MYDDLETON'S RIVER

                



           Awakening

Half a century on, approached in imagination

(mining buried treasure in the mind) it’s

like waking up after a long sleep, looking

out on a bright morning, wiping

away a film of slumber from eyes dazzled

by the dawn. It takes time for time

to dissolve now and resolve again then

to a statue on a patch of green between

busy roads. Hugh Myddleton constructs

the New River running somewhere here

bringing, gradient to gradient, sweet water

through the channels of my childhood

to London town and all the rivers

of Wales running through recent memory.



         Remembering

Even then the river was a conduit

for feelings that ran just beyond perception

touching my life with knowledge of its presence

but not quite in the light. Light after all

just glittered on its surface while in the dark

its waters ran deeper that I could fathom

behind those streets and through those parks

that beckon, as dreams of things once vivid

but now lost. What I know, and knew

even then is that I walked by streams

that flowed out of the busy life of cities,

that just through there or behind that ivied wall

somewhere was a gateway I avoided

which voided the silver waters down to Hades.



           Confluence

Irrigations, flowings from the source;

Is the essential river in its upper reaches

Or where it floods, deep and wide?

This New River (though no new river) was

my becoming and now my past which

flows to meet me. Tributaries and connecting

streams run through, across and contrary. Chadwell

springs mixed with waters from the Lee.

Severn and Wye trickle from peaty pools,

meander from the same mountain, running

along borders through towns, fields and woods

until worlds dissolve as fresh water tastes salt.

Rheidol too streams from this source and thickens

in its shorter course with lead from Myddleton’s mines.


           Botanic Garden

From any gateway to the Underworld we may emerge

through any gateway out again. Following

the river into a culvert under a hill I exhale

on a path winding like Tywi through other hills;

In this garden time is marked along the path by rocks

from each age of the world while a hedge of flowers

winds along its other side to a fountain

(a switch across a synapse into lost time).

Water spirals through a cross-section of an ammonite

and drains into a lake. The Lady of the Lake

appears and disappears. Myddfai, Middleton Hall,

a tower on a hill and a glass dome like the hills – 

What dissolves resolves again: places, shapes,

substances in suspension suspire as substantial form.


          The Tower

It was in that tower that the new journey began,

began quietly, climbing steps that turned again

and again into air gathering solidity to anchor

light to darkness as a world formed around me

and rivers flowed in my veins as well as across

the molecules of my eyes. Looking out

over the lost garden which time would rediscover

I turned back for a time of contemplation, waiting

for the flux to gather the configured forms,

trace the connecting streams, leets, seepages;

shafts running unseen below dividing rock bringing

light to the converging flood as these rivulets merge:

a New River breaks free from its containing channel

flows through space, time, imagination.



           Alchemy

Hugh Myddleton’s river poured into wooden pipes

tapped by London houses; his journey then

back to Wales where he tapped the veins of ore

and for every ton of lead a grain of precious silver

base metal transformed as only those with craft and lore

canne knowe. Planted in a remoate place

and countrey, they tunnel into wooded slopes

these mines, and like his river find a familiar

calling from a darkness deep within.

At the entrance to one adit: galena

and the glisten of fool’s gold (as they call it)

iron pyrites to those that would be wise

but transformations there are here, slippages

between worlds, fooles and alchymicall wittes betwyntimes.



           The Changeling


So I changed (Hugh Myddleton had Thomas

Middleton to compose a metrical speech

at his river’s inauguration) – like Antonio

I changed : Saturn’s plumb line stirring the depths

(swinging the lead?) transforming echoes,

glitter of moonlight on the waters not yet

uttered into being; anomie and heavy

idleness become wantonness, life in the full

zest of discovery of itself. No matter

it’s foolish to revel in the golden glow of

a new dawn. What is signified and what

signifies are always, and yet never, arbitrary.

I distil silver from the leaden waters of that river,

gold from pyrites for a store of treasure.



           Spoils


This valley and others spoiled by mines, yet wild

still with the scars that mar them. Myddleton’s

workings were shallow, though deeper than memory

could recall. Rust runs across discarded rock now

as iron and steel oxidize back into earth and water.

Cwmsymlog, Cwmerfin, Cwmystwyth – valleys at

journey’s end with rivers running down to the sea

as I run a slow course now against the backdrop

of these hills. What spark is it that recalls

Myddleton’s mild river by these torrents through the rocks?

There are moments when one place echoes another,

when each remembered location in time steps out of isolation

and flows with one purpose in a rush like these rocky streams

though everything is as still as Myddleton’s barely moving river.




Note: 

Hugh Myddleton (1560-1631), son of a governor of Denbigh Castle, worked in London for Elizabeth I and was later knighted by James I for bring clean water into the city along the channel of his ‘New River’ from springs near Hertford. Drinking water is still brought into London along the gradual incline he constructed. 
He eventually returned to Wales to open several lead mines in Cardiganshire and developed the technique of obtaining small amounts of silver from the lead ore.

The poem is to some extent also a personal autobiography

First published in SCINTILLA magazine.