Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems

by Lynette Roberts

  In her diary Roberts describes the event on which ‘Earthbound’ is based, and how she and one of the village’s evacuees make a wreath for the dead boy. The image is of two outsiders engaged in an act of community. Though the mirror scatters and inverts at the start of the poem, the wreath is circular and cyclic:

  We made the wreath standing on the white floor;

  Bent each to our purpose wire to rose-wire;

  Pinning each leaf smooth,

  Polishing the outer edge with the warmth of our hands.

  The circle finished and note thought out,

  We carried the ring through the attentive eyes of the street:

  Then slowly drove by Butcher’s Van to the ‘Union Hall’.

  The poem sets the whole against the broken, the circle against the fragment, peace against war, without lapsing into melodrama or sentimentality. Poems is crossed with bereavement. ‘Lamentation’ opens with Lynette’s view of herself as the outsider: ‘To the village of lace and stone/ Came strangers. I was one of these/ Always observant and slightly obscure’. It goes on to connect her own loss, the miscarriage of her child and the ‘emptiness of crib’, with the devastation caused by an air raid that has killed animals on the farm:

  O the salt loss of life

  Her lovely green ways.

  The emptiness of crib

  And big stare of night.

  The breast of the hills

  Yield a bucket of milk:

  But the crane no longer cries

  With the round birds at dawn

  For the home has been shadowed

  A storm of sorrow drowned the way.

  The lost child is a small but insistent presence in her poems, often figured as a shadow (most obviously in ‘The Shadow Remains’). In Part IV of Gods, the child announced in Part I has been miscarried:

  I, rimmeled, awake before the dressing sun:

  Alone, I pent up incinerator, serf of satellite gloom

  Cower around my cradled self; find crape-plume

  In a work-basket cast into swaddling clothes

  Forcipated from my mind after the foetal fall:

  Rising ashly, challenge of blood to curb – compose –

  Martial mortal, face a red mourning alone.

  To the star of third magnitude O my God,

  Shriek, sear my swollen breasts, send succour

  To sift and settle me. […]

  In other poems it is the mythical and the legendary dimensions that seem to shadow daily life. ‘The Circle of C’ opens in a matter-of-fact tone out of keeping with the poem’s arcane subject:

  I walk and cinder bats riddle my cloak

  I walk to Cwmcelyn ask prophets the way.

  ‘There is no way they cried crouched on the hoarstone rock

  And the Dogs of Annwn roared louder than of late.’

  It is a puzzling poem, but her notes on it are (like many of her notes) offered in good faith:

  The ghosts of dogs, heard and seen in the sky. Invariably connected with Hell and Death omens. They appear in early triads, and in the first story of the Mabinogion […] I have used this image as a interpretation of the raiders droning over the estuary and hill; their ghostly flight barking terror into the hearts of the villagers.

  This is typical of Roberts’s use of unusual references: she has (mostly) a clear idea of the connections between images and ideas, and her method of association, if sometimes hard to follow, is not designed to mystify us or make us toil through thickets of notes. That it sometimes fails is more down to lapses of method or confusion of effect than a deliberate attempt to write ‘obscure’ poetry. Compared with the notes, say, of T.S. Eliot, in parts more delphic even than the mysteries they elucidate, or those of David Jones or Ezra Pound, Roberts’s notes are artless and straightforward (this does not of course stop her from failing to provide notes for passages that need them). ‘The Circle of C’ moves from the mysterious prophetic mode (she is told that her lover ‘will come not as he said he could come/ But later with sailing ice, war glass and fame’) back into the ordinary, domestic world. The movement back to the home fire is similar to that of ‘Swansea Raid’:

  I left the Bay, wing felled and bogged

  Kicked the shale despondent and green

  Heard Rosie say lace curtained in clogs

  I’ve put a Yule log on your grate.

  Life is experienced as a sort of doubleness, unfolding in a mythic-domestic continuum. In poems like these, it’s as if the everyday was myth’s lived double. Roberts’s poems constantly make the connection between quotidian existence and the legendary or mythical forms they echo or project. In Part II of Gods with Stainless Ears, the geese ‘sleeve their own/ Shadows’. It is one of the poem’s many extraordinary yet precise images, and provides a way of thinking about the relationship between past and present and future, about myth and daily life, and about the poet and her many projected selves. Roberts often identifies with historical or mythical characters, such as Rhiannon and Branwen from the Mabinogi, strong women wronged, trapped, outcast, or reduced to domestic drudgery; women who lose their children and are failed by their husbands. In Gods with Stainless Ears, the woman is at the Singer sewing machine – a ‘perfect model scrolled with gold, // Chromium wheel and black structure, firm on/ Mahogany plinth’ – making an aertex shirt for her soldier lover. This is a machine-age Penelope awaiting her returning warrior.

  The language of Gods with Stainless Ears is already emerging in poems such as ‘Spring’, poems pitched somewhere between the futuristic and the pastoral:

  The full field.

  The stiff line of trees.

  The antiseptic grass – dew shining.

  The green,

  Spraying from shorn hedgerows.

  Sodium earth dug hard;

  Bound by the fury of earth’s lower crust.

  Black bending cattle nose to the warmth.

  Pebble sheep pant to a lighter tune.

  To high air sustained.

  To high springing air.

  To blue-life-mist rising from the flaming earth.

  If myth is time plumbed, then geology is place plumbed – Roberts is fond of the language of geology and archaeology, of strata and rock formations, the Palaeaozoic and the Cambrian. Often, as in Gods with Stainless Ears, it is the aerial view that dominates, the airman’s or the bird’s eye view, and poems proceed by dazzling climbs and swoops: planes and birds, emotions and states of mind, all partake of that energising verticality. But, as in ‘Spring’, there is also the view from the grass blade, from the sustaining earth – poetry that seeks depth as well as height, aiming for the core as well as the zenith.

  To a sense of place, Roberts adds an organic vision of community. In her South American poems she pays the same attention to cultural details, to the architecture and customs of the native people, as she does to those of the Welsh community she lives in. Whether writing about Welsh cottages, Incan temples or huts with corrugated roofs, Roberts is guided by a sense of the intimate bond between people, landscape and habitation. In an article for The Field called ‘Simplicity of the Welsh Village’ (the word ‘simplicity’ is a touchstone in her writing), Roberts claims that Wales’s ‘extensive peasant democratic tradition […] will harmonise with modern architecture’, and makes an audacious connection between peasant architecture and the uncompromising modernism of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. Her poetry makes similar connections between the old and the new, the ancient and the modern. In the same article, she describes the differences between Wales and England as inherent in their different cultures, landscapes and psychologies:

  The first [difference], to my mind, is colour: the blue slates and greener pastures, the two predominant colours of the Celt, the sharp outline of the whitewashed farms and houses as they stand against the skyline; the way in which the walls project geometrical planes of light that resemble still-life models of squares and cubes. This cold austerity is suddenly upon us, and contrasts so vividly with the rich, m
ellow tones of English farmhouses, that we are estranged and left singularly apart.16

  For Roberts, this geometrical, angular vision is entirely compatible with the centuries-old architecture of the Welsh village – her painterly eye is capable of seeing both abstract and figurative, the soft contours and the hard edges of her landscape. In Gods with Stainless Ears the village is ‘scintillating/ Like mothball white on a hill’ and the air ‘planed’ into ‘euclidian cubes’. That positive use of the word ‘estranged’ is telling too: in a sense, her poetry insists on unfamiliarity, estrangement and foreignness as part of the experience of the poem’s meaning, rather than as uncomfortable incidents on the way to clarity. In the notes to Gods with Stainless Ears she writes ‘I have intentionally used Welsh quotations as this helps to give the conscious impact and culture of another nation’. The poet who talks about ‘my village’ and ‘our heritage’ is also alive to the richness of unfamiliar or defamiliarised. In the same article she goes on, evoking the magnesium light of flash photography, to describe the ‘penetrating power of the white sunlight of Wales’ as an explosive revealer of forms:

  This last condition of magnesium light alters the whole panorama of Wales […]. It is a light which glazes every building, stone and tree […]. It is the clear condition of light, I believe, that has helped more to effect that change that exists between England and Wales than any other defect or attribute. The fresh and burnished illumination of colour is partly due to this light.

  The rain, the continual downpour of rain, may also compensate us indirectly, by giving us that pure day which precedes it, which everyone in Wales must know. During those intervals the rain water is reflected back to us through a magnetic prism of light. The sea, which surrounds two-thirds of Wales, throws up another plane of light. And a third shaft of light reaches us at a fuller angle through the sun.17

  Even at its most dazzling, eclectic or overcharged, Roberts’s poetry bears witness to a spectrum of female experience which rarely makes it into poetry about war – or not as something violently, colourfully lived, as distinct from merely endured. Under their myth-plated exteriors, Roberts’s poems treat childbirth and miscarriage, loneliness and disappointed expectation, exiguous rations and neighbourly slights. All these subjects turn up in her poems with an intensity of expression and originality of diction we find nowhere else. No poetry better expresses that amalgam of drudgery and enforced, fretful inertia, or that particular species of actively-experienced passivity that characterises an ordinary woman’s life in wartime. When Roberts gives an epic scale to the domestic, it does not traduce, inflate or efface the domestic – it extends it. Poetry is the mirror in which ordinary life looks to find itself reflected in myth.

  IV

  ‘Cwmcelyn’ appears at the end of Poems because Eliot felt that there were not enough poems to make up a volume. In a letter of 17 November 1943 he suggests that she include a section of ‘the long poem’ to bring it up to length. He also considers, then rejects, the idea of publishing both books in one. Gods with Stainless Ears was largely complete before Poems appeared, despite being published six years later (in her preface Roberts writes that it was written over two years, 1941-3). It is legitimate to suppose that between writing and publication the book underwent some changes. The most significant of these is the insertion of prose ‘arguments’ at the start of each section, recommended by Eliot to help the reader with the poem’s narrative. By the time these were written, Roberts had divorced Rhys, and this explains, in particular, the differences between the ‘argument’ and the narrative content of Part V. There have also been a few revisions of punctuation and vocabulary. One particular instance of this, noted by Nigel Wheale in his essay ‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’, is where Part V of Gods replaces ‘chinese fields of tungsten’ from the 1944 version of ‘Cwmcelyn’ with ‘chinese blocks of uranium’. It is a minor detail, but a revealing one: the revision reflects an increased awareness of developing nuclear politics that suggests Roberts’s interest in keeping the poem as up to date as possible.

  ‘The subject is universal, and the tragedy one of too many’, Roberts writes in her preface, the language composed of ‘congested words and images, and certain hard, metallic lines’:

  when I wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a newsreel. […] But the poem was written for filming, especially Part V where the soldier and his girl walk in the fourth dimension and visit the various outer strata of our planet.

  Roberts was not the first to imagine poetry and film joined – Auden and Britten had collaborated in the mid-1930s on GPO films such as ‘Night Mail’ and ‘Coal Face’ (1936). Though Roberts may certainly have learned something from their approach, theirs was a collaboration: Britten wrote a score to accompany lines by Auden which are no more or less intrinsically ‘filmic’ for being written for film. Film was for them part of the medium; for Roberts it was part of the conception. In her account of tea with the Sitwells we get an insight into what she had in mind not just for the poetry of the future, but for the way it would be disseminated:

  We spoke of the next war… I suggested that during that no doubt people would attend films of poetry with unseen voice as opposed to the poetry reading […] I said I hoped poetry would soon be filmed.

  This idea of the ‘unseen voice’ fits well with the narration of Gods – the poem is told by the woman, from inside and outside her own story, while the prose ‘arguments’ at the beginning of each section are impersonal and have the scene-setting function of script or screenplay directions. They do more than summarise the story (without them some of the poetry would be ambiguous beyond safe surmising); they also explain poetic conceits, sound effects (‘Machine-gun is suggested by the tapping of a woodpecker…’), and image-sequences as if for camera rather than reader. It would be difficult to find a long poem more cinematically imagined – rather as the Symbolist dramas of Maeterlinck or Mallarmé were conceived for the theatre of the intellect, so Gods with Stainless Ears may be a script for the cinema of the mind. In ‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’, Nigel Wheale embeds the poem in its era. This is a poem, as Wheale explains, full of ‘anxieties about post-war social development’ such as nuclear power and the Beveridge Report, with a busy meshwork of context behind its grand gestures of transcendence.18

  Briefly (and reductively) put, Gods with Stainless Ears tells, through 680-odd lines of mainly five-line stanzas, prose ‘arguments’, epigraphs and notes, a dreamlike war narrative of shifting perspectives and timezones. Set around the West Wales Coast, its protagonists are a man and a woman – the ‘soldier and his girl’. It is in many ways autobiographical: the soldier’s number is Rhys’s war number, the details of the woman’s life map directly onto Lynette’s, and the poem is peopled with local characters from Llanybri and Llansteffan. Part I introduces the scene and the setting; Part II begins with an elegy for a lost airman played on a gramophone; Part III describes the soldiers getting ready for action and the gunner ‘standing apart, through maladjustment of mind and spirit rejecting his girl’; Part IV starts with the girl speaking of her miscarriage; in Part V the protagonists are assumed upwards into a futuristic world, only to be returned to the world they left, changed forever.

  The unfolding of narrative in epic is hieratic, stately, processional; the unfolding of narrative in newsreel is jerky, spliced, whirring. Gods with Stainless Ears overlays both modes to extraordinary effect. In the ‘argument’ to the poem’s first part, Roberts writes:

  The poem opens with a bay wild and somewhat secluded from man. And it is in front, or within sight of this bay that the whole action takes place: merging from its natural state into a supernatural tension within the first six stanzas. War changes its contour.

  The opening is a poetic tracking shot:

  Today the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay,

  With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away

  Cadence of sight and sound, poets and men

  Rediscovering them. Saline mud
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  Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh as lime stud

  Whitening fields, gulls and stones attending them;

  Curlews disputing coverts pipe back: stem

  Plaintive legs deep in the ironing edge, that

  Outshines the shale, a railway line washed flat,

  Or tin splintered from a crab-green cave.

  This is Saint Cadoc’s Day. All this Saint Cadoc’s

  Estuary: and that bell tolling, Abbey paddock

  Sunk. – Sad as ancient monument of stone.

  Trees vail, exhale cyprine shade, widowing

  Homeric hills, green pinnacles of bone.

  The new beaks of the birds ‘scissor’ the air; a few stanzas later there are ‘aluminium beaks’, announcing the planes overhead. The poem insists on the exactness of its setting – the coast, the railway line, the shops and pubs. The local merges into the mythical: the Second World War merges into Cattraeth, the great murderous battle described by the poet Aneirin in the Gododdin as ‘Evans shop’ says that the soldiers are ‘training for another Cattraeth’; the hills become ‘Homeric’; and even John Roberts, the coracle man of Llansteffan (about whom Roberts writes in her diary and Village Dialect), merges into Charon, boatman of the Styx.