MAGGIE and I have returned to the Monmouth and Brecon Canal, which floats serenely through the magical valley of the Usk, the haunt of mystical poets such as Henry Vaughan, and, indeed, the scene of one of T. S. Eliot’s exquisite little “Landscapes” poems, “Usk”:

Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart behind the white well.
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. . .

I did, in fact, find the White Hart, if Eliot was referring obliquely to the excellent and ancient inn of that name, to which one comes via an aqueduct as the canal glides over the river, and I found it full of enchantments old and new. The White Hart means much more, of course, than an inn, as Eliot well knew, and, in Malory, the Hart is itself an emblem of Christ.

Last year, we didn’t get much further than the White Hart, but, this time, we went all the way to Brecon, where another poetic enchantment awaited us — not in the old cathedral or the ruined castle, but on the face of an uncompromisingly modern building: the Brecon Beacons College, an FE college, also a library and museum. But there, on its street-facing wall, was a beautiful inscription of poetry in both Welsh and English.

At the heart of this inscription I recognised the opening lines of Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light. . .
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years. . .
Like a vast shadow mov’d. . .

But these lines were framed by two passages from the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, the celebrated 14th-century Welsh poet, but with an English translation. The two lines “In the court of shades We hold the court of Art and Light” prefaced the passage of Vaughan and the line “Between starlight and ashes we must make our story” followed it.

It was as though, in this new poem, made by a fusion of the old, Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity was framed, as all such glimpses are, between shade and light, between the ash to which we return and the stars to which we aspire.

It would have been moving to read these lines anywhere, but I thought it a great tribute to the continued importance of poetry right at the heart of Welsh culture that here was this inscription of great poetry in two languages on an FE college, with its courses in computer science and digital technology, and its various apprenticeships. You wouldn’t find that on most FE colleges in England, and more’s the pity; for there is a kind of poetry in every techne, every art and science, just as there is real techne, technical skill, in the making of poetry.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the inscription, though, especially with its beautiful combination of Welsh and English, teasing the English reader with a poetry that is beyond them, and confirming to the Welsh reader the depth and beauty of their inheritance; for I had seen and admired the powerful poem by Gwyneth Lewis, combining both Welsh and English, which is blazoned in enormous, beautiful letters across the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, in Cardiff.

The Welsh speaks of the furnace of inspiration, and the English line, at once locally rooted as the Welsh slate and open to the wide horizons of both Welsh poetry and history, reads: “In these stones horizons sing.”