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. |