhyming couplets with a final stanza of three lines,  against seven pages of ‘The Begetting of Arthur’. This is the familiar version, with Merlin and magic, deception of the woman, and it ends with Uther crowing and Ygrain distraught ;

 

Uther drinks and boasts at his board,

Ygrain sings for her dead lord:

‘Would I were pierced though with a sword’.   

 

It’s possible Masefield was trying to mimic a ballad in ‘popular form’, and thought this sounded like the story if it had been told by someone uneducated or at least ‘non-literary’.   But whatever the intention, it isn’t a version of the story that can be taken seriously.  Remember, this is the man who wrote ‘Cargoes’.

 

His rhyming couplets and diction undermine any seriousness the story might have had. 

 

‘Uther saw Ygrain the Bright/His heart went pit-pat at the sight’.

or

‘He said to Merlin, ‘Make her mine/Or you’ll be hog’s meat for my swine’.

 

An uncharacteristically awkward syntax also spoils the story.

 

‘As he climbed into the Queen’s bed/Ygrain’s Duke on the moors fell dead’.

 

 

‘The Begetting of Arthur’, if you don’t know the usual version of the story, makes sense, but as a version of the story, it’s like watching an earnest, well-made film that somehow misses the point. ‘The Old tale of the Begetting’ puts the usual version at a distance, and manages to simultaneously  tell the story and mock it. 

 

Cleaning up a medieval story so it’s acceptable usually means killing whatever made the story hold its readers’ attention for centuries. 

I'll Howl Before You Bury Me.

 

I've just seen a copy of this book on sale on Amazon.com.au for 175 dollars.  Which seems outrageous given that neither the publisher nor the writer (me) will see any of that.  

I still have copies of the first print run for sale on my website for 20 Aus Dollars, price includes postage to anywhere in the world. Clicking on the link below will take you there. 

I'll Howl Before you Bury me