The Bramble : 無料・フリー素材/写真
The Bramble / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | The BrambleOut of luck – too much in love –I courted Tegau, a slaveTo her embrace. It was moreThan a crush: much like a mireOf longing tugging me down.I decided – awful dream –To go to her, and makeWild love. Face it: a mistake.I regret I took that road –So winding. I can’t get ridOf the memory: my bright yawnHalf an hour before the dawn.No one knew; no one awoke.What a futile thing is hope!Just to glimpse her slim beautyIs a poor bard’s rich bounty:A bright pleasure – so I thought.My credentials at her courtWere weak. I knew my sly featCould only work by deceitAnd not by trust – so my goalWas to avoid any soulOut wandering. Poets willAt least admire my stealth, skillAnd duplicity. I leftThe path. People only laughedAfterwards: the bold bard leapsAmong the oaks, tumps and lumps,Traversing miles in the birch,Midway between wilds and church,Skulking under shade of trees –For lust’s perfect cloak is leaves –He stumbles, and his right footIs caught on a projecting root.He flies into a bramble:Hedge-intestine, twined trouble,Blighted snare, taut and tighteningLike a maw round my twitchingLimbs – toothy spectre, shame’s twine,Strop of bleeding, barbed and thin!He flails about, sharply trussed –Trades a limp for all that lust.My fall was fast, ungainly,As I plummeted grimlyDown a steep bank, entangledIn tight, tenacious brambles:Nasty plight. A churlish snareIncising a livid scarOn a poet’s tender flesh:Its thousand teeth seethe and gnash,Mutilate a poet’s legs –Vainly he writhes and tugs,Speared still more. Its ugly cropOf bulbous blackberries flopAbout on barbed stems, each witheRipe for scourging – whips of wrathEtchers of beech-boles, savage,Barbed halters, miser’s salvage,Wires enmeshing fallen logs,Branches thin as herons’ legs,Nets of hatred, archly castTo trap a man, justly cursed,Tripwire snaking down a scree,Harsh string binding tree to tree.Come, you fires, and raze to ashThese whips giving me the lash:Burn until the scourge is gone;Scorch their teeth out, one by one!Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. Once again, Dafydd’s keen sense of self-irony is at work in this poem, not only in the candid expression of his own indignity, but also in his all-too-familiar impulse to take out his frustrations on an inanimate object: a piece of slapstick which has not diminished in comic potential from the days of the fabiliaux to the moment when Basil Fawlty bashed up his mini with a branch. Tegau is not the girl’s real name. It is derived from the Welsh Triads, in which Tegau Eururon (Gold-Breast) has a chastity-testing mantle, and is one of the “three faithful wives of the island of Britain”. Graham Thomas published a version of her story in the late eighteenth century: “Arthur’s sister was wife to Urien Rheged, and she was killed in sorcery. She sent to Arthur’s court three chastity-testing objects – a mantle, a drinking-horn, and some slices of bacon. Only Tegau was successful in the mantle-test, and only her husband in the other two tests”. (See Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydain: The Triads of the Island of Britain, Cardiff, 2006, pp. 503-4.) If this story is of mediaeval provenance, then it is likely that Dafydd’s “Tegau” was his beloved Morfudd, who was by this stage married to Bwa Bach, the spiteful “Eiddig” of Dafydd’s poems.Note: on the website, dafyddapgwilym.net, this poem has been given the title "The Briar". With all due respect to a team of scholars who have produced a marvellous and endlessly inspiring resource, Dafydd makes it clear that his adversary is a bramble and not a briar, since its fruits are blackberries, and not rosehips, and it clearly scrambles across the ground.I have added an alternative illustration below, and am interested to hear about the preferences of my Flickrite friends. |
| 撮影日 | 2012-06-13 19:48:23 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
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| カメラ | PENTAX Optio WG-1 , PENTAX |
| 露出 | 0.008 sec (1/125) |
| 開放F値 | f/4.6 |