af 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 i