I’m allowed one more nomination for this list, and I want to use it for the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, whose work I have recommended
here before. I pick
The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) in particular, not because I don’t think other volumes of Watkins were just as good, but because it’s the collection in which his own voice comes clean. It’s the collection in which Watkins first comes into his own—a debut of sorts, of a unique and wonderful poet.
Watkins avoided universities—always a good idea, if you can do it—and spent his whole life in the seaside place he grew up in, working as a bank clerk and refusing all promotions at his job so it wouldn’t interfere with his poetry. He wasn’t interested in literary fashion; his aesthetic was in the line of the English Romantics and Yeats, and his style at times (he was well aware) can seem taken straight from Yeats—more often, though, it is Watkins’s own. His view of things is definitely his own, although he draws on a similar Romantic (actually much older than that but you know what I mean) idea of Imagination and metaphysical-visionary thought. But Watkins gives that contemplative tradition a local habitation and a name—the landscape he lived in his entire life, and the Welsh bardic/poetic tradition he naturally felt close to.
I like Watkins most (although I like almost all his poetry) in his symbolist mode, as in this poem that opens this collection (
this poem was beautifully illustrated, later on, after this volume, by Watkins’s friend the painter Ceri Richards). This poem is the first in a series called "Music of Colours," which Watkins would return to over the years--in the thread I link above, "Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours" is perhaps the strongest poem in that series.
Music of Colours: White Blossom
White Blossom, white, white shell; the Nazarene
Walking in the ear; white touched by souls
Who know the music by which white is seen,
Blinding white, from strings and aureoles,
Until that is not white, seen at the two poles,
Nor white the Scythian hills, nor Marlowe’s queen.
The spray looked white until this snowfall.
Now the foam is grey, the wave is dull.
Call nothing white again, we were deceived.
The flood of Noah dies, the rainbow is lived.
Yet from the deluge of illusions an unknown colour is saved.
White must die black, to be born white again
From the womb of sounds, the inscrutable grain,
From the crushed, dark fibre, breaking in pain.
The bud of the apple is already forming there.
The cherry-bud, too, is firm, and behind it the pear
Conspires with the racing cloud. I shall not look.
The rainbow is diving through the wide-open book
Past the rustling paper of birch, the sorceries of bark.
Buds in April, on the waiting branch,
Starrily opening, light raindrops drench,
Swinging from world to world when starlings sweep,
Where they alight in air, are white asleep.
They will not break, not break, until you say
White is not white again, nor may may.
White flowers die soonest, die into that chaste
Bride-bed of the moon, their lives laid waste.
Lilies of Solomon, taken by the gust,
Sigh, make way. and the dark forest
Haunts the lowly crib near Solomon’s dust,
Rocked to the end of majesty, warmed by the low beast,
Locked in the liberty of the tremendous rest.
If there is white, or has been white, it must have been
When His eyes looked down and made the leper clean.
White will not be, apart, though the trees try
Spirals of blossom, their green conspiracy,
She who touched His garment saw no white tree.
Lovers speak of Venus, and the white doves
Jubilant, the white girl, myth’s whiteness, Jove’s,
Of Leda, the swan, whitest of his loves.
Lust imagines him, web-footed Jupiter, great down
Of thundering light; love’s yearning pulls him down
On the white swan-breast, the magical lawn,
Involved in plumage, mastered by the veins of dawn.
In the churchyard the yew is neither green or black.
I know nothing of Earth or colour until I know I lack
Original white, by which the ravishing bird looks wan.
The mound of dust is nearer, white of mute dust that dies
In the soundfall’s great light, the music in the eyes,
Transfiguring whiteness into shadows gone,
Utterly secret. I know you, black swan.
Oh, I almost forgot to say where the book can be got: a used copy for a reasonable price is
here. His collected poems is easily found as well, and well worth getting.