March is Dewithon Month #Dewithon. You can read about this celebration of literary Wales at the link
We are all invited to join in and I thought it was about time I did especially as this project – now in its 5th year – is the work of The Book Jotter whose weekly post of literary links always gets my weekend off to a good start. Thank-you Paula.
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Robert Graves wasn’t Welsh. His father was an Irish scholar of Gaelic, his mother was German and he grew up in England. He was on holiday in Harlech when war was declared in August 1914 and immediately went to enlist. He was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF).
His Goodbye To All That is perhaps the most well-known war memoir of them all.
David Jones also grew up on the edges of London. His father was a Welsh speaker from Flintshire who actively discouraged his son from speaking Welsh for fear it might hold back his career. At nine, Jones saw himself as Welsh and stopped using his Anglo-Saxon first name, Walter.
Jones was an artist and a poet. He also served with the RFC in the 15th, London Welsh, battalion. His poetic novella In Parenthesis was hailed as a masterpiece by W.H., Auden and T.S. Eliot.
Sospan Fach – Little Saucepan – is a Welsh folk song.
The “Cursèd Wood” is Mametz, so named by Siegfried Sassoon (also RFC) in his poem At Carnoy. The poem tells of the four companies of the Welsh Brigade camped at twilight on the evening before an attack on Mametz Wood.
There were many cursèd woods on the Western Front but this is the one that the 38th (Welsh) Division was charged with taking in July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. Almost 4,000 Welsh troops died in that one week of one campaign.
This is a good account of Mametz and a short film from the BBC: Mametz Wood and the 38th: ‘What dark convulsed cacophony’
In Parenthesis culminates in the attack on Mametz Wood where we learn what happened to Private Ball and his companions. “This writing,” Jones says in the preface,” has to do with some things I saw, felt and was part of. The period covered begins in early December 1915 and ends in July 1916.”
Over the Top and into Battle With Jesu
This is how David Jones described the attack:
… and Mr Jenkins takes them over
and don’t bunch on the left
for Christ’s sake.
Riders on pale horses loosed
and vials irreparably broken
an’ wat price bleedin’ Glory
Glory
Glory Hallulujah
And the Royal Welsh sing:
Jesu
lover of me soul .. to Aberystwyth
But that was on the right with
the genuine Taffies
but we are rash levied
from Islington and Hackney
and the purlieus of Walworth
flashers from Surbiton
men of the stock of Abraham from Bromley-by-Bow
Anglo-Welsh from Queens Ferry
rosary-wallahs from Pembrey Dock .
lighterman with a Norway darling
And two lovers from Ebury Bridge,
Bates and Coldpepper
That men called the Lily-white boys.
Fowler from Harrow and the House who’d lost his way into
this crush who was gotten in a parsonage on a maye.
Many of those “genuine Taffies” who went into battle singing a Wesleyan hymn to Joseph Parry’s tune Aberystwyth would have been from non-conformist homes ambivalent about the war. They may have come from homes affected by the surge of passionate revivalism that had swept through Wales in 1904-5. Singing hymns was what they knew, and what they did, as they climbed out of the trench in the chalk and into the machine gun fire.
At the end of the week not a tree was left standing
When the shivered rowan fell
you couldn’t hear the fall of it.
Barrage with counter-barrage shockt
deprive all several sounds of their identity,
what dark convulsed cacophony
conditions each disparity
and the trembling woods are vortex for the storm;
through which their bodies grope the mazy charnel-ways –
seek to distinguish waling men from walking trees and branchy
moving like a Birnam corpse.
At the end of the battle, “There stayed unbroken not one twig.”
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Listen to the hymn – perhaps more than once. And read Jones’s description of what happened to his company and companions at Mametz. (You can find the book online here.)
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In Parenthesis is rich with allusions and references to Welsh history and stories, Arthurian legends, and Greco-Roman mythology. The more you know about those the richer your reading experience will be. My knowledge is thin but it has never interfered with relishing this text. Jones provides some end notes and they are helpful with some of the references and also with the slang and jargon of the war.
Temporary unpaid Lance-Corporal Aneirin Merddyn Lewis does know the history of his people and
Lance-Corporal Lewis sings where he walks, yet in a low voice, because of the Disciplines of the Wars. He sings of the hills about Jerusalem, and of David of the White Stone.
Lance-Corporal Lewis looks about him and makes connections with the mythic past. His friend Watcyn knows everything about the Neath rugby team and can sing Sospan Fach to make the traverse ring but
he might have been an Englishman when it came to matters near to Aneirin’s heart. For Watcyn was innocent of his descent from Aeneas, was unaware of Geoffrey Arthur and his cooked histories, or Twm Shon Catti for the matter of that—which pained his lance-corporal friend, for whom Troy still burned, and sleeping kings return, and wild men might yet stir from Mawddwy secrecies.
And David Jones provides a helpful note about Sospan Fach.
Robert Graves was also at Mametz and he makes reference to the ferocity of that battle in more than one poem.
In this poem, he hears four miners from Ebbw Vale singing that same hymn to the tune “Aberystwyth” while sheltering from a hailstorm. And he remembers.
Sospan Fach
(The Little Saucepan)
And so, here is Sospan Fach and then the hymn, sung in Welsh and then English. May they not break your heart.
“To any Welsh reader, I would say, what Michael Drayton, in a foreword to his Poly-olbion, says, speaking of Wales: ‘if I have not done her right, the want is in my ability, not in my love.’ ” – David Jones writing in the preface to In Parenthesis.
Other posts about Jones and Graves:
In Parenthesis Part One
Lament in December
The War is too Much With Us
Things That Matter
That Cursèd Wood
Before The Charge: The Battle of Loos
Listening to that music – reading your words – moves me close to tears. A world changed. A world lost. And for what?
Alas, heartbreakingly beautiful, Josie, especially “Sospan Fach” in the context of the poem. I haven’t read David Jones’ poems although I have read and taught some of the WWI poets, inspired, admittedly by Pat Barkers’s brilliant WII novel Regeneration. I missed a number of your posts while I was away; lots to catch up on. Look forward to “Comfort Food and Comfort Books”!
That image of the Welsh battalion going into Mametz Wood singing is haunting.
I’ve had this thought once of being with a group of people reading “In Parenthesis” aloud with different people taking on the various voices and accents. I think he would have been much better known as one of the “major” war poets had he published that work a decade or so earlier. In any event – whenever I go back to it I find it remarkable.
a lot to digest but always worthwhile to peruse
A enlightening post, impressively put together. Thanks, Josie.
Chris – Temporary unpaid Lance-Corporal Aneirin Merddyn Lewis brought you to mind. In the sense that I know you to be a person knowledgable about, and interested in, British and classical myth and history and especially Arthurian legend.
(I love that contrast between Lewis and his friend Watcyn. One who knew and felt the past in his very being and the other for whom it’s just national sentiment at a rugby game. “Twas ever thus.)
Tribalism has its downsides, whether it’s in sports or politics, doesn’t it. I prefer (like Lewis) more nuanced and thoughtful approaches while still retaining one’s principles.
Thanks for the post about David Jones. Extraordinary artist and poet whose life was blighted by WW1.
Thanks for this link to the Dewithon. How enterprising and interesting some are!
Thank you. Have to wonder what would these lives have been – and indeed the whole of our whole history – had the war been averted.
And yes indeed. Enterprising, interesting, and useful! If you don’t follow The Book Jotter then you should!
I loved the Lament in December…thanks – and I wish I knew the Welsh better.
Come visit Wales. It is a beautiful land.
This is true!
It’s a great poem.
And I love how – in other works – poets like Graves and Sassoon provide the necessary counterpoint to all the celebrations of “victory”.
Josie, I loved all the references to the WWI Poets, AND the song at the end. It really is a foreign language. I think we should learn theLittle Saucepan in Welsh. Ir wud b nirct ty sre wth ar fryeds.
Yes, it’s a very different language.
I was having this fantasy while writing this post that I could start to learn it. (This will not be happening – although these days I do like to hear it spoken and sung. And that hymn is a heartbreaker. Imagine having heard and seen all those men walk into machine gun fire while singing that hymn. I kept replaying it as I was reading the last section of the book. It’s been haunting me ever since.)
This is splendid, Josie. I’m so glad you were able to participate this year. Sospan Fach is a wonderful song to get everyone up and singing at the top of their lungs! 😀 Thank you, also, for your kind words. You are always so supported and it is very much appreciated. 🤗 A very jolly Spring Equinox to you and your loved ones. 🌷🐰🐦🦔
The thanks are all to you!