gerwyn wiliams
was forced to perform around fortyanoethauorextremely difficult tasks before
winning her as his bride.^75 The dazzling creativity and imagination which charac-
terizeCulhwch ac Olwenas a prose tale inject new energy and optimism into the
poetic sequence and provide Llywelyn-Williams with hope for the future: ‘let the
mother again be joyful’; ‘there is a garden to be tended’ and ‘strength in the green
shoots’. Inge is now seen dancing, and her creativity is a counterpoint to the gloom
and pessimism of the previous two poems. Dance is seen as an ancient art-form,
and here it symbolizes man’s ability throughout the ages to rise above his material
environment and liberate himself through the strength of his imagination:
Because the training has been long, and her instruction thorough
in many an ancient city; and many an age
has fashioned her delicate art, the craft that incarnates
the spinning of the notes, that purifies the primal wound.‘To see civilization come to an end’ may not ‘augur well for the future’: however, in
retrospect, the activity which Llywelyn-Williams witnessed in ‘the only playhouse
in the sector of Berlin under control of the British forces which was comparatively
undamaged’^76 seemed to challenge the doomed sense of finality he had previously
expressed in July 1945. The humanitarian Llywelyn-Williams finds new grounds for
hope, a source of personal solace, in the rejuvenating power of art. This realization
presented him with a future for his own art and enabled him to reinvent and
redefine himself as a poet.
Written in 1954, ‘Ballad of the Phantoms’ and ‘On a Visit’ are poetic statements
of reconciliation which represent Llywelyn-Williams’s last attempt to take control
and make sense of his war experiences. Although the gloss ‘A wartime conversation’
appears in thePont y Caniedyddedition of ‘Ballad of the Phantoms’, nothing in
the poem itself would seem to link it exclusively to the Second World War. The
wartime conversation recounted is between two strangers, a female bartender and a
male combatant, both of whom have witnessed a fellow human being killed at close
range. At least, that is what one deduces from the references to ‘Girl’, ‘boy’, ‘lad’,
and ‘husband’:^77 the use of common rather than proper nouns ensures that the
characters are representative types and that the poem has a universal significance.
The location could just as easily be 1970s Hanoi or 1990s Sarajevo as Brussels
during the winter of 1944–5. With poise and dignity, the poem moves towards
its conclusion: ‘We are comrades in suffering.|It’s the saddest mystery in the
world;|And our cheer is in its sharing.’
(^75) Culhwch ac Olwen, a medieval prose tale, is a primary example of Welsh Arthurian literature;
seeCulhwch and Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale, ed. Rachel Bromwich and
D. Simon Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992). 76
77 See Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Notes’, trans. Clancy, inLight in the Gloom, 205.
Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Ballad of the Phantoms’, trans. Clancy, ibid. 134.