Gods is a modernist long poem, but not just in the Poundian sense of a ‘poem including history’. Rather, it is a poem including the future, a poem that tells a story, with a forceful narrative drive, and which bears witness to its time:
[…] To what age can this be compared?
Men slave, spit and spade. Glean life pure.
Accelerate oxidised roads. Drill new hearts and hearths.
Impale the money-goaders’ palisade. And you
Of acetated minds, workers with xantheine
Faces, revolutionise your land; holding
The simple measures of life in your hand,
Remembering navies and peacocks never sail
Together in the aftermaths of disaster.
This is the modernism of anticipation, not nostalgia. Despite the Poundian tone of ‘Impale the money-goaders palisade’, there is something optimistic about this poem, even amid the ravages, the personal loss, the death and decimation of the ‘pilotless age’. ‘To what age can this be compared?’ the voice asks, and it is not an ironic question. The answer is all ages and none: the poem takes place both in a unique time and place and in a vast mythic-historic continuum.
Roberts uses the familiar resources of science fiction: a technological cladding around mythical paradigms. Nature here exists in the machine age, while descriptions of modernist architecture (chromium cenotaphs, steel escalators, aluminium rails) are as vividly up-to-date as they are imagined. Even the poem’s flora are metallic forms forged in nuclear-age smithies:
Corymb of coriander, each ray frosted
Incandescent: by square stem held, hispid,
And purple spotted. Twice pinnate with fronds
Of chrome. Laid higher than the exulted hedge;
By pure collated disc of daisy glittering
White on red powdered stem […]
‘Ceraunic Clouds’, ‘zebeline stripes’, ‘chemical paradox’, ‘ciliated moon’, ‘febrifuge’, ‘paleozoic sentinels’, ‘crystallized cherubic stars’ give just a tiny sampler from Roberts’s language in Gods with Stainless Ears.
The poem also announces a coming into consciousness of possibilities: political, scientific and social. There is even a romantic nationalist underpinning. Roberts incorporates the poem ‘We must uprise O my people’ from Poems into Part II of Gods with Stainless Ears, seeming to promise, so far as Wales is concerned, some post-war nationalist unfinished business. In Part I, the English soldiers take down the Welsh flag, only for the flag’s colours to reinvest themselves into the earth:
‘Pull down the bastard.’ ‘Pull down the flag.’
The flag torn down. Emerald on
Unfortunate field and red flaw its great
Perfection; without sound crept back like myth
Into folds of earth: grew greener shafts of resilience.
There are shades here of both Saunders Lewis, poet and playwright and founder-member of Plaid Cymru, and of Dylan Thomas. At the end of Part V of Gods, the soldier ‘frees dragon from the glacier glade’, and the poem ends with a Wales in frozen limbo about to be released. The heroism may be Girl’s and Boy’s Own stuff, but it is meant, and it looks ahead to the post-war climate rather than back to the world of lost princes. To Roberts’s European and Anglo-American modernist contexts, we must also add the context of Welsh literary and cultural awakening. She is what would today be called a ‘nationalist’ or a ‘culturalist’: she insists on the uniqueness of Welsh culture and is conscious of the ease with which the small country could be – and was being – swallowed up. In her article on Patagonia she wrote of Wales being ‘oppressed partly by her own misdirection and partly by outside jurisdiction’; in a 1952 Times Literary Supplement review of Welsh writing, she warned: ‘what the Welsh dragon lacks at present is fire; […] the younger generation must rediscover the source of that fire before the particularities of the Celtic imagination are once again submerged in an Anglicised culture’.19 Both she and Keidrych Rhys were drawn to the radical nonconformist and pacifist tradition of Welsh culture, and Roberts’s time in West Wales coincides with the strengthening of Welsh Nationalism as a political programme. In her diary she expresses anger at the proposed forced requisition of land in Preseli in Pembrokeshire by the War Office – a major galvanising issue for post-war Welsh nationalism.
In Part V, the soldier and the girl rise up together:
We by centrifugal force … rose softly ….
Faded from bloodsight. We, he and I ran
On to a steel escalator, the white
Electric sun drilling down on the cubed ice;
Our cyanite flesh chilled on aluminium
Rail. Growing taller, our demon diminishing
With steep incline […]
They climb ‘through moist and luminous dust’, to ‘a ceiling and clarity/ Of Peace’ with ‘Sweet white air varied as syllables’. The woman-speaker is ‘contented in this fourth dimensional state’, but the couple are forced to return. As the ‘argument’ has it ‘the world demands their return’:
Earthwards like arctic terns the spangled
Mirrors still on our wings. Colder. Continuous as newsreel,
Quadrillion cells spotting the air, stinging
The face like a swarm of bees. Lower. A vitreous green
Paperweight – the sky is greenglaze with snow flying
Upwards zionwards. Such iconic sky bears promise.
Dredging slowly down, veiling shield of sky hard.
Cold. Austere. Tumbled over each other lurched
Into the dark penumbra; then, through a
Rift as suddenly, the solid stone of earth
Rushed up; hit us hard as household iron […]
Travelling down through ‘currents/ of ice, emerald streams and blue electric lakes’ they return to the post-war desolation of a ‘bleak telegraphic planet’, finding a ‘Mental Home for Poets’ in the now-derelict bay. There are perhaps associations of the Fall, but the divergence between the ‘argument’ and the final stanzas of the poem cause problems: the ‘argument’ is pessimistic and suggests the sundering of the couple and failure of liberation and renewal. The girl, alone, ‘turns away: towards a hard new chemical dawn’, the soldier ‘walks meekly into the mental home’. In the poem, however, the feel is on the contrary optimistic, defiant, vibrant:
Salt spring from frosted sea filters palea light
Raising tangerine and hard line of rind on the
Astringent sky. Catoptric on waterice he of deep love
Frees dragon from the glacier glade,
Sights death fading into chillblain ears.
This volume also presents a selection of Lynette Roberts’s uncollected and unpublished poems, many of which were intended for the volume that never appeared, The Fifth Pillar of Song. Eliot’s rejection of the book is understandable. Though there are many original or successful poems, it is uneven and confused. Its best poems are those, like ‘The “Pele” Fetched In’ or ‘Saint Swithin’s Pool’, which have simplicity and depth, and in which there is a sense of the cosmic embroiled in the everyday. Many are simply unsuccessful or underworked, or caught up in bombast and capital-lettered abstractions. The poems chosen here are intended to represent the best of the unpublished or uncollected work, though a few examples of latter category are included to give the reader a sense of the whole. The final section of the book contains three texts. The first is the ‘ballad for voices’ El Dorado, a breathlessly told, Wild-West-style adventure about the murder of Welsh colonists by a group of Indians in 1883-4. El Dorado was a poem for radio, and should be considered as such: it has colour, adventure and pace, but it does not measure up – as poetry – to the rest of Roberts’s work, and is not a gaucho Under Milk Wood. Also in the appendix is an article by Roberts on Patagonia, first published in Wales, in which she discusses the incident retold in El Dorado, and the text of a radio talk she gave on her South American poems.
V
It seemed inevitable that Roberts’s poetry would be
charged with ‘obscurity’, a charge often levelled against women poets of a modernist bent – Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, to mention just three (it is always the men who are ‘learnèd’ and the women who are ‘obscure’.) In a letter of 3 December 1944, Graves wrote to Roberts to air his own doubts:
Eliot and Pound have set a bad example. Your lines all work out surely, I grant you, which is very rare in the present slapdash pseudo-intelligent world; and of course in Cwmcelyn you are doing what every poet I suppose must do once at least: show his or her awareness of what a frightful mess the world of ideas has got into because of Science taking the bit between its teeth & bolting. You are saying ‘To interpret the present god-awful complex confusion one must unconfusedly use the language of god-awful confusion’… [T]here are a great many small points I’d like to question you about: such as your views on how much interrelation of dissociated ideas is possible in a single line without bursting the sense…20
Graves could hardly disguise his ambivalence. Her reply is remarkable for its self-assurance:
It is a long heroic poem. I cannot change it; but I believe a stricter technique would have reduced the poem and clarified what I wanted to say. On the other hand it would have been less pliable and adventurous and may have constrained that which I had purposely set out to do: which is to use words in relation to today – both with regard to sound (ie: discords ugly grating words) & meaning.21
A similar uncertainty about Roberts’s diction underlies Eliot’s query about ‘Poem’ (later the opening of Part II of Gods): ‘The words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline and neumes seem to exist but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake’, he tactfully suggests in a letter of 24 November 1943. The following month he accepts these words, telling her that he is convinced by her reasons – ‘I like your defense of your queer words and now accept all of them, but I am still not happy about zebeline’.22 Eliot’s are editor’s queries, but Graves’s are more obviously grappling with something larger. The point of view Graves puts forward in his letter to Roberts is articulated in many of his critical interventions, from the Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) which he wrote with Laura Riding, to the Clark Lectures of 1954. For Graves, ‘modernism’ is essentially a fractured response to a fractured world: for all its innovative bluster, it is tired, pessimistic and passive. It reveals something of Lynette Roberts’s faith in what she was doing that she should have stood her ground so single-mindedly against poets of the stature of Graves and Eliot.
In a review of Gods with Stainless Ears, the Times Literary Supplement critic complained that ‘the vocabulary needs a chemical glossary’, going on to dismiss ‘the contrast between the high tragic tones of the poet and the naivety of her incidents’ as ‘irresistibly ludicrous’ (16 November 1951). The review is dismissive, but the reviewer has a point about the poem’s contrasts: between grandiloquence and something altogether more artless or innocent. Tony Conran, in an essay on Roberts in his book Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry, offers perhaps the most perceptive comment made on what we could call Roberts’s contextual lack of context:
As with other primitives [Conran talks about John Clare and Emily Dickinson] these poets’ viewpoint is eccentric to their culture’s literary norm, though perhaps derivable from it. The primitive’s isolation is in a sense a reflection of the isolation of all modernist art. That is perhaps why Henri Rousseau lived happily beside the cubists. But it is not necessarily the same thing as modernism, though most primitives would certainly claim to be ‘modern’. Modernists create an environment in which primitives can come to the fore; so much so that ‘primitive’ and modernist can often be regarded as two sides of the same coin.23
Conran is right, not just in the detail of Lynette Roberts’s place in the poetic tradition, but in the more sweeping suggestion he makes about the relationship between the modernist and the primitive. We need not go along with the term ‘primitive’ – even if Conran is careful to use it in inverted commas – because after all Roberts was educated, well-read, artistically trained, and, for all her ‘outsiderness’, moved in literary circles, but we can see what he means. We might prefer the term ‘naïve’ in the specific sense of the naïve painters, the tradition of Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau. A painterly poet, Lynette Roberts was herself a painter in the naïve tradition – one of her finest paintings, of Llanybri old chapel, depicts an angel circling above the village, with the bay in the background and enormous leeks rearing out from the vegetable patch (see opposite page). The painting is framed with a homemade border, designed by Roberts and based on the apron worn by Rosie, her neighbour. Often intricate, exact and harmonious, the ‘naïve’ painting is also eclectic in its combinations of images, and plays fast and loose with perspective and proportion, facets which, in poetry, might be compared with tone, and specifically with irony, itself the manipulation of emotional distance. Roberts is certainly not ironic; she is never above her subject, and her subject is never beneath poetry. She writes a ‘Heroic Poem’ and she means heroic. The past is no refuge but a fund of analogies, an archive of correspondences; and there is no fear of the future. Her subject is ‘today which is tomorrow’ (Gods with Stainless Ears, Part V). Her work has no trace of cultural pessimism – on the contrary – and hers is not a poetry of ‘shored fragments’. It may be ‘difficult’ – indeed it seeks out difficulty as much as it seeks to ‘speak of everyday things with ease’ (as she writes in ‘The Shadow Remains’) – but it is not contorted with self-reflexiveness, knowing allusions, or arcane learning. Even the speech fragments, however cut loose from their sources, are transcribed from real utterance, so that raw, unmediated speech coexists with the most overwrought language. This is not the stylised demotic of The Waste Land. She also has an enabling – and in the best sense unsophisticated – belief in language’s sufficiency. We cannot imagine Pound or Eliot writing in their diaries: ‘I experimented with a poem on Rain by using all words which had long thin letters [so that] the print of the pages would look like thin lines of rain.’ Writing poetry is not ‘a raid on the inarticulate’ with shoddy equipment, but a way of bringing word and World into alignment. Her extraordinary freedoms of scale, subject and imaginative conception, her omnivorous diction and imagistic special effects, may at first glance appear similar to those of other modernist poets, but they are unique to Roberts, and to what we could call her ‘homemade’ world.
Llanybri Old Chapel by Lynette Roberts
How to ‘place’ Lynette Roberts? And do we need to? Poems and Gods with Stainless Ears are unique books. Their freshness and originality are difficult to overstate, and cannot simply be explained by means of an intersection of influences and the convergence of biographical and cultural-historical circumstances. Certainly her work can be seen in the context of modernism, in whose second generation Roberts belongs. It obviously shares something with that of Pound and Eliot, but perhaps the nearest to her in vision and conception is David Jones, another poet who created from, and was created by, war and Wales. Her fascination with dialect and her cosmopolitan’s idealisation of the simple life, combined with a contrasting taste for new-fangled, specialised or abstruse vocabulary, suggests something along the lines of Conran’s modernist-primitive symbiosis. Roberts’s work is set within a few square miles of coastline, among a particular people, their customs and their idioms. Roberts has a sense of the absolute coterminousness of past-in-presentin-future, intertwined as in a Celtic pattern: the archaic is a luminous guide to the contemporary, the mythical is a map of the real. Hers is a world, as she writes in Part I of Gods with Stainless Ears, ‘where past/ Is not dead but comes uphot suddenly sharp as / Drakestone’. In her fascination with archaeology and geology, her sense of place as the layering of time, we might see unexpected (and strictly limited) similarities with the Charles Olson of Maximus. In her modernism of the local she perhaps recalls (again in a limited but precise way) the William Carlos Williams of Paterson. In other respects – its tendency towards emphatic allit
eration and assonance, its rhapsodic descriptions, vatic registers and grand abstractions – her poetry belongs to the 1940s, alongside the work of the ‘Apocalypse’ and New Romantic poets. As well as the poets of this period, Roberts shares something with the artists, specifically with painters such as Ceri Richards and Graham Sutherland, who worked on the peripheries of the literary scene of the time. Most strikingly perhaps, her poetic aerial views are also reminiscent of Eric Ravilious, war artist with the RAF, whose dramatic coastlines and images of planes and submarines make interesting comparison with Roberts’s. Her work is also part of the twentieth-century flowering of Welsh poetry in English, the tradition of Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, Vernon Watkins, R.S. Thomas. Like these poets, Roberts has learned from the Welsh-language tradition, not just in verse technique but in literary heritage and cultural politics. Add to all this the work of Auden and MacNeice, and we have a poetry bristling with contexts, alive to its time and place even as it dazzlingly dramatises and reimagines them – a poetry open to influence and example while perfecting its own distinct voice and vision.
Acknowledgements
My greatest debt of thanks goes to Lynette’s daughter, Angharad Rhys, a generous source of help and humour who made the work both fascinating and enjoyable. I am grateful too to her brother, Prydein. This book, and my part in it, is for them.
No one who has worked on Lynette Roberts can fail to be grateful to her critics and advocates. Most notably Tony Conran, Nate Dorward, Keith Tuma, John Pikoulis, Nigel Wheale and John Wilkinson have all in different ways made compelling cases for her stature and interest, and kept the memory of her remarkable poetry alive.
It was Francesca Rhydderch of New Welsh Review who first gave me, a newcomer to Wales and to Lynette Roberts, the space to follow up on my enthusiasm. It’s a happy debt to record. The London Review of Books printed several of Roberts’s previously unpublished poems, and New Welsh Review first published her talk on her South American poems. It’s good to be able to thank Judith Willson once again for seeing the book through and contributing so much to its conception and presentation. Chris Miller, Charles Mundye, Angharad Price and M. Wynn Thomas gave invaluable advice on matters of interpretation, contextualisation and translation, and Ozi and Hilary Osmond were inspiring guides to the landscapes of Lynette’s poems: diolch o galon i chi.
Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Page 4