Although the adjective “lunar” is ambiguous, it’s difficult for the reader not to imagine the presence of either the moon or a moonlit object. If an object, what could it be, since it “has no history / is complete and early”? Some extremely ancient artefact? A stone? A very youthful face? A poem from two decades later, Nocturne 1, is an interesting subject for comparison. This is definitely a poem with a moon in it, and an argument about whether the moon is best seen as “goddess” or “faceless dynamo”. Auden in his maturity seeks balance: he reduces the lyricism, and some of the magic, but powerfully finds a counter-image, with the power to banish “my world, the private motor-car / And all the engines of the state”. The moon in “this lunar beauty”’ – if we insist on one “– is certainly not the woman she is in Nocturne 1. Imagine it embodied, and we might see the unusual figure of a moon-god. Gwilym glorifies Morfudd, said to be a rich merchant’s wife from Aberystwyth, as a troubadour might glorify his lady, but from closer quarters. For all her bejewelled brightness, she is no static icon, rather a force of nature. When we first see her, it seems she is naked, “a sheen of snow on a pebbly field”. Then she is transformed into a breaking wave, with its surface foam and unfurling “breast” of colour, its play of sunlight and echo. There’s no need for any superlative claim that Morfudd is more beautiful than these natural phenomena. In Gwilym’s poem, human beauty never eclipses nature, but is equal in the whole sacred constellation.

Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes award and was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton poetry prize. As Satymurti said, the Mahabharata is fundamentally concerned with “questions of the moral life in action”. This concern impels her own recent collection The Hopeful Hat, the universe of moral action being transposed to a smaller contemporary arena than that of Krishna and Arjuna. The collection reflects as well the imaginative expansion in Satyamurti’s writing when her cancer diagnosis was followed by a laryngectomy and the removal of part of her tongue. The need for “voicing the void” still brings moral obligations but there is plenty of hard-edged realism, and a dash of irreverent humour in the approach. This week’s choice is an abridged version of another great Dafydd ap Gwilym poem, Morfudd Like the Sun (Morfudd fel yr Haul). With this commentary by the scholar, translator and editor, M Wynn Thomas, the Morfudd sampling would be an ideal introduction for readers new to Gwilym’s work. This seems confirmed by the startlingly declarative first line of the last verse: “This is the poem of the air …” Yes, of course, Longfellow means to indicate the snowfall, but it also seems unavoidable that “this” is also “this poem,” the one Longfellow is writing and we’re reading, “[s]lowly in silent syllables recorded.” From this verse on, environmental damage accumulates. Padel sums up the sad, complicated story of the collapse of the Gulf Stream’s system of warm ocean-currents in the anthropomorphism of “failing muscles”. The image gives animal form and activity to the water, and suggests how all animals, ourselves included, will suffer, and are suffering, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise. The next “slide” in the visual presentation sweeps us into the core of the Chacaltaya glacier. Bolivia’s only ski resort has already been destroyed: that big number which gives its age (“two-hundred-and-fifty- // million-year core”) is tidily contrasted in the mimetic final stanza, tracing the glacier’s final shrinkage to an area “now shingle / and a fossil-feather-memory / of ice.” Again, the image of a living creature, one that could fly and, at least metaphorically, leave a “fossil-feather memory” in the landscape which humans used and destroyed, adds an intimate dimension to vast geological process.This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.” But for all your faults I love you,
For you linger with us still,
Though the wintry winds reprove you Ultimately, of course, there’s no Krishna to bring light and redemption to this moral anguish. If the writing of a poem might once have had redemptive potency, the poet now disconnects the current by her question “What has a poem got to do with this?” The question seems to anticipate the answer, “nothing: it’s no help to anyone – not even the poet”. There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”.

She was born in Buenos Aires, to an Australian family of Welsh descent. She studied in London at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and later married the Welsh writer, William Ronald Rees Jones, whose pseudonym was Keidrich Rhys. Eve arose indignant at his side. She was not created. Life compelled her forward. She held no scruples And immediately sought the forbidden tree. For this written evidence and graft of truth We can be truly grateful. Now at the end of his sixth day God, having Set his bait, fell away under his immortal palms To quibble with his conscience. The garden was too large to Till, and he had not given them their freedom. The cows Eve said were the only bit of sense. Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss. Snow-Flakes is often thought to be a poem about, well, snow. An evocation of snowfall in the first verse suggests that this may be all the poem wants to accomplish. But it develops into a more profound meditation, and what is finally “whispered and revealed / To wood and field” is heavier than snow. Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d buildThe speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”.

Yet this estrangement when examined in a poem can become a different and sharpened way of seeing. Williams’s characteristically laconic wit and casual tone are apparent in the poems of Lines Off, but the vision is at times more surreal, perhaps closer to that of the 20th-century poets of eastern and central Europe, such as Vasko Popa.Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Pool is from the New Poems section of Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems. As well as the Waldo Williams translation mentioned earlier, Poem of the week has previously featured Rowan Williams’s poem about the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. In fact, I wonder if some punctuation might be missing from the text I copied from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (edited by Philip Larkin in 1973). The ambiguity may well be deliberate, of course. Antitheses are important: love and fright, success and jealousy (“their unsought sons”), madness and articulacy (“To speed to learn, vain wish to teach”), the “split mind” (perhaps indicating the relationship itself) for which there is no remedy. The third day God saw what was emerging beneath him. The green mist and undulation of land and water: Its modulated rhythm and irritability of split forms Spitting up from the earth's face massed fronds And circular prisms of light. These he watched, startled, until there evolved The springing, active branches of varied leaves, Plants, shrubs and trees. A dishevelled array; A residue of years impelling change of growth. The reptiles unknown to him but already in birth Peered at his curiosity and their own under a Blanching light. The mammals also secure on The tree of life and hidden by its enormous branches of Passing mystery, clutched the young to their breasts.

To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in. The whole poem is designed as a unity, the syntax and verses flowing into one another like the interrelated ecologies they reflect. While it’s a didactic poem, with a central commitment to the variously “hard” environmental sciences, Down Here You’re With the Possible is also “down here” with the human need for poetry. It sustains our visual pleasure; it has the verbal music and texture that irresistibly appeal to “the blind inner life”.By now we know how closely clouds and snowfall have cohered with the poem’s emotional centre. There was a secret strength in Longfellow’s treatment of pathetic fallacy and metaphor, a deeper trope. The poem becomes a release of grief – not, of course as a poet today would make it, in intimate detail, perhaps naming names, places, times – but as a poet of Longfellow’s era might present it, through figurative and rhetorical veils, and in the restraining “music” of grammar and cadence.