Thanks, Zoe. Most helpful.
Stephen V
Triggers, my new poetry ebook from Shearsman Books is now available at:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_home.html
Reviews and comments appreciated!
> 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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