Welsh Journals

All his poems are characterised by a quiet intense degree of sensed observance and one immediately becomes aware that their style and form place A.L.R. outside the neo-modern apocalyptic and impressionistic schools of poetry, just as, as a character, he corresponds to little in contemporary trends in individual or mass personality. The difference in his poetry will not, however, give us the difference in the man at least for me it provides no superficial mirror in which I may see the man and character to whose wealth of thought and satire I am accustomed when we meet from time to time on Cornish roads. The detached calm, the melancholy introspection, the baulked striving provide each in their turn the second side to the coin, the sphere of mind and feeling which lies behind his dark or dancing eyes and rifted cascading speech and thought. Within a rather free changeful and unsteady metre this acuteness -of observation in nature and places around him bring gentle outlines persuasively reminiscent cf his objects of study, e.g. Irfley, or All Souls, or the country villages along the line, most of which are intimately known to me. Continually however he seizes (driven by the feeling and awareness of being never wholly where I am or what I would most gladly be") upon his subject to delve into an introspective search for himself, e.g.: If I understood these things That have such power to move, The universe would unfold Its secret heart to me As a sea-flower opens and shuts And slips into the sea." As a corrcllary to this continual effort to get back to a self-introspection there is throughout the volume a noticeable lack of any inner drive or crusading zeal on behalf of humanity or any particular section of it. There is a tendency in people who have striven but been baulked to lose this essential element. It is far from lost in A.L.R. but seems to me to be confined to a leaping in and out amidst a veritable vortex of dancing indirect imaginations. Of more importance than the style is the content of the verse, the Cornish content, evidence of which has usually been utterly and totally lacking in the writings of Cornishmen for generations past. In fact I am not aware of any Cornislunan ever at any time linking in a real effective sense any poetic or artistic creation specifically to Cornwall. Yet Cornwall has every bit as Celtic and un-Saxon a background as Wales and has roughly 1/7th her population. A.L.R. introduces us ever so gently and ever so slightly into the Cornish being. But only when the icil and troubles, the hopes, the endless and heroic attempts and the scanty successes have been written into a thrilled exaltation of a Cornwall once mighty in the truly human and manly sense, will poets born of Cornwall become Cornish poets. Will A.L.R. bend his undoubted talent in this necessary auditor a Cornishman, genuine direction ? Here one arrives at the real importance of this volume. Does it connect A.L.R. with his organic Cornish past ? It is my opinion that in itself it does not. But tak;n with his other works on Cornwall, i.e. contributions to Cornwall, it shows that the pull is in that direction and that the pull is strong. Does it connect him with an organic Cornish future ? Turn to his poem Homecoming to Cornwall In the moment of breathing in my native land I remember to hate the thousand indignities, The little humiliations, the small insults From small people, the hidden enmities, The slights that hurt the sensibilities Of a child that, longing for affection, learned To reward envy with contempt." The whole of the pettiness of a small backbiting Celtic community bore down upon this strange boy who had by his brilliance worked himself clean out of the tradition-filled tight Cornish country background. So that to the great physical suffering that A.L.R. underwent throughout his twenties there was reciprocated little responsive understanding. His political attempts in those years in his home constituency also received the same attitude. All this has bitten keenly deep into A.L.R.'s love for the land in whose earth his forebears have immemorially worked for