Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems

by Lynette Roberts

  I should like to think that today, when Wales seems oppressed partly through her own misdirection and partly through outside jurisdiction, she could turn and concentrate more on her Welsh Colony in Patagonia. This would help to extend her vision, which at the moment, through suffering has become too parochial. An exchange, I believe, on all matters, such as agriculture, political and cultural, would stimulate and help both Countries to develop. How do the sheep farms in both Countries compare? Are the owners of these camps interested in the new breeds of sheep? Have they yet found an animal which will live with a scanty water supply, produce strong wool and a good depth of flesh? Have they tried the Welsh Mountain Sheep recommended by Moses Griffith? What sort of year have they had with regard to the wool export? Fruit and corn harvest? What do they, the Welsh in Patagonia, know of the younger generation in Wales? Of the living young writers and painters? I should like to see what use the Welsh in Patagonia have made of their magnificent lakes; woven samples of the remaining Tribal Indian culture; attend lectures on Patagonia illustrated with film documentaries. See the actual botanical plants displayed, together with the birds, fossils, and original samples of the rock; to see their colour, texture, and mineralogy defined. See photo exhibitions exchanged between both Countries. The work of artists who have painted Patagonia. Their weaving. Leathercraft. Plan of airfields. Airports. Style of architecture. I should even like a weekly column on Patagonia in the Kemsley and Northcliffe Press which represent South Wales (the Western Mail and South Wales Evening Post). Y Cymro and Y Faner do occasionally publish news or letters from this Welsh Colony. But perhaps my interest in this matter is singular. For it pleases me very much, when I read in letters from relations that ‘they came across a tame King Emperor Penguin, a highly intelligent bird which had started to get its colourful plumage, the bright yellow turning to orange around its supposed ears’; this creature had been kept as a pet in Tierra del Fuego, ‘until he intended to wander off to the sea again.’ Of the cocktail party which ‘gathered at Rio Gallegos where in one evening 2,000 pesos were gathered for the British Red Cross, besides the auctioning of a trout which had been caught, for 117 pesos.’ Of the terrible floods this year, that not only held up the fishing but cut the railway line to Zapala, bringing down sides of the hills in the Cordillera. ‘The water was dark brown, which means no fishing in the Aluminé, but luckily the Quillan was clear so we were never without enough fish for the table.’

  A.F. Tschiffely, in a Postscript, written some years after his Patagonian tour, speaks of his present occupation, which is lecturing for the British Council in Buenos Aires; may he, and other persons of distinction, who also have a first-hand knowledge of Patagonia, bring back that link which we have too easily lost; and help unite the Welsh people in these two Countries whose interest on both sides have fallen into such neglect.

  * This Way Southward by A.F. Tschiffely. Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd. 10/6 [LR]

  NOTES

  Poems

  Poem from Llanybri

  Lynette Roberts wrote this for fellow-poet Alun Lewis (1915–1944) as an invitation to Llanybri. At the time Lewis was in Longmoor, Hampshire, with the Royal Engineers. His response is the poem ‘Peace’ in Raiders’ Dawn (1942). For an account of the friendship between Lewis and Roberts, see John Pikoulis, ‘Lynette Roberts and Alun Lewis’, Poetry Wales, 19/2 (1983), pp. 9–29. Tony Conran, in the same issue, writes that the poem ‘combines centuries of tradition, a modern Welsh accent – “If you come my way that is” – a controlling urbanity and a singular freshness of description. […] The poem is written within the convention of the guild of poets.’ Conran, who met Roberts in 1953 when she was living in a caravan in Hertfordshire, recalls ‘She once told me she only wrote it as a poetic exercise’ (Poetry Wales special issue, pp. 132–3).

  savori fach: winter green vegetables.

  cawl: Welsh broth.

  Cwmcelyn is the name of the bay below Llanybri facing Laugharne.

  The Shadow Remains

  In her diary entry for 4 August 1942, Roberts describes this as ‘a good poem about my v. simple life’. The poem also alludes obliquely to her miscarriage, a subject more directly treated in ‘Lamentation’.

  Plasnewydd

  Plasnewydd, meaning ‘new hall’ in Welsh, was the name of the childhood farm of Lynette Roberts’s friend Rosie Davies, who features in several poems, as well as the prose piece ‘Swansea Raid’. The idioms and direct quotations in the poem are Rosie’s, and in her diary entry for 17 June 1940 (headed ‘The Fall of France’), Roberts notes a conversation with Rosie:

  ‘Well, you see, it’s like this, Mrs Rhys’ … and Rosie on one foot with her hand on her hip, she licks around her mouth, then begins talking again, and it is always the same, ‘Well you see, it’s like this, Mrs Rhys. I can’t imagine the war or fighting at all, I’ve never travelled at all, only to go to Cardiff, so I can’t imagine this war at all. She’s very wrong mind you (meaning the WAR), and what I feel is they’re all flesh and blood like you or I Mrs Rhys, arent they? If you were to be stabbed you would feel it just as much as they, wouldn’t you? WAR there’s no sense in it. We’re simple people. We all get on. War there’s no sense in it’

  In an entry for 2 September 1940, Roberts recalls: ‘I wrote about Rosie and used her idioms in the poem called after her childhood farm “Plasnewydd”.’

  Pussy drwg: literally, ‘naughty cat’ in Welsh.

  Hal-e-bant: West Wales Welsh for ‘shoo’ or ‘get going’; literally, ‘get him/it away’.

  Fan Fach: ‘Llyn Y Fan Fach’ is a lake in the Carmarthenshire vans, associated with a Welsh folk tale from the Mabinogion, ‘The Physicians of Myddfai’. In the story, a widow of Blaensawdde sent her son to watch her cattle as they grazed near Llyn y Fan Fach. One day he saw a woman rise out of the lake, and fell in love with her. After courting the Lady of Fan Fach, the young man was told by her father that he must not strike her three times without cause, or she would disappear. Before disappearing back into the lake, the Lord of Fan Fach offered as his daughter’s dowry as many animals as she could call in one breath. The couple went to live on a farm near Myddfai, lived happily and had three children. On three occasions, however, the husband tapped his wife on the shoulder, and on the third she summoned the descendants of the animals she had brought with her, and they all disappeared back into the lake. The three boys became healers, the ‘physicians of Myddfai’.

  Low Tide

  Roberts’s diary entry for 12 July 1940, ‘Keidrych called up’, reads:

  Rosie offered me her daughter, Iris, to sleep with me when Keidrych was “called up”. This seems to be customary around here. Mrs Bollands, i.e. Sarah Ann, has also offered me her sister’s love child who was six years old. But naturally I refused. […] I stayed at home and wrote ‘Low Tide’.

  Raw Salt on Eye

  In the summer of 1942 many of the villagers of Llanybri began to suspect Roberts of being a German spy. The episode is referred to in her diary entry for 4 August of that year:

  I feel wretchedly lonely. The village, most of them have turned on me and treat me as a spy. The malicious talk seeping in so far that it infilters the minds of the children and they throw stones at me. […] So I wrote about the gossip and suffering in Raw Salt on Eye […]

  Amelia Phillips: one of the villagers whose idioms and sayings are recorded in Village Dialect.

  Lamentation

  This poem is about an air raid in which farm animals, including Rosie’s cattle, were killed. Roberts makes the connection between them and her miscarried child, the ‘death before birth’, the ‘emptiness of crib’. Among the most vivid entries in her diary is ‘Air Crash’ (the entry for 12 June 1942), in which she recalls her experiences of air raids in London, Dover and West Wales.

  Broken Voices

  In her own notes to this poem, Roberts explains her ‘attempt to apply the strict metre form of the Welsh englyn to the English language’. The commonest form of the englyn is a quatrain form in
which the lines have, respectively, ten, six, seven and seven syllables. The seventh syllable of the first line announces the rhyme, with which the last syllable of the next three lines rhyme. Roberts mentions Robert Graves as a poet drawn to the Welsh strict metre forms, and Graves’s father, Alfred Perceval, had published Welsh Poetry Old and New in 1912. Another poet who experimented with such effects is Hopkins.

  The englynion by R. Williams Parry quoted in Roberts’s note to the poem translates as follows: ‘Humble, warm-hearted Tom – who remains/ long in the sea:/ So cold is his death now/ Beneath the water’s flow, beneath the salty wave.// Oh wondrous peaceful multitude – the dead/ And the seaweed mingled/ the parlours of pearls, the acres of fish/ Are the grave of brilliant learning.’

  Earthbound

  In her diary entry for 2 February 1941, Roberts describes talking with English evacuees who came to Llanybri. One of these, the diary records, helped her make the wreath mentioned in the poem.

  greaving room: in Old English greave means ‘thicket’ or ‘brushwood’, ‘twigs’ or ‘branches’.

  Spring

  aconite: a poisonous plant; deadly poison.

  xerophyte fern: xerophyte plants are those adapted to live with limited water.

  Rhode Island Red

  Rhode Island Red: a breed of chicken.

  Poem

  This poem is part of the opening of the second section of Gods with Stainless Ears. In their correspondence about the book’s publication, T.S. Eliot asked Roberts if she would consider including a section of her ‘long poem’ to make up the length – the manuscript of Poems, minus the few poems Eliot wanted omitted from the volume came to twenty-seven pages. In a letter of 24 November 1943, Eliot makes a tactful enquiry about Roberts’s use of unusual words: ‘The words plimsole, cuprite, zebeline and neumes seem to exist but I think that bringing them all into one short poem is a mistake’.

  In a letter written on Christmas Eve 1943, he tells her: ‘I like your defence of your queer words [,] and now accept all of them, but I am still not happy about zebeline, which appears to be a Lewis Carroll invention’. ‘Zebeline’ becomes ‘zebrine’ here (meaning striped), but returns in Gods with Stainless Ears. See notes to Part II of Gods.

  Curlew

  In a diary entry for 15 July 1941, ‘Bird Notes’, Roberts refers to the Curlew’s ‘grey shagreen of shark, small-netted, thin and firm’. In a letter to Robert Graves of 18 December 1944, Roberts answers his criticism of a phrase in the poem, ‘shagreen bleat’:

  I especially wanted to write well on the curlew & had admitted my failure to Eliot before publication. I think the idea is good & result quite appalling. I shall attempt this again but how I don’t know. I did want to get the feeling of frustration in relation to the bird’s imprisonment & lack of a wholesome environment in relation to all peoples living in the world today. I tried to use the exact [qualities] of a curlew’s call which so often breaks with those 4 shrill notes – – – –. Shagreen bleat is bad as you point out. I had in mind the shagreen quality of its legs, the greezing gooseflesh of its voice.

  Moorhen

  In the same diary entry, 15 July 1941, Roberts makes notes on ‘today’s moorhen’:

  The dull slate ostrich texture of its breast feathers. The sheen of rust or parmoil lichen on its back – the brown yellow-gold of ginger nuts. The two scarlet garters above the shining and rather large-scaled legs whose vivid colouring was lime-green, as fresh as the inner barks of trees. Enamelled or lacquered beak, scarlet with a bright yellow or orange tip. Brown eyes with a red-purple sheen when caught in the sun’s rays. With this bird you SKIN it, not feather it.

  Crossed and Uncrossed

  This poem refers to Roberts’s visit, en route to visit Keidrych Rhys, to her friend Celia Buckmaster, in the recently bombed East End of London, in June 1942. (See also the poem ‘The Temple Road’, which recalls the same events.) In her diary she writes: ‘I turned up while the Library and buildings were still smouldering and continued to burn for another five days. The Round Church wet and empty like a grotesque sea shell.’ In her autobiography she recalls:

  I was astonished to find the results of the raid were still pending after days. The firemen were pinned to the bleached bricks trying to put out the fires. The library books were in heaps on the ground. The Round Church had taken a direct hit. The coloured windows were blown out and in brilliant pieces on the ground. Pegasus had melted and fallen. There remained a plane tree, some lily of the valley (Poetry Wales special issue, p. 49).

  The poem is also written out of another experience described in the autobiography, in which a German plane dropped a bomb on Yarmouth pier as Lynette and Keidrych were walking past.

  The title ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’, according to Roberts, refers ‘to the ways of burial of the crusaders. Their shock I point out in the poem causes the crusaders to uncross their legs and through burning they turn into tang shapes’ (ibid.).

  Lamb’s ghost: Charles Lamb, born in the Temple in 1775.

  proud widow: Celia Buckmaster’s mother, mentioned in Roberts’s diary for her resourcefulness during and after the raid.

  Orarium

  In a letter of December 1944, Graves wrote enthusiastically about this poem, having just criticised, a paragraph before, her overly ‘modernish’ approach in poems such as ‘Cwmcelyn’:

  What gets me most about the end of Orarium is its exact conformity with the most ancient poetic secrets of all, the ones that I am exploring in The Roebuck in the Thicket (now a much longer book than when you last saw it). The last three lines are the end-of-the-year calendar formula in all languages & literatures. The man of God has to have sorrell red hair to be authentic.

  Quotes:

  Lynette Roberts is one of the few true poets now writing. Her best is the best: for example, the perfect close to Orarium.

  Signed R.G.

  (If you care to pass this onto Fabers.)

  Roberts replied:

  Concerning what you say about ‘Orarium’, the poem was written straight off – almost subconsciously; though that which I expressed in its final phase is something which I had accepted and believed it [sic] intuitively: not through my study of mythology or penetration into science. […] The rhythm & syntax was influenced by a reading of Anglo-Saxon writings which I had been studying the previous week in order to try & find out which were the first Saxon rhythms to be used: that is Saxon as opposed to early Celtic schools.

  Blood and Scarlet Thorns

  This is the first of a series of poems about Argentina. In July 1941 Roberts wrote:

  I was lonely and homesick for the Argentine. I wrote a succession of my S. American poems. About the ‘Pampas’ ‘The New World’ about the Incas mountain grave ‘Xaquixaguana’ about my father ‘Argentine Railways’ about the ‘River Plate’ about Mechita where I was born ‘Blood, Scarlet Thorns’ about the convent ‘Canzone Benedicto’ about São Paulo Brazil which I called ‘Royal Mail’. I had the strong desire to leave the village & go to S. America.

  Rainshiver

  In a diary entry for 23 June 1940, Roberts notes: ‘I experimented with a poem on Rain by using all words which had long thin letters so that [illegible word] the print of the pages would look like thin lines of rain.’

  The New World

  Maté: a herbal tea drunk in South America.

  Xaquixaguana

  The title refers to a historic Incan site. The word means ‘valley of beauty’.

  buhls: buhl is ornamental inlaid patterning.

  agave: a spiny cactus-like plant native to South America.

  Azrael: the angel of death.

  alizarin: the red pigment of the madder root.

  Canzone Benedicto

  caladium: a plant native to South America.