The White Goddess by Robert Graves

of the vale of Hebron;
I was in the court of Dôn before the birth of Gwydion.
I was instructor to Eli and Enoch;
I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crozier;
15 I have been loquacious prior to being gifted with speech;
I was at the place of the crucifixion of the merciful son of God;
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod;
I have been the chief director of the work of the tower of Nimrod.
I am a wonder whose origin is not known.
20 I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark,
I have witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
I have been in India when Roma was built;
I am now come here to the remnant of Troia.
I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass;
25 I strengthened Moses through the water of Jordan;
I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene;
I have obtained the muse from the Cauldron of Caridwen;
I have been bard of the harp to Lleon of Lochlin.
I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn,
30 For a day and a year in stocks and fetters,
I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin,
I have been fostered in the land of the Deity,
I have been teacher to all intelligences,
I am able to instruct the whole universe.
35 I shall be until the day of doom on the face of the earth;
And it is not known whether my body is flesh or fish.
         Then I was for nine months
         In the womb of the hag Caridwen;
         I was originally little Gwion,
40         And at length I am Taliesin.
     
     
    The deceitful cry of the Lapwing! Gwion was not so ignorant of sacred history as he pretended: he must have known perfectly well that Moses never crossed the Jordan, that Mary Magdalene was never in the Firmament, that Lucifer’s fall had been recorded by the prophet Isaiah centuries before the time of Alexander the Great. Refusing to be lured away from the secret by his apparently nonsensical utterances, I began my unravelling of the puzzle by answering the following questions:
    Line 11. Who did convey the Divine Spirit to Hebron?
       13. Who did instruct Enoch?
       16. Who did attend the Crucifixion?
       25. Who did pass through Jordan water when Moses was forbidden to do so?
     
    I felt confident that I would presently catch a gleam of white through the tangled thicket where the Roebuck was harboured.
    Now, according to the Pentateuch, Moses died on Pisgah on the other side of Jordan and ‘no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day’; and of all the Children of Israel who had come with him into the wilderness out of the house of bondage, only two, Caleb and Joshua, crossed into the Promised Land. As spies they had already been bold enough to cross and recross the river. It was Caleb who seized Hebron from the Anakim on behalf of the God of Israel and was granted it by Joshua as his inheritance. So I realized that the Dog had torn the whole poem into shreds with his teeth and that the witty Lapwing had mixed them up misleadingly, as she did with the torn shreds of the fruit passage in the Câd Goddeu. The original statement was: ‘I conveyed the Divine Spirit through the water of Jordan to the level of the vale of Hebron.’ And the ‘I’ must be Caleb.
    If the same trick had been played with every line of the Hanes Taliesin, I could advance a little farther into the thicket. I could regard the poem as a sort of acrostic composed of twenty or thirty riddles, each of them requiring separate solution; what the combined answers spelt out promised to be a secret worth discovering. But first I had to sort out and reassemble the individual riddles.
    After the misleading ‘through the water of Jordan’ had been removed from line 25, ‘I strengthened Moses’ remained. Well, who did strengthenMoses? And where was this strengthening done? I remembered that Moses was strengthened at the close of his battle with the Amalekites, by having his hands held up by two companions. Where did this battle take place and who were the