gerwyn wiliams
man our song?’^37 Onehears allusions to the fatalistic rhetorical questions posed by
T. H. Parry-Williams in 1923: ‘Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd...?’ (‘What are we,
brother, you and I...?’) and ‘Beth fyddi dithau, ferch, a myfi...?’ (‘And what will
you be, my girl, and I...?’).^38 But by the closing poem eight years later, love had
matured into a less passive and more assertive force: already in ‘Since Death is Close
By’ Llywelyn-Williams claims that ‘never can he [death] ravage love’s unstinted
joy|that was snatched by us from his eternal terror’;^39 but by the time that he came
to compose ‘Love’s Unity’, the love is presented in deliberately exaggerated terms:
Beware of the jealous in us: the fortified place
that does not wish to reveal our close-kept secrets,
the kingdom that keeps its bare borders pure
from the ardent surge of the waves on the beach.
My darling, listen, as we lie here together,
side by side, close, thigh to thigh,
do you hear the two proud, sovereign kingdoms
intertwining and fusing into one?^40In those troubled times, the unifying love that acts as a bond between the poet and
Alis assumes an urgent and universal significance; it represents an ideal of trust
and meaning, mutual understanding and respect, honesty and truthfulness. This
is a more personal version of the concept of understanding between people that
Waldo Williams promoted in the aftermath of war in 1946 as the ‘Only balm to
the world’ in his homage to the community living around the Preseli mountains
in north Pembrokeshire.^41 As Llywelyn-Williams was to state years later—and
one imagines that Waldo Williams would have no difficulty accepting these words
either—‘Making whole the relationship between different individuals is the starting
point of all goodness for me, and the only practical basis for properly reforming
society and civilization.’^42
Soldier
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Cerddi 1934–1942may be read as poetic reportage on the period referred to in the
title of Llywelyn-Williams’s book: the material is organized chronologically, and the
(^37) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Cefn Cwm Bychan’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 111.
(^38) Originally written in 1923, ‘Yr Esgyrn Hyn’ was included by T. H. Parry-Williams in his slim
though highly influential volumeCerddi, in 1931; Joseph P. Clancy provides a translation, ‘These
Bones’, in his 39 Twentieth Century Welsh Poems(Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982), 62–3.
Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Since Death isClose By’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 123.
(^40) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Love’s Unity’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 129.
(^41) See Waldo Williams, ‘Preseli’, trans.Tony Conran, in Elfyn and Rowlands (eds.),Bloodaxe Book
of Modern Welsh Poetry, 125–6.
(^42) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Holi: Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 20.