Mythical Ballads

                    i

It was a grey December day

I fled my dull home town;
The Great North Road was snowbound,
The telegraph wires down.

A clock struck noon; I left my room

And crept down the creaky stair;
No-one stirred, I escape unheard,
Like a stray from its secret lair.

Today you play the vagabond,

A fugitive in disguise,
Tomorrow a secret agent
Pursued by enemy spies.

Now, wraith-pale, a sleet shower

Drifts down the smoky street,
Across cobblestones, smooth as pewter,
Worn by long dead feet.

In the footsteps of the dead,

The almost living wander;
They sip the wine and break the bread,
Half in fear, half in wonder;

In dreary Free Church meeting rooms

And ancient parish grounds,
Through chilly Sunday afternoons
Angelic voices sound.

On cold street corners neighbours linger,

Quick to point an accusing finger,
Gossip spreads like a malignant tumour:
Innocence spawns unfounded rumour.

Above the town a castle towers,

Above the keep, sunset glowers,
On crumbling ramparts soldiers stand
Like statues guarding the empty land.

Pre-destined to be an outcast.,

Estranged from saving grace
All the people from your past
Spit into your face.

                   ii

I took the road towards the East;

Beside the cold North Sea,
Seagulls screeched above the beach
‘You never will be free.’

I took the road towards the West

Across the wilderness,
I heard the voices of the blessed
Mock my emptiness.

I took the stony Northern Road

But reached a barbed wire border,
I did not know the secret code;
They would not let me over.

I travelled back towards the South -

Beside a shady shore
I kissed sweet Pleasure’s pouting mouth
Then lingered there for more.

                     iii

And did you hold your one true love

Towards the break of day,
And watch her wake in a sunless grove
Where ancient gods held sway?

When she awoke we never spoke

Of dreams we dared not share,
But wrapped in silence’s thin cloak
We hid from our despair.

I fear it’s pity and disgust

With which you now regard me -
And when we touch you’ll turn to dust
Like Rider Haggard’s She.

                      iv

Alone I watch the crimson dawn

Silhouette the Cyclades,
Recall a jilted sirens’ song
By the blood-flecked sea,

And feel within an icy wind

Chill me to the bone:
Have mercy, Lord, on those who’ve sinned,
Who are doomed to die alone.

In 'Ancestral Ground'  I wrote: 'The victim of an infantile dark age / you sift through shards for clues'.

Mythical Ballads contains a serious amount of shard raking. I have no idea when I actually wrote it. I surmise that it was probably around the same time as Ancestral Ground, that is the Winter of 2001/2, but I have no solid evidence for this. I cannot even remember the act of writing it.

My interest in ballads, however, goes much further back. During my first year at Manchester University in 1973 I had to study a subsidiary subject, and I chose the poetry option. We certainly covered Lyrical Ballads in some depth and through that I discovered 'Percy Reliques' leading me to re-read a small book that I'd picked-up at some point secondhand called 'North Country Folk Tales' or something. Around this time I began to listen to contemporary local folk musicians such as the Tyneside group 'The High Level Ranters, through them I discovered their traditional antecedents such as the Nothumbrian Piper, Billy Pigg and country dance bands like the  'Cheviot Ranters' who I vaguely remember playing at church dances and the like when I was a child in the early 1960's. 

The soundtrack to my childhood was an eclectic one. My sister studied piano and as she practised her exam pieces by composers such as Bach, Chopin and Debussy I was introduced  to classical music. However, she was eight years older than me and the music she preferred to listen to for pleasure was 1960's pop - the Beatles and Rolling Stones particularly. As she tended to go to church both in the morning and evening on Sundays, she delegated to me the task of recording, on her 'Fidelity' reel to reel, Alan Freeman's 'Pick of the Pops'; I suppose this must have been from around 1966/67 onwards.

My father remained throughout this musical onslaught fiercely rooted to his Scots heritage. The weekly country dance band programme from the Scottish Home Service featuring Jimmy Shand's band and the toxic theme tune 'Kate Dalrymple' were, along with the football scores on a Saturday tea-time sacrosanct moments when I knew I had to 'pipe down' as he would say. I suppose I should be forever grateful for this imposition of the execrable, as I do wonder without this weekly moment of musical torture if I ever would have explored the variety of musical styles which began to interest me during my middle teenage years. By the time I went to University I had managed to collect quite a bit of modern classical music, not just early Twentieth Century material by Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky. Bartok, Berg and Schoenberg, but more avante garde contemporary compositions by Ligeti, Boulez and Stockhausen, Was it all just revenge for being forced-fed Jimmy Shand I wonder? Whatever it was, I strongly resisted the imposition of Scottish identity, along with Presbyterian values and doctrines and developed during my adolescence an uneasy relationship with of the allure of received tradition which simultaneously appalled and fascinated me.

Along with music quite a bit of the fiction I read during my teens - such as Alan Garner and Ursula le Guin had folk derived 'fantasy 'roots and in my first year at University I moved onto the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy as well as Peake's Gormengast. Indeed, as the 1970's went on interest in folk culture grew stronger. When Gill and I began to live together in 1976 my exposure to traditional and folk derived music increased. Gill's record collection contained more acoustic music, both contemporary American singer songwriters and British folk rock bands such as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. A number of her acquaintances, such as Stu Lucley, were professional folk musicians and after we moved to Manchester we often drank at the Clarence in Rusholme which was a pretty lively Irish pub back then with regular traditional music sessions. Quite often we'd cycle out to Pointon or other folk venues and listen to people such as Dave Swarbrick,  Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick and John Renbourn. During this time I sold a few redundant History of Art books and bought myself an Anglo Concertina on which I managed to knock out a few Morris Tunes after a while.

Gill's interest and expertise in landscape history combined with my basic knowledge of the development of vernacular building styles enlivened the regular cycle trips we took in Cumbria, Shropshire the Cotwolds and Southwest England. Politically I moved from red to green, working as a volunteer fund raising coordinator for Greenpeace when we first moved to West Lancashire in 1983 and reading Schumaker, Illich, and Rogers while working on an alternative education project in Skelmersdale.

Eco Warrior stance?

The house that we bought on a new Barratt housing development had a larger than average back garden; starting from a muddy quagmire we transformed it into a productive organic vegetable garden helped along the way ideologically, by John Seymour's 'Self Sufficiency Handbook', but more practically by a few Soil Association pamphlets backed up by the late, great Geoff Hamilton's books and his Television Programme, 'Gardeners World'.

Growing our own....

Inevitably Gill and I went vegetarian, I grew a 'save the whale beard' and tried over a number of years to poison friends by various fairly unappetising attempts at home-brewing and with home-made elderflower wine.

My interest in traditional music and story telling continued. The Waterson's 'Frost and Fire' album alerted to me to the work of A L Lloyd, whose book, 'Folk Song in England' helped put the ritual and ceremonial aspects of English traditional story and song into context. This interest spilled over into my academic studies. Continuing to read the books that I had bought for my Open University literature modules I was drawn to W H Auden's ballads. His work in this genre is facsinating and varied ranging from the almost traditional, 'Lady Weeping at the Crossroads' written just after the Second World War, to his earlier work in the Thirties which includes the faux-naif sociology of 'Miss Gee' and 'James Honeyman' and the quasi-surreal magic realism of 'As I walked out one evening'. In terms of fiction, I opted to write the extended essay required for my PGCE's Children's Literature module on death and resurrection myths in the novels of Tolkien, Le Guin and C S Lewis. Throughout these years many a Saturday night's revelries would conclude with Sandy Denny and the boys blasting out Matty Groves or Tam Lin from the stereo. So, I suppose given all of this. it should not be surprising that the only thing I wrote in verse during this time was a version of the Northumbrian folk tale, 'Sir Guy the Seeker', adapting this traditional tale of bad decision making into the style and form of a border ballad. It's pure pastiche of course, but I think a rousing rendition of it by Denny, Thompson, Swarbrick et al. would have sounded pretty cool. We can but dream!

Given all of this dalliance with tradition then I suppose it may have been inevitable that 'Mythical Ballads' just occurred to me the way it did arriving seemingly more or less complete. Most poems are a bit of a struggle; occasionally one simply writes itself and happens almost as if it has been written beforehand by someone else. No wonder even sensible poets ponder sometimes if they do have a Muse who comes along and 'gifts' them the words. It is difficult to tell with such poems if they are drivel or inspired as it feels you have had little conscious control over their making. That is certainly how I felt about this poem and 'Dialectics' for that matter. It took me over six years to pluck up courage to post either of these to Sonnet Central's workshop, 'Not Sonnets'. Most people responded positively, Quincy Lehr, I think, saw in the ballad certain Audenesque qualities. Rick Mullin suggested I split the poem into sections, which I did. Though on the board I made the point that I felt that 'quest type' traditional ballads were a stronger influence, now I'm not so sure. There are elements of all kinds of ballads within the poem. The psychological aspect of it is certainly more Auden than 'Thomas the Rhymer'. The bathetic, throwaway moral point at the end tips a wink towards The Ancient Mariner.

 It is my most complete attempt to 'state my case' and the questions of belonging, faith, guilt and estrangement that have been the lifelong psychological effects of childhood indoctrination into non-conformist belief are well set out. My most profound irrational fear is contained in the line from 'Ancestral Voices', 'All your precious things are lost without a trace'. Mythical Ballads find a palpable form for those fears, it is the only thing I have ever written that actually disturbs me, fear and vehemence haunts its lines. The icy wind in the final stanza is the shadow of Presbyterian mean spiritedness, I think. John Ashbery calls his poem 'Soonest Mended' a one-size-fits-all confessional poem. Maybe this is mine, written specially for everyone of 'lapsed' faith.