occupying new territory same death also defeated ‘the guardian of the ford, the defender of the border’
centuriesbefore: the reference here is to another major character from early Welsh
saga poetry, namely Gwˆen ap Llywarch.^70 It is then suggested that the ‘anonymous
cross’ may belong to a victim running for his life, one overtaken by hopelessness, or
an internee at Belsen. The mood is depressing and sombre, and nature itself does
not seem to offer any hope for the future: above the grave, ‘the prophetic trees will
not venture to promise|that spring will come back in its turn’.
The prospects remain gloomy at the beginning of the third and final poem within
the sequence, ‘Theater des Westens’:
It keeps on raining. Somewhere in the roof
the hidden pool overflows at the tip of a crack,
and through the captive darkness, the steady unhappy
drops trickle to soak the slack carpet.^71The same rain had greeted the protagonist at the end of Llywelyn-Williams’s
unpublished novel ‘Gwys i’r Gad’ (‘A Call to Arms’), when his military aircraftˆ
touched down on the European mainland: ‘The first part of the journey was over.
And it was raining’;^72 the rain is a source of misery in ‘If the Rain would Stop,
Friend’, and the same oppressive, monotonous rain was immortalized by the most
prominent Welsh writer in English associated with the war, Alun Lewis, in ‘All
Day It Has Rained’.^73 But despite the rain leitmotif, creativity and artistry are seen
challenging the inevitability and negativity of death in Llywelyn-Williams’s poem:
Let us be content to watch Inge dancing,
dancing where the harsh electric light is focussed;
stronger than the fear that lurks in the rain’s pulsations
is the music that fosters the assurance of her supple arms.Llywelyn-Williams later referred to the genesis of this poem in the experience of
‘seeing for the first time in my life (more’s the pity) some of the glory of the ballet’
and hearing the musicians whom he praised ‘for persevering so gallantly amidst
such destruction, and maintaining such a high standard’.^74 Art is identified as a
civilizing life force. But once more, the literal experience is filtered through the
poet’s literary inheritance, and the fatalistic Heledd is superseded by an allusion to
Olwen, another female character from early Welsh literature, for whom Culhwch
(^70) See Jenny Rowland’s translation of ‘Gwˆen ap Llywarch’, inEarly Welsh Saga Poetry, 468, which
contains the line ‘I intend to keep watch on the ford’.
(^71) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Theater des Westens’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 142.
(^72) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Gwys i’r Gad’, in Evans, ‘Bywyd a Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 394.ˆ
(^73) M. Wynn Thomas compares and contrasts the writers in hisInternal Difference: Twentieth-
Century Writing in Wales(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), 49–67; Greg Hill sheds further
light on the matter in ‘A Oes Golau yn y Gwyll? Alun Llywelyn-Williams ac Alun Lewis’, in M. Wynn
Thomas (ed.),DiFfinio Dwy Lenyddiaeth Cymru(Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1995), 120–44.
(^74) Llywelyn-Williams to his parents, 19 Aug. 1945, quoted in Evans, ‘Bywyd a Gwaith Alun
Llywelyn-Williams’, 191.