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Anna Lewis The Wash-house Poems from the Mabinogion Note This sequence is drawn from the story of Blodeuedd, found in the Mabinogion, the major collection of Medieval Welsh tales. Blodeuedd is often thought to represent the natural world in human form; connections and tensions between humans and the natural environment run throughout the story. The sequence is told from the imagined perspective of Blodeuedd’s maid. Blodeuedd is created from wild flowers by magic, to be the bride for a young nobleman, but begins an affair with another man, who encourages her to kill her husband and appropriate his land. Their attempt at murder fails when her husband transforms into an eagle, and flies out of sight. Blodeuedd’s husband is later reinstated by his uncle, a magician, who then pursues Blodeuedd, and turns her into an owl as punishment for her disloyalty.
page 61
Lewis 55 The Wash-house 1They knotted the roots and petals of wildflowers together, waved their hands in some fashion or other, and this droop of a girl sat up from the green. A bride for the groom. She doesn’t say much, words stumbling out like young shoots. ‘Don’t remember,’ she says, so I show her where she used to be broom, hitching herself from the dry soil under the cliff, bees clamouring at each cup. I show her where she was meadowsweet, where she thickened the low field by the stream: always thirsty, always twisting towards the white spurting water, and insisting her roots in tough currents downwards, wrangling the earth. I show her where she was oak flower, pouting in gangs between the spring twigs, urging the green thud of water up through the trunk and into the fizz of those thousand pink mouths. ‘Next?’ she says, wheeling hair round her finger, but we are due back at the hall. We stand for a few moments longer, watch the fritter of blossom over the stream.

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Anna Lewis The Wash-house Poems from the Mabinogion

Note This sequence is drawn from the story of Blodeuedd, found in the Mabinogion, the major collection of Medieval Welsh tales. Blodeuedd is often thought to represent the natural world in human form; connections and tensions between humans and the natural environment run throughout the story. The sequence is told from the imagined perspective of Blodeuedd’s maid. Blodeuedd is created from wild flowers by magic, to be the bride for a young nobleman, but begins an affair with another man, who encourages her to kill her husband and appropriate his land. Their attempt at murder fails when her husband transforms into an eagle, and flies out of sight. Blodeuedd’s husband is later reinstated by his uncle, a magician, who then pursues Blodeuedd, and turns her into an owl as punishment for her disloyalty.

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