I was born in Rhymney
To a miner and his wife –
On a January morning
I was pulled into this Life.
.
Among Anglicans and Baptists
And Methodists I grew,
And my childhood had to chew and chance
The creed of such a crew.
.
I went to church and chapel
Ere I could understand
That Apollo rules the heavens
And Mammon rules the land.
.
And I woke on many mornings
In a little oblong room,
And saw the frown of Spurgeon:
‘Beware, my boy, of doom.’
.
And there was the family Bible
Beneath a vase of flowers,
With pictures of the Holy Land
That enchanted me for hours.
.
And there was my Uncle Edward,
Solemn and stern and grey,
A Calvinistic Methodist
Who made me kneel and pray.
.
He would carry me on his shoulders
When I was six or seven
And tell me of the golden days
When chariots flew to heaven.
.
He was furious against Pharaoh
And scornful about Eve,
But his pathos about Joseph
Could always make me grieve.
.
He knew the tribes and custom
And the apt geography
Of Jerusalem and Jericho
And the hills of Galilee.
.
And Moses was his hero
And Jehovah was his God.
And his stories were as magical
As Aaron’s magic rod.
.
But sometimes from the Bible
He would turn to politics
And tell of Gladstone’s glory
And Disraeli’s little tricks.
.
But even William Ewart Gladstone
Of beloved memory
Would fade and be forgotten
When it came to D.L.G.
.
The little Celt from Criccieth,
The Liberal on fire,
He was the modern Merlin
And Moses and Isaiah!
.
The ghost of Uncle Edward
In a solemn bowler hat,
Does it haunt the plains of Moab
Or the slopes of Ararat?
.
Or lurks it in the Gateway,
Where Peter holds the key,
To welcome on the harp strings
The ghost of D. L. G.
.
I lost my native language
For the one the Saxon spake
By going to school by order
For education’s sake.
.
I learnt the use of decimals,
And where to place the dot,
Four or five lines from Shakespeare
And twelve from Walter Scott.
.
I learnt a little grammar,
And some geography,
Was frightened of perspective,
And detested poetry.
.
In a land of narrow valleys,
And solemn Sabbath Days,
And collieries and choirs,
I learnt my people’s ways.
.
I looked on local deacons
With not a little awe,
I waved a penny Union Jack
When Asquith went to war.
.
I pinned my faith in Kitchener
And later in Haig and Foch,
And pitied little Belgium
And cursed the bloody Boche.
.
We warred along the hillsides
And volleyed sticks and stones,
And sometimes smashed the windows
Of Mrs Hughes and Jones.
.
We stood in queues for apples,
For paraffin, and jam,
And were told to spit on Lenin,
And honour Uncle Sam.
.
But often in the evenings
When all the stars were out
We played beneath the lamp-post
And did not stop to doubt
.
That the world was made for children
Early on Christmas Day
By a jolly old whiskered Josser
In a mansion far away.
.
And there were the hours for Chaplin,
Pearl White, and Buffalo Bill,
And the hours for nests and whinberries
High on the summer hill.
.
And O the hour of lilac
And a leopard in the sky,
And the heart of childhood singing
A song that cannot die!
.
I learnt of Saul and Jesus
In the little Sunday School,
And later learnt to muse and doubt
By some lonely mountain pool.
.
I saw that creeds could comfort
And hypocrisy console
But in my blood were battles
No Bible could control.
.
And I praised the unknown Artist
Of crag and fern and stream
For the sunshine on the mountains
And the wonder of a dream.
.
On one February morning,
Unwillingly I went
To crawl in moleskin trousers
Beneath the rocks of Gwent.
.
And a chubby little collier
Grew fat on sweat and dust,
And listened to heated arguments
On God and Marx and lust.
.
For seven years among the colliers
I learnt to laugh and curse,
When times were fairly prosperous
And when they were ten times worse.
.
And I loved and loved the mountains
Against the cloudy sky,
The sidings, and the slag-heaps
That sometimes hurt the eye.
.
MacDonald was my hero,
The man who seemed inspired,
The leader with a vision,
Whose soul could not be hired!
.
I quoted from his speeches
In the coalface to my friends –
But I lived to see him selling
Great dreams for little ends.
.
And there were strikes and lock-outs
And meetings in the Square,
When Cook and Smith and Bevan
Electrified the air.
.
But the greatest of our battles
We lost in ’26
Through treachery and lying,
And Baldwin’s box of tricks.
.
I began to read from Shelley
In afternoons in May,
And to muse upon the misery
Of unemployment pay.
.
I stood in queues for hours
Outside the drab Exchange,
With my hands deep in my pockets
In a suit I could not change.
.
I stood before Tribunals
And smothered all my pride,
And bowed to my inferiors,
And raged with my soul outside.
.
And I walked my native hillsides
In sunshine and in rain,
And learnt the poet’s language
To ease me of my pain.
.
With Wordsworth and with Shelley
I scribbled out my dreams,
Sometimes among the slag-heaps,
Sometimes by mountain streams.
.
O I shook hands with Shelley
Among the moonlit fern,
And he smiled, and slowly pointed
To the heart that would not burn.
.
And I discovered Milton
In a shabby little room
Where I spent six summer evenings
In most luxurious gloom.
.
I met Macbeth and Lear,
And Falstaff full of wine,
And I went one day to Stratford
To tread on ground divine.
.
And I toiled through dismal evenings
With algebraical signs,
With Euclid and Pythagoras
And all their points and lines.
.
Sometimes there came triumph
But sometimes came despair,
And I would fling all books aside
And drink the midnight air.
.
And there were dark and bitter mornings
When the streets like coffins lay
Between the winter mountains,
Long and bleak and grey.
.
But season followed season
And beauty never died
And there were days and hours
Of hope and faith and pride.
.
In springtime I went roaming
Along the Severn Sea,
Rejoicing in the tempest
And its savage ecstasy.
.
And there were summer evenings
By Taf, and Usk, and Wye,
When the land was bright with colour
Beneath a quiet sky.
.
But always home to Rhymney
From wandering I came,
Back to the long and lonely
Self-tuition game,
.
Back to Euclid’s problems,
And algebraical signs,
And the route of trade and commerce,
And Caesar’s battle line,
.
Back to the lonely evenings
Of triumph and despair
In a little room in Rhymney
With a hint of mountain air.
.
O days I shall remember
Until I drop and die! –
Youth’s bitter sweet progression
Beneath a Rhymney sky.
.
At last I went to college,
To the city on the Trent,
In the land of D. H. Lawrence
And his savage Testament.
.
And history and poetry
Filled all my days and nights,
And in the streets of Nottingham
I harnessed my delights.
.
I loved the leafy villages
Along the winding Trent,
And sometimes sighed at sunset
For the darker hills of Gwent.
.
And the churches of East Anglia
Delighted heart and eye,
The little steepled churches
Against the boundless sky.
.
And lecture followed lecture
in the college by the lake,
And some were sweet to swallow
And some were hard to take.
.
I read from Keats and Lawrence,
And Eliot, Shaw, and Yeats,
And the ‘History of Europe
With diagrams and dates’.
.
I went to Sherwood Forest
To look for Robin Hood,
But little tawdry villas
Were where the oaks once stood.
.
And I heard the ghost of Lawrence
Raging in the night
Against the thumbs of Progress
That botched the land with blight.
.
And season followed season
And beauty never died,
And I left the land of Trent again
To roam by Rhymney’s side,
.
By the narrow Rhymney River
That erratically flows
Among the furnace ruins
Where the sullen thistle blows.
.
Then I tried for posts in Yorkshire,
In Staffordshire and Kent,
For hopeless was the striving
For any post in Gwent.
.
I wrote out testimonials
Till my hands began to cry
That the world was full of jackals
And beasts of smaller fry.
.
At last, at last, in London,
On one November day,
I began to earn my living,
To weave my words for pay.
.
At last I walked in London,
In park and square and street,
In bright and shady London
Where all the nations meet.
.
At last I lived in London
And saw the sun go down
Behind the mists of Richmond
And the smoke of Camden Town.
.
I watched the Kings of England
Go riding with his queen,
I watched the cats steal sausage
From stalls in Bethnal Green.
.
I tried the air of Hampstead,
I tried the brew of Bow,
I tried the cake of Kensington
And the supper of Soho.
.
I rode in trams and taxis
And tried the social round
And hurried home to Highgate
On the London Underground.
.
In little rooms in London
The poetry of Yeats
Was my fire and my fountain –
And the fury of my mates.
.
I found cherries in Jane Austen
And grapes in Hemingway,
And truth more strange than fiction
In the streets of Holloway.
.
And da Vinci and El Greco
And Turner and Cézanne,
They proved to me the splendour
And divinity of man.
.
I gazed at stones from Hellas,
And heard imagined trees
Echo across the ages
The words of Sophocles.
.
And often of a Sunday
I hailed the highest art,
The cataracts and gardens
Of Wagner and Mozart.
.
I studied Marx and Engels,
And put Berkeley’s theme aside,
And listened to the orators
Who yelled and cooed and cried
.
O the orators, the orators,
On boxes in the parks,
They judge the Day of Judgement
And award Jehovah marks.
.
O the orators, the orators,
When shall their voices die?
When London is a soap-box
With its bottom to the sky.
.
In many a public library
I watched the strong men sleep,
And virgins reading volumes
Which made their blushes deep.
.
Sometimes I watched the Commons
From the narrow galleries,
My left eye on the Premier,
My right on the Welsh MPs.
.
In Christopher Wren’s Cathedral
I heard Dean Inge lament
The lack of care in breeding
From Caithness down to Kent.
.
And once in the ancient Abbey
I heard Thomas Hardy sigh:
‘O why must a Wessex pagan
Here uneasily lie?’
.
To Castle Street Baptist Chapel
Like the prodigal son I went
To hear the hymns of childhood
And dream of a boy in Gwent,
.
To dream of far-off Sundays
When for me the sun would shine
On the broken hills of Rhymney
And the palms of Palestine.
.
With Tory and with Communist,
With atheist and priest,
I talked and laughed and quarrelled
Till light lit up the east.
.
The colonel and his nonsense,
The busman and his cheek,
I liked them all in London
For seven days a week.
.
O sometimes I was merry
In Bloomsbury and Kew,
When fools denied their folly
And swore that pink was blue.
.
And sometimes I lounged sadly
By the River in the night
And watched a body diving
And passed out of sight.
.
When the stars were over London
And lights lit up the Town,
I banished melancholy
And kept the critic down.
.
When the moon was bright on Eros
And the cars went round and round,
The whore arrived from Babylon
By the London Underground.
.
O I stood in Piccadilly
And sat in Leicester Square,
And mused on satin and sewerage
And lice and laissez-faire.
.
I saw some royal weddings
And a Silver Jubilee,
And a coloured Coronation,
And a King who crossed the sea.
.
In springtime to the shires
I went happy and alone,
And entered great cathedrals
To worship glass and stone.
.
I had holidays in Eire
Where the angels drink and dance,
And with a Tam from Ayrshire
I roamed the South of France.
.
For week-ends in the winter
When cash was pretty free,
I went to stay in Hastings
To argue by the sea.
.
For Sussex in the winter
Was dearer to me
Than Sussex full of trippers
Beside the summer sea.
.
In the wreck of Epping Forest
I listened as I lay
To the language of the Ghetto
Behind a hedge of May
.
And in the outer suburbs
I heard in the evening rain
The cry of Freud the prophet
On love and guilt and pain.
.
And on the roads arterial,
When London died away,
The poets of the Thirties
Were singing of decay.
.
I saw the placards screaming
About Hitler and his crimes,
Especially on Saturdays –
That happened many times.
.
And I saw folk digging trenches
In 1938,
In the dismal autumn drizzle
When all things seemed too late.
.
And Chamberlain went to Munich,
An umbrella at his side,
And London lost her laughter
And almost lost her pride.
.
I saw the crowds parading
And heard the angry cries
Around the dusty monuments
That gazed with frozen eyes.
.
The lands were full of fear,
And Hitler full of scorn,
And London full of critics
Whose nerves were badly torn.
.
And crisis followed crisis
Until at last the line
Of battle roared to fire
in 1939.
.
And then evacuation,
And London under fire,
And London in the distance,
The city of desire.
.
And the world is black with battle
in 1943,
And the hymn of hate triumphant
And loud from sea to sea.
.
And in this time of tumult
I can only hope and cry
That season shall follow season
And beauty shall not die.
.
.
By Idris Davies
(6 January 1905 – 6 April 1953)
Rambling At The Bridge Head 