Opening Passages: The book is a bunch of very different kinds of poems, so an ordinary 'opening passage' doesn't make sense. Here is the beginning of the first poem in the Lewis-Williams translation, "In Praise of Cynan Garwyn, Son of Brochfael":
Cynan bestowed on me
Shelter in battle --
My praise is no lie --
Gifts and property,
A hundred horses,
Saddles with silver,
A hundred mantles
All equally full;
My lap's full of armlets
And many brooches. (p. 3)
The National Library of Wales has a digital copy of the Peniarth MS 2 which has come to be called The Book of Taliesin, and if I am reading it correctly, the first poem in the actual manuscript is the poem usually known as "The Elegy of the Thousand Sons", because some scribe wrote that title on the page at some point despite its relation to the actual poem being very obscure; Lewis and Williams instead give it the title, "Saints and Martyrs of the Faith", and the beginning of it in their translation is:
Apostles and martyrs,
Virgins, renowned widows,
And Solomon who thought on God --
Your virtues a holy path for a holy people.
And they come to me, a harmonious company,
Till my own virtues are securely protected. (p. 169)
The most famous poem in the work is arguably "The Battle of the Trees", which begins:
I was in many forms
Before my release:
I was a slim enchanted sword,
I believe in its play.
I was a drop in the air,
The sparkling of stars,
A word inscribed,
A book in priest's hands,
A lantern shining
For a year and a half. (p. 54)
Summary: The Book of Taliesin by its nature evades simple summary. Indeed, its history makes it almost accidentally a literary classic; we have no idea what the original thinking was behind collecting these poems together in a single manuscript. It could very well be that what we have is just a medieval scribe's equivalent to a 'mixtape' of favorite poems, perhaps with others added later. At some point someone erratically gave some of the poems titles; there are occasional numbers in the margins of the manuscript whose point is not entirely known but are usually thought to be evaluation numbers, giving what points the writer thought the poem would get in a poetry competition; in the seventeenth century it began to be called Llyfr Taliesin or Llyvr Taliessin. Editors and translators have always seen fit to rearrange the poems, and the manuscript is defective in places, so for many poems there's always at least some level of reconstruction involved. Thus is The Book of Taliesin, a book made, it would seem, by practically the whole Welsh nation through its entire history, highly chaotic, somewhat fluid, and yet -- and this is not a minor point -- by that very fact somehow a perfect emblem of the boiling cauldron of inspiration that Taliesin and all Welsh poets since have claimed to be the source of their poetry. That its existence as a major classic just seems to have happened by accident -- or inspiration confined not to a single person but poured over many -- makes it more what it should be, and not less.
Lewis and Williams rearrange and divide the poems thematically -- Heroic, Legendary, Prophetic, Devotional, Ungrouped. I think this actually made it harder to read, particularly having the Heroic poems right at the beginning. The Heroic poems are mostly about praises of kings -- Urien of Rheged primarily, but occasionally others -- and descriptions of battles. They are on their own usually the least interesting poems, because while cleverly done, and vivid in their imagery, they have pretty much the structure and content you'd expect from poems that are eulogies celebrating warlords. But while they are less interesting in themselves, I think they benefit greatly from juxtaposition with some poems that Lewis and Williams group elsewhere. I think it's important, for instance, to see that there are links between the 'Heroic' poems about Urien and Owain and the 'Legendary' poems about Alexander the Great, Hercules, and various Welsh heroes; it's important to see the links between the (relatively) straightforward battle poems in the 'Heroic' section and the fantastic "The Battle of the Trees" in the 'Legendary' section. Likewise, it's important, I think, that the 'Heroic' and the 'Legendary' aren't really separated off from the 'Prophetic' and the 'Devotional'. The kinds of poems are not always the same, but when we get prophecies of future heroes or poems about the saints, these are in fact all just Welsh heroes, which include shadowy Celtic warriors lost in legend like Mabon and Uther Pendragon, semi-historical Welsh kings like Urien, Alexander the Great, Hercules, Biblical heroes like Moses, Solomon, and David, Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin Mary (who are not merely Biblical heroes to the poet, but contemporary and future heroes as well), and various historical Welsh heroes that are fit into the scheme by the literary device of writing their history as a 'prophecy' by Taliesin or Myrddin or some other noted Welsh prophet. In modern times we tend to have a weird purism whereby we select out the 'real' Welsh mythology, but the people who were enthusiastic about the Maginogion or Urien of Rheged or Uther Pendragon were also enthusiastic about Bible stories, hagiographies of saints from all over the known world, and the adventures of Alexander the Great. That was Welsh culture. And while the audiences could perfectly well distinguish out the fact that stories about Urien were different in source and sometimes kind from stories about Moses or about Hercules or about Math, there's no reason whatsoever to think that they thought these differences mattered all that much. Heroes are heroes; they don't need documentation to prove whether they are adequately Celtic in provenance. When you have a sky full of stars you don't go picking and choosing which are the Welsh ones. Likewise, they would never -- as we would almost never -- care all that much about how 'legendary' or 'historical' or 'religious' something was. You can sometimes distinguish such things out, if you really want to, but in practice, in the everyday life of a people, and certainly in the highly associative minds of poets, it all runs together.
While I think there's a good argument for just presenting the poems in the chaotic order in which the Peniarth MS 2 puts them, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with rearranging them, either. But it's important to grasp, I think, that the poems by the juxtaposition of their diversity in one collection are always going to be richer than any scheme according to which you might rearrange them.
I should at least say something more specific about the poems themselves. The poems that are usually the best (some of the other poems give them a run for their money, but we're talking usually) are the Taliesin poems in a strict sense, in which the poet, in personam Taliessini, so to speak, tries to capture the sense of poetic inspiration and thus in a way speaks for all poets at all times:
I was path, I was eagle,
I was coracle at sea.
I was bubbles in beer,
I was a raindrop in a shower.
I was a sword in the hand;
I was a shield in battle.
I was a harp string,
Enchanted nine years
In water, foaming.
I was tinder in fire,
I was a forest ablaze. (p. 55)I am the vigour
Of the Lord God's praise. (p. 66)I sang at a feast over joyless liquor,
I sang before Llyr's sons in Aber Henfelen.
I saw battle's brutality, the grief, the mourning;
There were blades shining on the fine spearheads. (p. 69)I've been a sow, I've been a buck,
I've been a sage, I've been a ploughshare,
I've been a piglet, I've been a boar.
I've been the tumult of a storm,
I've been a spreading flood,
I've been a wave in a gale,
I've been the disperser of ruin. (p. 92)I have sung with skill, and still I shall sing
Until the greatest day of all shall dawn,
Many matters in my mind,
Over which I worry. (p. 117)
I don't think it would be easy to find any poetry that so perfectly captures the overwhelmingness of poetic inspiration, in which, at its height, it can seem like the whole world is flowing through you; the poet, like the intellect itself, is open to everything, in some sense capable of being everything. The Book of Taliesin is a book of poems, yes, but more than that, I think the whole collection together becomes a book about poetry. It's not surprising that it's had the influence it's had on poetry both in Wales and beyond; even its chaotic and semi-fluid nature only makes it better at showing one what it is to be a poet. We get, to the extent a book can capture, a picture of poetic imagination itself, built out of many different products of that imagination, like a picture built out of pictures.
Favorite Passage: From "The Great Song of the World":
I praise my Father,
my God, my sustainer,
who placed in my skull,
to form me, a soul.
Happily, he made for me
My seven elements:
Of earth and fire,
And water and air,
Flowers and cloud,
And wind from the south.Second, my Father formed
For me the senses' design
By one, I breathe out,
And two, I breathe in,
And three, I give voice,
And by four, I taste,
And by five I see,
And by six I hear,
And by seven I smell --
To follow a trail. (p. 114)
(The initial capitalization and comma punctuation in the Lewis-Williams translation is a little inconsistent here, and I don't know how intentional this was, if at all.)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although as a set of very diverse poems of very diverse kinds, this is generally more of a dip-in-and-taste book than a read-straight-through book.
******
The Book of Taliesin, Lewis & Williams, trs., Penguin (New York: 2020).
