Houdinis of the Strict-Metres: The Poetry of Twm Morys and Emyr Lewis - Critical Essay

Literary Review, Wntr, 2001 by Sioned Puw Rowlands

The opening of this poem is particularly unsatisfactory: `Roedd o fel angel penfelyn--wedi / Mynd i regi a mwynder hogyn, / Gyda ser o lygaid syn / Nes o'n i isio cydio mhob cudyn.' (He was like a golden-haired angel--gone / to swear mild like a boy / With stunned star eyes / 'Til I longed to grasp each lock and strand.)

After all, a line must be drawn somewhere between a lively oral language and lame debased speech. And here is more of it: `Duwcs, gad i'r hen dacsi--fynd yn wag, / Daw hi'n ol gyda hyn, yli' (Goodness, let the taxi--go empty /It'll be back soon, you'll see). It must be asked whether the poet is being serious. I don't think either that a list of `toddeidiau,' one after the other, properly belongs to the `Cerdd Dafod' system.

This is Emrys Edwards's critical response to `Y Mor' (The Sea) by Twm Morys--an awdl(1) entered for the `Chair' competition at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Bro Colwyn, 1995. Not that this is in any way surprising. Cerdd Dafod, or the strict-metre tradition of The Twenty-four Metres in Welsh poetry, is infamous for controversy.

Indeed, the popular weekly radio programme Talwrn y Beirdd, devoted to competing teams of poets, translates as `Bards' Cockpit'--a rather strange notion for literature after the Middle Ages, as if it were still bound to a dialectical progression in two simple parts, the one pitted against the other, until the battle is won, and preparation for the next war begins. How does a literary activity like this manage to sit comfortably with a society which is post-structural and postmodern, where the buzz words are flux and multiple viewpoints? Or put differently, and grossly simplified, how could we still be writing Bach chorales after Schoenberg?

Twm Morys and Emyr Lewis are two poets who prove that first of all, we are not. And secondly, that Bach is fundamental to Schoenberg, as Schoenberg is to Michael Nyman. Or that the cywyddau(2) of Dafydd ap Gwilym are fundamental to R. Williams Parry, as R. Williams Parry is to Morys and Lewis.

Both writers are youngish--in their late thirties/early forties--and both belong to the peripatetic tradition of performing their poetry in pubs and other venues up and down the country. Twm Morys also performs his poetry to music, with his folk-rock group Bob Delyn a'r Ebillion.

The tradition of performing poetry, in particular, cynghanedd or the strict metres, is nothing new of course. Performance has always been integral to the construction of these metres. Indeed, the serial repetition of consonants in precise relationship to the main accents in a line, together with the use of internal rhymes, formed a type of aide-memoire for the poets before the time of printing. It is no surprise therefore, in an age so susceptible to personal performances via multimedia, television and radio, that strict-metre poetry regained its popularity in the 1990s--to the extent that some critics have been prompted to talk of a second renaissance.

Jerry Hunter, in his survey of contemporary Welsh poetry between 1969 and 1996 in A Guide to Welsh Literature c. 1900-1996 (ed. Dafydd Johnston), also notes how the two volumes of Cywyddau Cyhoeddus (`Public Cywyddau') published in the 1990s, reflect the fact that the new wave of strict-metre poets are committed to taking their work directly to their audiences, in a variety of venues. Not that there has ever been a break in the tradition from the sixth to the twenty-first century (apart from a brief hiatus at the end of the seventeenth century).

It is no less a coincidence that cynghanedd and the strict metres developed out of Welsh literature as opposed, say, to English literature. Not only is Welsh an accented language, but mutations are central to its construction. On a practical level, this means that a word can sometimes be written in four different ways, with the change, crucially, happening at the beginning of the word. Take for example the word for dog--ci. A line requiring a nasal mutation would give nghi, a soft mutation gi, whilst an aspirate mutation would give chi--four different possibilities therefore for using the word `dog' in a line of cynghanedd.

So what prompts an outburst such as Emrys Edwards'? Why does he balk at the use of everyday language as if it wasn't deserving enough of poetry? What prevents him from reading `Y Mor' by Twm Morys as a strikingly new way of writing in strict-metres; as an astonishingly fluent marriage between the late twentieth-century and the long continuous tradition of cynghanedd; the exciting presence of history flowing down a telephone line?

   O, tynn fi atat heno'n - yr awyr
   Draw draw dros adfeilion
   Lloegar, dros yr holl eigion,
   Tafla i mi raff hir y ffon ...

   (O, pull me to you tonight through the sky
   over, over the ruins of England, over all the
   ocean, throw me the telephone's long rope ...)

To begin with, given the high complexity of the strict-metre system, there has been an understandable need for it to be noted down as a set of rules. The trouble with this is that rules tend to need new rules in order to be changed--so that writing Cerdd Dafod can sometimes feel like a humble appeal to a board of directors for sanction. Take the example of John Morris Jones in 1924--famous for his zeal for linguistic purity, and one of the three great grammarians of the Welsh language--using a `statute' of 1819 to justify awarding a prize to a poem which had incomplete cynghanedd, only using the system in the second half of its couplets: `The statute which is in force is the decision passed at the 1819 Eisteddfod.' As if the most appropriate use of rhyme, alliteration, and accentuation in each particular case is not up to the individual poet, but to an executive committee.