The Ballad of the EAS Rider

The working class at University in 1977, when you got a grant and there were no tuition fees. 

lyrics

Twisting round my hair in knots, 
Twisting round your neck with thoughts. 
My oh my, you have to agree 
Certain issues of poetry 
Can’t conceive of a harmony. 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face. 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m twisting… 

Listening to you plum for choice 
Between degrees of passive vice. 
‘There’s much that may be said for Donne.’ 
I am the outside world come in, 
Butchered hands and axe grinding, 
OPEN YOUR ED AND LET ME IN! 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face. 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m twisting …. 

Your rich aesthetic literariness 
Is like the lush grass on a grave. 
My oh my I’m rotten through 
But life moves through and it’s sick, of you. 
I’ll thrust you off me and trample you. 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your case 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m … Terminating this debate!

Excalibur (A Dream Too Real To Live) from The Lost Land

"Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!"
I begged Bedwyr - and twice more -
"Throw back, grown black, Excalibur
That I might live forever
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of my heart's bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home, and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream
That Artos, once man Arthur,
(Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long-fought malice Mordered)
Is God, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look!

A Christ sword to Word your sky!"

From our forthcoming Arthur set "The Lost Land". The tune is the Lonely Ash Grove.

From our forthcoming Matter of Britain set "The Lost Land," this interpretation of the famous moment in the Arthur legends when the Mordred-conquering but broken king of Logres commands Bedivere (originally Bedwyr, first friend) to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur ('lightning blade') back into the Lake form whence it came, takes a number of things for granted which alas one cannot. First, that the Arthur legend is not the property of the English (as often believed) but of an older Celtic Britain which fought them for what became known as "Logres" the Lost Land - (modern Welsh Lloegr, England) - hence our use of a haunting Welsh tune. Second, the (to me) attractive Celtic 'otherworldliness' of the lyric is due - as in the verses of our "Morgan le Fay" - to my alternating use of two of the most common medieval Welsh meters (Morgan uses the other two) known collectively as cynghanedd (literally 'harmony')

The required intense focus on word-sounds and patterns here and in its sibling piece Morgan cast a spell over my composition which allowed magical thoughts to form. This in turn affected the choice of tune and the overall performance.

A Dream Too Real To Live (First Take)

"Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!"
I begged Bedwyr - and twice more -
"Throw back, grown black, Excalibur
That I might live forever
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of my heart's bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home, and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream
That Artos, once man Arthur,
(Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long-fought malice Mordered)
Is God, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look!

A Christ sword to Word your sky!"

From our forthcoming Matter of Britain set "The Lost Land," this interpretation of the famous moment in the Arthur legends when the Mordred-conquering but broken king of Logres commands Bedivere (originally Bedwyr, first friend) to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur ('lightning blade') back into the Lake form whence it came, takes a number of things for granted which alas one cannot. First, that the Arthur legend is not the property of the English (as often believed) but of an older Celtic Britain which fought them for what became known as "Logres" the Lost Land - (modern Welsh Lloegr, England) - hence our use of a haunting Welsh tune. Second, the (to me) attractive Celtic 'otherworldliness' of the lyric is due - as in the verses of our "Morgan le Fay" - to my alternating use of two of the most common medieval Welsh meters (Morgan uses the other two) known collectively as cynghanedd (literally 'harmony')

The required intense focus on word-sounds and patterns here and in its sibling piece Morgan cast a spell over my composition which allowed magical thoughts to form. This in turn affected the choice of tune and the overall performance.

Lady Guinevere - the music video

This Guinevere lyric is written in imitation of the French romance verse form (octosyllabic couplets giving a lighter, faster feel than the English iambic pentameter) and tries to evoke the medieval Guinevere of the troubadours of Provence rather than the Gwenhwyfar of Celtic myths and of Dark Age history (who will have her own very different song in the set). We wanted Guinevere to sound contemporary and confident, chipping against the beat of the courtly love tradition in which she was a love object rather than a love subject.

The original poem continues and concludes as follows:
I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.)  

lyrics

Lyric

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

Anyone who's heard the hypnotic circling chords of CS & N's 'Guinnevere' on their eponymous album will know how flexible Arthurian romance can be. There, David Crosby is some West Coast modern day Lancelot caught - amid fraught pentagrams, orange trees, seagulls, gardens with aimlessly wandering peacocks etc - in a fatal spell of attraction for an elusive green eyed, gazing golden haired woman,  longing to be free out on the  sea with her. This is a long way from the Arthur of Dark Age history,  not quite so far  from Celtic mythology and a direct descendant of French romance:  the troubadours of Provence would have recognised this Norman version of The Matter of Breton in it even if the Dark Age warriors riding behind the Romano-Celtic Arth-Ursus into battle against the Saxons might have wondered what their warlord's shadowy wife 'Gwenhwyfar' (white phantom) was doing consorting with a general they hadn't even heard of, unless he was Llugh, the Celtic god of light and harvest, after which Londinos (London) is reputedly named. The point is, 'The Matter of Britain' has lasted because, like Britain itself, it has a magical relationship with time and place. It changes and it stays the same. 

My version of Guinevere below is very much the French romance one, the Matter of Britain as sung in French verse by Provencal troubadours, magical hero-stories exiled to Brittany (Little Britain) with Celtic Britons fleeing through Cornwall as the Saxons conquered the West, given a shining armour polish by the Normans, a brilliant gloss of French romance and courtly love and spreading across the North of Europe (and into Spain).  And that's before we even get to the later Arab enchantments, new learning and flying dragons absorbed as the Christians embarked on the Crusades and those twin propaganda campaigns, the Norman Conquest's identification with the Saxon-subduing Celtic knights of old followed by Henry VIII's repeat of the same, both to legitimise a new Britain using the old Matter.

"Lady Guinevere" was first published in 'Schools Poetry Review' in the late 80s and then in my first volume of poems "Coming Home" in 1991 along with an alternative Welsh-metered Dark Age/ Celtic mythological "Gwenhwyfar" the twinned poems evident love of all things Arthurian earning me an invitation by elegant formal letter to a British order of Arthurians which I was too wary to take up. I subsequently extended the sequence into a book of verse called "The Lost Land" which I learned by heart and performed as a one man show (Arthur; Britain's Making") - using masks and English, Welsh and Scottish flags - at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011. Not to mention an epic school play "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" - epic in every way, cast of 70, 2 hours long, produced by 3 different directors in 3 different local schools, published by a teacher's training college, workshopped in class and with youth theatre groups, still rewriting it for various remakings 30 years later...

The audio link  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/lady-guinevere is to the version of "Guinevere" which will appear on our Peacock's Tale folk indie duo's forthcoming album of "The Lost Land" and opts for our remit of 'traditional' tale with 'contemporary' beat.

Lady Guinevere

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.) 

lyrics