‘Yes I think we [Welsh] rather love precipices, we go towards them, then withdraw… I think we all do, we Celts… …there was a second or two I think… when I didn’t fancy much staying alive… I did wake up one morning to find how splendidly rich and extraordinary the world was, and that I couldn’t bear its richness and its beauty, and in order to obviate the idea of the richness and extraordinary beauty of the world, I thought it was best to leave it…We all know we’re going towards an inevitable doom… It’s rather interesting to deliberately go towards it, and then withdraw…’
—Richard Burton on Parkinson, 1974
By Alan Morrison
Roman bust on barrow shoulders,
Marble-sculpted mouth & brow;
Stabbing blue-fire stare—cat-like
Irises: two Satanic Labradorites;
A pockmarked god with white-licked sides.
Alexander’s face reincarnate
As a pitted Co-Op pulpit boy
Into a flinty mining village
Choked in pits & damp-steamed hills,
Smoke-mist fleapits & welfare halls.
Voice awash with ash & granite
Splashing anger, rasping rage,
Nostril-snorting indignation—
Now vanquished angel’s caterwaul—
Now hounded scowling howl—
Now stone-intoning Chapel roll
Grafted on the thumping page.
Flame blazed out like Zanzibar…
Cormorant… on his scorched tongue
Singed by tar & brackishness;
A barstool Bard of verbal blaze
To drink’s slow, slurring suicide…
Obviate the richness… go towards
Precipices… then withdraw…
Visage, vodka-ravaged to a cratered
Moonscape, wasted cast quarried out
Of rakishness, sybaritism’s
Alcohol-encrusted spine;
Voracious morning reader, a hair
Of the dog-eared book for hangover cure,
Philosophy pick-me-up; nicotine-
Coated throat from four packs’ harsh
Fags a day, Benson & Hedges’
Ubiquitous gold bullion always nearby—
Actor, intellectual, compulsive diarist,
Frustrated writer, poet of tooth
& tongue, Hedd Wyn of thespians,
Dylan Thomas’s stentorian medium—
A fame-mauled lion from Pontrhydyfen,
Through rootless Hollywood to Swiss
Tax exile—no contradiction in
Earning a fortune from the silver screen
& calling himself a communist since
“Unlike capitalists, I don’t exploit people”—
But his spirit never left Pontrhydyfen,
He’d return there often, to the unassuming
Terrace of 2 Dan-y-bont, & lavish his
Twelve elder sisters & brothers with gifts,
His once mighty roar tamed to a rumbling growl,
His talent half-mastered, half-sabotaged
By snubbed ambition: stubbed cigarettes
& blackened matchsticks in an ashtray—
But O his Prince Hal, Gareth, Philip Ashley,
Marcellus Gallio, Jimmy Leith, Jimmy Porter,
Hamlet, Thomas à Becket, Alec Leamas,
Henpecked ‘George’, bald hairdresser Harry
C. Leeds, burnt-out psychiatrist Dysart,
Tortured John Morlar, torturer O’Brien,
& that immortal narrator who haunts slow,
Black, crowblack fishing-boat bobbing Llareggub…
Wales’ Aslan snarled his last gasped drags
Then slipped out to prowl a moonless night
Eternal, lithe as a panther, white as howlite.
The original version of this poem, under the title ‘The Lion of Pontrhydyfen’, from A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (Waterloo Press, 2009), has recently been included on the Centenary Poems page celebrating Richard Burton: https://centenarypoems.com/burtonbrando
