gerwyn wiliams
you, and the destruction for a time’—and ‘The Airman’ refers enthusiastically to
thepilot who ‘will loose his great blessing to the earth, and shatter the world!’^24 As
far as the love he and his wife, Alis, had for each other, it too—according to ‘When
Freely We Stroll Again’—would be stronger following a period apart: ‘Sweet every
yearning when we are home together,|purified by the dead, silent months.’^25 Yet
there was nothing to suggest that either of them would survive the War: when
peace would eventually return, when the ‘purer city rises hereafter,|there will be a
strange couple in our old home’.^26 As Llywelyn-Williams stated elsewhere, ‘When
the war came at last, I wasn’t convinced that my friends and I would survive, and I
believed that Cardiff and such places would be burnt to ashes in next to no time.’^27
There is therefore nothing contrived in theastonishment at having survived that he
later expresses in ‘After the Conflict’ and ‘The First Christmas of Peace’, the closing
poems of the ‘War’ section inPont y Caniedydd.
He continues to diagnose the sickness that characterized the period in ‘Cui
Bono?’, and not for the first time employs medical imagery: ‘despite expecting, like
an invalid, the wise verdict|and the sure advice; the medicines are terror|and the
doctor’s books merely cultivated lies.’^28 He had listened ‘to the doctor’s advice’^29
in a previous poem, but could no longer depend upon that advice. As in the case
of the later poem ‘Exploring the Land’, ‘Cui Bono?’ brings to mind ‘1914–1918:
Yr Ieuainc wrth yr Hen’ (‘1914–1918: The Young to the Old’), W. J. Gruffydd’s
vitriolic indictment of the older generation, written after he had survived his term
of duty on board a minesweeper during the First World War:
More blind than the blind, the sight that has seen the dying
of the faith that was dulled by the tricks of the world,
truth turning untrue, and the soft word harsh,
every creed a disgrace, and every poem silent.^30But whilst Gruffydd had contrasted the corrupt elders with the honourable young,
the older generation having betrayed the younger generation’s trust in them by
leading them into war, Llywelyn-Williams offers a more bitter truth: as he sees
matters, the younger generation are infected with the cynicism of the old. Gruffydd
had claimed that the old had not in their ‘sad life’ any ‘hope’, ‘faith’, or ‘love’;
(^24) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘The World that Vexes Us’ and ‘The Airman’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the
Gloom, 123 and 128.
(^25) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘When Freely We Stroll Again’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 124.
(^26) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Here in the Tranquil Hills’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 120.
(^27) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Holi: Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 17.
(^28) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Cui Bono?’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 121.
(^29) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘After Listening to the Doctor’s Advice’, 117.
(^30) W. J. Gruffydd, ‘1914–1918: Yr Ieuainc wrth yr Hen’ (‘1914–1918: The Young to the Old’), trans.
Robert Minhinnick, in Menna Elfyn and John Rowlands (eds.),The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh
Poetry: Twentieth-Century Welsh-Language Poetry in Translation(Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2003), 53–4. Such
was his admiration of Gruffydd that Llywelyn-Williams prepared a special issue ofTir Newyddin his
honour in May 1938.