‘These troubled hills’: Idris Davies, poet of Gwent
What makes our idea of a place? Gareth Leaman considers the work of the poet Idris Davies from Gwent in the imagining of our corner kingdom
Whether as historic kingdom, modern-day cultural region or literary motif, all conceptions of ‘Gwent’ make clear the centrality of landscape to the cultivation of a society. To trace uses of the term is to tell a story of terrain providing the contours for political boundaries, of the earth providing the ‘raw material’ for an economy based upon its extraction, and of the people dragged into this process producing their own unique culture.
The continued existence of Gwent – that is, of a people coalescing in a land, establishing a name and giving it meaning – is a matter of geographical providence. It owes all its existences to the formation of its natural features: the rivers that flank its east and west, the mountains and sea that bind its north and south, and the minerals beneath its surface.
This tract in the southeastern corner of Wales was naturally demarcated enough for a distinct political territory to form within it. The kingdom that emerged here in the post-Roman void took its name from its administrative centre, Venta Silurum (on the site of modern-day Caerwent), likely meaning ‘market of the Silures’. As Paul Thomas notes, ‘[the] transition from Venta Silurum to Gwent could suggest in the early medieval period Venta Silurum lost its association with wider Siluria and had become, instead, symbolic of a specific territory’. Thus the land is set, its name embedded into history, its etymology a portent of its future meanings: Gwent is a market.
When greed was born
In Monmouthshire,
The hills were torn
For Mammon’s fire
– Gwalia Deserta, IX
The Kingdom of Gwent may not have lived beyond the early medieval period, but its name survived through the centuries, taking on new meanings with the passing of time. It’s in the next great instance of the landscape codifying its politics that ‘Gwent’ takes on its modern cultural connotations.
Among the prehistory that gave Gwent its frame of mountains and waterways, the coal measures formed, awaiting the transmogrification from dead matter into dead labour. The development of the South Wales coalfield drew the wider region – Gwent included – inescapably into the social catastrophe of the industrial revolution, turning the earth inside out and fating the landless peoples in its orbit to ‘[find] themselves dragged into an abyss by what were plainly the forces of hell’, to borrow Eric Hobsbawm’s description of the proletarianisation that the world’s labouring poor were all subsumed into.
Into Wales there came, as Gwyn Alf Williams tells it, ‘intrusive and massively endowed entrepreneurs’ who ‘exploited all the resources and all the people they could get hold of with…irresponsible and single-minded fervour’. This metamorphosis of the land’s constitution into capital turns a region of scattered settlements into the teeming ‘first industrial nation of the World’ at a dizzying pace.
Thus just as this ascendant bourgeoisie drew the wealth out of the land and shipped its goods across the globe, so too did it draw the world in, with workers uprooted from elsewhere gathering to form wholly new communities. Untethered from existing structures and previous ways of life, this malleable underclass became subsumed absolutely into a life of labouring for landowning profiteers.
This transformation of the land, then, made a new people in its own disfigured image. The process of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘reterritorialisation’ is quite literal: the people, like the land, are torn asunder and reconstituted as subjects of globalised capitalism, and so they remain. Gwent, once again, is a market.
Yet in the folds of this new land, these burgeoning, embattled communities also synthesised the capacity for a collective vitality – formed both because of and despite the ‘cruel, unjust and inhuman’ catalyst for their existence. As Daryl Leeworthy notes, ‘the people who moved to South Wales from all over the world had to make a society and culture from scratch’, constructing life-supporting infrastructure ‘in communities that simply did not exist … before the industrial revolution’.
The workers of the world may have little choice in entangling themselves in the lines of flight that capital draws, but there is no passive victimhood among peoples who still have a desire to live fulfilling lives. ‘They owed nothing to the rich except their wages’, Hobsbawm writes, and so ‘What they had in life was their own collective creation’. This is the very essence of class conflict, an inherent property of all working-class communities. It brews a potent, contradictory mix of pride and righteous anger: love for your community, but hatred of that which made it and exerts intolerable pressures upon it. This psychosocial tension is to define the region, and those who name it, in the centuries to come.
I was born in Rhymney
To a miner and his wife–
On a January morning
I was pulled into this Life.
– ‘I Was Born in Rhymney’
It is into this Gwent that the poet Idris Davies is born in 1905, on the frontier of the many declines that define modern Wales. Into a Welsh-speaking household where the prevalence of the language is in (possibly interminable) decline. Into a community that will soon feel the strain of (definitely interminable) deindustrialisation.
His life and work reflect this flux: employment ‘beneath the rocks of Gwent … for seven years among the colliers’, before the aftermath of the 1926 General Strike led his life in a direction reflective of the working-class propensity for (individual and collective) auto-didacticism: ‘the long and lonely | Self-tuition game’ and learning ‘the poet’s language | To ease me of my pain’.
It’s this spirit of self-tuition, of collective improvement from within a culture, rather than reliance upon political patronage from without, that defines Davies’ poetic temperament. Ken Worpole, in writing of his ‘admiration for Davies as a socialist poet’, notes how it’s the embeddedness of his life that draws out the political content of his work, in that:
‘whereas most other writers have always had to write from outside the situation they are describing, and have often tended to too crudely overlay their politics on to the subject matter, Davies wrote from within a specific culture which in itself was working-class and socialist, and consequently the politics had already been woven into the fabric of the communities he was writing about.’
The poetry is in this very authenticity: such work could only be produced from within the culture it describes. Davies documents, with sincerity yet without sentiment, the life and character of industrial South Wales, in all its multitudes and contradictions, and always giving primacy to the landscape that cultivated it. In so doing, he expresses the political injustices that plague this land with a moral clarity unencumbered by literary pretence.
There are many literary Gwents: from Wordsworth’s traversing of the eastern lowlands’ ‘beauteous forms’, the wistful pastoralism of WH Davies, Arthur Machen’s ‘singularly strange vision’, through to Fred Hando’s ‘attempt to interpret the magic of the sequestered places of Gwent’. All, to varying degrees, note the creep of industry across the landscape and the peoples dragged with it. But only Idris Davies fully synthesises such observations into a poetics of Gwent, that captures a society produced – and produced alone – by the dialectic of landscape and capital, not least the only writer to be fully embedded within that life: a true representative of a living culture with the sentience to speak of itself. ‘The clean, sweet mountain air’; the ‘derelict valleys’ and ‘slums by the sea’; the ‘courage and comradeship of men’ and the ’slaves who bled for beer’. These multitudes are contained within a single signifier that pervades these works, that of ‘Gwent’.
Most immediately striking in Davies’ work in this regard is the banal mentioning of ‘Gwent’ in passing, as a matter of geographic fact. Yet it remains inseparable from the economic processes that its land gives way to: it’s the ‘hills and skies’ that house the ‘blighted … valleys’. And thus every invocation of Gwent’s landscape contains the inference of its wreckage: there is no nature beyond the purview of capital, there is no capital without ravaging the resources of the land, and in the midst of this we find the people stuck making a living from the scraps afforded by this reality. And so the motif of natural destruction is not simply deployed as a loose metaphor that explicates the hardships of the people that occupy the landscape, but rather to make clear the tight interlocking of land, capital and labour that produces the society of which Davies writes.
And the landscape of Gwalia stained for all time
By the bloody hands of progress.
– Gwalia Deserta, XXII
Gwent thus becomes symbolic of proletarian culture’s complicated, angst-ridden relationship with the landscape. Affection for the region’s aesthetic beauty permeates Davies’ work, yet his community is intertwined with – responsible for in immediate terms, even – the economic production that brings about its devastation.
For James Prothero, Davies is a poet whose work demonstrates an anxiety regarding ‘the degree to which the society and culture of Wales and Britain in general deny that beauty and degenerate in an industrial, selfish and inhumane capitalism.’ In highlighting this we see a refusal to indulge an idealised vision of ‘nature’ that suppresses its inseparability from industrialisation, always reminding us that, as Raymond Williams writes, ‘We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out.’
This produces an acute inner turmoil, in that Davies belongs to a culture whose only reason for being is to bring about the destruction of the land in which they’ve made their home. Such a thought imbues his work with a deep bitterness towards his land and people that can only come from a desire to see the betterment of both: just as the land is ‘ransacked and marred for ever’, so too are the people diminished by the limitations that a life of labour places upon them.
Thus the more his work is tied to the specificity of a place and the portraiture of its people, the more it highlights how fragile the relationship between people and place really is. There is a constant feeling of transience that is always part of the worker’s psyche: that you only ‘belong’ where the currents of capital deposit you. Capitalists in need of labour to extract wealth from their earth find a landless people in search of work: so goes the formation of a ‘working-class landscape’. We sense this resentment, this conflict of the collective unconscious, this psychosis of wanting rid of a place’s hardships but being wholly dependent on it for the anchoring of identity and meaning, all within Davies’ work.
Davies’ poetry draws out the insoluble tension between land, labour and capital, focusing on the culture that is inadvertently produced in such a conflict. In so doing he develops a politically-cogent sense of the pastoral: encompassing man’s relation to nature, its place on the land, and the political forces that mediate these relationships.
These dynamics are, ultimately, historical processes: to be conscious of the landscape and its political domination is to acknowledge the gradual transformation of nature over time, concurrent with the development of society and culture. ‘In the course of the historical transformation of Nature’, Marcuse writes, ‘it becomes part of the human world, and to this extent, the qualities of Nature are historical qualities’. In Davies’ work, a conception of Gwent, as a geographical and cultural marker that transcends any one particular epoch, becomes the means through which he can historicise nature and make explicit its contemporary subjugation by industrial society. It’s through this that Gwent, as a signifier of this process, provides the context for a lucid articulation of the political pressures and injustices in which he and his poetry are immersed.
Gareth Leaman is a writer from Newport. His work has appeared in Planet, New Socialist, Tribune and elsewhere.