Stephen asked what I meant when I mentioned the haughty tone of the Welsh bardds and the rebuke in Dylan Thomas' poem. Thomas refuses to 'murder / The mankind of her going with a grave truth / Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath /With any further /Elegy of innocence and youth'. By describing what he will not do, Thomas rebukes those who do talk of the girl's death with a certain pomposity and try to make her death mean something. There is a kind of haughtiness in his tone which appears in the work of other Welsh poets.
T.H. Parry-Williams (1930s) writes in 'Hon' ('This One' or 'She', a seminal Welsh poem:
A chelgar am uned a chenedl a gwlad o hyd:
Mae digon o'r rhain, heb Gymru, i'w cael yn y byd.
R wyf wedi alaru ers talwm ar glywed grwn
Y Cymry, bondigrybwll, yn cadw swn.
My rough translation:
Cackling about unity and nation and country unfurled:
There's plenty of this, without Wales, in the world.
I have been alarmed for an age on hearing groans
of the Welsh, unmentionable, making moan.
Parry-William's playful manner deflates pomposity just as Thomas does in 'A Refusal to Mourn'. Thomas did try to learn Welsh and knew rudimentary Welsh. It is likely that he knew this poem since it is a seminal work in Welsh poetry. Even if he had not read the Welsh-language poets in Welsh, there is a cross-dissemination that goes on between the Welsh-language and English-language poets in Wales. I think that it is wrong to think of the two spheres as being divided.
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