Welsh Journals

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Pair Dadeni or "The Cauldron of Rebirth By JOHN COWPER POWYS CLOSE to where I live in North Wales there is a certain wayside field which has for the past ten years exercised a curious power over me and held a peculiar attraction for me. It contains an enormous iron cauldron bronze-red from rust, and resting-ever since I have visited it with awe and reverence-upside down upon the slope of a bank near a mighty hedge. Now I have noted in the case of other aboriginal or nearly aboriginal races the same sight, the sight of long-disused and extremely antique- looking iron cauldrons, cauldrons growing rustier and rustier as the years pass over them, cauldrons completely forgotten where they lie. Of all the tribes of men in our Western Hemisphere the Welsh People are the most preoccupied with one particular aspect of the unfathomable procession of life and death; the aspect, namely, to which the English poets give the symbolic title resurrection." In Wales we are all mandarins of this mystery; and our simplest obituary in a local weekly comes far nearer to the Greek Anthology than any eulogy to a lost hero of the human race in a great London Daily. The ever-mysterious prose-epic of Wales, entitled, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, which relates in its four branches the strange story of Pryderi the son of Pwyll, that is to say, as old Llywarch Hen might groan in his occult cynghanedd, Sorrow the offspring of Wisdom," is literally haunted by all manner of magical mixings up­I can use no other expression-of life with death and death with life; so that on all sides we grow aware of half-alive things and of half-dead things, of life vanishing as the death-mists rise or fall, of birth appearing even from the lap of death. A stranger might think that the great cauldron of Ceridwen the Welsh Demeter dominated us still and proved us still to be the most introverted as well as the oldest of all the tribes of the West. But now since the whole world has become a Cauldron of Death, what more natural than that we in Wales should revert to our Pair Dadeni or Cauldron of Rebirth ?