King March thinks he has been clever, and the poem's whole pleasure lies in watching that confidence collapse. "A Brecon Version" retells the triangle of Trystan, Queen Essylt and her husband King March as a small ballad-like story, and it turns on a piece of legal cunning that backfires. Arthur rules that the lovers may share the queen by the seasons: one has her while the leaves are on the trees, the other while they are off. March, given the choice because he is her husband, picks the winter, reasoning that "the nights were longer / When the leaves were off the trees." He congratulates himself on leaving "summer to her lover." Essylt's closing song shows him how badly he has miscalculated.
Her answer is a riddle he failed to solve. Holly, yew and ivy-wood are the "three trees that are good" because they "keep / Their leaves forever and always." If the verdict depends on leaves, then for these evergreens the leaves never fall, and winter never arrives. The judgment March thought he had won hands the whole year to Trystan. Essylt's phrase "always / And always and forever" piles up its time-words so that the year seems to stretch out without end, and the final line, "With Trystan I will sleep," is the plainest in the poem, as if no ornament were needed once the trick has worked. Her earlier greeting of the verdict, "O blessèd be / The judgment and its giver!", reads differently on a second look. She is almost certainly already savouring the loophole, and her courtesy and dancing carry a quiet irony.
The poem's shape reinforces that feeling of a story told aloud. Its stanzas are short and its sentences simple, and it relies on repetition rather than elaboration: "Trystan took Queen Essylt / To Celyddon's green wood" is followed at once by nearly the same line, changing only "To" to "In." The same device appears when "Whoever Trystan drew blood on" is mirrored by "Whoever drew blood on Trystan." These doublings give the verse the rhythm of an oral tale or a folk ballad, where lines are echoed and varied rather than developed. The rhyme is loose and irregular, sometimes landing ("spell" with "fell," "March" with "was" only approximately) and sometimes simply dropping away, which keeps the tone relaxed and unfussy rather than polished. Even the lines are mostly short, built from a few strong beats.
The imagery is spare and tied to ceremony and status: harpers and poets sent to soothe, silver and gold given in return, Gwalchmai arriving "in a corselet all of gold." Wealth and rank oil the machinery of the story, yet the final outcome depends on something much plainer, a tree that keeps its leaves. That contrast is part of the poem's charm. All the royal bargaining and diplomacy, with its kings, counsellors and peacemakers, is overturned by a woman's wordplay. The most powerful figure in the judgment turns out to be the one who was least consulted. Essylt is given no vote, yet she has the last word, and it is a song.
The poem is significant for how it lets a very old kind of story speak in a modern, economical voice. The title calls it a "version," which suggests a retelling of a traditional tale rather than an original invention, and the poem keeps the feel of a legend passed along. What it adds, or at least what it brings to the surface, is a sly comedy about the limits of authority. Law, status and cleverness all fail March because he reads the rule's wording as if it were its meaning. Essylt reads the same words more carefully, or more mischievously, and finds the gap. For a reader, the pleasure is double: the click of the riddle's solution, and the sense that love, in this telling, wins not by force but by listening harder to what has actually been said.