Afallen bere, beraf ei haeron,
A dyf yn argel yn argoed Celyddon;
Cyt ceiser ofer fydd herwydd ei hafon,
Yn y ddel Cadwaladr at gynadl Rhyd Theon,
A Chynan yn erbyn cychwyn y Saeson.
Cymru a orfydd; cain fydd ei Dragon;
Caffant pawb ei deithi; llawen fi Brython!
Caintor cyrn elwch cathl heddwch a hinon.
What it means appears to be something of this sort:
Sweet and beautiful Tree of the trees!
The Wood-dogs guard the circle of its roots;
But I will foretell, a day shall be
When Modred and Authur shall rush to the conflict;
Again shall they come to the Battle at Camlan,
And but seven men shall escape from that meeting.
Sweet Apple-tree, sweetest its fruitage!
It grows in secret in the Woods of Celyddon;
In vain shall they seek it on the banks of its stream there,
Till Cadwaladr shall come to Rhyd Theon,
And Cynan, opposing the tumult of Saxons,
Wales shall arise then; bright shall be her Dragon;
All shall have their just reward; joy is me for the Brython!
The horns of joy shall sound then the song of peace and
calmness….
The sweet fruits of the Tree, he says, are the "prisoners of words," (carcharorion geirau)—which is just what one would say, under a stress of inspiration, about the truths of the Secret Wisdom;—and they shall not be found, he says,—they shall be sought in vain,—until the Maban Huan, the 'Child of the Sun,' shall come. The whole poem is exceedingly obscure; a hundred years ago, the wise men of Wales took it as meaning much what I think it means: the passing of the real wisdom of the Mysteries,—of Neo-druidism,—away from the world and the knowledge of men, to a secret place where the Woodmen, the Black-robed, could not find to destroy it;—until, after ages, a Leader of the Hosts of Light should come—you see it is here Cadwaladr, but Cadwaladr simply means 'Battle-Leader,' —and the age-old battle between light and darkness, Arthur and Modred, should be fought again, and this time won, and the Mysteries re-established.—If I have succeeded in conveying to you anything of the atmosphere of this poem, I have given you more or less that of most of the poetry attributed to this period; there is a large mass of it: some of the poems, like the long Gododin of Aneurin, merely telling of battles; others, like the splendid elegies of Llywarch Hen, being laments,—but with a marvelous haughty uplift to them; and others again, those attributed to Taliesin, strewn here and there with passages that . . . move me strangely . . . and remind me (to borrow a leaf from the Imagists) of a shower of diamonds struck from some great rock of it; and of a sunset over purple mountains; and of the Mysteries of Antiquity; and of the Divine Human Soul. Much of this poetry is unintelligible; much of it undoubtedly of far later origin; and the names of Taliesin and Myrddin, all through the centuries spells for Celts to conjure with, are now the laughing-stock of a brand-new scholarship that has tidied them up into limbo in the usual way. It is what happens when you treat poetry with the brain-mind, instead of with the creative imagination God gave you to treat it with: when you dissect it, instead of feeding your soul with it. But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since: a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the Grand Manner,—of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; —but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul;—and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space and time:
"I know the imagination of the oak-trees."
"Not of father and mother,
When I became,
My creator created me;
But of nine-formed faculties,
Of the Fruit of fruits,
Of the fruit of primordial God;
Of primroses and mountain flowers,
Of the blooms of trees and shrubs,
Of Earth, of an earthly course,
When I became,—
Of the blooms of the nettle,
Of the foam of the Ninth Wave.
I was enchanted by Math
Before I became immortal.
I was enchanted by Gwydion,
The purifier of Brython,
Of Eurwys, of Euron,
Of Euron, of Modron,—
Of Five Battalions of Initiates,
High Teachers, the children of Math."
—Now Math—he was a famous wizard of old—means 'sort,' 'kind'; and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation,' 'heterogeneity.' To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses;—as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion,' that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit Vidya, or Budha; he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five Battalions of—'Celfyddon,' the word is 'artists,' 'skillful ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word Celi, 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom. It is difficult for a student of symbolism not to believe that there were Theosophical activities in fifth- and sixth-century Britain.
Another glimpse of the feeling of the age you get in the two oldest Arthurian romances: The Dream of Rhonobwy, and Culhwch and Olwen. They were written, in the form in which we have them, not until the last centuries of Welsh independence,—when there was another national illumination; and indeed all the literature of this early time comes to us through the bards of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They transmitted it; wrote it down; added to and took away from it; altered it: a purely brain-mind scholarship might satisfy itself that they invented it; but criticism, to be of any use at all, must be endowed with a certain delicacy and intuition; it must rely on better tools than the brain-mind. Matthew Arnold, who had such qualifications, compared the work of the later bards to peasants' huts built on and of the ruins of Ephesus; and it is still easier for us, with the light Theosophy throws on all such subjects, to see the greater and more ancient work through the less and later. I shall venture to quote from Culhwch and Olwen: a passage that some of you may know very well already. Culhwch the son of Cilydd the son of the Prince of Celyddon rides out to seek the help of Arthur:
"And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of costly gold. In his hands were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and that faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at its heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was at his side, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war-horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was on the right side bounded across to the left side, and the one that was on the left to the right, and like two sea-swallows sported they around him. And his courser cast up four sods with his four hoofs like four swallows in the air, now above his head and now below. About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, having an apple of gold at each corner; and every one of the apples was of the value of a hundred kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his toe. And the blade of reed-grass bent not beneath him, as he journeyed towards the gates of Arthur's palace."