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Vernon
Watkins 50th anniversary
This year October 8
th
falls on a Sunday, as in 1967, when in
Seattle,
North America, 61-year-old Pennard poet Vernon Watkins collapsed and died while
playing tennis.
Following retirement
from long service with Lloyds Bank, mainly at
Swansea’s
St Helen’s Road branch, he took up a Gulbenkian Fellowship in poetry at
University College,
Swansea, which awarded him an honorary Doctorate
of Literature, before he travelled with members of his family to
Seattle.
This was intended to be a year as Visiting
Professor of Literature at the
University
of Washington, where he
had lectured
on W.B. Yeats
and Gerard Manley Hopkins for one semester in 1964.
Often referred to as “
Swansea’s Other Poet”,
Vernon Watkins was a good friend of Dylan Thomas, whose obituary he wrote in
“The Times”.
He sought to defend his
friend’s reputation, for the often exaggerated anecdotes of Dylan’s drinking
and outlandish behaviour distracted attention from appreciating the quality of
his poetry and other writings.
Vernon
was a very fine poet in his own right, whose work was as different from Dylan’s
as that of John Donne (like
Vernon,
a metaphysical poet) from that of John Betjeman.
There was no rivalry between Dylan and
Vernon, for both
appreciated the other’s poetry, and during the 1930s they would regularly meet
to discuss poetry, and suggest any words or phrases that might improve what
either had written.
During
Vernon’s lifetime Faber and Faber published
six volumes of his poetry, with a seventh being printed at the time of his
death.
Subsequently three more volumes
of his poetry have appeared, as well as his “Collected Poems” in 1986.
For the centenary of his birth “New Selected
Poems” was published in 2006, and this was recently reprinted for the 50
th
anniversary of his death.
In the
foreword, Dr Rowan Williams describes
Vernon’s
long poem “The Ballad of the Mari Llwyd” as “one of the outstanding poems of
the century”.
Sadly the radio recording
of Dylan reading it (which takes 30 minutes) has not survived.
Vernon
could speak German and French, and translated poems from both languages, having
spent one year at
Cambridge
studying modern languages.
He made
several visits to
Germany,
being outraged at the time of the Nazi book burning in 1933 when books by German
nineteenth century poet Heinrich Heine were burnt: he had to be hurried away by
friends from danger.
Vernon
translated two cycles of Heine’s poems composed in 1825/26 into English,
entitled “The
North Sea” and this was
published in 1951.
At the time of his
death
Vernon
was being considered, among others, as a possible Poet Laureate, following the
death of John Masefield.
His poetry was composed in spite
of the time pressure of full-time work six days a week in a bank, entailing bus
journeys to and from Pennard to Hospital Square (the junction of St Helen’s
Road and Bryn-y-Mor Road), and not neglecting his wife Gwen and his five
children.
He met Gwen during the war,
when they both worked at
Bletchley Park, near
Milton Keynes,
the government secret code-breaking centre.
They lived on Pennard cliffs where a friend recollected “my image of him
will always be out of doors, on walks above or below the cliffs, or on the
rocks at low tide, out for lobsters, crabs and prawns…”
The 50
th anniversary
of his death is being marked in several ways.
This month Jeff Towns’ exhibition is in the foyer of the Singleton
campus University library, with last Monday a reading of and discussion about
his poetry at the Taliesin Theatre.
This
morning a Vernon Watkins walk will start from outside Pennard’s Three Cliffs
coffee shop at 11am, while on 19
th October the Ostreme Centre in
Mumbles hosts a talk from the editor of “New Collected Poems” at 8pm -
admission £3.
These events and a forthcoming
biography should ensure that Vernon Watkins, whom Dylan described as “
The most profound and greatly accomplished
Welshman writing poems in English”, is not forgotten.
Late I return, O
violent, colossal, reverberant, eavesdropping sea.
My country is
here. I am foal and violet. Hawthorn breaks from my hands.
I watch the
inquisitive cormorant pry from the praying rock of Pwlldu,
Then skim to the
gulls’ white colony, to Oxwich’s cockle-strewn sands.
(from
“Taliesin in Gower”, courtesy of Gwen Watkins)
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