Lynette Roberts -'Cross and Uncrossed'

Thought that it was time to update this blog.  Have mainly be focused on a new blog dedicated to seventeenth century war related poetry and literature titled A Burnt Ship

Have also been reading up on the life of Lynette Roberts (1909- 1995) . A longer version of this post will be available soon.  Lynette Roberts played a significant role in the Anglo-Welsh poetry scene  of the mid-20th century .


                                'Cross and Uncrossed  '

Norma Bull ' Effigies of Crusaders in Round Temple Church London ' ( Courtesy of Imperial War Museum, IWM ART LD4889 )

                           Lynette Roberts was born in Argentina in 1909, and relocated to Britain in the 1930's, marrying Welsh magazine editor and  poet Keidrych Rhys in 1939.The couple settled in the village of  Llanybri . Rhys was conscripted on 12th July 1940, and was later to go AWOL for a short time after several years service. . Lynette Roberts immersed herself in Welsh village life, studying the mythology and language of the country, proud of her own distant  Welsh ancestry. And wrote poetry of her own.

Backed by T.S. Elliott’s influence at ‘Faber’ two collections subsequently appeared ' Poems' in 1944 and 'Gods With Stainless Ears' in 1951,and the latter featured a long poem about her life in Wales in World War II, taking in the 19th -21st February 1941 Air Raid on Swansea. The people of  Llanybri could see the flames...230 died, 397 injured , 7,000 homes were destroyed.

From ‘Gods With Stainless Ears’

“... Night falling catches the flares and bangs

On gorselit rock. Yellow birds shot from

Iridium creeks,-Let the whaleback of the sea

Fall back from a wrist of ripples, slit.

Snip up the moon sniggering on its back,

For on them sail the hulls of ninety wild birds

Defledged by this evening’s raid; jigging up

Like a tapemachine the cold figures February

19th, 20th, 21st. A memorial of Swansea’s tragic loss….”

                 The  marriage between  Lynette Roberts and Keidrych Rhys broke down in 1948 : Lynette Roberts took their  two young children to England in 1949,  and in 1955 she opened an art centre at Chislehurst Caves in Kent. In 1956 part of the cave roofs collapsed seriously injuring a sculptor called Peter Danziger. The centre closed and  Lynette Roberts had the first of a series of breakdowns and suffered from recurring  mental health conditions from the rest of her life until her death in 1995.

The  already published works of Lynette Roberts were left to lapse-seemingly out of fashion as new trends began to flourish in the late 50's such as 'The Movement' and 'The Angry Young Men'. Her previous  friendships with such luminaries as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Alun Lewis,and  T.S. Elliott earned her the occasional mention and the odd footnote. In fact Lynette Roberts shared her research into Welsh culture and mythology with Robert Graves for his work ‘The Roebuck in the Thicket’ , which later became  ‘The White Goddess’.

Even in the late 1970’s /early 1980’s wave of feminism which explored women’s relationship to war, there was little focus on her work. Lynette Roberts was conspicuously absent from Catherine Reilly’s influential ‘Chaos of the Night -Women’s Poetry and Verse ‘ from 1984. One exception was ‘Poetry Wales ‘ magazine that devoted an issue to Lynette Roberts in 1983.

Anne Powell’s 1996, ‘Shadows of War-British Women’s Poetry of the Second World War’ featured of  three of Lynette Roberts’ poem.  And  in 21st century a new wave of interest appeared in her work with the appearance of 'Lynette Roberts-collected poems' edited by Patrick McGuiness in 2005 and a companion volume of 'Diaries, Letters, and Recollection ' in 2008, also edited by Patrick McGuiness.

A particularly intriguing entry reads:

“And my stay at the Inner Temple when I turned up while the library buildings were still smouldering and continued to burn for another five days. The Round Church wet and empty like a grotesque seashell. Out of this experience I wrote my poem ‘Crossed and Uncrossed.’ “

‘Diaries, Letters and Recollections’  12th June 1942 - Looking back at 10th May 1941 Raid. Here are some verses from said poem to consider :

‘ Crossed and Uncrossed ‘

Heard the steam rising from the chill blue bricks

Heard the books sob and the buildings huge groan

As the hard crackle of flames leapt on firemen

                and  paled the red walls……….

Round Church built in a Round Age, cold with grief,

Coloured Saints of glass lie buried at your feet;

Crusaders uncross limbs by the green light of flares,

             burn into Tang shapes

From paper window we gaze at the catacomb of books,

You,unflinching stern of spirit, ready to

Gather charred sticks to fight no gas where gas was

           everywhere escaping

Through thin library walls where ‘Valley’ still grows,

From Pump Court to dry bank of rubble, titanic monsters,

Roll up from the Thames, to drown the ‘storm’ should it

                  dare come again.

Still water silences death : fills night with curious light,

Brings  green peace and birds to top of Plane tree

Fills Magnolia with grail thoughts; while you of King’s Bench

          Walk, cherish those you most love.”

Further Reading 

Lynette Roberts- Diaries, Letters and Recollections' , edited by Patrick McGuiness, Carcanet Press
                                                                                                                                     (2008)
Lynette Roberts - Collected Poems             edited by Patrick McGuiness, Carcanet Press (2005)

Keidrych Rhys -The Van Pool: Collected Poems  edited by Charles Mundye, Seren  ( 2012).



Lynette Roberts Independent Obituary

Lynette Roberts feature Flashpoint Magazine

New blog launched 2nd February 2023 Bleak Chesney Wold  Charles Dickens/ 'dark' 19th century history 

We are at War - Forty Years Backward March

Pleased to hear that the Second World War Experience Centre  magazine 'Everyone's War'   will include an article I wrote last year about poetry from the North Africa campaign. 




Two poems about the outbreak of World War 2 from the point of view of teenagers in Britain, Elizabeth Jennings and Michael A. Mason

                                                     Public Air Raid Shelter in Trafalgar Square from 1941
                                                                      Courtesy Wikimedia Commons


Anniversary Fatigue

Deliberately decided to avoid posting about the anniversary of Britain entering into World War 2. Have to admit that anniversary fatigue is taking its toll .

But if I have posted on 3rd September 2017  would have included Elizabeth Jennings (1926- 2001), who later went on to become one of the 1950's 'Movement' poets.  Her work is rarely included in World War 2 poetry anthologies - the exception being 'Poems From the Second World War'
 ( Macmillan's Children's books in partnership with the IWM. 2005 ).

'The Second World War' - Elizabeth Jennings

"The voice said 'We are at War'
And I was afraid
for I did not know what this
meant
My sister and I ran to our friends next door
As if they could help. History was lessons learnt
     With ancient dates, but here

     Was something utterly news,
The radio, called the wireless then, had said
That the country would have to be brave. There
was much to do. ....."

 Personally I am drawn to the simplicity of the poem, Elizabeth Jennings would have been 13 when war broke out and this poem captures the adolescent realising that they were experiencing ' something utterly news'.  I am not in a position to reproduce the whole poem.

The same anthology contains Anthony Thwaite's poem 'Bournemouth 3rd September 1939' , about a school boy enjoying the seaside whilst waiting to start the Autumn Term.  Born 1930, he was far younger than Elizabeth Jennings.  The poem ends with the ominous  lines

"...........Later, tucked in bed
I hear the safe sea roll and wipe away
The castles that had built in sand that day. "


Forty  Years Backward March -Michael Arthur Mason 

Canadian writer Paul Nicholas Mason has  shared this poem his father  Michael Mason   wrote about serving in the RAF during World War 2, on WW2f.com, and has kindly given consent for the poem to be reproduced here.

This is a memory of an outbreak of war from the point of view of a boy just about to turn fifteen. Again I appreciate the simplicity of the poem, which conveys the aspect of the unreal with what Elizabeth Jennings above called 'something utterly news'. Also like characterisation of Chamberlain as 'disheartened Victorian ' ( who was, after all, born in 1869)   and the commander who has been 'demothballed' who wishes the boys a 'good war'.

Paul has supplied the following biography.

Michael A. Mason was born September 29, 1924 in Oxfordshire, England, the son of the butler to the Earl of Jersey.  He was educated in state schools, and joined the RAF in 1943.  He was released early in 1946 to return to university in London.  Michael eventually earned his B.A. (Hons), Dip Ed, M.A. and PHD in English Language and Literature, and taught at universities in East Africa, B.C. and Ontario, Canada.  He finished his teaching career as Head of English and Philosophy at Royal Military College, Kingston, Ontario.


'40 Years Backward March ' - Michael A Mason. 

Tired but precise, a voice. “We are at war
With Germany.” I’d seen him the year before
Bringing home “Peace with Honour.”
Chamberlain. “It is the evil things
That we shall be fighting against.”
Thus spake a disheartened Victorian.

Warm summer and bright sunshine brought them out.
This was a Junkers, circling the school
Low down. “To shelters?” No.
We had no instructions. Besides,
The All Clear had sounded; and so, officially,
He wasn’t there. It seems he abided by that,
Drifting away from us, taking his time.
Just curious.

Bomber in a hurry shed its cargo
Over the woods. We were below it,
Hunting for walnuts. You fling up a stick and
Down they come. Old Tom was eighty,
But outran most of us. “What’s the use?”
You ask. Why, none. We might have become
So easily part of the harvest.

Air Commodore, once retired;
Demothballed. He was old; to us, on parade,
Incredibly. “I wish you
A good war,” he said. “Resent him?”
No, not now. For what he meant was
“I hope you survive it.” In such times
This is not the way you should say it.

An outsize motorbike belting along behind trees
But raised as if to skim them. Suddenly there’s
Our first Vee-One, yammering over the fields
Towards us – you can imagine them
Looking for you (which is bad for morale) –
Till high in plain view over
The huge dead elm behind the house it
Cut, dipped as it lost momentum, and
Blew up somewhere else.
“Missed by a mile?” Or so;
Unless you were in the houses it demolished.

Before long they were common as wasps and
Rather a trouble at night: each dragon of darkness
Bringing you to the window
The better to watch that
Flaring rumble charting its
Ruinous way. “I take a dim view of this,”
So the cliché ran; but you’d heard
They sometimes swung round before dropping,
And you always had to be sure
That this next one kept right on going.

Yes, a long time ago, and just
Marginal. Of the mute and inglorious
Multitude only a memory
By another long-time survivor.
But, when nobody’s left to remember
The strange particular drumbeat
Of a Junkers, or Vee-Ones, or summer
So fine that it brought all the wasps out
And thus gave a tinge rather special
To youthful ambitions in those years,
Let’s hope there won’t be such a mustering
Of heavy battalions of nightmares
Lining up on parade at the recall
To arms for the next Peace with Honour
That, by the time that one’s been swatted,
There’ll be nobody left to remember."

Links. Guardian Obituary for Elizabeth Jennings

         Paul Mason recites Forty Years Backwards March  (Youtube ) 

Johannes Bobrowski

                             

                                      Johannes Bobrowski - 'My dark has already come '
                                           
                                   

                                 

                                                  Image courtesy of Wikipedia-German troops crossing Soviet border 1941

                Johannes Bobrowski ( 1917- 1965)  served in the German army from 1940- 1945, and was a Soviet Prisoner of War from 1945- 1949, and then settled in the Russian zone which eventually became the DDR.   A large amount of his  work that  is available in English seems strangely impersonal, centred around a bleak but strikingly beautiful natural world.


                                     Place of Fire


                                      We saw that sky, Blackness
                                      moved on the water, the fires
                                      beat, darkness with trembling
                                      lights stepped forward in front
                                      of the wood on the bank, in animal hide,
                                      We heard
                                      the mouths in the foilage.

                                      That sky stood
                                      unmoved. And was made
                                      of storms and tore us forward,
                                      screaming we saw the earth
                                      ascending with fields and rivers,
                                      forest, the flying fires
                                      benumbed.
                             
The poet is a hopeless and helpless presence in a  tumultuous landscape.

References to his own experiences as a soldier and/prisoner of war intrude occasionally.

                       " I began to write near Lake Ilmen in 1941, about the Russian landscape, but as a foreigner, a German. This became a theme, something like this; the Germans and the European East-because I grew up around the river Memel, where Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and Germans, lived together, and among them all the Jews. ..."

                         Introduction to ' Shadowlands. (anthology from 1966)  page 16

The Memel region was German territory before the Treaty of Versailles, where it was placed under international control,only to be taken by Lithuania, then annexed to Germany in 1939.  Through his poetry, Bobrowski was to evoke the region of Europe as 'Sarmatia,' which he counted as being East Prussia, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, though sometimes stretched into western Russia.  In a long poem from 1952 'Pruzzische Elegie', Bobrowski added a note stating that this work "calls to memory the people of Pruzze ( Old Prussia) exterminated by the Teutonic Order", the Germanic knights who began military campaigns against north European pagans as from the  13th century.


                                         One poem  where humans activity is a central theme is 'Kaunas 1941' commemorating the killing of Jews by pro-German Lithuanian nationalists, who murdered their victims with  iron bars and shovels whilst their supporters cheered them on. The style even then seems understated compared with  the horror of the event.


                                       Kaunas 1941

                                                        
                                                                         " Noisily
                                      the murderers pass the gate.we walk
                                      softly, in musty air, in the tracks of wolves.
                                       At evening we looked out
                                      over a stony valley. The hawk
                                      swept round the broad dome
                                      We saw the old town, house after house
                                      running down to the river.

                                 
                                     Will you walk over
                                     the hill? The grey processions
                                     -old men and sometimes boys-
                                    die there. They walk up the slope ahead of the slavering wolves."


                             If Bobrowski is a serving soldier and observer, he reports the scene with a distinct detachment,at one point asking the question "Did my eyes avoid yours brother" The poem ends with the cryptic line 'My dark has already come' .  Perhaps Bobrowski's work has been neglected in Britain as so many people wish to read war poetry as some  sort of historical eye witness account. Bobrowski comes over as an invader and intruder in his mythical 'Sarmatia' . He wrote from the view of an enemy soldier, and later as a Christian viewing the crushing of a heathen culture.



 Johannes Bobrowski's  work was read in both the DDR and in West Germany. Bobrowski avoided politics, and did not clash with the DDR authorities like his contemporary Peter Huchel. Bobrowski also avoided social comment and political polemic, unlike his fellow DDR citizen, Brecht.
                     

Perhaps a favourite Bobrowski poem of mine is Lake Ilmen 1941, with its hints that the landscape of 'Sarmatia' will triumph over the Teutonic invaders.


                                                  Lake Ilmen 1941

                                              " -Days of the lake. Of light
                                                A track in the grass
                                                the white tower stands
                                                like a gravestone.
                                                deserted by the dead
                                                The broken roof
                                                in the caw of crows
                                               Nights of the lake.The forest
                                               falls into the marshes
                                               The Old Wolf
                                               far from the burnt out site
                                               startled by a phantom,
                                               Years of the lake.The armoured
                                               flood. The climbing darkness
                                               of the waters. One day
                                               it will strike
                                               the storming  birds from the sky."

                                             

                                         

                                   
                             




Further reading On Line

Cutbank Journal  Montana University review of Bobrowski 's poetry , 1980

Writers No One Reads blog feature on Bobrowski

Literator South African literature blog  Fascinating article about Bobrowski's poetry, Jewish Suffering, and how this issue was treated by the DDR.


Books

'Shadowlands' -excellent anthology of Bobrowski's work introduced by poet Michael Hamburger, poems translated by Ruth and Mathew Mead , first appeared in 1966, but has been reprinted several times.

A volume of Bobrowski's poetry in English appeared in the Penguin Modern Poets series of 1971.

'Between Sarmatia and Socialism -The Life and Works of Johannes Bobrowski' by John Wiezerock
1999, ( A lot of the poetry quoted is not translated from the original German).


 Michael Hamburger  East German Poetry (1970)

Choked Sunset Glow- the poetry of Peter Huchel

                                          Peter Huchel ( 1903- 1981) 

                               

                                       
                                          Photo : Operation Barbarossa, March 1942, from German Federal 
                                                       Archive, in public domain via Wiki-media Commons

                                       

                                       

                        World War 2 poetry from Germany has been requested, and as there seems to be a revival of interest in the former DDR ,I  have been looking at the work of  Peter Huchel and Johannes Bobrowski. Bertold Brecht is probably the most famous DDR poet, and could well be the subject of another blog post.  (Brecht has the honour of writing one of my favourite ever poems How Fortunate the Man With None ),

British interest in the work of both poets developed in the 1960's and early 1970's, mainly through the dedication shown by poet-translators such as Michael Hamburger and Mathew and Ruth Meads, yet seems to have stalled.

                                                            
                                                  Roads

                                        Choked sunset glow
                                        Of crashing time
                                        Roads.Roads.
                                        Interesections of flight.
                                        Chart tracks across the ploughed fields
                                        That with the eyes of killed horses
                                        Saw the sky in flames.


                                       Nights with lungs full of smoke,
                                       With the hard breath of the fleeing
                                       When shots
                                       Struck the dusk
                                       Out of a broken gate
                                       Ash and wind came without a sound,
                                       A fire
                                       That sullenly chewed the darkness.

                                      Corpses,
                                      Flung over the rail tracks,
                                      Their stifled cry
                                      Like a stone on the palate.
                                      A black
                                      Humming cloth of flies
                                      Closed their wounds.

     Translation of Peter Huchel poem by Michael Hamburger from 'East German Poetry' (1970)



                                   Peter Huchel was born in Berlin in 1903 and educated at Berlin Freiburg and Vienna universities. According to his entry in 'Poemhunter.com' , Huchel travelled in different European countries, and published poetry from 1931- 1936 that was inspired by the landscape of  Brandenburg. Other on line sources maintain that  his first poetry collection was published then quickly withdrawn in 1932. Huchel was conscripted into the German Army in 1940- 1945  and fought on the Eastern Front, being captured in 1945 and held as a Prisoner of War. It is difficult to  find exact dates but by 1949 Huchel was in East Berlin, started broadcasting on radio, and also began editing a magazine 'Sinn und Form'  ('Sense and Form' ) . With the establishment of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Huchel's career prospects went into reverse and he lost the editorship ; The magazine needed to give priority to the work of pro-Soviet poets.  Living in Stasi enforced isolation, Huchel was finally allowed to leave the DDR in 1971. After spending time in Rome, he settled in West Germany, dying in 1981.

                                              'Psalm'

                                             "The desert now will be history
                                             Termites with their pincers
                                             Write it
                                             On sand
                                             And no one will enquire
                                             Into a species
                                             Eagerly bent
                                             On self-extinction ."
                                            translated by Michael Hamburger from East German Poetry (1970)

                                    Another poet from the DDR was Johannes Bobrowski (1903-1965), who also fought on the Eastern Front and spent several years as a Soviet prisoner of war. A few months before his, death Bobrowski was asked in an interview conducted in East Berlin, which poet has inspired him the most. He replied
" Peter Huchel of course. I first read (a) poem of his in Soviet prison camp in a newspaper, and it impressed me immensely." ( Quote taken from Rich Ives 1980 article)
I have not  quite worked out whether Huchel was being published in a prison camp magazine as both men were Prisoners of War at roughly the same time. Peter Huchel was later to publish five Bobrowski poems in 'Sinn und  Form' in 1957.  Both poets work contained elements of 'Natursprache' - defined by the critic Nicolas Yuille as being the concept that "nature objects are part of language system that refers to a higher order."

One of my personal favourites  Peter Huchel 's poems is 'The Pastor Reports on the Downfall of His Parish' , in which  Christian eschatology undergoes a meltdown due to the ferocious impact of war. The whole notion of Christ is demolished and the verse ends ominously "Here was no Law. My day had been to brief to recognise God."

'The Pastor Reports on the Downfall of His Parish'

"It was not the fall of hell:
As if pelted by stones in a vast fury
That melted even dust, bones and skulls
And, at one with the startled light, Christ's head,
Broke from the wood.
The squadrons wheeled threateningly.
Through the red sky they flew off
As if they were slashing the arteries of the noon.
I saw it smouldering, devouring , burning-
And graves, even graves, were churned up.
Here was no Law. My day had been too brief.
To recognise God."

From 'The Pastor Reports on the Downfall of His Parish'
translated by Michael Hamburger from East German Poetry (1970)

                                         Memorial plaque to Peter Huchel, Berlin-Wilemersdorf
                                        Courtesy Wikimedia Commons 



FURTHER READING

 Rich Ives  Johannes Bobrowski Poetry from East Germany CutBank journal Spring 1980
 
 Michael Hamburger  East German Poetry (1970)

 Nicolas Yuille   Visionary Poetry in the German Dictatorships (1978)


UPDATE

Currently working on Bleak Chesney Wold   Charles Dickens/ 'dark' Victoriana blog 

Two Laments for Cologne 30th May 1942 -First Thousand Bomber Raid

                 Cologne 30th May 1942  -Thousand Bomber Raid 
                                             Mary E. Harrison/Vera Brittain

               

                                         The National Archives UK (Mass bomber raid on Cologne)-artist unknown

          On the night of 30th May 1942/31st May 1942 the first of Bomber Command's Thousand Bomber Raids was directed against Cologne.  Found two poems related to the attack, both by British women. 


Mary E. Harrison 


 As a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force ( WAAF) and an artist, Mary E. Harrison made a model of Cologne that was used in the planning of the raid of 30th May/31st May 1942. She was horrified to see photographs of the results of the bombing, which inspired her poem 'My Hands'

The poem was published in two Oasis Salamander Trust anthologies,  'More Poems of the Second World War ;the Oasis Selection''. (1989), also in 'The Voice of War' Poems of the Second World War ' (1995) . Then again in  'Shadows of War- British Women's Poetry of the Second World War' edited by Anne Powell, ( 1999). Not clear when it was first written or published. 

The biographical information on Mary in the 1995 'Oasis' anthology advised that she trained as a model maker at RAF Nuneham Courtney, Oxfordshire, and posted to Allied Central Interpretation Unit (Photographic Intelligence) RAF Medmenham , Bucks. 'My Hands' is the only poem that I have found by her in print, or referenced on line.

The poem's strength is the way that  forged connections between an artist's model and  reality. There is no attempt to talk about war in oblique detached terms. 



My Hands

" Do you know what it is like to have death in your hands?
When you haven't a murderer's mind?
Do you know how it feels when you could be the cause
Of a child being blind?.
How many people have died through me
From the skill in my finger tips?
For I fashion the clay and portray the landscape
As the fliers are briefed for their trips."

I have reproduced the first verse, a longer extract can be found on the Oasis Trust Website



Vera Brittain  

Vera Brittain was a pacifist  during World War 2, and leading member of the Peace Pledge Union. Though more famous for her writing relating to World War 1, Vera wrote extensively about World War 2 as well. 



Lament for Cologne 

"You stood so proudly on the flowing Rhine,
Your history mankind's, your climbing spires
Crowned with the living light that man desires
To gild his path from bestial to divine
Today, consumed by war's unpitying fires,
You lie in ruins,weeping for your dead
Your shattered monuments the funeral pyres

Perhaps, when passions die and slaughters cease
The mothers on whose homes destruction fell,
Who waiting sought their children through the hell
Of London, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, 
Will seek Cologne's sad women, unafraid
And cry's God's cause is ours. Let there be peace.! " 

Reproduced by kind permission of Mark Bostridge and T.J. Brittain-Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970.

The poem was re-published in Vera's 'Seed of Chaos' (1944) ,but  originally published in 'The Friend' magazine on 19th June 1942. 'Seeds of Chaos' contained a  survey of Allied attacks on German cities. Vera stated that  Cologne had been subjected to repeated raids as from 30th May 1942 and by the time of writing the devastation of this  city was the equivalent of 'seventeen Coventries ' ; a reference to the notorious Coventry air raid of the 14th November 1940. In her memoir of 1925- 1950, 'Testament of Experience' ( 1957),, Vera claimed that  "news bulletins, boasted that 70,000 were killed or injured " during the 30th May 1942 night raid on Cologne : RAF figures mention 500 dead, with 5,000 injured. 

I am fascinated, and sometimes exasperated, by the writing of Vera Brittain and other pacifists of World War 2. The hopeless naivete, , the endless call for 'negotiations' with Germany when Appeasement had clearly failed, and their  lack of any coherent tactics to oppose Nazism. Moreover, I totally understand criticism  that the deaths incurred during the raid on Cologne 30th May 1942 are not extensive  compared with the millions of casualties incurred during the Eastern Front, the Holocaust. the Japanese invasion of China, the vast numbers of Polish slave labourers worked to death by the Germans, the hundreds of thousands of victims of the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustasha let loose in Yugoslavia, and more. 

 I can even see the objection that George Orwell and also some 'absolutist' pacifists had, albeit from opposing viewpoints, that Vera and the Bombing Restriction Committee were somehow trying to 'humanize' war via campaigning against the 'saturation' bombing of cities. 

But it's hard to remain aloof when Vera connects Cologne with other bombed cities of Europe. Her poem was drawing on the notion that there is something essential about all human experience during a bombing raid. That there's still a human price to pay in fighting even a 'just' war. Poetry is an obvious vehicle to remind one of this fact. Most of all, a writer of Vera's standing, publishing a statement lamenting the German losses that resulted from RAF bombing, was a courageous act in 1942. 


'Seed of Chaos' was reprinted along with 'Humiliation of Honour' under the title 'One Voice-Pacifist Writings from the Second World War' -Vera Brittain, with a foreword by Shirley Williams. ( Continuum, 2005) 

An alternative view : George Orwell v, Vera Brittain

George Orwell was highly critical of 'Seed of Chaos' . 

 " Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of 'limiting' or 'humanizing' (sic) war is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bother to examine catchwords. "

Tribune 19th May 1944.

The George Orwell v. Vera Brittain disagreement re-emerged in recent years, with an accusation that Vera falsely claimed that George Orwell changed his views on civilian bombing  in her book 'Testament of Experience' , which was  published well after Orwell's death in 1950.  The Orwell Society website  below links to a piece 'Vera Brittain v. George Orwell' by Richard Westwood , from February 12th 2012. 

Orwell Society



UPDATE

This blog remains on line as long as people care to visit it. Hopefully it has made a contribution towards getting World War 2 poetry noticed. 

I am currently working on a new blog Bleak Chesney Wold  concerning Charles Dickens & 'dark' Victoriana 

Latest News May 2017 and some thoughts on Keidrych Rhys

                            Latest news 

                                            Image: Nijmegen, kerkhof Graafseweg, monument vergissingsbombardement 
                                          ( to commemorate the casualties from the Allied bombardment of  22nd February 1943)
                                           With thanks to Wikipedia commons 







The Great War at Sea Poetry 'Weebly' website has now closed. Thank you to everyone who has offered support over the last three years.  Posts from the website have been archived at
Worldwarpoetry.com

Have been very pleased to publish 'The World is a Broken Place' parts 1 & 2 ', interview with Professor John Guzlowski , and his writing about his parents' experience as Polish slave labourers during World War 2 and the family's subsequent lives as 'Polack' immigrants to the US. His last collection of poetry and short prose 'Echoes of Tattered Tongues' has already been reviewed on this blog a few weeks ago.
Full interview is also to be found at  worldwarpoetry.com

I have written an article about the poetry of the North African campaign 1940-1943 which the Second World War Experience Centre (SSWEC)  are considering publishing in their magazine 'Everyone's War'- and on line-  later this year,  Their website can be found here. SWWEC.

  

                                                        Keidrych Rees         

                                           

                                 

                                         

                                                     image courtesy of the National Gallery 
                                                     Photo of Kedrych Rhys taken in 1943.

                                                               

Currently reading Keidrych Rhys  'The Van Pool : Collected Poems'  edited by Charles Mundye, published by Seren, 2012. Extremely helpful in supplying biographical information and also great to have a definitive collection of Rhys' work. 

                             "Worse than branched antlers in the blood stream
                             Worse than the tapping pain of madness in the veins
                             For grieving mother's is her boy's death
                             In the smoke -plumed spinning reaches of smooth air."
                         
                             'Lament '

This collection reprints the whole of the original book ' The Van Pool and Other Poems' that was first published in 1942. Further poems are added, along with translations from Welsh that  Keidrych Rhys  worked on. 

 Keidrych Rhys ( 1915- 1987)  was born William Ronald Rees Jones, and took the name Keidrych Rhys in 1940. He served in the London Welsh Regiment as an anti-aircraft gunner after being called up in 1940, and was stationed in Kent during the Battle of Britain, later in Suffolk, and also at Scapa Flow.  In 1943, Rhys was invalided out of the army after a spell at Northfield Hospital , near Birmingham, which specialised in treating psychiatric conditions.

Rhys was married to the poet Lynette Roberts from 1939- 1949.  He edited the magazine 'Wales'  from 1937- 1949, a publication crucial to the development of 'Anglo-Welsh' culture though there was a three year intermission due to the War from 1940-1943.:

"No, I'm not an Englishman with a partisan religion
My root lie in another region
Though ranged alongside yours' "

-'Tragic Guilt'

His contribution to World War 2 poetry is immense, Keidrych Rees edited an anthology titled ' Poems from the Forces' in 1941, and its successor ' More Poems From The Forces -A Collection of Verses By Serving Members of the Navy, Army and Air Force' published in 1943 .This anthology included some of Keith Douglas' earlier work (before the 'War in the Desert' poetry) , and also featured work by Alun Lewis and Gavin Ewart.  By contrast to World War 1, it seemed that war poetry anthologies were slow to emerge in World War 2. 1943 also saw the publication of the classic anthology 'Oasis -The Middle East Anthology of Poetry from the Forces' ,a Cairo based initiative. 



Death of a Hurricane Pilot 

"But
Too late; the Pilot dead inside
An RAF officer soon came but interrogated nothing,
More concerned with the marvellous stress of aluminium 
Gee what stress they take-wizard workmanship"


- 'Death of a Hurricane Pilot'


The Poem 'Death of a Hurricane Pilot ' is perhaps the most famous poem that Rhys wrote. Marking the death of a Belgian pilot Roger Emile d' Cannart  D'Hamale  fighting for Britain in the , 46 Sqdn, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, shot down over Kent on 1st November 1940 . He subsequently was re-buried at the Brussels Town Cemetery Belgian Airmen's Field of Honour.  Rhys' poem depicts a scene of indifference to the fate of the dead pilot. An RAF official is more interested on the crash landing's impact on the plane's wreckage. The behaviour of the rest of the crowd is worse.
 "Children, ghastly souvenir hunters, forty yards away, kick the skull."



Keidrych Rhys was friends  with some of  the literary luminaries of the time.  Dylan Thomas was his best man, borrowed a suit from fellow poet Vernon Watkins for the occasion. Rhys also managed to maintain a presence  with the Fitzrovia  literary set whilst stationed in Kent, and was therefore ideal to develop what we would now call a network to stimulate the genre of  World War 2 poetry.

But in regard to World War 2 related literature,  he somehow lost momentum . Something made him move away from a role of being a literary advocate for World War 2 poetry. And his work offers us a clue- 'Poem Being Invalided Out Of Army '  -which was  written long after the 'Van Pool'  collection -   refers to " Terrible accusing patterns  "  that seem ingrained to a discharged man's mind, making him belong to a category of

" despised anonymous personalities
admonished by the other half from whose callous sanity
the whole mad recognising world is unanimous in self-redemption."

A  review of Lynette Roberts collected poems by Alan Tucker, written in 2010 , which suggested that Rhys had gone AWOL in 1942. If correct, Keidrych Rhys would be the only other  known World War 2  poet to have absconded besides Vernon Scannell. 

Keidrych Rhys, as a literary editor, went on to promote the work of R.S. Thomas and John Cooper Powys. Along with Lynette Roberts, he encouraged Robert Graves writing of 'The White Goddess' . Three provisional extracts from this book were published in the magazine 'Wales'. 


A longer article about Keidrych Rhys will follow. 

For more information 


http://www.walesartsreview.org/the-van-pool-the-collected-poems-of-keidrych-rhys/

https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/keidrych-rhys-van-pool-collected-poems

http://www.bbm.org.uk/airmen/dHamale.htm

Lynette Roberts 

http://www.flashpointmag.com/tucklyn.htm