The Bard (poem)

The Bard (1774) by Thomas Jones, National Museum of Wales

As the victorious army of Edward I marches along the slopes of the Snowdonian mountains near to the river Conwy they encounter a Welsh bard, who curses the king. The bard invokes the shades of Cadwallo, Urien and Modred, three of Edward's victims,[1][2] who weave the fate of Edward's Plantagenet line, dwelling on the various miseries and misfortunes of his descendants. The bard goes on to predict the return of Welsh rule over Britain in the form of the house of Tudor, and the flowering of British poetry in the verse of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Finally he tells Edward:

["]...with joy I see
  The diff'rent dooms our fates assign.
Be thine despair, and scept'red care,
  To triumph, and to die, are mine."
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.[3]

— lines 139-144

Gray was a keen student of medieval history, and in time came to make a particular study of the oldest Welsh poetry, though without actually learning the language.[4][5] Several pages of his commonplace books are devoted to notes on Welsh prosody, and he also mentioned there a legend, now considered quite unhistorical, which he had come across in Thomas Carte's A General History of England (1747–1755). When Edward I conquered Wales, "he is said", wrote Gray, "to have hanged up all their Bards, because they encouraged the Nation to rebellion, but their works (we see), still remain, the Language (tho' decaying) still lives, and the art of their versification is known, and practised to this day among them". Gray also studied early Scandinavian literature, and found in one Old Norse poem the refrain "'Vindum vindum/ Vef Darradar'", which was to reappear in The Bard as "Weave the warp and weave the woof". In 1755 he began work on The Bard, and by August of that year had completed two thirds of the poem. Initially he worked with a speed and a sense of identification that were both unusual for him. "I felt myself the Bard", he declared. But composing the third and final strophe proved more difficult, and he eventually ground to a halt.[6][7][8] For two years the poem remained unfinished, but then in 1757 he attended a concert by John Parry, a blind harpist who claimed that the traditional Welsh harp repertoire went back as far as the druids. Gray was so inspired by this experience that he returned to The Bard with new enthusiasm, and was soon able to tell his friend William Mason, "Mr Parry, you must know, has set my Ode in motion again, and has brought it at last to a conclusion."[9][10] Gray sold the copyright of this poem and of his "The Progress of Poesy" to the publisher Robert Dodsley for 40 guineas, and Dodsley issued them together under the title Odes by Mr. Gray.[11] The book was printed by Gray's friend Horace Walpole who had just set up a printing press at his home, Strawberry Hill, and who had set his heart on inaugurating the enterprise with Gray's poems. The Odes were published on 8 August 1757 as a handsome quarto, with a print run of 2000 copies priced at one shilling.[12] Walpole prevailed on Gray to add four footnotes to The Bard for the first edition, though Gray told Walpole, "I do not love notes…They are signs of weakness and obscurity. If a thing cannot be understood without them, it had better not be understood at all." These proved, for many readers, inadequate to explain the poem, and Gray complacently wrote to Mason "nobody understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied." Rather against his will, he was persuaded to add a few more notes for the 1768 edition.[13]

The Bard (c. 1817) by John Martin, Yale Center for British Art

William Etty, Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm, 1832

In the general state of ignorance of Welsh culture that prevailed in English literary circles in 1757 The Bard formed something of a challenge to Gray's readers. He claimed that "all people of condition are agreed not to admire, nor even to understand" the Odes.[14] In 1778 the political writer Percival Stockdale was one such negative voice:

If the subject of a Poem is obscure, or not generally known, or not interesting, and if it abounds with allusions, and facts of this improper, and uninteresting character, the writer who chuses the subject, and introduces those improper, and unaffecting allusions, and facts, betrays a great want of poetical judgment, and taste. Mr. Gray had a vitiated fondness for such insipid fable, narrative, and references.[15]

Dr. Johnson characteristically grumbled "I do not see that The Bard promotes any truth, moral or political", and found much of the imagery ridiculous.[16] But from the very beginning Gray's complaint of universal misunderstanding was mistaken. In December 1757, only four months after The Bard was published, Gray was offered the Poet Laureateship .[17] Favourable, even enthusiastic, reviews appeared in the Critical Review, Monthly Review and Literary Magazine, and their voices were soon echoed by many others.[18] John Brown, a then fashionable social commentator, reportedly called The Bard and The Progress of Poesy the best odes in the language; David Garrick thought them the best in any language; Thomas James Mathias compared The Bard favourably to Pindar, Horace, Dante and Petrarch; and by 1807 even Percival Stockdale had changed his mind, and could write of its "poetical excellence".[19][20] One exception to this trend was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1799 wrote that "The Bard once intoxicated me, & now I read it without pleasure", and more than thirty years later could still remark that he found it "frigid and artificial".[21] On the whole, however, as Edmund Gosse noted, The Bard "for at least a century remained almost without a rival among poems cherished by strictly poetical persons for the qualities of sublimity and pomp of vision."[22]

The publication of The Bard started a new chapter in the history of English poetry. It might be called the first primitivist poem in the English language,[23][24] and certainly its success inspired a new generation of writers to turn their attention to Welsh and Gaelic themes from the distant past in a movement which came to be known as the Celtic Revival. One of the first to be so influenced was the Scot James Macpherson, whose prose poems issued under the name of the ancient bard Ossian achieved extraordinary popularity, spreading the Celtic glamour across Europe and America.[25][26][27][28] Also indirectly inspired by The Bard were Walter Scott's hugely popular evocations of the Scottish past.[29] The Bard, in fact, was a precursor of Romanticism, or as the critic William Powell Jones put it, Gray "started a flame…when he wrote The Bard, and the fire swept into the Romantic movement itself."[30] Its influence extended to Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, and as far as W. B. Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish writers of the Celtic Twilight.[31] One measure of the poem's place in the culture of the English-speaking world lies in the academic James MacKillop's claim that "The current standard English definition of this Celtic word [bard], denoting a poet of exalted status, i.e. the voice of a nation or people, dates from Thomas Gray's use of it in his poem".[32]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Bard. A Pindaric Ode

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Bard (poem).

• Annotated text of The Bard at the Thomas Gray Archive
• Annotated description of Blake's illustrations of the Poem at the William Blake Archive
• "The Mountain Sublime from the Enlightenment to Romanticism: The Bard in Thomas Gray and John Martin" by Robert Baldwin