Brought back into print in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Vernon Watkins' death.

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was called by Kathleen Raine: 'the greatest lyric poet of my generation.' Dylan Thomas referred to him as: 'the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English', or, in a letter, as 'the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today.' Philip Larkin wrote: 'In Vernon's presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one's devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact, 'live by poetry'; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.' All Watkins's poetry was published by Faber & Faber in his lifetime, and he was friends with such widely differing poets as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Kathleen Raine. When he died, in 1967, he was being considered for Poet Laureate, after the death of John Masefield.

Since that time, however, although a few have continued to praise his poetry very highly, public awareness of it has ceased almost completely, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th century poetry.

100 years after Watkins's birth (June 27th, 1906), New Selected Poems of Vernon Watkins offers the first widely available selection of his poetry since his death, with a new introduction and notes, outlining the literary and biographical context of his work, and a foreword by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a rare joy thus to be reintroducing the work of a major poet to a new generation of readers.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury ix

Introduction xi



from The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd (1941)

The Collier 1

Griefs of the Sea 3

Two Decisions 4

Stone Footing 5

from Ballad of the Mari Lwyd 5



from The Lady with the Unicorn (1948)

Music of Colours: White Blossom 10

The Feather 12

Crowds 13

Lover and Girl 13

Gravestones 14

The Listening Days 15



from The Death Bell (1954)

Time's Deathbed 16

The Dead Shag 18

The Shell 20

Art and the Ravens 22

Taliesin in Gower 24

Ballad of the Rough Sea 27



from Cypress and Acacia (1959)

Three Harps 30

Taliesin and the Spring of Vision 31

A Man with a Field 32

The Mare 33

Hunt's Bay 34

Trust Darkness 35

The Exacting Ghost 37

The Curlew 39

Angel and Man 39

The Tributary Seasons 41

Moonrise 44

Ode at the Spring Equinox 44

Good Friday 47

Great Nights Returning 49



from Affinities (1962)

The Precision of the Wheel 50

The Interval 52

Rewards of the Fountain 52

Vine 53

Affinities 54

from The Childhood of Hölderlin 55

Bishopston Stream 60

Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours 61

Five Poems of Magdalenian Darkness 64

Returning from Harvest 67



from Fidelities (1968)

Two Sources of Life 69

Earth and Fire 69

The Sibyl 70

The Guest 71

The Razor Shell 72

Fisherman 72

Cornfields 73

Trees in a Town 74

Sonnet 75

Rebirth 76

The Snow Curlew 77

Means of Protection 77

Vultures 78

The Stayers 79

Strictness of Speech 79

Unity of the Stream 79

Fidelities 80

To a Shell 81

The Beaver 82

Triads 83



from Uncollected Poems (1969)

Air 85

Second air 85

The Coin 86



from The Ballad of the Outer Dark (1979)

A Dry Prophet 88

Rhadamanthus and the New Soul 89



from The Breaking of the Wave (1979)

May You Love Leaves 91

I Do Not Ask a Gentle Way 91

Villanelle 92

Though to Please Man 93



Rarely Published and Unpublished Poems

True Lovers 94

from Sonnets of Resurrection 95

Untitled 95

Parable Winkle 96

Attis 97

The Melodramatic 100

Aphorisms (Prose) 101



Notes 103

Selected Bibliography 113