Vernon Watkins: a second visit

September 25, 2020 8 Comments

This year’s Haf Bach Mihangel, the forecasters say, will come to an abrupt end tomorrow, on the autumn equinox.  But today’s a perfect day: hot, with sunshine from dawn to dusk, and only the slightest of breezes.  I’m walking the coast to Oxwich.  After climbing out of Pwll Du Head the path is easy going, wandering absent-mindedly along the grassy tops of the limestone cliffs.  As it joins the lane above Hunts Bay I remember a walk here four years ago, when I succeeded in finding, after some difficulty and with guidance from the late Nigel Jenkins, the memorial stone to the poet Vernon Watkins that overlooks the Bay and the sea.  I wonder whether I can remember where the stone is. 

My first try is premature, and results only in gorse scratches to legs and hands on the steep slope.  Then I recall the spot is further along, opposite the first houses after Hunts Farm (all new since Watkins’s day).  A narrow path, barely noticeable, snakes into the dying undergrowth.  There’s nothing to be seen, until I realise that the stone is on a ledge immediately below where I’m standing.  It faces the sea, near where Vernon Watkins must have stood hundreds of times.  You can only see its face if you turn your back to the sea.  No one walking the coast path could possibly know about the stone.  Even if you did know, you’d need instructions to pinpoint it. 

The stone’s near-invisibility might be a mirror – perhaps a deliberate one – of the nature of Vernon Watkins the man.  By all accounts he was a self-contained and undeclarative person, unlike his close friend Dylan Thomas, and might have been averse to a public drawing attention to himself.  It’s true, there’s a plaque commemorating him in Pennard Church, a small, slightly crooked plaque on the outside wall of the care home at Southgate where his house once stood, and a third on the wall of the old Lloyds Bank in St Helen’s Road, Swansea, where he worked.  But he’d have been more embarrassed than flattered, you sense, if he’d been accorded the equivalent of the Dylanolatry that litters Swansea, Laugharne and other Thomas locations.  Hunts Bay, with its modest, bowl-like valley sweeping down to the rocks and the sea, would have been enough for him.

The stone gives his dates (1906-67), below his name and the phrase, ‘Poet of Gower’.  This epithet grounds him in his beloved adopted homeland, though it also makes him sound a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ poet, like William Barnes or George Crabbe, whereas the claims he makes in his poems are not primarily about locality but about wider themes of life and (especially) death.

The inscription carries a line, carved by Ronald Cour, from one of Watkins’s best-known poems, the long-line ‘Taliesin in Gower’: ‘I have been taught the script of the stones, and I know the tongue of the wave’.  When I get home, I look the poem up and read it.  And find myself disappointed.  Well-chosen though it is for its geographical fit, it seems to me to contain in its twelve stanzas many of the weaknesses of Watkins’s verse.  It starts with an invocation, in the kind of orotund, ‘poetic’ language that was common enough in English poetry up to the 1950s, but which sounds dated and off-putting today (you can imagine Dylan Thomas reciting it portentously in his Anglicised brogue):

Late I return, O violent, colossal, reverberant, eavesdropping sea.
My country is here.  I am foal and violet.  Hawthorn breaks from my hands.

Admittedly, the voice is the imagined voice of the mythical Welsh poet Taliesin.  But his ode sounds more like Swinburne than a version of Old Welsh, and the high, vatic tone continues, with little or no variation, through the rest of the poem.  Nouns and adjectives describing the animate and inanimate life of the south Gower coast pile up in ever thicker drifts, as the ancient poet celebrates the vitality of the land and its creatures, persistent through ages of time.  The fourth stanza is typical:

Yet now my task is to weigh the rocks on the level wings of a bird,
To relate these undulations of time to a kestrel’s motionless poise,
I speak, and the soft-running hour-glass answers; the core of the rock is a third:
Landscape survives, and these holy creatures proclaim their regenerate joys.

Somehow the language here never takes flight, never surprises, never delights.  It’s weighed down by phrases that are ponderous (‘undulations of time’) or clichéd (‘motionless poise’).  Why are the creatures ‘holy’?  Watkins described himself, as others have since, as a ‘metaphysical’ poet.  But you don’t find in ‘Taliesin in Gower’ that vital, daring connection between idea and image, that colloquial tone, or that delight in twisting an argument like a subtle knife so common in, say, the poems of John Donne or George Herbert.  I suppose there’s an ‘argument’ of sorts, when we arrive at the final stanza:

I celebrate you, marvellous form.  But first I must cut the wood,
Exactly measure the strings, to make manifest what shall be.
All Earth being weighed by an ear of corn, all heaven by a drop of blood,
How shall I loosen this music to the listening, eavesdropping sea?

There’s an implied irony here, since the poet has just spent eleven stanzas ‘loosening the music’ in celebration of the world around him.  But maybe I’m searching for things that are not there.

Interestingly, there’s another poem by Watkins that, by its title alone, ‘Hunt’s Bay’, might have suggested itself as a source of quotation on the memorial stone.  It’s a darker, more personal poem that tones down the rhapsodic excess of ‘Taliesin in Gower’.  The best parts forget about the metaphysics and show Watkins’s lyric gift and eye for the natural world:

I have been among broken things,
Picked up the fragile lace
Of a sea-shell through which the wings
Of a gull in a clear blue space
Could be seen, then lost:
By a wave of the sea it was tossed.

In his foreword to the New selected poems (2006), Rowan Williams, a strong advocate of Vernon Williams, rejects ‘the charge that he somehow empties out the specificity of landscape or personality in order to evoke timeless patterns’.  But for me the charge is an accurate one.  Watkins has a habit of undermining his keen earthly observation by turning a moral eye to the heavens, in a ceremonial process Williams calls ‘liturgical’.  At its conclusion ‘Hunt’s Bay’ can’t resist shutting its eyes to the wonders of the Bay and indulging in solemn generalisation:

Touch you may and touch you can,
White and strange, the drifting wood,
But never touch the severed man
Torn from history for good,
Nailing to splints and spars
Night and the turning stars.

My personal ‘poet of Gower’ is Nigel Jenkins.  His poems are everything Watkins’ are not: loose in form, colloquial, scabrous and political, but always personal and always human.  His ‘Wild cherry’ doesn’t aspire to philosophy or theology.  It hides its art, but goes straight to the heart:

Tiptoe on wall-top, head in
clouds of white blossom, I
reached for the fullest, the
flounciest sprays, I travelled
many miles to give you them.

You placed them, smiling,
in a jar on your table,
and there was beauty between us,
between us too there were words,
white clouds of words …

One of the sprays I’d kept myself,
and I’ll know on what morning
you brush up the petals, you
toss out the twigs with the ashes
and empties, yesterday’s news.

Nigel Jenkins and Vernon Watkins share a resting place, outside St Mary’s Church, Pennard.  I wonder what they have to say to each other?

Comments (8)

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  1. Jim Young says:

    Hi Andrew – you might like my poetry blog above (searchable) found you on Twitter. I am a Swansea poet.
    Best wishes,
    Jim

  2. Cherry says:

    Hi Andrew
    I just wanted to thank you for pointing out where the plaque to Vernon Watkins is on the Gower cliffs. Your directions lead us to it quite easily, something I have wanted to see for some years. My father was a great friend of Vernon’s. He was the third man in that famous photo of three men, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins and Wyn Lewis, sitting on the cliffs of Gower, which you may be familiar with.

    Do you know who arranged to have the plaque placed there?
    Cherry

    • Andrew Green says:

      Many thanks, Cherry, for this interesting information. I don’t know who was responsible for putting up the Hunts Bay plaque: maybe the answer lies in Richard Ramsbotham’s biography?

    • Ben says:

      Hello Cherry,

      I’m a PhD researcher, in Wales, developing a project about Vernon Watkins. (Thank you, Andrew, for the great post!).

      If I may, I was thinking about your father, Cherry, recently. I’m very familiar with that photograph you mention through Gwen Watkins’ ‘Portrait of a Friend’. I have often been curious to learn more about Wyn’s personality and life after Dylan and Vernon. It would be lovely to speak with you sometime, if you wanted!

      I would also highly recommend Richard Ramsbotham’s book!

      Best wishes to you both,

      Ben

  3. Rampago says:

    I wonder why you have to disparage one poet in order to reinforce your preference for another. You may not like Watkins’ poetry, that is evident, but there are plenty of people for whom it means a great deal. You may consider it a ‘high vatic tone’, as is your right, but it was highly regarded by Eliot, Larkin among others, and Dylan Thomas who called him the ‘most profoundly gifted Welshman writing poetry in English’. They might reasonably be said to have known whereof they spoke!

    You are of course fully entitled to your opinion, and I would have gladly left you to it but, irritatingly, your (in my view mean-spirited) emerges as the first item on a google search of Vernon Watkins and Pennard Church: two subjects close to my heart.

    ‘Positive thoughts travel and negative thoughts rebound’ as the old adage goes so I hope, with all good wishes, you might take this reply as something in the nature of a rebound.

    • Andrew Green says:

      Thanks for this response. Of course, I was only giving my honest personal response to VW’s poetry. I wasn’t attempting to assess his place in a ‘canon’ of contemporary poetry (a futile task, in my view). Nor was I seeking to dismiss contrary views of others like yourself. Or to be ‘mean-spirited’.

      You’re right to note that Eliot, Larkin and others thought highly of his verse at the time it first appeared. It’s interesting, though, that despite attempts by Rowan Williams and others to elevate it, very few people seem to find it of abiding interest today. Contrast Larkin, who wrote poetry that speaks to large numbers today because he wrestled with universal themes in language that still echoes strongly to us. Eliot, too. Most people would be hard put to quote a single line of VW.

      I can understand that you find it annoying that a sceptical view comes to view first on an internet search. Maybe, the answer to that is for you or other lovers of VW’s work to write and publish in his defence. I’m very willing to admit that I’m missing things …

  4. Rampago says:

    I don’t really think that VW needs defending, and I’m suspicious of a view that deems popularity – or indeed quotability – as the determinant of artistic quality. Most people would be hard put to quote a line of NJ either, but that doesn’t diminish his work or the fact that his poetry speaks to you.

    In my own subject, music, Schubert’s sonatas were more or less ignored for a century, seen as too long or too formless in comparison with the mighty Beethoven. It took Artur Schnabel 100 years after Schubert’s death to bring them to the public. They are now seen as among the greatest works of the piano repertoire, but by your criteria they might have been consigned to the bin by the middle of the eighteenth century.

    Who knows how many people find VW of ‘abiding interest’, and does it really matter? I suspect it may be more than you think, but they probably don’t dwell in the lands of social media and blogging…

  5. Rampago says:

    19th century, I meant to say

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