The White Goddess by Robert Graves Read Free Book Online

tops of the beech-tree  
    Have sprouted of late ,
Are changed and renewed
    From their withered state.
     
    (lines 103, 52, 138, 58)
     

When the beech prospers,  
    Though spells and litanies
The oak–tops entangle ,
    There is hope for trees.
    This means, if anything, that there had been a recent revival of letters in Wales. ‘Beech’ is a common synonym for ‘literature’. The English word ‘book’, for example, comes from a Gothic word meaning letters and, like the German buchstabe ,is etymologically connected with the word ‘beech’ – the reason being that writing tablets were made of beech. As Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century bishop-poet, wrote: Barbara fraxineis pingatur runa tabellis –‘Let the barbarian rune be marked on beechwood tablets.’ The ‘tangled oak-tops’ must refer to the ancient poetic mysteries: as has already been mentioned, the derwydd, or Druid, or poet, was an ‘oak-seer’. An early Cornish poem describes how the Druid Merddin, or Merlin, went early in the morning with his black dog to seek the glain ,or magical snake’s-egg (probably a fossiled sea-urchin of the sort found in Iron Age burials), cull cresses and samolus ( herbe d’or ),and cut the highest twig from the top of the oak. Gwion, who in line 225 addresses his fellow-poets as Druids, is saying here: ‘The ancient poetic mysteries have been reduced to a tangle by the Church’s prolonged hostility, but they have a hopeful future, now that literature is prospering outside the monasteries.’
    He mentions other participants in the battle:
    Strong chiefs in war
Are the [ ? ] and mulberry….  
     
    T he cherry had been slighted….
The black cherry was pursuing….

The pear that is not ardent….
     
    The raspberry that makes
    Not the best of foods….
     
    The plum is a tree
    Unbeloved of men ….  
     
    The medlar of like nature….
     
     
    None of these mentions makes good poetic sense. Raspberry is excellent food; the plum is a popular tree; pear-wood is so ardent that in the Balkans it is often used as a substitute for cornel to kindle the ritual need-fire; the mulberry is not used as a weapon-tree; the cherry was never slighted and in Gwion’s day was connected with the Nativity story in a popular version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew; and the black cherry does not ‘pursue’. It is pretty clear that these eight names of orchard fruits, and another which occupied the place that I have filled with ‘fir’, have been mischievously robbed from the next riddling passage in the poem:
    Of nine kinds of faculties ,
    Of fruit of fruits ,
Of fruit God made me….
     
     
    and have been substituted for the names of nine forest trees that did engage in the fight.
    It is hard to decide whether the story of the fruit man belongs to the Battle of the Trees poem, or whether it is a ‘Here come I’ speech like the four others muddled up in the Câd Goddeu, of whom the speakers are evidently Taliesin, the Flower-Goddess Blodeuwedd, Hu Gadarn the ancestor of the Cymry, and the God Apollo. On the whole, I think it does belong to the Battle of the Trees:
    (lines 145–147)
     

With nine sorts of faculty  
    God has gifted me:
I am fruit of fruits gathered
    From nine sorts of tree – 
     
    (lines 71, 73, 77, 83, 102, 116, 141)
     

Plum, quince, whortle, mulberry,
Raspberry, pear,
Black cherry and white
    With the sorb in me share.
    By a study of the trees of the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet, with which the author of the poem was clearly familiar, it is easy to restore the original nine trees which have been replaced with the fruit names. We can be sure that it is the sloe that ‘makes not the best of foods’; the elder, a notoriously bad wood for fuel and a famous country remedy for fevers, scalds and burns, that is ‘not ardent’; the unlucky whitethorn, and theblackthorn ‘of like nature’, that are ‘unbeloved of men’ and, with the