monandrian: ‘monandria’ in botanical terminology refers to plants with one stamen or male organ and hermaphrodite flowers.
boracic: like or derived from borax, the acid borate of sodium.
calandria: a South American mockingbird known for its distinctive song.
Cwmcelyn
See the notes to Part V of Gods with Stainless Ears.
Gods with Stainless Ears
The poem is dedicated to Edith Sitwell, with whom Roberts corresponded from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s. Sitwell praised Poems effusively, and was far less inclined to question and correct than Graves or Eliot. Her garrulous correspondence contains interesting comments on the poetry scene of the 1940s, and topical waspishness at the expense of, among others, Julian Symons, Laura Riding and Anne Ridler. Roberts wrote to ask if Sitwell would accept the dedication to Gods, and received a telegram:
DELIGHTED HEAR SPLENDID NEWS […] ACCEPT DELIGHTEDLY DEDICATION LONG POEM […].
Part I
The prose ‘arguments’ at the beginning of each section of Gods with Stainless Ears were added at the suggestion of T.S. Eliot.
Saint Cadoc’s Day: 25 September, formerly 24 January. Saint Cadoc is the patron saint, among other ailments, of deafness.
vail: to bow or bend.
cyprine: blue vesuvianite.
Confervoid residue: Conferva are a type of green freshwater algae.
pridian: on the previous day.
John Roberts: the ferryman of Llansteffan, mentioned also in Roberts’s short story ‘Fisherman’ in Village Dialect:
John Roberts known for years in the village, and as much attached to them as they were to him, stood in front of us now in his rough Breton suiting; his burnished flesh glowing like coals of fire; trousers rolled up above his bare feet and knees. I wanted to ask if it were true that he had dropped two of his relatives into the river by the full curve of the moon. But I was scared: scared of his answer. For I depended on him, as did many others to be ferried entirely at his mercy over that particular estuary. And like them, had been thrown across his back, lifted over sand and rock, dropped in the boat and quietly rowed over a mirrored water of birds (p. 26).
1620B64: Keidrych Rhys’s army number.
Maeterlinck blue: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Symbolist playwright, poet and essayist, author of Pelléas and Mélisande and The Blue Bird. ‘Evans Shop’: this is the Welsh habit of joining a person’s name to that of their trade or place of work. See, later, Jones ‘Black Horse’: the local pub landlord.
CERAUNIC CLOUDS: ceraunics is the branch of physics that deals with heat and electricity.
argyria: silver poisoning.
acetated minds: glass discs coated with cellulose acetate were used for direct recordings by means of a cutting stylus (as distinct from pressing); hence ‘acetate recordings’. This fits with Roberts’s reference to gramophones, recordings, film and newsreel.
xantheine: xanthene is a compound used to make fluorescent dyes.
pele: a mixture of coal dust, clay and water for burning in hearth fires; see the poem ‘The “Pele” Fetched In’.
ambuscade: to lie in ambush; to conceal.
cark: to burden, or to be anxious.
chevron: the mark on the sleeve of an officer. Chèvre in French means ‘goat’ – hence the play in the next line on ‘kid’.
callid Cymru: callid means ‘crafty’, ‘cunning’.
Part II
The first part of this section appeared, in a slightly different version, as ‘Poem’ in Poems.
gault: gaults are beds of clay and marls between the upper and the lower greensand.
zebeline [zibeline]: a Slavic word for the fur of the sable, black. neumes: in medieval music notation, neumes are signs representing certain melodic patterns, often indicating a single syllable sung to a cluster of notes. The notes on the stave were recorded at certain historical periods in quadrilateral shapes, hence their shape rhyme with slates and bird boxes. Compare with Ezra Pound in the Pisan Cantos transcribing the birds on telegraph wires as musical notes (Canto LXXXII).
hispid: rough, bristly.
pinnate: like a feather, having leaves or branches arranged on each side of a stalk.
frescade: a cool walk or alley.
fieldfare: a species of thrush.
cymes: a cyme is a flower cluster in which each growing point terminates in a flower.
chyles: chyle is white milky fluid produced in digestion.
MO: Medical Orderly.
zinnias: a zinnia is a plant of the Americas renowned for the beauty of its flowers.
deflexed: bent downwards.
XEBO 7011: Lynette Roberts’s number during the war.
collyrium: eye wash.
‘Cow and Gate’ lorry: Cow and Gate are a firm of baby food manufacturers.
Part III
himmel hokushai: himmel means ‘sky’ in German; Hokusai was the eighteenth-century Japanese painter whose views of Mt Fuji became popular in Europe in the late nineteenth century.
febrifuge: anti-febrile, fever-soothing.
ciliated: fringed with cilia, or fine hairs.
chagrin: shagreen, an untanned leather; also a sort of silk.
paleozoic: dating from the most ancient times; Roberts will have also had in mind the specific sense of palaeozoic Cambrian rocks or strata, found in Wales. ‘Cambria’ is the Latinised derivative of Cymru, the Welsh for Wales.
Kuan glaze: a greenish-grey glaze with a crackle effect.
iridium: a white metal of the platinum group, resembling polished steel. defledged: unable, or no longer able, to fly.
Freud, Norman Haire/ Or Stopes: Sigmund Freud; Norman Haire (1892–1952; an expert on sexual education) and Marie Stopes (1886–1958; feminist and family planning pioneer).
distrained: the verb has two senses: ‘to compress’ or ‘grasp tightly’, or ‘to pull asunder’.
shine of celandine: the Lesser Celandine, a woodland plant with bright yellow flowers. See also Wordsworth’s ‘The Small Celandine’.
Part IV
In the original edition ‘Part IV’ was misprinted as ‘Part VI’.
Epigraph: Dyfnallt was John Dynfallt Owen, poet and Nonconformist minister (1873–1956). Dyfnallt wrote several poems about his harrowing experiences on active service in the First World War.
rimmeled: the reference is to the cosmetic brand Rimmel.
forcipated: delivered by forceps.
third magnitude: the brightness of stars is measured on a scale called magnitude. The scale works in reverse, so that the lower the number the brighter the star. A third magnitude star can be seen without optical instruments.
shrived: to shrive is to impose a penance; also to absolve.
grailed: to grail is to make slender; also a comb maker’s file.
seels resinate woe: to seel is to stitch up the eyes of birds; figuratively, to make blind, hoodwink.
Grisaille: decorative painting in grey monotone to represent forms in relief. tansy tears: tansy is a herbaceous plant with clusters of small yellow flowers.
Paillettes: bright metal or coloured foil; also a decorative spangle for a dress.
Part V
Cycloid: the curve traced in space by a point in the circumference of a circle as it moves along a straight line.
ichnolithic: ichnothology is the science of studying fossil footprints. anthracite: a kind of coal, brilliant black.
ichnographic: an ichnography is a ground plan of a building or a map of a place.
Chinese blocks of uranium: in the first version of this poem ‘Cwmcelyn’, Roberts has ‘Chinese fields of tungsten’.
boracic: from borax, white salt crystal.
cyanite: an aluminium silicate, usually blue.
ketch: a two-masted boat.
kestral: kestrel (American spelling).
cade: a pet lamb, or an animal reared by hand as a pet.
Calder ‘stills’: the Alexander Calder (1898–1976) to whom Rob
erts refers in her notes was a contemporary American sculptor who built mobiles. One of the most famous of these was ‘Animal Circus mobile’.
‘Singer’s’ perfect model: a reference to the Singer sewing machine.
dorcas: in the Acts of the Apostles Dorcas is a maker of clothes; also a brand name for thimbles.
Aertex: a cotton material.
Waled: ribbed.
Belisha beacons: flashing lights at pedestrian crossings.
aniline: chemical dye.
xerophilous: able to survive with little water.
oölite: limestone composed of small rounded granules; roe-stone.
curry comb: a comb or metal instrument for grooming horses.
Isotonic: musical term meaning ‘equal tones’.
palea: the OED defines the word as ‘a chaff-like bract or scale; esp. the inner bracts enclosing the stamens and pistil in the flower of grasses; […] the scales on the stems of certain ferns; […] ornith. A wattle to dewlap.’ Critics have been confused by this word, to the extent of speculating that it might be a typographical error. It seems more likely that it is intended, and intended to invoke the first, botanical, sense noted.
Catoptric: relating to mirrors or reflections.
Uncollected and Unpublished Poems
All but two of these poems (‘Downbeat’ and ‘Release’) form part of one or other of the typewritten manuscripts of unpublished poems. One of these typescripts is untitled and collects unpublished poems and ‘El Dorado’; the other is entitled The Fifth Pillar of Song. It contains approximately eighty pages of poems, of varying quality and states of completion.
The title page of the typescript reads: ‘THE FIFTH PILLAR OF SONG BY LYNETTE ROBERTS’, and contains a list of poems. At the top of the page Roberts has written ‘The pencil notes in this MSS are by T.S. Eliot whom the poems were sent to for possible publication Summer 1951.’ The typescript also contains numerous handwritten notes, explanations and alterations by Roberts herself. It is also in places mispaginated. The other typescript essentially replicates, in different order, the Fifth Pillar typescript, but begins with ‘El Dorado’, and has ticks beside the titles of poems that had been published.
The uncollected poems are published here not as they are in the typescript, but as they appeared in the first publications noted below them in the text. The unpublished poems are taken from the typescript, with obvious errors corrected, but otherwise unaltered.
Song of Praise
According to her autobiography, Dylan Thomas had told Roberts that ‘he wished he had written “the long nosed god of rain”’ (Poetry Wales special issue, p. 35).
Englyn
In the manuscript of The Fifth Pillar this is part of a four-stanza poem called ‘Either Or’. Roberts kept the last stanza only.
Ty Gwyn
Ty Gwyn: ‘White House’ in Welsh; where Lynette and Keidrych lived during the war.
The ‘Pele’ Fetched In
In her diary entry for 15 January 1940, ‘Making “Pele”’, Roberts describes the process and draws a picture in the margin.
Displaced Persons
In her diary entry for 26 June 1940, Roberts describes the arrival of evacuees in the village, and mentions writing a poem ‘about the “Displaced Persons” of Europe likening them to the birds without food and dying of starvation’.
Chapel Wrath
In her diary entry for 26 June 1948, Roberts describes visiting the graveyards and studying the lettering on the gravestones. ‘The best cutting’, she writes, ‘were those on natural slate, where their stabbing was exceptionally deep, so that the letters stood quietly out in spite of the handicap of years and their dullness of colour.’ Earlier she had found the chapel ‘as both church and chapel always are… locked… locked against humanity’.
Trials and Tirades
The poem’s original title was ‘13 Bergson Street: Trials and Tirades’, altered by hand in the typescript.
Angharad
The name of Lynette and Keidrych’s daughter, born in 1945.
Prydein
The name of Lynette and Keidrych’s son, born in 1946.
The Temple Road
Originally called ‘The Blow Lamp’, this poem is suggested by the arrival of a carpenter (described in the diary entry for 6 March 1941), who uses his blowlamp to remove paint from the front door. The smell reminds Roberts of the aftermath of the bombing raid on the Temple Road and East End of London, described in another poem, ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’.
The Fifth Pillar of Song
This was the title poem of the collection Eliot turned down.
corbeau: dark green; corbeau is French for ‘raven’.
cynometer: an instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky.
Branwen: in the Mabinogion, the daughter of Llyr and Penarddun; she married the Irish king Matholwch, but he banished her to the kitchen. She taught a starling to talk and sent him to tell her brother of her plight. War between Wales and Ireland followed.
Rhiannon: Rhiannon was the wife of Pwyll, King of Dyfed, and mother of Pryderi. In her first appearance she rides a magical horse. To her belong the birds of Rhiannon, who sang for those who returned from Ireland.
Cimmerian age: the age of darkness.
cambutta: a pastoral staff used in the ancient Celtic church.
cyperous: Cyperus is a species of aromatic marsh plant.
Bruska’s Song
‘Bruska’ was the name of Roberts’s flower-arranging business. See also Keidrych Rhys’s poem, ‘Ephemerae for Bruska’, in The Van Pool and Other Poems. ‘Bruska’s Song’ is not listed in the table of contents of The Fifth Pillar, but its pagination makes clear that it was part of it. On the manuscript is written, and deleted, ‘Child’s Song or Bruska’s Song’, and ‘Dedicated to Posy, the Youngest’.
Pendine
Pendine Sands, a few miles from Laugharne and Llansteffan.
Release
This poem is not part of the manuscript of The Fifth Pillar, and seems to have been written later. It is typed up on a sheet of paper with various fragments of other, also unfinished, poems, and was probably written after the Fifth Pillar poems.
Downbeat
In 1948–9, Roberts moved to a caravan in Laugharne, adjacent to the graveyard. She divorced Rhys the following year.
El Dorado
This verse-play was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 1 and 5 February 1953 and repeated twice. The story is taken from an article, among Roberts’s papers, from the Buenos Aires Herald, 28 July 1936. The article was sent to her by T. Hughes Cadvan, the son-in-law of J.D. Evans, the sole survivor of the massacre of the Welsh colonists, and one of the original colonists who landed on the Patagonian shores in 1865. Cadvan Hughes had read Roberts’s piece ‘Patagonia’ in Wales, and in his letter he tells her that the article is written by him from Evans’s own account:
His version, to me, is stirring in its simplicity; a story told without any effort to colour or exalt his own participation nor to justify his actions. His sole purpose, as he told me, was to leave to posterity a true and exact account of what had happened. […] I have no time to translate in all its detail the story as he dictated it in Welsh but I am sending you a clipping from the B.A. Herald of July 28th 1936 in which you will find the story almost complete as I wrote it at the time (Letter of 14 January 1946).
Hughes ends the letter by adding a couple of eglynion from a friend of his in Chubut ‘to show that there are Welshmen with poetic leanings living in Patagonia’.
There are also among Roberts’s papers two letters from a Geoffrey Parry Rhys of Weston-Super-Mare, great-grandson of the Parry who was killed in the Kel Kein confrontation (‘I have always been told he was scalped!’), asking for a copy of ‘El Dorado’.
The broad outlines of the story are as follows: in late 1883, four young Welsh men went prospecting for gold, following the Chubut river, on a journey to the interior of the territory that would take three and a half months. When, at
the end of February 1884, they reached the confluence of the Chubut and the Lepá rivers, they found no gold, but met two Indians, who invited them back to their camp in Súnica. The Welsh were suspicious, and decided to hurry back to the colony, a journey of over 300 miles. It was a dangerous and difficult journey, and two of the men, Parry and Hughes, became so exhausted that they had to be strapped to their saddles. By 4 March they had crossed the Chubut and reached the Kel Kein valley. Evans rode off to hunt for food, and when he returned the men were attacked by the Indians. Only Evans escaped, by riding his horse into a steep gulley, gaining precious time over the Indians, who were forced to make a detour to avoid the dangerous descent. According to the article, he looked behind him and saw ‘his comrade Davies falling from his horse speared through, Parry with a spear stuck in his side but still keeping his seat’. Evans eventually reached the Iamacan river, and rejoined the Chubut. When he reached Gaiman, he was taken in by another Welsh settler, and noticed for the first time a gash in his armpit where he too had been speared. When told of the incident, the founder of the Welsh colony, Lewis Jones, refused to believe that the Indians had done this, as relations between the Welsh and the Indians had always been good, and Jones considered himself ‘a personal friend of the Indian chiefs’. Jones himself led an expedition to verify Evans’s account of the incident, and took Evans with him. According to the article, ‘The bodies of the unfortunate young men lay where they had fallen mutilated in the most cruel and savage manner, too revolting for description’. The bodies were buried there in a single grave, and a short service held. A marble monument, paid for by subscription, was later placed at the spot. Evans later farmed and started the first flour mill in the area, and became known as ‘El Molinaro’. In the photograph accompanying the article, Evans sits beside the monument to his horse, ‘El Malacara’.
Index of First Lines
A curlew hovers and haunts the room. 15
A fox stared and outstared me – in a wood; 86
A pencil left in her sweet room, 88
A whirl of cobalt birds against 89
Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Page 17