occupying new territory reporters around’.^60 Throughthe words of Llywelyn-Williams the Welsh language
borewitnesstooneofthetwentiethcentury’smajorlandmarks.Llywelyn-Williams’s
was not a war reporter’s response, recording the first copy of history, but rather
a poet’s response, that of one who allowed the experience to settle before giving it
artistic expression. And this contrasted with his work for what was, in essence, a
propaganda unit offering quick interpretations and immediate answers at the time.
At least three years went by before he wrote the Berlin sequence: it appears that
he wrote ‘Lehrter Bahnhof’ and ‘Theater des Westens’ in 1949 and ‘Zehlendorf’
in December 1951.^61 Years later he recalled ‘the destruction’ which was ‘terrible’:
‘That’s what made the greatest impact upon me, not the killing.’^62 In 1952, in a radio
broadcast, he described the experience that formed a basis for the opening poem:
I remember going one evening in August 1945 to a Berlin station, a station not far from
the Tiergarten and the garden where Hitler had spent his remaining hours a few weeks
previously. The main hall was a reservoir, for the underground pipes had been burst by the
bombing, the roof was smashed, and the platforms piled with mud and filth and shattered
glass and steel: and the rain that night constantly falling.^63
In another letter of September 1945 he refers to himself as ‘a sort of impersonal
onlooker on to the destruction, too, but that does not make the lovely things to
which I belonged any more real—music and poetry, and love of the mountains;
one feels numb and paralysed, and there is only an ache ofhiraeth, ever so deep
and strong’.^64 Yet, the fact that several years lay between the original experiences
and the later poems guarantees a certain amount of distance and objectivity as well
as ensuring that the poet is not restricted by the temporary details of the event.
The Berlin poems form a retrospective sequence written by a survivor-poet rather
than a soldier-poet. In fact, one is immediately directed to Wales, rather than
Germany, by the opening reference to ‘Heledd’ in ‘Lehrter Bahnhof’.^65 Heledd was
a princess in exile from the court of Pengwern in seventh-century Powys, and a
principal character in early Welsh saga poetry, and in the poem she is identified
with the homeless Inge in twentieth-century Berlin; as well as being a proper noun
in German, ‘ing’ is a common noun in Welsh meaning ‘pain, agony, affliction’.^66
(^60) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Sgwrs ag Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 6.
(^61) See Evans, ‘Bywyd a Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 396, where composition dates for the
poems are presented, based on a list found among the poet’s private papers. 62
63 Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Sgwrs ag Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 6.
Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Yr Ail Rwyg’, 9 Nov. 1952, a radio broadcast quoted in Evans, ‘Bywyd a
Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 192.
(^64) Llywelyn-Williams to Alis Llywelyn-Williams, 21 Sept. 1945, English-language letter quoted ibid.
176.
(^65) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Lehrter Bahnhof’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 140–1.
(^66) See the entry for ‘ing, yng’, inGeiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language:
Cyfrol II G-LLYYS(Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1968–87), where it is translated as ‘strait(s),
extremity, press of battle, crisis, distress, dire adversity, affliction; anguish, excruciating pain, agony,
pang’.