gerwyn wiliams
‘[T]he years play tricks with us,’ says the poet: despite the fact that many centuries
separateHeledd and Inge, they are drawn together by their common experience as
victims of war. This suggests a continuous history, an ongoing tradition of warfare,
as Llywelyn-Williams establishes himself at the outset as the latest Welsh poet over
a thousand years to bear witness to war. The station is caught in limbo: a bullet had
‘ripped the fingers [of the clock] away|that appointed the coming and going|of
the harsh wheels’ stately bustle’. The fact that there is no timetable operating in
a train station—of all places—emphasizes the sense of anarchy. But this timeless
state also helps to underline the poem’s relevance and extend its significance.
Contemporary descriptions of the destruction in Berlin—‘The whirlwind went
by—|and from the cleft in the wall, from the crack in the pavement,|the water
pours without echoing the song of the brook.|The night drips around us’—are
interlaced with allusions toCanu Llywarch Hen: ‘let us...praise the hearth’s purity
beneath the grey lichen’s blight’; ‘Sharp is the breeze’.^67 This modern-day Heledd is
a fallen princess: ‘concealed on the handy bed of the rubble,|as a gift for savouring
the cigarette, for sucking the chocolate,|you can extend your love to the lonely
conqueror.’ In the face of such a cheapened and debased existence, the third and final
stanza asks when will order be reinstated, but also closes with a sobering thought:
Thiswasalwaysagross,pompouscity
and fit to be ruined;
have you heard, Heledd,—no, wounded Inge,—
the greedy eagle’s fierce laughter,
have you seen, in his half-shut eyes,
the preordained image of all our fragile cities?Ifor Williams saw signs of ‘Fate and arrogance reaping destruction’ inCanu Llywarch
Hen;^68 Llywelyn-Williams sees history repeating itself and hubris destroying other
Pengwerns and other Berlins in the future.
In the second poem of the sequence, ‘Zehlendorf’—‘a suburb on the south-
western border of the city...[through which] the Russians...made their final
attack on the city’—Inge appears again, but this time in a public park leaning over
an unidentified gravestone: ‘do not give him a name’.^69 This again emphasizes the
universal and symbolic significance of recent historical events already seen in the
opening poem of the sequence: the gravestone signifies the death of millions during
the war itself, the omnipotent, unavoidable, and ever-present death ‘that mercifully
climbs to our bed at the long day’s end,|that awaits us on the farthest corners
of our consciousness,|on Everest’s highest peak, there to greet our strength’. The
(^67) Compare Jenny Rowland’s translation of ‘Aelwyd Rheged’, in herEarly Welsh Saga Poetry
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 482, which contains the line ‘This hearth—grey lichen hides it’; see
also her translation of a line from ‘Llym Awel’, ibid. 501: ‘Sharp is the wind, bare the hill.’ 68
Ifor Williams, ‘Rhagymadrodd’, in Williams (ed.),Canu Llywarch Hen,p.lxix.
(^69) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Zehlendorf’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 141–2.