occupying new territory 1944 issue of the Welsh quarterlyYTraethodydd. It is easy to understand, however,
why Gwyn Thomas mistakenly associated the poem with the following description
of the destruction that Llywelyn-Williams witnessed in Germany:
I was with other soldiers there toward the end of the war. I remember going through the
Reichswald—around the winter and spring of 1945—going there to fight. As we came out
of a forest near a place called Goch we came across a regiment of the SS.... I remember
going around the outskirts of the forest after the battle; this was the only time when I saw
lads who had been killed. One of my friends was among them: he had been set out tidily but
was completely dead, the poor fellow.^51
Be it a premonition or not, here were the ‘fruitless marks of the bitter slaughter’s
anguish’, the destruction caused by him and his fellow combatants, and the only
indication that his humanity has not ceased to function is his troubled conscience:
...comes upon us the harder, more hazardous battle of dealing
with the grace that chills the blood of the seething heart.
Vile, furtive underminer; against this,
tank, or bomb, or gunshot is of no avail.^52In the actual experience of war, his hopefulness is dimmed, and the earlier doubts
he had harboured in Brecon are validated. All mention of ‘shatter[ing] the world’
in order to create ‘a new world’ cease:^53 they sound in retrospect like the slick
sloganeering of the politician and propagandist. Llywelyn-Williams’s innocent
perception of war has been corrected by the reality. He was forced to face up to his
experience and be true to himself: ‘I could only offer a direct affirmation of my own
experience as a combatant.’^54 And that, after all, is all a poet can do, according to
Wilfred Owen: ‘That is why the true Poets must be truthful.’^55
But the truth hurt: although six of the war poems included inPont y Caniedydd
were more or less complete by 1946, three years went by before he began composing
the first of the five remaining poems based upon his experiences. They are significant
years for him as a poet: as he suggests in a letter sent to his wife in July 1945, he
considered himself at an artistic crossroads. Although he would eventually return to
work for the BBC, at this stage he had no wish to do so:
Features would entail too much creativework, and despite the good reception that my
poems had, I feel now that whatever artistic energy I may have once possessed, it has all
been knocked out of me by the war. I have said what I wanted to say, and now since being
in Germany, I have seen it all come true, to say it again would be absurd. To see civilization
(^51) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Sgwrs ag Alun Llywelyn-Williams’,Llais Llyfrau(Winter 1986), 6. Gwyn
Thomas’s comment appears in his 52 Alun Llywelyn-Williams(Caernarfon: Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1987), 36.
Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Counter Attack’, 133.
(^53) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘The Airman’, 128, and ‘Since Death is Close By’, 123.
(^54) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 174.
(^55) Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and Fragments,ed.
Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 535.