The White Goddess Read Online Free PDF Page A

except where it fails to maintain decorous composure; and this is because of the difference between the attitudes of the Classical poet, and of the true poet, to the White Goddess. This is not to identify the true poet with the Romantic poet. ‘Romantic’, a useful word while it covered the reintroduction into Western Europe, by the writers of verse-romances, of a mystical reverence for woman, has become tainted by indiscriminate use. The typical Romantic poet of the nineteenth century was physically degenerate, or ailing, addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny. The Classical poet, however gifted and industrious, fails to pass the test because he claims to be the Goddess’s master – she is his mistress only in the derogatory sense of one who lives in coquettish ease under his protection. Sometimes, indeed, he is her bawdmaster: he attempts to heighten the appeal of his lines by studding them with ‘beauties’ borrowed from true poems. In Classical Arabic poetry there is a device known as ‘kindling’, in which the poet induces the poetic atmosphere with a luscious prologue about groves, streams and nightingales, and then quickly, before it disperses, turns to the real business in hand – a flattering account, say, of the courage, piety and magnanimity of his patron or sage reflexions on the shortness and uncertainty of human life. In Classical English poetry the artificial kindling process is often protracted to the full length of the piece.
    The following chapters will rediscover a set of sacred charms of varying antiquity in which successive versions of the Theme are summarized. Literary critics whose function it is to judge all literature by gleeman standards – its entertainment value to the masses – can be counted upon to make merry with what they can only view as my preposterous group of mares’ nests. And the scholars can be counted upon to refrain from any comment whatsoever. But, after all, what is a scholar? One who may not break bounds under pain of expulsion from the academy of which he is a member.
    And what is a mare’s nest? Shakespeare hints at the answer, though he substitutes St. Swithold for Odin, the original hero of the ballad: 
    Swithold footed thrice the wold.
He met the Night-Mare and her nine-fold ,

Bid her alight and her troth plight ,
And aroynt thee, witch, aroynt thee!
     
     
    A fuller account of Odin’s feat is given in the North Country Charm against the Night Mare ,which probably dates from the fourteenth century: 
    Tha mon o ’ micht, he rade o ’ nicht
Wi ’ neider swerd ne ferd ne licht.
He soc ht tha Mare, he fond tha Mare ,
He bond tha Mare wi ’ her ain hare ,
Ond gared her swar by midder-micht
She wolde nae mair rid o ’ nicht
Whar aince he rade, thot mon o ’ micht.
     
     
    The Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets. The prophet Job said of her: ‘She dwelleth and abideth upon the rock. Her young ones also suck up blood.’
    1 Cynghanedd may be illustrated in English thus:
              Billet spied,
              Bolt sped.
              Across field
              Crows fled, 
              Aloft, wounded,
              Left one dead.
    But the correspondence of the ss in ‘across’ and the s of ‘crows’, which has a ‘z’ sound, would offend the purist.

Chapter Two
     

THE BATTLE OF THE TREES
     
     
    It seems that the Welsh minstrels, like the Irish poets, recited their traditional romances in prose, breaking into dramatic verse, with harp accompaniment, only at points of emotional stress. Some of these