Idris Davies (6 January 1905 – 6 April 1953) was a Welsh poet. Born in Rhymney, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, he became a poet, originally writing in Welsh, but later writing exclusively in English.
He was the only poet to cover significant events of the early 20th century in the South Wales Valleys and the South Wales Coalfield, and from a perspective literally at the coalface. He is now best known for the verses "Bells of Rhymney", from his 1938 Gwalia Deserta (meaning literally "Wasteland of Wales"), which were later adapted into a popular folk song.
Life and career
The Rhymney Valley in South WalesMemorial plaque (in English and Welsh), Victoria Road, Rhymney
Davies was born at 16 Field Street, Rhymney, Monmouthshire, the Welsh-speaking son of colliery chief winderman (mine lift operator) Evan Davies and his wife Elizabeth Ann.[1] After leaving the local school at the age of fourteen, for the next seven years Davies worked underground as a miner in the nearby McLaren Pit at Abertysswg and later at the Maerdy Pit, Pontlottyn. After an accident in which he lost a finger at the coalface, and active participation in the General Strike of 1926, the pit closed and he became unemployed. He spent the next four years following what he called "the long and lonely self-tuition game",[1] having been introduced to the work of Shelley by a fellow miner.[2]
In 1947 he returned to teach at a school in the Rhymney Valley.[3] The poems for his second anthology, published by Faber and Faber in 1945, were chosen by T. S. Eliot. Eliot thought that Davies' poems had a claim to permanence, describing them as "the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place".[1]
His final volume, Selected Poems, was published shortly before his death. Around this time Dylan Thomas wrote Davies a surprisingly touching letter. Thomas had read "Bells of Rhymney" as part of a St. David's Day radio broadcast, but told Davies that he did not feel the poem was particularly representative of Davies' work, as it was "not angry enough".[4]
Davies died from abdominal cancer, aged 48, at his mother's house at 7, Victoria Road, Rhymney on Easter Monday, 6 April 1953. He was buried in Rhymney Public Cemetery.[1] There are memorial plaques to Davies at Victoria Road[5] and at the town library.[2]
After his death over two hundred of his manuscript poems and a short verse-play, together with the typescripts of his comprehensive wartime diaries, were deposited at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. Later, more of his unpublished poems and most of his prose – an unfinished novel, essays, lecture notes and some of his letters – were found. Some of this later material appeared posthumously in The Collected Poems of Idris Davies (1972); Idris Davies (1972), and Argo Record No. ZPL.1181: Idris Davies (1972).[1]
There is a modern memorial sculpture for Davies in Rhymney, with an inscription reading "When April came to Rhymney with shower and sun and shower" – the opening line of his poem "Rhymney".[6]
In September 2006 a refurbished grave memorial was unveiled, at a re-dedication service, in the town's cemetery.[7]
Views
"The author of this lyrical sequence is moved by a fine indignation born of experience. His poem, therefore, is the outcry of a community as well as that of an individual. It expresses the hopes, betrayal, and suffering of the people of South Wales. It has the simplicity of folksong, of a modern folksong rich with the idiom and image of the contemporary scene and outlook on life. These songs ring true and their appeal is more than a literary one. The author takes his place with Welsh poets such as W. H. Davies and Huw Menai as one authorised by his people to sing for them, and to show the world in music what they have suffered and are still suffering in actuality"
— Gwalia Deserta, frontispiece, 1938
The editor's frontispiece from Gwalia Deserta provides a useful summary of Davies' outlook.
In a diary entry Davies wrote: "I am a socialist. That is why I want as much beauty as possible in our everyday lives, and so I am an enemy of pseudo-poetry and pseudo-art of all kinds. Too many 'poets of the Left', as they call themselves, are badly in need of instruction as to the difference between poetry and propaganda ... These people should read William Blake on Imagination until they show signs of understanding him. Then the air will be clear again, and the land be, if not full of, fit for song."[8]
Work
Gwalia Deserta XXXVI
In the places of my boyhood
The pit-wheels turn no more,
Nor any furnace lightens
The midnight as of yore.
The slopes of slag and cinder
Are sulking on the rain,
And in derelict valleys
The hope of youth is slain.
And yet I love to wander
The early ways I went,
And watch from doors and bridges
The hills and skies of Gwent.
Though blighted be the valleys
Where man meets man with pain,
The things by boyhood cherished
Stand firm, and shall remain.
from Gwalia Deserta (1938)
Davies' first published volume was the 1938 extended poetical work Gwalia Deserta. The verses it contained were inspired partly by such mining disasters as that at Marine Colliery at Cwm near Ebbw Vale in 1927, and by the failure of the 1926 UK General Strike, the Great Depression in the United Kingdom and their combined effects on the South Wales valleys.
The "Bells of Rhymney" verses, perhaps Davies' most widely known work, appear as Part XV of the book. The stanzas follow the pattern of the well known nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". In the late 1950s the verses were adapted into a folk song by Pete Seeger and became a folk rock standard. The song, entitled "The Bells of Rhymney", has been covered by many others since. More recently some of the other stanzas from Davies' Gwalia Deserta have also been set to music by Welsh performer Max Boyce as the song "When We Walked to Merthyr Tydfil in the Moonlight Long Ago".
