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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Songs before Twilight

Songs before Twilight

A study of the development of Welsh poetry more comprehensive than that of Professor Williams could hardly have been made, in terms intelligible to the reader who has no Cymric. It will be of peculiar interest to those familiar with the works of Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and other English poets whose mood and method is influenced by a Welsh background. The concreteness and variety of early Welsh poetry is impressive:

The birchgrove is fine down,
a green skirt and a weight of hair,
and on the street of thorn stems
linen shops like London’s Cheap . . .

Fortunately Professor Williams has quoted lavishly from his sources, and in each case accompanied the Welsh original with spirited and sensitive translation. The whole body of verse which he discusses takes its criteria of reality from two systems of living – the feudal order and Catholic Christianity. From the feudal obligation derives the sentiment of gratitude to the poet’s patron, and the formal lament for dead heroes; from Catholicism, the tension between supernatural order and licentious wish, origin of the greatest mediaeval poetry. By the sixteenth-century the lock of tradition had snapped, leaving the door open for nonconformist sentimentality and heavy sermonising. Henceforth Welsh verse is a dog without a master; and when it found one in Dylan Thomas, he fortunately for us did not write in Welsh. Professor Williams’s book is a mausoleum of giants’ bones; but it is interesting to see how many techniques independently discovered by modern poets were alive in early Welsh. This volume should be of great value to those who wish to gain an insight into Celtic literature, without the twilight. Professor Williams’s commentary is a model of lucidity.

1953 (77)