‘The Precision of the Wheel’ (22 October 1959) On the night Watkins’s first son was born he had completed ‘The Lady with the Unicorn’, leading to the book bearing that name. Twelve years later, to the day, he received his first copy of Cypress and Acacia. The coincidence occasioned this poem.

‘Affinities’ (1959) Stanza 8. In a talk to the Poetry Society in 1966, Watkins said of Dylan Thomas: ‘His poetry is ancient, as it is always dealing with first things. I remember, after reading my poems at Oxford in 1952, acknowledging my great debt to him. I had introduced the poems briefly and said among other things that a poet cannot learn a true style from a contemporary, and that he must relate himself to ancient and dead poets, and be influenced by those alone. At the end I was challenged and asked to reconcile this statement to my other one about the influence of knowing Dylan Thomas. I said, “Dylan Thomas is an ancient poet. He happens to be alive”’ (Poetry Wales, Vol. 12, No. 4, Spring 1977).

‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’ (1953) This nine-part poem, prefaced by a translation from Hölderlin, forms a section of its own within Affinities.

‘Music of Colours: Dragonfoil and the Furnace of Colours’ (1961) Watkins’s third ‘Music of Colours’ poem. ‘One of the most vibrant evocations of summer in English poetry’ (John Ackerman, ‘Visionary glimpses of eternity’, The New Welsh Review, No. 28, Spring 1995).

Fidelities (1968) Fidelities contains sixty-one poems, completed between 1959 and 1967. The volume’s flyleaf states: ‘Fidelities was completed by Vernon Watkins shortly before his sudden death in Seattle – where he was Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Washington – on 8th October, 1967 at the age of sixty-one.’

‘The Sibyl’ (1961) A rare glimpse, perhaps, into Watkins’s self-estimation as a poet. Among those who visited Watkins’s small house on the cliffs of Gower were Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Pablo Neruda. The last two lines clearly refer to Dylan Thomas.

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