This essay first appeared in Poetry Wales 16.4 (Spring 1981).
The task of discriminating amongst Idris Davies's poems is a particularly difficult one. To begin with, a question hangs over the poems amongst
which one has to discriminate: many of Davies's poems remain inaccessible, being still in manuscript or in obscure magazines and journals; so
that the Collected Poems of 1972, edited by Islwyn Jenkins, is in fact a Selected Poems – incomplete, and doubtfully arranged to boot.1 Then there is the variousness of the poems: what is one likely to be able safely to say about a body of work
that includes satire, surrealism, protest poems, free verse reportage, prophetic lyrics, love lyrics, nature lyrics – poems written on many
levels of intention – except that it represents all the gradations between the fine and the bad? It isn’t surprising, then, to find contentious
critical pronouncements about Davies's work both general and specific. As an example of the general one might take A. T. Tolley's assertion
that "Davies was at his best and most typical when he wrote directly about the valleys as he knew them".2 Professor
Tolley quotes as an example of this "best and most typical" Davies the whole of poem VII from Gwalia Deserta, where a miner's wonderings
are imagined as he toils at the coal face). Tolley's comment that "the material gains… little from the poet's putting it into verse" sits very
oddly with the notion that such stuff might represent the "best" of anybody, implying as it does that "the material" was something else before
it became poetry and has undergone some crude process of transliteration. I'd prefer to say that "the material" here gains enough from being
"put into verse" to justify Davies's having done it. The advantage the poet has over the novelist lies in his license to isolate the one person,
scene, event and, focussing completely on it, to commit his full energies to realising it without being obliged to relate it to a whole surrounding
superstructure. So to select is an artificial act, but such selectivity is built into poetry's nature. When that's said, however, poem VII,
though "typical" of one of Davies's many modes of writing, is neither "typical" of all of him (no single poem of his could be that) nor does
it exemplify him at his best. An instance of the second sort of contentious statement is this from Islwyn Jenkins:
For a flash of well-focused, aesthetically distanced, recorded observation… nothing in this third book is more memorable than the early SONNET,
which deserves a place in any anthology of twentieth century poetry.3
Here's the opening of this poem:
I tossed my golden anchor to the sea
To tease the twisted tides of salty joy,
And then my heart pursued the mystery
Of sea-born kings that did the moon annoy
Before the horn of summer caught the tune
Born in the shell of grief.
Well, one asks, what precisely is this "observation" that's so "well-focused, aesthetically distanced" and "recorded"? Could these terms be
more inappropriate? Alas, "Sonnet" represents a nasty attack of Dylans and, far from being the best thing in Tonypandy and other poems,
is probably the worst: it's meretriciously literary Celtic moonshine. As regards the virtue of well-focused observation, it simply cannot stand
comparison with – to look no further – poem VII of Gwalia Deserta.
My own approach to Davies in this essay is twofold: to pursue a theme which I hope will lend what I have to say a sufficient degree of continuity,
and, as I go along, to attempt an appreciation of the poems that come under scrutiny.
Reading Davies's poems can be a dramatic experience, for the mind at work in them is in a state of flux. The lottery of birth and the pressures
of history made Davies a Welshman and a miner at a most turbulent time in a most turbulent century. His experiences demanded direct and authentic
expression – a trenchant realism – yet there was in his sensibility a powerful vein of Romantic feeling. By "Romantic" I don’t mean to imply
that Davies felt that urge which inspired so much great Romantic verse (he did, as it happens, write celebratory poems about his native landscape);
rather, I mean that there was in him a potent faith in the perfectibility of human society, a surging idealism. It's hardly surprising then
that he should have been won to poetry by Shelley, author of Prometheus Unbound, Queen Mab and The Mask of Anarchy: Shelley
– poet of social and political commitment, and an idealist whose visionary hopes were often expressed in language so abstract as to render it
relatable only with difficulty to diurnal events of which his analytical mind was keenly aware. In Blake and Wordsworth, too, Davies found poems
of protest and revolutionary optimism, but though his work betrays their influence, neither of these earlier Romantics seems to have meant as
much to him as Shelley. The brief extract from Davies's unpublished verse play Beyond the Black Tips that appears in Collected Poems
is extremely Shelleyan. Consider the song of the Guardian and the Dreamer:
The far cock crows because his lust
Is lust devoid of crime,
The round moon rolls because she must
Serve God's eternal rhyme
When planets wheel
And meteors prance
To the splendour born of fire,
And the heavens reel
In a frenzied dance
To desire beyond desire.
Or take the lines given to the Voices of the Air. In these lyrics T. E. Hulme's over-simple and sardonic claim that "the whole of the romantic
attitude seems to crystallize in verse round metaphors of flight"4 is well illustrated: but Beyond the Black
Tips is dated 1946 – over a century and a quarter later than Shelley's "Skylark" and "Cloud". Yet Davies's Dreamer must wake up, and
what he has to wake up to is couched in very different rhythms. The Guardian tells him:
Go back into the world below the hill,
The world of food and clothes, and troubled rest,
And broken hearts, and all the common cares
Of all the common days and common nights;
Go back before the moon is gone behind
The pit-head stacks and the long crooked streets
Upon the valley sides.
Leaving behind overblown Shelleyan rhetoric, Davies switches to rhythms of speech accommodated in plain decasyllabics – and the result is much
better verse. Here, then, is a clear instance of the kinds of allegiances that tug him in contradictory directions, producing as one progresses
from poem to poem the effect of a poet whose heart and intellect are often at odds, whose sensibility seems divided against itself. The extract
from Beyond the Black Tips imposes a formal containment on this opposition that defuses the potentially antagonistic elements, and for
that reason it has illustrative interest despite its lack of poetic tension.
Now consider the opening stanza of "Rhymney":
When April came to Rhymney
With shower and sun and shower,
The green hills and the brown hills
Could sport some simple flower,
And sweet it was to fancy
That even the blackest mound
Was proud of its single daisy
Rooted in bitter ground.
A pleasant, unexceptional, competent nature lyric, one might think, having read half of this, and the Wordsworthian fifth line seems to confirm
such a response. But the carefree lightheartedness of sweet fancy is swiftly undercut: that "blackest mound" is recognisably a thing of experience,
and it sounds a note of unease. Celebratory simplicity recovers in the next line with the appearance of the daisy, but then comes one of the
most powerful and Blakeian lines Davies ever wrote: "Rooted in bitter ground": and the lyricism is smacked in the face. The poem continues:
And old men would remember
And young men would be vain,
And the hawthorn by the pithead
Would blossom in the rain,
And the drabbest streets of evening,
They had their magic hour,
When April came to Rhymney
With shower and sun and shower.
Well, is this to be read as a straightforward celebration, is Davies affirming the reality of the "magic hour" in spite of the drabness of the
streets, and accepting with indulgence the vanity of the young? Or is the magic hour an illusion, are the young men fatuous? (It's impossible
to say what the old men remember: anything from happy memories in a state of nostalgia to bitter memories – the reader is left to speculate.)
If the stanza is purely celebratory, Davies has entered into collusion with the sweet fancy against which the black earth is set, and the poem
drifts from the harsh anchorage of the last line of the first stanza at the price of an elusiveness of tone. The poem conveys the difficulty
of simple lyric for Davies: should he deal with the hard truths of history, the spoilt landscape, or can he relax and let romantic feeling have
its head? "Rhymney" is complicated by the poet's need both to celebrate his locality and demonstrate his political and historical awareness.
The conflicting sides of Davies's temperament, then, are realistic and idealistic – or pessimistic and optimistic: at one moment he's plunged
in gloom, at another he soars on wings of hope; and he's both a satirist, a debunker of pretension and hypocrisy, and a myth-maker, transforming
the mundane into the archetypal. This doubleness is the key to the violent oscillations of style to be found in his poems: he may descend at
the drop of a hat from the high-flown to the plain-spoken, and can as easily re-ascend to the magniloquent. It's to state no more than the obvious
to state that he's at his most prosaic when dealing with objects, people and situations observed at first-hand – or eye. Yeats, whom he deeply
admired, disciplined his inner tensions so that they emerged in his mature poems as an organized conflict between 'self' and 'anti-self': Davies
never sought to draw up in formal battle-lines his warring impulses – they never take on the chiselled precision of antinomies or contraries.
For one thing, it wasn't in his personality to assume a cold detachment of the kind that characterises Yeats's intellectual mask. (When, in
"One February Evening" (1939), Davies uncharacteristically invites the "northern winds" to "scatter from my memory the weeds of human lore /
And make me as cold, as careless, as a wave on a desolate shore", he is imitating Yeats's fin de siècle desire to escape, and the poem
as a whole sounds a note of rather literary self-pity.) What one finds in Collected Poems at large, and especially in the two long sequences,
is a medley of contrasting moods embodied in a variety of forms and styles.
Gwalia Deserta illustrates Davies's inner conflict at its most intense and unresolvable, and is for this reason his key work. (Its remarkable
heterogeneity could be gauged by listing some of the poets, an odd bunch of bedfellows, whose influences are discernible in it; T. S. Eliot's
presence is a notable one – but it's an Eliot shorn of Eliot's symbolist dislocation of language.) Unlike the Oxbridge poets of the Thirties
whose communist sympathies clashed with the interests of the social classes they came from, Davies was born into a community whose natural political
instinct was socialist. A sharer, in the 1920s and 1930s, in that community's hardship, anger and despair, keenly conscious (how could he be
otherwise?) of the disfigurement of the surrounding landscape by the unchecked rush of industrialisation, and with an awareness of history's
bleak lessons, what hope could he entertain, in certain extreme but deeply-felt moods, that human nature and the fundamental constitution of
human societies would ever change radically? This is poem XVII:
It is bitter to know that history
Fails to teach the present to be better than the past,
For man was a slave in the morning of time
And a slave he remains to the last.
Once he crawled in the barbarous gloom
As the trembling slave of theology,
And to-day he moves in his sweat and his tears
As the servile fool of machinery.
It is bitter to know that all his dreams
Are roses that die to nourish the weeds,
That murder and malice and pain and grief
Are the surest traces of all his deeds.
The reappearance of that word "bitter", and its formulaic incantation, is a sure sign that Davies is staring reality in the face, and this seems
to me the blackest and most extreme statement in Collected Poems. Ironic, then, that the lilting anapaest should be chosen (or should
choose itself) to provide the poem's basic rhythm; but the painful burden it has to carry destroys any chance of metrical smoothness, and the
result is a halting, uneasy marriage of speech-rhythms and metre. A lyric form is turned to anti-lyric use, and the effect is disquieting. Elsewhere
Davies lambasts the capitalist "vandals" who avariciously exploit men and valleys; he sees also, however, that there can be no simple explanation
of why things are as they are – the enslaved must themselves bear some of the responsibility for their condition. Thus, in poem II, he's torn
between castigating his "fathers" as "slaves who bled for beer", who "sold the farm and the flower", and pitying them as "sullen slaves whipped
onward / To load my lords with gold"; then, in poem XIX, he sees that Heaven and Hell are inventions of human minds that cannot bear very much
reality:
And we raise our far Eldorados
In invisible valleys of air
While we crawl 'twixt the pub and the chapel
Chewing the cud of despair.
We feed on illusions – that's the only way we manage to keep going, to reconcile ourselves to the bestial realities of our narrow lives. This
is a savage and unremitting poem whose vitality is undeniable, and taken together, it and poem XVII would seem to preclude the possibility of
Davies thinking and feeling in any other way. But he does, of course: violent pessimist though he may be in certain moods, he can be no less
violent an optimist. In poem XXV, after arguing that human beings must reconcile themselves to living in and for this world alone, that there
is no other kingdom, he declares:
Your cities shall be founded
On human pride and pain,
And the fire of your vision
Shall clean the earth again.
Not may but "shall": the stanza rings with a fervent faith. No grounds are given for the poet's certainty. Well, it’s in the nature of
faiths to occupy an extra-rational realm of the mind, to flourish despite the lessons of history. But, as we have seen, there's another Davies
who asserts precisely the opposite. We cannot believe both of them without falling into doublemindedness ourselves.
Davies's self-division in Gwalia Deserta, as elsewhere in his work, is no better dramatized than in his attitude to "dream". "Dream",
"dreaming", "dreamer" constitute one of the most important groups of words in his verse; of the thirty-six poems in the sequence, fifteen employ
one or more of its variants. We've already encountered one example: "It is bitter to know that all his dreams / Are roses that die to nourish
the weeds…" Here the poet's attitude to dreams is ambiguous: their identification with roses suggests that they are both natural and beautiful:
yet at the same time they're ineffectual, living and dying only to have their substance utilized by growths that are neither useful nor beautiful.
Let us ask, then, what Davies means by "dreams". He never defines the concept clearly, but I think we can identify it as the realisation of
socialist aspiration through the creation of a society in which men and women are economically and socially equal, a society in which justice
can everywhere and at all times be seen to be dispensed, a society in which individual men and women can develop their talents and capacities
to the full and, whatever the nature of their work, can hold up their heads with pride. A utopia? Certainly; but though many of us would like
to be where it's at, how many of us regard the likelihood of ourselves (or our descendants, for that matter) ever getting there as other than
precisely a dream – in Davies's dismissive term, "Eldorado", a castle in the air? That the constitution of the human animal is against its ever
coming to pass – a nature perverse, intractable, and a dozen other epithets from the thesaurus – Davies knew as well as you or I in our more
darkly lucid moments, but he persisted in hoping, in hoping against hope as the saying is. Poem XXIX is wholly given up to picturing the dreamer
– it might, indeed, be a self-portrait. Typically Davies's narrator wanders away from the mining town into the mountains, where, in the clean
air, listening to lark-song, he experiences a Wordsworthian exultancy:
There in the dusk the dreamer dreamed
Of shining lands, and love unhampered
By the callous economics of a world
Whose god is Mammon.
There in the mountain dusk the dream was born,
The spirit fired, and the calm disturbed
By the just anger of the blood.
Wilder than the politician's yellow tongue
And stronger than the demagogue's thunder,
The insistent language of the dream would ring
Through the dear and secret places of the soul.
O fresher than the April torrent, the words of indignation
Would clothe themselves with beauty, and be heard
Among the far undying echoes of the world.
And slowly the west would lose its crimson curves,
The larks descend, the hidden plover cry,
And the vast night would darken all the hills.
Davies gives full rein to his rhetoric, and the words ring with conviction. Here, one might feel, is the idealism of a spirit uncontaminated
by sophisticated cynicism – a spirit rare in our century. Yet where one might expect the poem to end, after "echoes of the world", it doesn't.
And to my mind, a strange thing happens. The poem began in the past tense: "There was a dreamer… who wandered" etc. Logically its closure ought
to revert to this tense, to read:
And slowly the west lost its crimson curves,
The larks descended, the hidden plover cried,
And the vast night darkened all the hills.
But this isn't what he wrote: the verbs are all in the subjunctive mood, continuing on from "would ring… would clothe" etc. The result of this
choice is to make what is happening on the mountain where the dreamer is dreaming seem as though it follows from, is a consequence of, his dream:
the distinction that exists at the beginning of the poem between external world and inner dream-imagining has dissolved. Again I speak of a
personal response, but for me the effect of these last three lines is to import an uneasy, ominous quality into the writing – that losing of
sunlight and bird-song before the fall of "the vast night". So that instead of the poem ending on a note of visionary ecstasy, it ends quite
otherwise. Doubt in the form of darkness is cast on the dreamer's millennial hopes (though they are neither dashed nor denied). Is this effect
intentional or unconscious? Again, we cannot know; not that it would make any difference to the experience of reading the poem.
In other verses in the same sequence, dreaming fares not at all well. In poem V it's subjected to irony: Jude the poet, who dreamed while labouring
at the coal-face of distant isles – after the image of Innisfree? – will eventually get his release-papers: but only to be crated up and dropped
into earth again. And in the next poem, VI, despite a sarcastic reference to "brawny demagogues" in the opening stanza, dreaming seems to get
its come-uppance in no uncertain terms:
Dream no more on your mountains
But face the savage truths
That snarl and yell in your valleys,
Around your maids and youths.
Down from your dreams in the mountains,
Back to your derelict mate,
For the dreamers of dreams are traitors
When wolves are at the gate.
Now dreaming is a reprehensible luxury. It isn’t thought that's needed, but action – vigorous action. This is also the theme of
"Come Down", another poem that calls upon the "young mountain dreamer" to abandon his fantasizing, re-enter the public square (a Celtic Zarathustra
emerging with bleary reluctance from his cave?), and commit himself whole-heartedly to the day-to-day struggle for a just society. Well, one
supposes, there's dreaming and there's dreaming – dreaming that's self-indulgent and sterile, and dreaming that's imaginative and issues in
creative work which can effect the way people think and live. Davies seems unable or unwilling in these poems to make real distinction between
the two kinds. As a result a reader might conclude that they cannot be distinguished – at least by this writer. This is a crucial matter,
not least because Davies is himself a poet – a poet, that sort of individual commonly regarded as the antitype of the man of action. In short,
a pitiable dreamer. Davies casts doubt on dreaming's worth only at the risk of dirtying his own doormat: could a poet be a man of action of
a kind too, in a certain mode of dreaming not only desirable but necessary to a society in need of reinvigoration? These are questions
he must have debated with himself, and I shall return to them.
In the last three sections of Gwalia Deserta, Davies strives to achieve, if not a synthesis between the warring forces, or voices, inside
him (impossible after what's gone before), then at least a balance between them. XXXIV nostalgically recalls youthful walks to Merthyr Tydfil
during which he and his friends shared their "hopes and visions" – only to close the poem with a rueful recognition that those earlier selves
"were boyish dreamers in a world they did not know". Political innocence is only natural in the young, but I'm prompted to wonder just how many
degrees distant it is from the political naivety that informs many of the adult Davies's utterances – for instance (to look outside Gwalia Deserta)
"The Socialist Victory"? In the penultimate poem, XXXV, he calls on the winds to "blow about us… / Until one greater man shall lead us / And
our hearts be young again". For Selected Poems (1953), Davies changed this passage to read "Until one greater day shall greet us" – increasing
its vagueness in a way that doesn't exactly boost one's confidence in the poet's sense that there might actually be, somewhere over the horizon,
a great man capable of bringing that "greater day" to pass. The poem continues:
Perhaps the enduring mountains shall stir our blood again,
That earth shall sing of glory before the best have died,
That all things mean and squalid shall pass for ever away,
But though our hope be fragile let us keep faith with pride!
And on a peak in Gwalia, I babble in the night:
The cargoes steam from Cardiff, and Cardiff streets are bright,
The trains flash down the valleys, the land is fresh with light,
The horny hands have honour, and Love alone has might.
Well, it's all there – the Romantic belief in the renewing powers of nature and the Shelleyan faith in the eventual triumph of Love with a capital
L. Davies performs his balancing act, and the rhetoric has its nobility: but doesn't this invite the diagnosis of literary schizophrenia? Aren't
the "mean and squalid" things he wants to see the back of inextricable from those polluting trains, those cargoes of sweated coal, those hands
scarred and blue with infleshed dust? The closing poem, XXXVI, which focuses again on the blighting of boyhood hopes, is no less double-minded.
The second stanza –
The slopes of slag and cinder
Are sulking in the rain,
And in derelict valleys
The hope of youth is slain.
– carries so despairing a finality that one is surprised to be reading on. Here's the fourth and last stanza:
Though blighted be the valleys
Where man meets man with pain,
The things my boyhood cherished
Stand firm, and shall remain.
A determined conclusion, certainly, but after what's gone before I find myself wondering just what the "cherished" things can be, and since
the poem doesn't tell me I can't but find these closing words empty, a gesture born of desperation, an act of will on the part of a poet desperate
to retrieve something from the lost realm of idealistic youth.
One wonders if, after Gwalia Deserta was in print, Davies read "Inside the Whale", George Orwell's essay of 1940 where, after a penetrating
analysis of the state of literature in the Thirties, Orwell concludes:
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism – robbing reality of its terrors by
simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale – or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself
over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.
5
If Davies read this in 1940 or thereabouts, what did he think of it? For the drama of Gwalia Deserta results from trying to be simultaneously
inside and outside the whale, or, to put it another way, one Davies knows only too well what the gut of the South Wales whale looks like,
but another persists in believing that he can make good his escape.
The Angry Summer of 1943 doesn't possess the sharpness of tension present in the earlier sequence. This is hardly surprising: what was
now taking place in Europe and beyond was liable to make what had happened back in South Wales in 1926 look somewhat parochial: a realisation
that his homeland was one disaster area among many may have contributed to the tempering of his inner conflicts. But there is a vitiating simplification
in The Angry Summer. It doesn't come in so much with, for instance, the caricature (in poem 6) of "dropsical" Viscount Bag (whose historical
nose doesn't look any too clean) but with the counter-temptation to idealise the miner. Davies's problem here was Shelley's also: from where
is that "greater man" going to come to regenerate us? Since the Westminster / capitalist / bourgeois / aristocratic nexus is no source of hope,
Davies's answer must be that of Winston Smith in 1984 – the proles. But Orwell's chosen form allows an ironic distance to exist between
the novelist's overview and Winston's simple faith: Davies has no such poetic resource to hand (and wouldn't descend to it if he had). What
he does is present a twofold view of the miner, and it's from this species of double vision that The Angry Summer derives what small
degree of tension it has. Look at Davies's miners in poem 11, "Tanned by mountain breeze and sun", and 27, where
out of the grime they came
Insulted and angry and proud,
Together to march in the sun
With a song and a curse and a vow,
Together to challenge the creed
That blood is baser than gold,
Together to stand to the end,
Together to live or die.
This picture of heroic comradeship is offset by a group of poems that portray individual miners as men like other men, neither wholly good not
wholly bad, a mixture of faults and virtues. There is the tolerant and good-humoured catalogue in poem 14; Shoni bach Amos in 22 "Drunk as a
lord in town" (as a lord!); and Emlyn, Danny bach Dwl and Nipper Evans in 36 discussing ways of putting the world to rights:
One would make things brisk and hot,
Another kill the whole damn lot...
And on and on the chatter flows
Until Maria yawns and goes
To pull the blinds and shut the shop
So full of coloured gassy pop.
And for once Davies allows himself a gently puncturing irony. At large, however, he lets his Welshmen off the hook: there's nothing in The Angry
Summer to recall from the earlier sequence the attack on his "fathers in the mining valleys" (poem II) or the grim recollection of the
self-deceptions that he and his fellows have practised on themselves (poem XIX).
Davies's treatment of the "dream" theme provides a further indication of how his attitude has softened. "Dream" and its cognates now appear
in less than a fifth of the poems (nine out of fifty), and the notion of dreaming is never criticised to anything like the extent it is in Gwalia
Deserta. For example: the opening poem of the sequence speaks in the same breath of "Days of dream and days of struggle", implying that
the two activities, far from being at odds with one another, tend to the same transformative end. The value of Dai's dream on the mountain in
poem 5 is unquestionable, "born", as it is, "in the blaze of the sun". In poem 30 the miners' class-enemies pursue them with dogs and guns,
denouncing them as "crazy with dreams"; such dreams are dangerous to those whose interests lie in the maintenance of the status quo. And, most
instructive of all, there is poem 46, in which the young man on the mountainside is questioned as to the validity of reading Shakespeare:
'Do you think to be great some day, young man,
From your dreams on the mountain side?'
I only desire that the land of my birth
Breed in me love and pride.
Here then is the answer to "Come Down" and Gwalia Deserta VI: might it not be that "the greater man" will be one (will need to
be one?) nourished in early manhood by dreams, in love and pride – for these dreams make the spirit fit for action in the world. And yet (how
often there's a yet!) one may feel that the young man's view of Shakespeare, implying as it does that the bard's portrayal of love and pride
presents them solely as positive qualities, is a peculiar one. In only one poem, 10, is there a counter-suggestion to all this optimism as regards
dreaming: the last stanza runs –
High summer on the slag heaps
And on polluted streams,
And old men in the morning
Telling the town their dreams.
In the shadow of those slag-heaps, in sight of those polluted streams, one thinks, the old men's dreams might meet with a somewhat sarcastic
response from the young men.
Davies's main problems arrive when it comes to ending The Angry Summer. He's dealing with history, and historically what happened was
defeat for the miners, who battled on until in the last month of the year they capitulated. In Randal Jenkins's words:
The final December meetings were like the disorganised retreat of a beaten army. Disaster had shattered a dream: a battle had been lost; the
war itself remained. 6
Davies faces his old dilemma: there is on the one hand the pressure of bitter historical fact, the defeat of the dream, and on the other his
deep-seated Shelleyan desire to raise the cry of an undefeated spirit. So in the closing poem, 50, he attempts a balancing act reminiscent of
that in Gwalia Deserta XXXV. It falls into couplets – not a form he uses much, though it's that of the fine "Bells" poem – and its opening
is notable:
The summer wanes, and the wine of words
Departs with the departing birds.
The roses are withering one by one
And the lesser grasses grow sick of the sun,
The mountain tops are brown and bare
And listless grows the secret hare.
That fourth line has a Shakespearean richness, and might indeed bring to mind the despairing Macbeth's "I 'gin to be aweary of the sun". The
middle of the poem modulates into an uneasy mixture of pathos, indignation and ironic facetiousness, But despite the slander, the lies and the
treachery,
the battle's end is not defeat
To that dream that guided the broken feet
And roused to beauty and to pride
Toiler and toiler, side by side,
Whose faith and courage shall be told
In blaze of scarlet and of gold.
And at the end of this extraordinary poem, Davies plucks triumph out of abject defeat. A triumph for poetic will, but he's speaking both for
and to a dispirited people, and his desire to salvage something from the wreckage of 1926, though it may fail to command one's intellectual
assent, is one with which it's difficult not to sympathise.
Before leaving The Angry Summer, I want to focus on a poem that seems to me wholly successful and no mean achievement: poem 24.
Cow-parsley and hawthorn blossom
And a cottage among trees,
A thrush and a skylark singing,
And a gipsy lying at ease.
Roses in gentlemen's gardens
Smile as we pass by the way,
And the swans of my lord are sleeping
Out of the heat of the day.
And here we come tramping and singing
Out of the valleys of strife,
Into the sunlit cornfields,
Begging the bread of life.
No one but Idris Davies could have written this. Its movement from an untroubled Georgian pastoralism to an evocation of the intrusion of the
marching miners (in Housman the passing of soldiers to the beat of drums unsettles maids and men alike) is perfectly managed: their entry is
prepared for in the middle stanza where the smiles of the roses and snores of the swans (apologies to naturalists) discreetly convey the respective
responses of their owners to the passers-by. Then the massed noisy entry, not unexpected but still forceful, the telling contrast of "valleys
of strife" and "sunlit cornfields", and the clinching last line with its simple, moving and unanswerable plea for justice. The poem demonstrates
Davies's ability to write subtly and with a power that doesn't fall into stridency.
Professor R. George Thomas finds Davies's semi-autobiographical long poem I Was Born in Rhymney "the complete justification of his dogged
wish to write in a popular public style" and says "In a sense this poem almost supersedes Gwalia Deserta and The Angry Summer"7. Those obscuring modifiers ("In a sense… almost") are of course bits of academic insurance which drain the
statement of meaning and secure the speaker against unwelcome flanking movements. So I cannot attack what he says – or rather, doesn’t
say. Earlier he says of I Was Born in Rhymney that it provides "the best introduction to [Davies's] work". I'd prefer to say that it
provides the best introduction to Davies's life. The trouble with the poem is its extreme rhythmic monotony – the same tripping iambic
lines tied up into neat stanzaic packages by inevitable rhymes and deposited before the reader at regular intervals with all the mechanical
facility of a combine harvester. But the poem does have moments when it's more than informative. My favourite verse is the following one, where
the poet's sense of humour breaks through in the teasing juxtaposition:
I watched the King of England
Go riding with his queen,
I watched the cats steal sausage
From stalls in Bethnal Green.
And so to "Tonypandy", the third and shortest of Davies's poem-sequences and much the least interesting of the three. Randal Jenkins finds that
"as another poem about miners, [it] has some significant new features"8. The four features he identifies, however,
all seem to me to be present in the earlier sequences. He finds Dai, the central and representative figure in the six poems, "less dominated
by economic necessity": but poem IV characterises him as one of many who through the ages have been
Ravaged by hunger to desperation
And goaded and whipped and tortured
For the sake of a pampered despotic few.
These lines bring to mind poem XVII of Gwalia Deserta. Randal Jenkins is right to sense a different controlling tone in "Tonypandy",
however. Although Davies's awareness of the cruelties of men and the mockeries of history remains keen, he no longer rails against destiny's
arbitrary design. The note of apocalyptic optimism and the vague Shelleyan faith in the ultimate triumph of Love are absent from the sequence.
Here, to use Orwell's metaphor, Davies accommodates himself to life inside the whale: not in a spirit of complete passivity, certainly, but
the poem is undoubtedly a report from the beast's commodious belly. Jenkins comments that Davies "now shows a sense of perspective which saves
him from sentimentality about miners as a social group". Dai has eponymous qualities, however, and I can't feel that in his compassionate quietism
Davies avoids sentimentalising him.
Dai and his Martha and his fireside,
Dai and his lamp in the depths of the earth,
Dai and his careless lilting tongue.
Dai and his heart of gold.
Perhaps it's unfair to lift these lines out of context, but this isn't the only place where I feel Davies embarrassingly unmans Dai. Were I
a Welsh miner I'm sure I’d feel uncomfortable with the passage.
What of "dreaming" in "Tonypandy"? Well, dream here is of two kinds. One is the sort I identified earlier in this essay with socialist aspiration.
Davies says half to Dai, half of him:
You know in your heart how your life has been botched,
Been robbed of peace and grace and beauty,
Of leisure to dream and build and create…
As in The Angry Summer dreaming is a positive activity, a birthright that the miner has been denied. In the opening poem of the sequence,
on the other hand, "dreaming" appears as something much less grandiose: here it's rather Dai's nostalgic remembrance of actual times of past
happiness. An everyday dreaming well inside the whale.
I think I've said enough about I Was Born in Rhymney and "Tonypandy" now to suggest that in neither of these longer poems does one find
the later Davies at his best. One must look for this best in his shorter poems. There are a number of notable verses in Tonypandy and other poems,
of which the earliest-seeming, "The Sacrifice" and "The Gate of Death", carry the dates 1938 and 1939 respectively. Both are in free verse.
Still more remarkable are "Ruin" and "Ultimate Autumn", which are written in Davies's favourite quatrains – but quatrains instinct with a rhythmic
life largely absent from the metrically repetitive I Was Born in Rhymney. Even if there were no other poems of note (there are), these
four alone would be enough to kick out through the door the notion that Davies is a proletarian writer of circumscribed regional themes. I have
pursued the idea of "dreaming" through several poems, seen it, indeed, in its first connotation, take a bit of a beating, get laid effectively
in its grave. I now want to resuscitate the idea and consider Davies as a dreamer in a different sense. Let us take our bearings from some words
of Richard Hughes:
...the writing of poetry does for the poet what dreaming does for Tom, Dick and Harry: it allows a safe outlet for conflicts and tensions too
painful for his conscious mind to face, disguised so impenetrably in symbol that the poet himself has no inkling of what his poem is really
'about' – just as the dreamer has none till his analyst tells him. The tension both determines the symbol and generates the compulsive force.9
Poetry of this kind emerges, to employ Hughes's metaphor, from "under the threshold" – from a source below that of the poet's conscious,
calculating intelligence. Thus it may accurately be seen as a version of dreaming. In Gwalia Deserta, above all, we found verse that
enacted the conflicts and embodied the tensions between antithetical aspects of Davies's sensibility; now, in these later poems, his licence
to dream in a Shelleyan manner having been revoked by the action of reason on experience, he begins to write tense and disquieting poems of
a new order – a mature poetry of experience. It's a curious fact that none of the four poems I've named appear in Selected Poems of 1953
(the bad "Sonnet" does): did Davies fear that their comparative difficulty, their cryptic quality, might be misinterpreted as pretentiousness
on the part of one mainly as a poet of the people writing for the people? Here is "Ruin":
And now the crippled cowman calls
Across the ruins in the rain:
'Beware the dagger in the dusk,
The steel that seeks the ageing brain.'
The snake lies low behind the thorn
And grins on rural innocence,
The river grumbles in the mist
And bailiffs count the shabby pence.
Tomorrow death shall be desired
In lofts and cellars damp with dreams,
And the sourest servant hang
Head down along the beams.
This is neo-symbolist, and shows that in the Forties, alongside his poems of social commitment, Davies was producing work of a very different
British tendency.10 "Ruin" is a disturbing piece. Its symbols possess at once an air of ordinariness (cowman,
snake, river, bailiff, servant) and strangeness. The strangeness comes in part from their association in a poem that's certainly a unity. Symptoms
of madness, neurosis, murderousness and suicide are kept under firm formal control, and the tension between the natural anarchy of the images
and the restraint imposed on them by the quatrains is considerable. I shall resist the temptation to explore the poem in depth (it's in any
case likely to strike different readers in a variety of different ways), but I can't resist noting the appearance of "dreams" in the final stanza.
The ambiguous context suggests both the pathos and the futility of the dreams of those condemned to servile existences. The elements out of
which "Ruin" is constructed are mythic distortions of the fractured twentieth century world, the stuff of both experience and imagination.
A reading of Davies's late poems (those designated "New Poems" in the 1953 volume and those dated late in Collected Poems) bears out
the thesis that he was unable (it's hardly surprising) to sustain that openness to the unconscious which produced "Ruin" and "Ultimate Autumn".
As is the case throughout his career, the poems are extremely various, very uneven in quality, and risky to generalise about. The lyrics "A
Star in the East" and "The Christmas Tree" view the world through the eyes of childhood innocence, and suggest retreat rather than development.
"Arfon" is a piece of overblown rhetoric and definitely represents a regression to Romantic optimism. In "The Retired Actor" Davies adopts the
persona of a man reviewing past theatrical selves through a pair of mildly self-dramatizing rose-tinted spectacles. I'm not myself happy, as
are Randall Jenkins and Professor Thomas, to take this poem as a piece of confessional self-analysis on the poet's part – though they may well
be right to do so.
Easily the most intense of the later poems is "Come to our Revival Meeting". (Its appearance as early as page 14 of Collected Poems is
an indication of the unsatisfactory arrangement of the book.) Remarkable though this poem is, however, one has to concede that it's flawed.
It falls into two parts, a nightmarish section of sixteen lines and banal one of five, and the failure of the two parts to form a whole, or
even to relate to one another at all, suggests how far from "under the threshold" the first sixteen lines have emerged.
And this is the sordid dream of the drunkard creeping to prayer,
And the maddened mob drowning the noise of the birds
Frightened and fluttering in the dusty trees,
And all the hysterical converts insulting the heavens,
The brown pond sticky with the thighs of the damned;
And here comes a fellow to shake your liver
For out of his nightmare he leapt
When the moon crept up behind the Iron Bridge
And the garbage heap, where the trollop sat waiting
To sell her filth to the fool. And I saw
All this shabby mockery of April
As a neurotic's delirium, his hallucination
Of apes and angels and dog-headed ghosts
Mingling and whirling and circling and dancing
Among the decayed boughs that laced like serpents
The ripped edges of the darkening sky.
Here – unlike in "Ruin", where they are held in formal restraint – the images flood out, piling one on top of the other with a manic surreal
vitality. What looks as though it might have been triggered off by the poet's contempt for the scare-mongering tactics of a revivalist preacher
plunges him – an involuntary self-immersion – into the destructive element. The poem (its nature is rather that of a fragment, like many of
the constituent parts of The Waste Land), rather than giving us an external view of the drunkard's "sordid dream", presents his delirium
as if the poet himself were experiencing it: "And I saw…" Davies undergoes it in a state of negative capability. More grotesque than "Ruin",
"Come to our Revival Meeting" also possesses a disturbing power, for it moves to a frenzied roll-call of the phantasmagoric – those "apes and
angels and dog-headed ghosts" – only after it has presented us with what are undeniably pieces of our sordid and hysterical modern world. Having
got this out, though, Davies seems not to have known what to do with it. It's difficult not to conclude, when one sets this fragment against,
for instance, "A Star in the East", "The Christmas Tree" and "Arfon", that Davies's sensibility remained volatile and unresolved to the end.
Simple though many of his poems may be, they are the work of a complicated man. To repeat the observation that they are uneven in quality is
a way of acknowledging that complication, as Davies strove, whilst aiming at a popular readership, to give expression to the various and sometimes
incompatible pressures of his sensibility. It seems to me that he never arrived at an assured mastery – although there are assured and authoritative
poems. What I hope to have shown is that his poetic career shows, among other things, a shift (never thoroughgoing, never fixed) from one order
to poetic dreaming to another. He gravitates from writing poem-sequences whose self-dividedness dramatically declares itself, and which resist
synthesis, to writing poems whose ambiguous and resonant symbols refuse to come to the heel of the rational mind.
How then might we go about recognising where Davies's best work lies? By identifying work – in sequence or in individual poems – where he refuses
to simplify his response, refuses the seductions of rhetoric, where his poetic intelligence has not allowed itself to compromise. It's the poet's
business to reflect and explore the complexities and intransigencies of experience, not to water down, sentimentalise, or otherwise misrepresent
experience in a misguided attempt at solace or propaganda. The best poets fail to maintain their grip on the world through language at times
(their grip on language is their grip on the world), but bad poets never begin to take hold of authentic experience. There can be a sentimentalism
of despair – just as there can be a sentimentalism of hope, and Davies's poetry succumbs on separate occasions to one or the other of these
moods. But good poetry is born of the mind's effortful negotiation, through language, with experience, with its attempt to grasp experience
in all its richness, elusiveness, polyvalence. The 'simple' poems of Blake and Wordsworth are simple only to the innocent eye, while apparently
complex poems may be no more than frivolous exercises in opaque expression. The good poems of Idris Davies, like those of other poets, negotiate
effortfully with experience.
Notes
1 Since this essay was written, Dafydd Johnston has edited The Complete Poems of Idris Davies (University
of Wales Press 1994) on sound scholarly principles.
2 The Poetry of the Thirties (Gollancz 1975) p. 326.
3 Idris Davies: Writers of Wales series (University of Wales Press 1972) p. 45.
4 "Romanticism and Classicism" in Speculations (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1936) p. 120.
5 Collected essays, Journalism and Letters Volume 1 (Penguin 1970) pp. 576-77.
6 Idris Davies p. 10.
7 Introduction to Collected Poems, p.xxvi.
8 Idris Davies p. 37.
9 "Introduction to In Hazard", in Fiction as Truth, Selected Literary Writings by Richard Hughes,
edited Richard Poole (Poetry Wales Press 1983) p. 46.
10 See, for example, Chapter 20 of The Modern Writer and his World by G. S. Fraser.
Back to top ^