In my poetics everything is dark.
So let me, in this place of revelation
Of yet more darkness let rip on my hopes
And pull the rip chord, parachuting down
Into a proper world. Let me describe it.
And if it cause offense or give some pleasure
I don’t care, we are at ground zero now.
I told somebody what I love in life
Before, when we were travelling up above
In places which I took to be my homeland.
I’ll tell them once again to let you hear them.
I lectured Galya and my daughter thus
As we went walking close and far from home.
At Vyrnwy where the village was submerged
For English towns to have our plenteous water,
We went up through the forest in the snow
And the deserted farms. And I said, then:
‘I wish for order, real discipline
In my society. People are honest
And they must promise virtuous things.
They may be dissolute at feasting times.’
At Nant Glyn’s yew tree pulpit in the night
We went another time, and talked like this:
‘Because things flourish by the grace of God,
I want my people to be near to him,
And to avoid what spoils proximity.
So arrogance, and eating lots, and passions
Which wreck the still composure of the heart -
You must avoid this kind of egoism.
In strictness with yourself you’ll find the freedom
Of joyful lightness of mind and heart’s peace.’
Another time, at Diffnog’s Holy Well
Behind the little church and naked trees
We drank the water and took photographs
Galya and me. And this is what I said:
‘But where the people must live lives like this,
All of them just the same in self-coercion,
They must also have leave to be alone
In fact the very core of my society
Is the monastic challenge to the state:
Let ordered isolated single people
Go looking for eternity in time.
And set up monasteries in the wastes
To combat time and merely temporal things.’
At Holywell there at the saint’s cold shrine
We drank the water three times, and the last
When gypsy men and children were with us,
We shared the place, and this is what we sang:
‘They’ll build fantastic monuments to their lord
Around the idea of solitude and order
Roads will be built and maintained, grand machines
And works of art will be created for
The celebration of our solitude.
And taxes will be paid by everyone
To pay for this magnificent effort.
An army and police will be levied
To protect it with the money got together.’
Another time we went up Moel Ffamau
My child and me enduring wind and rain,
And I told her that ‘All of this is on
The explicit and indubitable ground
That the only life worth living is the one
Lived in the utter stillness of the heart.
And never on merely human principles
Should you do anything of any kind.’
At Llandwyn on the edge of Ynys Mon
We took our torches to the fallen chapel
And to the very edge even as the tide
Washed round the silent decommissioned lighthouse.
We made talk in the night, and someone said:
‘And public rituals will be conducted
To commune with their God in public spaces.
It is a large church with a canon law
Immune to change, performing rituals
Attended by all people and the young
Especially and resolutely old.
The Christian sacraments will be observed.’
At that time we went to Treaddur Bay
And there was sea spray mixed with ice and snow
Across the windscreen of our little car
And no one else around. These words were heard:
‘The statesmen of the land will be well-born
And constitute a class of higher people
For people who compete for power are given
To lying and forgetting what is right.
They will reflect our Christian position
They’ll be elected, if that’s what you want
But, being privileged and rich already
They’ll act paternally and mainly do
By any means whatever the act of service.’
What leaves you breathless is to know the truth
That I am happy and that I love to think
That there must be a ruling caste in Britain
And that is why as we one day approached
The top of Snowden, while she was exhausted
I said this to my love with no response:
‘The upper tier of the land will be true Christians
And born to rule. They will know how to pray
And how to form and maintain our traditions.
They are exemplary in ostentation
Because they do not do that, rather they
Are frugal and not vulgar and deceitful.
But note well, there must be a chance for falling
And rising to that rank by other folk.’
Another time we went to Pistyll Rhaeder
Along the river to that waterfall
Where it debauches into mists of water.
‘And what I love is hierarchical order
Where wealth’s inherited and social status
Inherited and gathered in one place.
And lineage descends from male to male
To circumvent the habitus of lying
And anguish when these things are subject to
The base game-playing competition of life.
But let those vicious unpaternal men
Fall and be trodden down on hard if they don’t serve.’
On Anglesey are many lighthouses,
I was imagining swimming across
The high tide to one at the eastern end
Of that ancestral place one day in Summer
And how I never did Commando training.
It was as cold and dreary as it gets
I loved it so much and it started raining.
‘I’m sorry that I talk of what I think
But in these places no one else could hear
We’re always on our own,’ I said to her.
‘But I can’t keep my dream inside my belly
It must come out. Despite the hierarchy
And splendid unashamed patriarchy
It will at the same time be understood:
That this society’s every action
Is fruitless and redundant without this:
The individual alone is king.
The crowd have their day, but never trespass
On ground where the soul stands pure before our God.
The land can pass away for all I care
If this is not informing all its works.’
At Telford’s Horseshoe Falls we were turned back
That Summer when we strayed along the bank
Of the Dee there, when Police caught up with us.
They told us not to come back into Wales,
And walked us to the car; but it’s my land.
‘I have no comment on this place today.
But in the future, universities
Must try to turn out individuals
With taste, and to believe in our ways.
They will mould children into Christian grown ups.
And things like papers, like the Times or the Sun,
Along with anyone else with influence
Will be imprisoned for misuse of words
And trying to propagandise what is false.
I mean if they deny God’s love for us.’
That Summer on the hill of Dinas Bran
Outside Llangollen we lay in the sun
The girls and me and my son. A ruin since
Some seven centuries like many castles.
The mozzies bit us; we ate and were happy.
‘But people should not be taught to be happy
It is impossible and never let
A nation set its hopes on this delusion.
It’s time, by contrast, for original sin
To be recognised scientific fact.
There’s no perfection of the human life.
They’ll be shown history to prove I’m right.’
That year, no longer wary of police
We came to great Llyn Brenig’s farther shore
Where no life stirred and where the burial mounds
Of Neolithic people is what we saw.
But walking from one end to the other end
We talked a bit together, sweating hard.
And I said: ‘I would never have the law
To change in any way. Rather, the dead
Wanted to leave the world to me like this
And that is how I want it to remain.
If any change in social things should happen
I would say that the dead are not in favour.
They have the biggest say about our future.’
There are actual caves near to St Asaph
You’d hardly notice on Bontnewydd hills
They huddled there and buried one another
Ten thousand years ago on the hillside.
I went inside, but Galya didn’t like to.
We said: ‘I’d teach the children Latin and Greek
So that the birth, and the death of a society
Will be embedded deep into the minds
Of the young and old, so that they know their future.
And in addition, learn of the time of Christ.’
Near to the sea at Colwyn Bay the Orme
Had seals lying on the beach in the Autumn
They howl like wolves whose voices echo round
The bay and inside caves when heard from above.
The night was coming on when we observed them,
And I insisted, as we walked away:
‘The taste for music is not arbitrary
There’s good and not good music like all else.
And good music is music fit for God
And for pure intellect and memory.
And in the other arts what edifies
Our country and our people.’ She replied
That she did not agree and I just smiled.
And these things make me happy in a good life
That in the ideal society I dream of
That I could live there and have my ideas
Shared in common space and based upon the truth.
We went to do some work near Iron Bridge
I showed my children and my Galya
The bridge there, as it was shown me at school.
‘My beautiful land I love, and me alive
In it, and such things as these functional things
Whose dark complexity and struggling
Contrast with the destruction of our day
Which socialists get into in their hatred.’
Don’t think that I am on a holiday
When I take my beloved to the scenes
Of mines dug at Minera near to here.
I work at labouring, and my ancestors
Were miners here, and at Blaenau Ffestiniog
And miners also generations back
In Ystradyfodwg and in the Rhonda,
In slate, or coal, or lead and also lime
And above Coedpoeth covered in heather.
We went into the lime kiln from the rain
And what I said was this, or something like it:
‘Greedy behaviour, avarice and wealth
Got in the heat of greed is frowned upon
Because it demeans labour and it spoils
The soul of a man to long for it inside.’
Some time toward Autumn we had made our way
Beyond Pwllheli to Bardsey Island.
We found a holy well there which the pilgrims
Are thought to have drunk before they made the crossing
To that remote and Christian site of prayer.
We sat and watched the seals as they watched us
And ate our sandwiches: ‘In my wild dreams
I see society orderly and strong
And based on something so weak and beloved
As its ideal; and yet for foreigners,
It is a terrible power of murder and hate
Which foreigners abhor and also envy
But it is kept safe by its military.
The officers would all be upper class
Except where soldiers show an inclination
And real ability to rise up there.
And by whatever means these officers
Defend the land with tooth and nail and yet
These people have no authority in the state
But purely for defence or for attack
Against our enemies,’ and then was quiet.
If you were at mount Snowden as we were,
Then at Llanberris if you turned about
And went away from there, but to the north
You’d find Dinorwig mines lying about
Spread eagled over those more northerly peaks.
It is a mining ruin in the mountains.
Now shattered by the obscene and beautiful
The soul there is bewildered and is empty.
‘By birth the people of my ideal land
Are educated so their will is God’s.
And taught from childhood to love their country
Which brought them out of the womb and gave them suck.
But foreigners have not had that advantage
And so an immigrant is a foreign thing
Who will fit in, or be a visitor.
No changes to our world because of him.
No ghettos or new islands of new cultures
Inside our delicate and jealous land.
Freedom to be and think is fine, but law
And state and public policy will be defined
By our ancestral and inherited promise.’
On Harlech beach beneath the castle walls:
‘Outside church and the state small groups can be
Where people socialise and have ideas
But nothing at all that would hate my land.’
And this is what my heart longs for the most
That it would be a constitutional thing
That the heart meets the spirit of God in grace
When God awards it to the penitent.
And that this secret fact impossible
To be observed or proven or even known
Would be put in a law as actual fact.
And that in consequence the individual
Is in every case a part of God. And it’s a crime
To either say the contrary or do
A thing which harms the soul inside a man.
At Delamere in Cheshire it was raining
Again while we discussed this all together
The four of us, and I explained this lemma.
‘It’s possible to think whatever you want
In literature, or in some school’s debate
But in the public place there’ll be no doubt.
It will be criminal for the immortal soul
To be denied or to be pushed about
Without consent. I mean the mind and spirit
The stuff of bodies, gender, race and that
Is not worth mentioning.’ At Erddig Hall
And at the Castle at Chirk, both National Trust,
We went with others through the recent past
All gone now, I supposed, and shut today.
It makes me happy to be engineering
Some new computer at a workman’s bench
At nights like Shelley’s Platonist past midnight
Sat at drawing plans and trying scrape a living
Or trying to make an alchemist’s invention.
So there, I said: ‘It is completely right
That maths and science have a place in schools
But they’re a bit demonic of attention.
Besides, they can’t pretend to touch the heart.
They suit they study of the working class.’
We come home in the end, to Ecclestone
At Wales and England’s border where a bridge
Across the Dee was built by Thomas Telford
And walk there near the estate of Westminster.
And there reflect. And Galya said to me
Something I can’t remember, and I said:
‘The young will be brought up to graduate
Into this world. And then be married off
To someone so the race continues on.
The family home is a fit place to grow.
And then let them be given an occupation.
When I was coming up there was no hope
No public, no society, no taste
And that is how it is today as well.
But the largest object in the way of health
Is sex; sex in the mind; sex in the square
Sex in the act and in the gender question.
Let them be married, copulate and die
And this is all the mystery of it.
What stops this happening or makes it strange
Or complicated will ruin our state.’
And then toward Christmas I remember this
That we went walking near to Valle Crucis
The abbey there shut down by Henry VIII
And its remains, which only lack a roof.
‘And though the individual through God
Is sole and most important thing on earth
We shall have in my dreamed society
An actual king and he shall have a family.
For while what’s secret cannot be observed
We will attempt to see it in the flesh
God’s representative on Earth as human ruler
And he shall have a palace and his children
And be the immovable summit of the perfect
Embodying the favour of the lord,’
I said that there, and later, at Llangernyw
Where a four thousand year old yew tree grows
Indifferent to time or to the past
Or to the future, or the way they mix
Into the confused present moment, there,
Making the cross across her breast, Galya
Wandered about the churchyard out of sight,
And I communed within in that quiet place
Where people before me had done the same
I prayed that my land would think as I do.
‘And this is what you like, being positive?’
The demon asked me. I said, ‘This I like.’
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