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Note
on Angharad
She
could have been any of the girlfriends of the young oarsmen in the
Southsea Rowing Club to which I belonged.
Her portrait owes something, in the first few lines, to Eugenio
Montale’s twenty-year-old Esterina in his Falsetto.
Then she becomes the ocean female of legend, merged with the
princess whose kiss turns frogs into princes.
Young men did and do at times feel like frogs, and the pretty
girls, especially if you don’t have one, seem as remote as royalty.
The coaches here (‘charabancs’ in those days) bore families
into the Hampshire countryside. I’m
not sure about the Merlin reference: wisdom imprisoned in its tree and
far away anyway, back in 1952. Some
of my acquaintances did their National Service in the Korean War
(1950–53). Later in life,
when we’d quit rowing, necking and getting drunk, we settled into
middle-class jobs. Over the
years I re-created Angharad, or her equivalent, out of ‘myths and arty
books’. I must also have
cast about my wife Lise a sort of Jungian cape of magical mermaid scales
which did not, at the same time, prevent her from being beset by
domesticity, just as I was. I
turned back into a frog. An
old frog gets a goodnight kiss, there is no transformation.
In
a 200-page index covering the notes to my collected poems in the
privately distributed series 100 Plus or Minus I
have the following entries against Female, which give some
idea of her place in my work: ‘adulation of; ... as enemy; beautiful,
mysterious, sibylline, deceitful, lucky; celebrated; destroyer of men;
image of, derived from fiction; less vexed by the human condition;
Madonna-Vampire; magical spirit; portrait … of much feebleness, one
strength; redeeming the male; roles in the male psyche; saviour; [made
the] subject of emotional suffering; used to be magical; ~ ejaculation;
~ genitalia.’
Alan
Marshfield
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