Scarped against the sky it rises it’s
Shadow bare of grass and gorse,
Barren are it’s granite ledges, worn
Fine through erosive force,
Shrouded in the firmament it’s peak
Lies cold and stark,
A tomb for scoria and fossils, from
An age that has left it’s mark.
Towering these weathering crags reign
Obscurely above the earth –
A lonely black mountain, sterile since
It’s birth.
.
.
By Donald Sainsbury
How bare the countryside! What dearth
How stark the hamlets’ desolation…
Long-suffering country of my birth,
poor homeland of the Russian nation.
Never will the stranger’s gaze
look deeper to perceive or guess
what hidden light there is that plays
and shimmers through your nakedness.
In servant’s guise the King of Heaven,
beneath the cross in anguish bent,
has walked the length and breadth of Russia,
blessing her people as he went.
by Фёдор Иванович Тютчев (Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev)
(1855)
translated by Avril Pyman
Fun fact: Counted amongst the admirers of Tyutchev’s works were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy along with Nekrasov and Fet. Then later Osip Mandelstam who, in a passage approved of by Shalamov, believed that a Russian poet should not have copy of Tyutchev in his personal library – he should know all of Tyutchev off by heart.
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clouds that glint in the wind—-
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
by R. S. Thomas
from The Stones of the Fields (1946)
Where are you going to, Hywel and Blodwen,
With your eyes as sad as your shoes?
We are going to learn a nimble language
By the waters of the Ouse.
We are trampling through Gloucester and through Leicester,
We hope we shall not drop,
And we talk as we go of the Merthyr streets
And a house at Dowlais Top.
We have triads and englyns from pagan Dyfed
To brace us in the fight,
And three or four hundred Methodist hymns
To sing on a starless night.
We shall grumble and laugh and trudge together
Till we reach the stark North Sea
And talk till we die of Pantycelyn
And the eighteenth century.
We shall try to forget the Sunday squabbles,
And the foreign magistrate,
And the stupid head of the preacher’s wife,
And the broken iron gate.
So here we say farewell and wish you
Less trouble and less pain,
And we trust you to breed a happier people
Ere our blood flows back again.
by Idris Davies
There was a Welsh language opera based on the same Welsh story as this poem. Blodwen is an opera in three acts composed in 1878 by Dr Joseph Parry to a Welsh libretto by Richard Davies. It was the first opera written in the Welsh language. I just mention it as I doubt many people know of it.
Rambling At The Bridge Head 