Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (18 page)
Read Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Online
Authors: Lynette Roberts
Poems
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.
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, 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’.
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’.
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
.
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.
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.’
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’.
aconite: a poisonous plant; deadly poison.
xerophyte fern: xerophyte plants are those adapted to live with limited water.
Rhode Island Red: a breed of chicken.
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
.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
Maté: a herbal tea drunk in South America.
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.
caladium: a plant native to South America.
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.