Charms and Riddles

      It's forgotten more often than not these days that a lot of early poetry (in just about any language) is what we now call "riddle poetry," appropriate considering that the verb "to riddle" has at its etymological roots the ideas of sifting through things, distinguishing between things, and, in fact, the very act of reading.   (One might remember that the ability to solve a riddle was once associated with heroism, as in the story of Oedipus.) There is a lot of this sort of poetry in English, the principle being the identification of a thing based on a description, a process which tied language, and its imaginative implications, with things tangible and real. Yes, the principle is simple enough, but perhaps worth reinforcing in this age more inclined to descriptive language than to metaphorical language. But a doddering through a few anthologies tonight turned up this (anonymous) piece from the tenth century, a poem translated from the Welsh by Joseph P. Clancy; I'm going to leave it untitled for now and see if anyone can solve the riddle.

Make out who this is:
Formed before the Flood,
Powerful creature,
Fleshless and boneless,
Nerveless and bloodless,
Headless and footless,
No older, no younger,
Than when he began;
He is not put off
By terror or death;
He's never unneeded
By any creature
(Great God, so holy,
What was his origin?
Great are His wonders,
The Man who made him);
He's in field, he's in wood,
Handless and footless,
Ageless and sorrowless,
Forever hurtless;
And he's the same age
As the five epochs;
And he is older
Than many times fifty;
And he is as broad
As the earth's surface;
And he was not born,
And he is not seen,
On sea and on land
He sees not, unseen,
He's unreliable,
Will not come when wanted;
On land and on sea
He's indispensable;
He is unyielding,
He's beyond compare;
From the four corners
He'll not be fought with;
He springs from a nook
Above the sea-cliff;
He's roaring, he's hushed,
He has no manners,
He's savage, he's bold;
When he goes cross-country
He's hushed, he's roaring,
He is boisterous,
The loudest of shouts
On the face of the earth;
He's good, he's wicked;
He is in hiding,
He is on display,
For no eye sees him;
He is here, he is there;
He hurls things about,
He pays no damages,
He makes no amends,
And he is blameless;
He is wet, he is dry,
He comes quite often.
One Man fashioned them,
All created things,
His the beginning
And His is the end.

It's not a bad translation, except in a few spots ("cross-country," for example; and the increasingly obvious turns toward the end). The translation loses, too, I'm sure much of the original poem's incantatory feel, though certainly not all of it. Reminds one very well of the the very nature of poetry: to charm with sound, and then to allow for meaning, or at least the idea of meaning, to break that charm, or to release us from its mystification: yes, it's about two forms of order, the first of sound, the second of sense. Both orders, however, don't automatically exist: instead they are built, accumulated, or (shifting metaphors a bit drastically) accreted. Neither order is ever total, ever perfect. And that's the beauty of it: the orders are always being created (rather than standing in some monolithic completion), because poetry, like music, has to exist in at least a version of time, as your eyes run across the page or as your voice sounds it out. (Try looking at all of the words of a poem at one time: it can't be done. Not even with poems about red wheelbarrows.) But the idea of an implied answer to a riddle (a metaphor itself for 'a sense of meaning') allows us to stop that particular movement of time, to step out and view that movement from a more distant stance. (And, oh, how readers today stand there waiting to be told "the point" of things, or what a piece of writing "is all about....") To solve a riddle is to understand an order of meaning, to grasp it, to see completeness, function, and thus feel free from that order. Surrender and liberation, always key principles of poesis and literature-- and so many other things, for that matter. Food for thought, especially for my unfortunate American friends now mid-charm.

      Some of you might wonder why I'm thinking about this. Well, it's always been to me a central tenet: rethink the obvious, start with the basics, and reconsider what they do. And then work outward. It's inevitably the obvious that we forget as we niggle over complexities.