occupying new territory A similar emphasis on the common suffering caused by war is found in the poem
whichimmediately follows, ‘On a Visit’.^78 Besides the sequence of three poems that
constitute ‘In Berlin—August 1945’, this elegant and balanced narrative poem—it
consists of seventy-two lines subdivided into twelve six-line stanzas—is the longest
war poem written by Llywelyn-Williams, and he explores thoroughly within it
all aspects of the situation he presents. He measured First World War poetry by
these criteria—‘an appreciation of how wholly was the experience perceived and
expressed, how complex the admission of truth, how compassionate the poet’s view
of man’s condition’^79 —and measured by his own standards, ‘On a Visit’ must be
regarded as a classic poetic meditation on war.
A retrospective, reconciliatory tone is established from the outset:
Peace has surely come by now to heal it completely
and turn the sicken house to a home of joy once more;
if I could return some winter twilight
and walk again through the noiseless lane’s silent snow
to where I once was, there would be a change in time and a new
order, and I would not know a world as strange as summer.
The starting point is the ‘new|order’ of the present, not wartime, and the positive
attributes of ‘Peace’ and ‘joy’. The voice is experienced, middle-aged, and respons-
ible—Llywelyn-Williams was 41 in 1954. He also ensures that enough time has
lapsed between the past he is about to discuss and his own present, and at the
start of the second stanza goes as far as to suggest that ‘perhaps it was a dream’.
Throughout the poem one is convinced of its authenticity by the precision and
care with which the situation is described. Yet, one senses that Llywelyn-Williams’s
main interest lies not in the concrete details he seems to be recalling, but rather in
the moral significance of his tale. The basic predicament—a man seeking refuge in
a strange house from a snowstorm—appears rather prosaic, but it is presented in a
way that injects the commonplace with extraordinary resonance. The poem is essen-
tially an ‘epiphany’ as that word is defined by David Lodge: a ‘descriptive passage
in which external reality is charged with a kind of transcendental significance for
the perceiver. In modern fiction an epiphany often has the function performed by a
decisive action in traditional narrative, providing a climax or resolution to a story or
episode.’^80 Itis,therefore,appropriatethatLlywelyn-Williamsattemptstoriseabove
the material reality of war in this, one of the two last poems he wrote about the War.
(^78) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘On a Visit’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 135–7. An alternative translation of ‘Ar
Ymweliad’, entitled ‘The Visit’, is provided by R. S. Thomas inModern Poetry in Translation,new
series no. 7 (Spring 1995), 157–9. It is one of six poems chosen and translated by Thomas to represent
modern Welsh verse, and the fact that it immediately follows a translation of ‘In Two Fields’ by Waldo
Williams supports the claim that Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Waldo Williams represent between
them the two premier, though contrasting, Welsh poets of the Second World War. 79
80 Llywelyn-Williams, untitled review of Jon Silkin’sOut of Battle, 105.
David Lodge,The Art of Fiction(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 147.