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 gerwyn wiliams

to the sixth century. Taliesin’s heroic poetry is firmly established as a cornerstone
ofthe Welsh literary canon.^47
This was not the first occasion for Llywelyn-Williams to allude to early Welsh
poetry: ‘Men of Catraeth’ is dated 1938, the year that Ifor Williams’s scholarly edi-
tion ofCanu Aneirin, referring to the heroism of the Britons at Catraeth (Catterick),
had appeared;^48 ‘Lounge on the Hill’ alludes toCanu Llywarch Hen,alsoedited
by Ifor Williams, three years after an edition of this early Welsh saga poetry had
been published.^49 The availability and accessibility of this ancient war poetry can
be regarded as one advantage that Second World War poets had over their First
World War counterparts: it enriched their range of reference and intensified their
emotional impact and literary creativity. And as the references to W. J. Gruffydd and
Hedd Wyn suggest, they could also turn to the poetry of 1914–18 for precedents
on how, artistically, to approach the challenges of recent warfare. But the allusions
to early Welsh war poetry are conscious and intentional rather than occasional
or accidental inPont y Caniedydd. Consequently, whilst the war poems inCerddi
1934–1942andPont y Caniedyddforge a thematic link, the manner by which they
approach their subject-matter sets them apart.
Llywelyn-Williams enlisted in the Army with a certain amount of idealism in
1940, initially convinced that the war represented an opportunity to establish a new
order and to rid the world of evil. His early enthusiasm does not seem to have lasted
long. ‘The Counter-Attack’, the second poem in the ‘War’ section, suggests the
laboriousness, the monotony, and the futility of the work in which he was involved:

After clearing this forest, warily probing

each innocent bush and each tidy glade...

after conquering the broken streets, trampling hearths

once handsome, plundering their pretty rooms.^50

And although it follows ‘In Night Battle’, which is annotated with the background
details ‘1 March 1945, outside the town of Weeze in northwest Germany’, the poem
did not evolve from a military experience abroad: it was originally written in August
1943 while Llywelyn-Williams was based at Brecon, and later published in the April

(^47) The translation quoted comes from Joseph P. Clancy, ‘The Battle of Gwen Ystrad’, inidem,
Medieval Welsh Poems(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 39.
(^48) Ifor Williams’sCanu Aneirin(Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1938) is a scholarly edition of
the heroic poetry attributed to the sixth-century poet Aneirin, who wroteY Gododdin. For accessible
translations, see Clancy,Medieval Welsh Poems, 45–76. David Jones alludes to the poem in his
modernist classic,In Parenthesis(1937), which Alun Llywelyn-Williams regarded as ‘the only poetic
masterpiece to emerge from the [First World] war’; see Llywelyn-Williams, untitled review of Silkin’s
Out of Battle, 104–5.
(^49) Ifor Williams’sCanu Llywarch Hen(Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1935) is a scholarly
edition of early Welsh saga poetry dating back to the ninth or tenth century and contains within it
englynionassociated with the historic character Llywarch Hen. For accessible translations, see Clancy,
Medieval Welsh Poems, 76–104.
(^50) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘The Counter-Attack’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 133.