Vexilla Regis / Sir Bedivere's Horse

Vexilla Regis (pencil & watercolour)

by David Jones

While on the subject of Arthurian deposits ... One thing leads to another and so here is a delightfully eccentric way of 'interpreting' the painting above.The poet Jean Earle wrote this poem in her eighties with all the willed mischievousness of a young tyro.

Sir Bedivere's Horse

David Jones, dreaming ‘Vexilla Regis’.
Painted the souls of trees
On lumpish hills, such as spiral
My birthplace. Beyond the foremost,
Tallest and roughest Tree,
Run the wild horses.

Dreamer myself,
I know one is Sir Bedivere’s horse.
I was once Sir Bedivere’s squire.

How we sagged, after we lost Arthur!
Wandering purposeless –
The forest stiff in a winter
Like glass fur. So scarce the forage ….
Sir, at his blackest hour,
Poorly with fever,

Hardly spoke, grieving. The horse thin,
Carrying both of us. “At last”, I said,
“We are coming
To World’s Edge. My brother lives near,
In a fortified house.
You could lie down?”

So we had shelter. But Sir, brooding,
Rode his dear creature out,
Returned alone. “I have freed him,
To your hills”. “But where’s the bridle?”
Bed, not at all himself,
Had left it hanging.

“Sir, he’ll starve! Caught in some coppice,
Like the ram sacrifice
In holy writ”. Sir refolded
His great hurt as he did his long legs,
Closed off his mind from me,
Covered his face.

People there thought it a shame, to live
Stuck with a darkened knight
Who licked his wound while cursing
Lost battles. The pain Sir Bedivere
Nursed was as everywhere
As the King’s grave ….

Life will go on. I was young, afire –
Finding the horse, I’d go
Adventuring. Try my mettle
Some new road. Sir Bed would not miss
All my uncourtly ways.
Scarce a brilliant squire ….

Where the Honddu, in a rushy foaming
Hurries its little fishes,
I found the horse – fast in a tangle
Of witchwood, that might have killed him,
Strangled him with the reins,
Had I not come.

Ripe for love, sniffing his sweat and steam,
Gathered the wild mares,
Enticing him. It needed
My utmost muscle and finesse –
Muddied and almost thrown –
Till I unwound him.

Crazed for freedom; and the whinnying, hot
Mares – oh, the animal
Was as myself, was a brother
In prison. I slashed the brute loose.
Whatever might curb his life
Now – I would not.

With the soft act, Sir Bedivere’s
Quixotic chivalry
Came home to me. It was oddly
Endearing. Return to him, then –
Muddy; but maybe not
Quite a bad squire?

Such whiffs of mediaeval spice
David Jones loved: yet his fey brush
Deft with running shapes,
May not have known –
Through the layered myth –
Which was Sir Bedivere’s horse.

The title of the painting comes from a Latin hymn Vexilla Regis prodeunt ... (Forth come the standards of the King) written in Gaul in the 5th century. The symbolic imagery of the painting refers, among others things, to the Crucifixion (there's a robin with a 'bloodstained' breast). But what about those horses? Jean Earle was not so eccentric in the light of this from David Jones' letters:"the rushing ponies are, more or less, the horses of the Roman cavalry, turned to grass and gone wild off to the hills. This idea, probably, in turn comes from something in Malory's Morte D'Arthur when, right at the end, after the death of Guenevere, and the break up of the round table, Lancelot and the other knights let their armed horses free to roam where they will ... and gone off to be hermits and the like." (Dai Greatcoat p.149 ...)

JEAN EARLE

A poet I have been particularly fond of over the years is Jean Earle. Born in 1909 and brought up in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, she began writing poetry as a young women, but then wrote very little until she was in her sixties, publishing several volumes between A Trial of Strength (1980) and The Bed of Memory (2001). She died in 2002. The artlessness of her ‘naïve’ style belies a sophisticated use of imagery and reference that also characterises her work. One of her collections, Visiting Light (1987), provides a theme for many interpretations of her work as a poetry of light. Here, from that collection, is an extract from ‘The Woollen Mill’

Down the mill walls, light translated water,
The roaring silver
Over the wheel, that ground out light – and light –
Danced out of ancient cogs
From when they were young wood.
Such bright looking hurt …
When someone passed
I turned my head for relief of his shadow.

But as the final line of that extract also suggests, she was very conscious too of darkness and images of shadows also recur frequently in her work. In ‘Devil’s Blackberries’. for instance, where “Late pickers – cut off from sunset/In a ditch of brambles -/From earthed heels let fly/Their lengthening shadows” or the poem ‘Shadowlands’ where she declares herself “Obsessed by shadows …”.

For many years she worked as a secretary in the Bishop’s Palace at Abergwili near Carmarthen. In the poem ‘Walking Home’ she writes of her experiences there. Here is the final third of the poem:

My passing means no more
Than the shadows of firs
Brushing out a cold evening coming.
Fir shadow too, in the brown room,
Very sweet all day. One must ignore it
For the work’s sake. But afterwards what harm
If the shadow perceive a sudden flush
Between unhuman things …
The oak, the typewriter
In its business mask.
Were not its steely vitals drawn
Native as oak, from the hot earth?

A thousand blackbirds roost
In the drive bushes. Garden and churchyard
Are one broad round, steeped in ceremonial
Long before Christ. Often I feel the rites
Quilling like blackbirds …

This is an old, holy place,
Waging perpetual wars. I side with them –
But am unsure under what rising powers
I walk home.

Jean Earle reportedly communicated to an enquirer just before she died that “I believe I am a Christian”. Certainly she wrote about Light both directly and metaphorically in a way that suggests she conceptualised it in accordance with Christian belief. But her awareness of darkness and her uncertainty about those “rising powers” in the shadows also suggests that she sensed another dimension to the religious life.