Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (4 page)

Even at its most dazzling, eclectic or overcharged, Roberts’s poetry bears witness
to a spectrum of female experience which rarely makes it into poetry about war – or
not as something violently, colourfully lived, as distinct from merely endured. Under
their myth-plated exteriors, Roberts’s poems treat
childbirth and miscarriage, loneliness and disappointed expectation, exiguous rations
and neighbourly slights. All these subjects turn up in her poems with an intensity
of expression and originality of diction we find nowhere else. No poetry better expresses
that amalgam of drudgery and enforced, fretful inertia, or that particular species
of actively-experienced passivity that characterises an ordinary woman’s life in wartime.
When Roberts gives an epic scale to the domestic, it does not traduce, inflate or
efface the domestic – it extends it. Poetry is the mirror in which ordinary life looks
to find itself reflected in myth.

‘Cwmcelyn’ appears at the end of
Poems
because Eliot felt that there were not enough poems to make up a volume. In a letter
of 17 November 1943 he suggests that she include a section of ‘the long poem’ to bring
it up to length. He also considers, then rejects, the idea of publishing both books
in one.
Gods with Stainless Ears
was largely complete before
Poems
appeared, despite being published six years later (in her preface Roberts writes that
it was written over two years, 1941-3). It is legitimate to suppose that between writing
and publication the book underwent some changes. The most significant of these is
the insertion of prose ‘arguments’ at the start of each section, recommended by Eliot
to help the reader with the poem’s narrative. By the time these were written, Roberts
had divorced Rhys, and this explains, in particular, the differences between the ‘argument’
and the narrative content of Part V. There have also been a few revisions of
punctuation
and vocabulary. One particular instance of this, noted by Nigel Wheale in his essay
‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’, is where Part V of
God
s replaces ‘chinese fields of tungsten’ from the 1944 version of ‘Cwmcelyn’ with ‘chinese
blocks of uranium’. It is a minor detail, but a revealing one: the revision reflects
an increased awareness of developing nuclear politics that suggests Roberts’s interest
in keeping the poem as up to date as possible.

‘The subject is universal, and the tragedy one of too many’, Roberts writes in her
preface, the language composed of ‘congested words and images, and certain hard, metallic
lines’:

Roberts was not the first to imagine poetry and film joined – Auden and Britten had
collaborated in the mid-1930s on GPO films such as ‘Night Mail’ and ‘Coal Face’ (1936).
Though Roberts may certainly have learned something from their approach, theirs was
a collaboration: Britten wrote a score to accompany lines by Auden which are no more
or less intrinsically ‘filmic’ for being written for film. Film was for them part
of the medium; for Roberts it was part of the conception. In her account of tea with
the Sitwells we get an insight into what she had in mind not just for the poetry of
the future, but for the way it would be disseminated:

This idea of the ‘unseen voice’ fits well with the narration of
Gods
– the poem is told by the woman, from inside and outside her own story, while the
prose ‘arguments’ at the beginning of each section are impersonal and have the scene-setting
function of script or screenplay directions. They do more than summarise the story
(without them some of the poetry would be ambiguous beyond safe surmising); they also
explain poetic conceits, sound effects (‘Machine-gun is suggested by the tapping of
a woodpecker…’), and image-sequences as if for camera rather than reader. It would
be difficult to find a long poem more cinematically imagined – rather as the Symbolist
dramas of Maeterlinck or Mallarmé were conceived for the theatre of the intellect,
so
Gods with Stainless Ears
may be a script for the cinema of the mind. In ‘Beyond the Trauma Stratus’, Nigel
Wheale embeds the poem in its era. This is a poem, as Wheale explains, full of ‘anxieties
about post-war social development’ such as nuclear power and the Beveridge Report,
with a busy meshwork of context behind its grand gestures of transcendence.
18

Briefly (and reductively) put,
Gods with Stainless Ears
tells, through
680-odd
lines of mainly five-line stanzas, prose ‘arguments’, epigraphs and notes, a dreamlike
war narrative of shifting perspectives and timezones. Set around the West Wales Coast,
its protagonists are a man and a woman – the ‘soldier and his girl’. It is in many
ways autobiographical: the soldier’s number is Rhys’s war number, the details of the
woman’s life map directly onto Lynette’s, and the poem is peopled with local characters
from Llanybri and Llansteffan. Part I introduces the scene and the setting; Part II
begins with an elegy for a lost airman played on a gramophone; Part III describes
the soldiers getting ready for action and the gunner ‘standing apart, through maladjustment
of mind and spirit rejecting his girl’; Part IV starts with the girl speaking of her
miscarriage; in Part V the protagonists are assumed upwards into a futuristic world,
only to be returned to the world they left, changed forever.

The unfolding of narrative in epic is hieratic, stately, processional; the unfolding
of narrative in newsreel is jerky, spliced, whirring.
Gods with Stainless Ears
overlays both modes to extraordinary effect. In the ‘
argument
’ to the poem’s first part, Roberts writes:

The opening is a poetic tracking shot:

The new beaks of the birds ‘scissor’ the air; a few stanzas later there are ‘aluminium
beaks’, announcing the planes overhead. The poem insists on the exactness of its setting
– the coast, the railway line, the shops and pubs. The local merges into the mythical:
the Second World War merges into Cattraeth, the great murderous battle described by
the poet Aneirin in the
Gododdin
as ‘Evans shop’ says that the soldiers are ‘training for another Cattraeth’; the
hills become ‘Homeric’; and even John Roberts, the coracle man of Llansteffan (about
whom Roberts writes in her diary and
Village Dialect
), merges into Charon, boatman of the Styx.

Gods
is a modernist long poem, but not just in the Poundian sense of a ‘poem including
history’. Rather, it is a poem including the future, a poem that tells a story, with
a forceful narrative drive, and which bears witness to its time:

This is the modernism of anticipation, not nostalgia. Despite the Poundian tone of
‘Impale the money-goaders palisade’, there is something optimistic about this poem,
even amid the ravages, the personal loss, the death and decimation of the ‘pilotless
age’. ‘To what age can this be compared?’ the voice asks, and it is not an ironic
question. The answer is all ages and none: the poem takes place both in a unique time
and place and in a vast
mythic-historic
continuum.

Roberts uses the familiar resources of science fiction: a technological cladding around
mythical paradigms. Nature here exists in the machine age, while descriptions of modernist
architecture (chromium cenotaphs, steel escalators, aluminium rails) are as vividly
up-to-date as they are
imagined
. Even the poem’s flora are metallic forms forged in nuclear-age smithies:

‘Ceraunic Clouds’, ‘zebeline stripes’, ‘chemical paradox’, ‘ciliated moon’, ‘febrifuge’,
‘paleozoic sentinels’, ‘crystallized cherubic stars’ give just a tiny sampler from
Roberts’s language in
Gods with Stainless Ears
.

The poem also announces a coming into consciousness of possibilities: political, scientific
and social. There is even a romantic nationalist
underpinning
. Roberts incorporates the poem ‘We must uprise O my people’ from
Poems
into Part II of
Gods with Stainless Ears
, seeming to promise, so far as Wales is concerned, some post-war nationalist unfinished
business. In Part I, the English soldiers take down the Welsh flag, only for the flag’s
colours to reinvest themselves into the earth:

There are shades here of both Saunders Lewis, poet and playwright and founder-member
of Plaid Cymru, and of Dylan Thomas. At the end of Part V of
Gods
, the soldier ‘frees dragon from the glacier glade’, and the poem ends with a Wales
in frozen limbo about to be released. The heroism may be Girl’s and Boy’s Own stuff,
but it is meant, and it looks ahead to the post-war climate rather than back to the
world of lost princes. To Roberts’s European and Anglo-American modernist contexts,
we must also add the context of Welsh literary and cultural awakening. She is what
would today be called a ‘nationalist’ or a ‘culturalist’: she insists on the uniqueness
of Welsh culture and is conscious of the ease with which the small country could be
– and was being – swallowed up. In her article on Patagonia she wrote of Wales being
‘oppressed partly by her own misdirection and partly by outside jurisdiction’; in
a 1952
Times Literary Supplement
review of Welsh writing, she warned: ‘what the Welsh dragon lacks at present is fire;
[…] the younger generation must rediscover the source of that fire before the particularities
of the Celtic imagination are once again submerged in an Anglicised culture’.
19
Both she and Keidrych Rhys were drawn to the radical nonconformist and pacifist tradition
of Welsh culture, and Roberts’s time in West Wales coincides with the strengthening
of Welsh Nationalism as a political programme. In her diary she expresses anger at
the proposed forced requisition of land in Preseli in Pembrokeshire by the War Office
– a major galvanising issue for post-war Welsh nationalism.

In Part V, the soldier and the girl rise up together:

They climb ‘through moist and luminous dust’, to ‘a ceiling and clarity/ Of
Peace
’ with ‘Sweet white air varied as syllables’. The woman-speaker is ‘contented in this
fourth dimensional state’, but the couple are forced to return. As the ‘argument’
has it ‘the world demands their return’: