What is Man?
What is living? The broad hall found
between narrow walls.
What is acknowledging? Finding the one root
under the branches’ tangle.
What is believing? Watching at home
till the time arrives for welcome.
What is forgiving? Pushing your way through thorns
to stand alongside your old enemy.
What is singing? The ancient gifted breath
drawn in creating.
What is labour but making songs
from the wood and the wheat?
What is it to govern kingdoms? A skill
still crawling on all fours.
And arming kingdoms? A knife placed
in a baby’s fist.
What is it to be a people? A gift
lodged in the heart’s deep folds.
What is love of country? Keeping house
among a cloud of witnesses.
What is the world to the wealthy and strong? A wheel,
turning and turning.
What is the world to earth’s little ones? A cradle,
rocking and rocking.
In March, 2012, the poet and theologian, Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Pisgah Chapel in Llandysilio, Pembrokeshire, to deliver the Waldo Williams Society annual lecture. Entitled Poetry and Peacemaking, the lecture drew on Waldo Williams’s poem Mewn Dau Gae (In Two Fields) and discussed the work of the Welsh-language poet and peace activist in relation to the transformative force known as “awen” – sometimes mistranslated as the Muse.
Rowan’s kinship with Waldo will be clear to all readers – even the benighted English – of the two translations with which he concludes his latest collection, The Other Mountain. This week’s poem, What is Man? (Pa Beth yw Dyn? ) is one of those translations. Recent events sharpen the moral resonance of Waldo’s metaphorical catechism. British MPs voted to drop bombs rather than push a way through thorns towards dialogue with the factions of Syria, to risk endangering the cradles of “earth’s little ones”. Can we trust any baby yet to use the knife responsibly?
I’m among the doubly benighted – an English atheist who can’t speak Welsh beyond the beginners’ phrasebook, page one. I’d be reluctant to comment on the original poem via comparative English translations. All I can add, after reading and being greatly moved by all the work in The Other Mountain, is a generalisation. Sometimes, when a poet presents his/her original poems side by side with translated poems, the diction and tone will be radically different in the translation. This doesn’t happen, or only minimally, in Rowan Williams’s Waldo Williams translations. They sing at a slightly higher pitch than his own poems, perhaps, but the melody and pulse are united.
The most essential question of all begins the poem, in the form of the title. It’s not directly answered. Instead, a further question, related and perhaps even tougher, shoulders into the opening line “What is living?” The answer – “The broad hall found/ between narrow walls” – recalls the Venerable Bede’s image of human life as the flight of a sparrow across the mead hall. It’s a powerfully physical image, with no insistence on spiritual interpretation – a little Zen-like, perhaps.
The success of a poem-as-catechism depends on how successfully the writer avoids the impression of predestination, of having filled in the didactic Q&A form in advance. The essence of poetry, after all, is to avoid pat questions, pat answers, and good questions chosen because they invite pat answers. What is Man? benefits from answers that seem sometimes to lack a perfect logical or moral fit with the questions. Because the answer is always stretched across the line-break, there’s often an effect of initial complexity yielding to clarity. For instance, at the end of stanza two, thorns make an unexpected appearance in connection with forgiveness. Yet those emblems remind us that forgiveness hurts, although the wounds may not be fatal. The enemy is an “old enemy” and that’s an important qualification: any path is long overgrown, the thorns cluster thickly. There’s an intensifying Christian symbolism too, of course, for readers coming from that tradition.
The third stanza creates a kind of extended chiasmus. Singing is “the ancient gifted breath/ drawn in creation” whereas “labour is making songs/ from the wood and the wheat”. That’s almost to say that singing is a kind of work (creation), and labour a kind of song.
My favourite stanza is the fourth. The answer to “What is it to govern kingdoms?” isn’t particularly original, but the clarity of the allegory, the “skill” imagined as a baby “still crawling on all fours” revitalises it. Relentless, the questioner pushes on with the related, urgently abbreviated question, “And arming kingdoms?” The answer is brilliantly visual, and devastating in its summoning of chaos.
Is there any implied connection between stanzas four and five? There doesn’t seem to be. The experiences of being a people and loving your country are expressed with homely, tender, inwards-turning images of house and fold, and none of the defensive emotion someimes attached to these concepts. The idea of “keeping house/ among a cloud of witnesses” seems to glance back at the Advent lines that respond to “What is believing?” In both instances I felt my imagination stranded between solid ground and the nebulous. Perhaps that’s as it should be.
The last stanza issues what might be an overt invitation to moral judgment. Its question about the nature of the world inhabited by “the wealthy and strong” is mirrored by the question concerning their antithesis, the weak and powerless, imagined as “earth’s little ones.” But the first answer doesn’t clearly condemn the wealthy and strong. (Does it in the original?) It shows us something intensely human, after all, and even indigenous to the poem’s stanza-form and anaphoric structures: the turning wheel.
It’s relentless, of course: the “turning and turning” evokes ceaseless, insatiable, joyless production. The world as felt, or desired, by the “little ones” is one of satisfied demands, peaceful rest and the delightful repetition of movement without travel. These figures may interestingly leave the reader with evolution’s central human dilemma: stop or go on? And they add to the impression that the ripples flowing from this apparently simple poem have a universal reach.
