My grandmother’s grandfather was David Celyddon Phillips (1848–1915), Welsh-born minister and poet, known by the bardic name “Celyddon.” Recently I learned that my second cousin David M. Phillips Jr. has in his possession a leatherbound, hand-written copy of D. C. Phillips’ long narrative poem The Promised One, or, Jesus of Nazareth — previously unpublished as far as either of us know, despite that one of Celyddon’s lengthy obituaries mentions:

For the past twenty-five years [1890–1915] he had worked on the story of the life of Christ in verse, and up to a few days ago he still continued to polish and improve it, which he hoped would be his master work. The volume will be published by his sons as a memorial.

Well, 110 years later, Dave scanned and I transcribed the 220-page, 846-stanza poem into an HTML version which is now accessible online here:

• The Promised One, by D. C. Phillips

Many thanks to Dave, and also to my second cousin Ann Reddick for sending me down this rabbit hole in the first place!

The Promised One is in English, whereas most of Celyddon’s output was in Welsh. The Welsh poems I’m completely unable to judge, as I don’t know anything about Welsh except that Google Translate makes a hash of it. If you can read Welsh, Celyddon’s 1891 Gweddillion y Gorlifiad (“Remains of the Flood”) is here.

I gather from various sources that Celyddon was acclaimed for his skill in the “twenty-four meters” of Welsh poetry, so it is pleasantly expected that he makes restrained but effective use of meter in The Promised One. Part I’s three cantos (the Old Testament portion) are in iambic pentameter with an ABAB rhyme scheme; he switches to iambic tetrameter in ABBA for the New Testament portion. Yet the Annunciation gets blank verse:

“Fear not, for thou hast favor found with God:
Behold, thou shalt conceive and bear a son,
And Jesus thou shalt call his name. He shall
Be great, and called the Son of the Most High.
God shall give him his Father David’s throne;
And o’er the house of Jacob he shall reign;
And of his kingdom there shall be no end.”

And while the story of the Magi begins and ends in iambic tetrameter, their crècheward journey uses a rollicking trimeter that reminds me of Rudyard Kipling:

All hail to the star of the East,
  All hail to the men that she led;
  The wisest were they, for they read
In the star the sign of the feast.

All hail to the sons of the East,
  The kinsmen of Jethro and Job;
  God’s temple to them was the globe,
And the presence of God was their feast.

Also notable (not for their meter but for their torturous drumbeat refrains) are the forty lines of fasting in the desert and the forty stanzas of the Temptation.

“The word hath reached this barren vast
  That thou shalt wield a sov’reign rod,
  And that thou art the Son of God;
If thou art He break now thy fast.

“For hunger’s pangs are keen and dread,
  And cannot long be borne by thee;
  Be thine own stay if thou art He:
Command these stones to turn to bread.”