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The closing aria of "King Arthur and Me- the Opera" (releases May 1st). The lyric, first published in 'Coming Home"(King of Hearts Publishing) in 1991, is based in form and spirit on the elegies, eulogies and 'death bed confessionals' of ancient Welsh poetry. From memory, while Celtic poetry shares the unrhymed alliterative qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry, the line is unbroken and more lyrical, the rhythms and cadences more lilting and the assonance more marked. In other words, I tried to make the English sound as Welsh as possible.
Maz wrote the minor key tune and sings it beautifully here. Gwenhwyfar ( "white phantom") is very much the dark age Celtic wife of her beloved chieftain Arthur here, not the Norman courtly lover she later became in French romance tradition. ("Guinevere", track -.) Over these earlier versions, the atmosphere of Celtic mythology in which Arthur (Artos) is a god and Gwenhwyfar the land itself, still hangs like a mist, just as Robin Hood was the eternal spirit of the greenwood as well as an outlaw in a specific period of Norman-Saxon England.
So here, partly in the tradition of a warrior's praise of a fallen lord, we have Gwenhwyfar elegising and eulogising Arthur as a god-like Dark Age Celtic warlord resisting Saxons after the Roman withdrawal from Britain and Gwenhwfar as both his lady and the Britain he was protecting.
(Medraut is the earlier Welsh name for Mordred.)
lyrics
Part 1 The recorded version omits verse 3.
Lord Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved:
Cross on invincible shield, blood-red,
Dragon on young-summer green, red,
The terrible clatter of returning hooves.
I never quite believed. Always feared him
Dead. But he always came.
Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved:
Swift white charger swooping like a spear
On the bonfire builders, the wolvers of women,
Scourging the rat run inroads of Europe,
Animal tracks of attacking Saxon,
His spur-tensed Britons beat back the Beast.
(Gone my Beloved, my Beloved I mourn:
Then Llugh fought battles within himself,
Cei fought his own rule, Bedwyr fought Llugh,
And some sought long for the holy caldron,
Sought it like a spoil of war,
And, gentle as light, my Beloved loved me.)
And Medraut gnawed through the golden years
Myrddin called a threshold to the dark,
And its beacon. Medraut, eyes on me
Like a dog’s on the moon, snapping his moment.
To Camlann the coastland, carried me off.
Gone my Beloved, my Beloved I mourn.
Part 2
And little the faith I had yet in Arthur,
The Angel campaigner, strong as light,
His sun-bright stars above the wicked forest
Seeming to fade. Rusty the scabbard,
Still magic the sword. And, once more, he came.
I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession.
At last I understood. The flincher from spears,
Medraut, was part of Arthur, his shadow,
Chancel and gargoyle had to be cancelled
Where all deeds are drowned, all swords returned:
Avalon. And I’ll run no more.
I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession.
Night and this nunnery will fall. Ravens
Will flock on the gore. Let others keep
A glimmer, a glorious page, of Logres alight
Until the dawn. My confession’s done.
Still my heart waits for hoofbeats.
(Still, my heart waits for hoofbeats…)
credits
released April 25, 2024
Maz: lead vocal, acoustic guitar
Gaz: bass, bodhran, howls, cymbal, support vocals in Part 2
Photograph of Maz as Gwenhwyfar in her blue nun period (in the romance versions Guinevere took the veil at the end of her life in remorse for her courtly love with Lancelot and the subsequent ruin of Logres, a Cistercian version of the Eve story by which women get blamed for everything by the monks who held all the pens which has no basis in history except possibly that Arthur's historic widow may have sought refuge from a perilous position in a convent) by Bhas Allan
It's all right, folks, we're married. A marriage of melody and rhythm ( flirting with harmony & timbre.) Old married woke
folk, indie, Norfolk noir, beat poems, ghazals & Americana for the world from NW Norfolk. Maz lead & harmony vocals, acoustic guitar. Gaz lead & harmony vocals, drum & bass. Traditional tunes with contemporary beats. garethcalway.blogspot.com/p/doin-different.html...more
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