“The poem cannot live until it has been willing to die,” Vernon Watkins declared in The Second Pressure on Poetry (Unicorn, X, Spring 1963, reproduced in The Prose of Vernon Watkins). In this week’s poem, Three Harps, he expresses the related idea that the poet, too, must go through death-like mourning to find his muse, his own “harp of bone.”
Three Harps first appeared in Cypress and Acacia (1959), Watkins’s fifth collection and the first he published after the death of his friend, Dylan Thomas, in 1953. The trees symbolise opposites: the cypress symbolises mourning and the acacia symbolises life. The poem mentions yew, besides cypress, as tutelary, and alludes to the “amber tears” shed by the Heliades, Phaethon’s sisters who mourned their boy-racer brother so steadfastly they were turned into amber-weeping poplars. Three Harps is ultimately an elegy on the death of a brother-poet. In the centenary year of Thomas’s birth, there could not be a finer tribute.
It looks like a formally simple, ballad-like poem, but it’s not easy to decipher, or even to scan. Metrically, it shifts between sometimes-iambic dimeter and trimeter. English was Watkins’s first language, but the music of the line, I suspect, is Welsh-coloured. Sometimes you can sense a tension between the stress patterns of the two languages, and even the sentence structures, as in the abbreviated opening stanzas.
The poem yields itself slowly. There may be more than one answer to the question of what the three harps represent. Watkins considered lyric poetry to be music’s sister art, and these are clearly harps that express fundamental principles of his lyricism. Apollo’s lyre was the original harp; the triple-harp, although invented in Italy, is Wales’s national instrument. It may not be too fanciful to imagine the three harps also as classical, Celtic and English traditions playing harmoniously in Watkins’s finely schooled imagination.
The first harp is associated with “emulation”. Daedalus’s craft and the misjudged desire of Phaethon to drive his father’s chariot are interpreted both as opposing forces, and as part of the same force. The “God of light” gives way to the son’s “desire for flight” although the poet Phaethon, in stanza three, is seen as someone fated to transcend the smoky wreckage he wrought. In the crucial sixth stanza, however, the poet has learned a new emphasis on depth (“Little for the sun I cared”) and unworldly, internalised poetic aspiration: “My soul I made / Write old ambition new / And qualify the laurel’s shade.” (I pronounce “qualify” with a single stress here, and make a three-beat line.)
Any scepticism about the elaborate skills of “Daedalus’s table” may recall the younger poet’s belief in spontaneity, his naive distrust of revision as “an impure act”. He learned differently as he matured, and, like Dylan Thomas, gave meticulous attention to the fine “gold-edged printing” of craft. Revision is what he means by the poem’s obligation to die, and what’s encoded in “the second word” here. But, again, I can’t see this as a poem of chronological development, and “either/or” decisions. Poetry requires both “a harp at arm’s length” and “a harp a hand away”.
Finally, even the combined art of those two harps seems to be subjugated. In the magnificent eighth and ninth stanzas, the poet advises transcendence of “birth’s enterprise / And death’s small crime” and reminds us, in that lovely use of anaphora, of a Bardic tradition in which the poet “lay down” in darkness to compose. This brings us to the underworld of mourning, the descent from the high, bright harp of literary ambition to the third, “shrouded harp” of human loss, painful to touch, since it consists of “the ribs of the man”. That unspecified “man” surely embraces two poets, one dead before his time, the other grieving for him, though renewing his inspiration through his grief.
Three Harps is included in Richard Ramsbotham’s New Selected Poems, an excellent introduction to Watkins, which was published by Carcanet in 2006, the poet’s centenary birth year.
****
Three Harps
Ambitions playing:
The first, inseparable
From gold-edged printing
On Daedalus’ table.
Desire for flight:
Chariot-usurping skill.
The god of light
Torn from the godlike will.
What tears of amber,
What pre-natal force
From dawn’s dark chamber
Fired me on my course?
Three harps: one
From emulation drew its strength.
The rising sun:
A harp at arm’s length.
The second word of day;
The second word:
A harp a hand away
Held by a human cord.
By cypress taught and yew,
My soul I made
Write old ambition new
And qualify the laurel’s shade.
I set one grave apart,
Gave speech to stone:
“Come back to my sad heart
And play this harp of bone.”
Little for the sun I cared,
Little for renown.
I saw the unknown, unshared,
True grave. So I lay down;
Lay down, and closed my eyes
To the end of all time,
The end of birth’s enterprise
And death’s small crime.
Then at once the shrouded harp
Was manifest. I began
To touch, though pain is sharp,
The ribs of the man.
VERNON WATKINS