Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems (19 page)

calandria: a South American mockingbird known for its distinctive song.

See the notes to Part V of
Gods with Stainless Ears
.

Gods with Stainless Ears

The poem is dedicated to Edith Sitwell, with whom Roberts corresponded from the early
1940s to the mid-1950s. Sitwell praised
Poems
effusively, and was far less inclined to question and correct than Graves or Eliot.
Her garrulous correspondence contains interesting comments on the poetry scene of
the 1940s, and topical waspishness at the expense of, among others, Julian Symons,
Laura Riding and Anne Ridler. Roberts wrote to ask if Sitwell would accept the dedication
to
Gods
, and received a telegram:

The prose ‘arguments’ at the beginning of each section of
Gods with
Stainless Ears
were added at the suggestion of T.S. Eliot.

Saint Cadoc’s Day: 25 September, formerly 24 January. Saint Cadoc is the patron saint,
among other ailments, of deafness.

vail: to bow or bend.

cyprine: blue vesuvianite.

Confervoid residue:
Conferva
are a type of green freshwater algae.

pridian
: on the previous day.

John Roberts: the ferryman of Llansteffan, mentioned also in Roberts’s short story
‘Fisherman’ in
Village Dialect
:

1620B64: Keidrych Rhys’s army number.

Maeterlinck blue: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Symbolist
playwright
, poet and essayist, author of
Pelléas and Mélisande
and
The Blue Bird
. ‘Evans Shop’: this is the Welsh habit of joining a person’s name to that of their
trade or place of work. See, later, Jones ‘Black Horse’: the local pub landlord.

C
ERAUNIC CLOUDS
: ceraunics is the branch of physics that deals with heat and electricity.

argyria: silver poisoning.

acetated minds: glass discs coated with cellulose acetate were used for direct recordings
by means of a cutting stylus (as distinct from pressing); hence ‘acetate recordings’.
This fits with Roberts’s reference to gramophones, recordings, film and newsreel.

xantheine: xanthene is a compound used to make fluorescent dyes.

pele
: a mixture of coal dust, clay and water for burning in hearth fires; see the poem
‘The “Pele” Fetched In’.

ambuscade: to lie in ambush; to conceal.

cark: to burden, or to be anxious.

chevron: the mark on the sleeve of an officer.
Chèvre
in French means ‘goat’ – hence the play in the next line on ‘kid’.

callid Cymru: callid means ‘crafty’, ‘cunning’.

The first part of this section appeared, in a slightly different version, as ‘Poem’
in
Poems
.

gault: gaults are beds of clay and marls between the upper and the lower greensand.

zebeline [zibeline]: a Slavic word for the fur of the sable, black. neumes: in medieval
music notation, neumes are signs representing certain melodic patterns, often indicating
a single syllable sung to a cluster of notes. The notes on the stave were recorded
at certain historical periods in
quadrilateral
shapes, hence their shape rhyme with slates and bird boxes. Compare with Ezra Pound
in the
Pisan Cantos
transcribing the birds on telegraph wires as musical notes (Canto LXXXII).

hispid: rough, bristly.

pinnate: like a feather, having leaves or branches arranged on each side of a stalk.

frescade: a cool walk or alley.

fieldfare: a species of thrush.

cymes: a cyme is a flower cluster in which each growing point terminates in a flower.

chyles: chyle is white milky fluid produced in digestion.

MO: Medical Orderly.

zinnias: a zinnia is a plant of the Americas renowned for the beauty of its flowers.

deflexed: bent downwards.

XEBO 7011: Lynette Roberts’s number during the war.

collyrium: eye wash.

‘Cow and Gate’ lorry: Cow and Gate are a firm of baby food manufacturers.

himmel hokushai:
himmel
means ‘sky’ in German; Hokusai was the
eighteenth-century
Japanese painter whose views of Mt Fuji became popular in Europe in the late nineteenth
century.

febrifuge: anti-febrile, fever-soothing.

ciliated: fringed with cilia, or fine hairs.

chagrin: shagreen, an untanned leather; also a sort of silk.

paleozoic: dating from the most ancient times; Roberts will have also had in mind
the specific sense of palaeozoic Cambrian rocks or strata, found in Wales. ‘Cambria’
is the Latinised derivative of Cymru, the Welsh for Wales.

Kuan glaze: a greenish-grey glaze with a crackle effect.

iridium: a white metal of the platinum group, resembling polished steel. defledged:
unable, or no longer able, to fly.

Freud, Norman Haire/ Or Stopes: Sigmund Freud; Norman Haire (1892–1952; an expert
on sexual education) and Marie Stopes (1886–1958; feminist and family planning pioneer).

distrained: the verb has two senses: ‘to compress’ or ‘grasp tightly’, or ‘to pull
asunder’.

shine of celandine: the Lesser Celandine, a woodland plant with bright yellow flowers.
See also Wordsworth’s ‘The Small Celandine’.

In the original edition ‘Part IV’ was misprinted as ‘Part VI’.

Epigraph: Dyfnallt was John Dynfallt Owen, poet and Nonconformist minister (1873–1956).
Dyfnallt wrote several poems about his harrowing experiences on active service in
the First World War.

rimmeled: the reference is to the cosmetic brand Rimmel.

forcipated: delivered by forceps.

third magnitude: the brightness of stars is measured on a scale called
magnitude
. The scale works in reverse, so that the lower the number the brighter the star.
A third magnitude star can be seen without optical instruments.

shrived: to shrive is to impose a penance; also to absolve.

grailed: to grail is to make slender; also a comb maker’s file.

seels resinate woe: to seel is to stitch up the eyes of birds; figuratively, to make
blind, hoodwink.

Grisaille: decorative painting in grey monotone to represent forms in relief. tansy
tears: tansy is a herbaceous plant with clusters of small yellow flowers.

Paillettes: bright metal or coloured foil; also a decorative spangle for a dress.

Cycloid: the curve traced in space by a point in the circumference of a circle as
it moves along a straight line.

ichnolithic: ichnothology is the science of studying fossil footprints. anthracite:
a kind of coal, brilliant black.

ichnographic: an ichnography is a ground plan of a building or a map of a place.

Chinese blocks of uranium: in the first version of this poem ‘Cwmcelyn’, Roberts has
‘Chinese fields of tungsten’.

boracic: from borax, white salt crystal.

cyanite: an aluminium silicate, usually blue.

ketch: a two-masted boat.

kestral: kestrel (American spelling).

cade: a pet lamb, or an animal reared by hand as a pet.

Calder ‘stills’: the Alexander Calder (1898–1976) to whom Roberts refers in her notes
was a contemporary American sculptor who built mobiles. One of the most famous of
these was ‘Animal Circus mobile’.

‘Singer’s’ perfect model: a reference to the Singer sewing machine.

dorcas: in the Acts of the Apostles Dorcas is a maker of clothes; also a brand name
for thimbles.

Aertex: a cotton material.

Waled: ribbed.

Belisha beacons: flashing lights at pedestrian crossings.

aniline: chemical dye.

xerophilous: able to survive with little water.

oölite: limestone composed of small rounded granules; roe-stone.

curry comb: a comb or metal instrument for grooming horses.

Isotonic: musical term meaning ‘equal tones’.

palea: the OED defines the word as ‘a chaff-like bract or scale;
esp
. the inner bracts enclosing the stamens and pistil in the flower of grasses; […]
the scales on the stems of certain ferns; […]
ornith
. A wattle to dewlap.’ Critics have been confused by this word, to the extent of speculating
that it might be a typographical error. It seems more likely that it is intended,
and intended to invoke the first, botanical, sense noted.

Catoptric: relating to mirrors or reflections.

Uncollected and Unpublished Poems

All but two of these poems (‘Downbeat’ and ‘Release’) form part of one or other of
the typewritten manuscripts of unpublished poems. One of these typescripts is untitled
and collects unpublished poems and ‘El Dorado’; the other is entitled
The Fifth Pillar of Song
. It contains approximately eighty pages of poems, of varying quality and states of
completion.

The title page of the typescript reads: ‘
THE FIFTH PILLAR OF SONG BY LYNETTE ROBERTS
’, and contains a list of poems. At the top of the page Roberts has written ‘The pencil
notes in this MSS are by T.S. Eliot whom the poems were sent to for possible publication
Summer 1951.’ The
typescript
also contains numerous handwritten notes, explanations and alterations by Roberts
herself. It is also in places mispaginated. The other typescript essentially replicates,
in different order, the
Fifth Pillar
typescript
, but begins with ‘El Dorado’, and has ticks beside the titles of poems that had been
published.

The uncollected poems are published here not as they are in the
typescript
, but as they appeared in the first publications noted below them in the text. The
unpublished poems are taken from the typescript, with obvious errors corrected, but
otherwise unaltered.

According to her autobiography, Dylan Thomas had told Roberts that ‘he wished he had
written “the long nosed god of rain”’ (
Poetry Wales
special issue, p. 35).

In the manuscript of
The Fifth Pillar
this is part of a four-stanza poem called ‘Either Or’. Roberts kept the last stanza
only.

Ty Gwyn: ‘White House’ in Welsh; where Lynette and Keidrych lived during the war.

In her diary entry for 15 January 1940, ‘Making “Pele”’, Roberts describes the process
and draws a picture in the margin.

In her diary entry for 26 June 1940, Roberts describes the arrival of evacuees in
the village, and mentions writing a poem ‘about the “Displaced Persons” of Europe
likening them to the birds without food and dying of starvation’.

In her diary entry for 26 June 1948, Roberts describes visiting the
graveyards
and studying the lettering on the gravestones. ‘The best cutting’, she writes, ‘were
those on natural slate, where their stabbing was exceptionally deep, so that the letters
stood quietly out in spite of the handicap of years and their dullness of colour.’
Earlier she had found the chapel ‘as both church and chapel always are… locked… locked
against humanity’.

The poem’s original title was ‘13 Bergson Street: Trials and Tirades’, altered by
hand in the typescript.

The name of Lynette and Keidrych’s daughter, born in 1945.

The name of Lynette and Keidrych’s son, born in 1946.

Originally called ‘The Blow Lamp’, this poem is suggested by the arrival of a carpenter
(described in the diary entry for 6 March 1941), who uses his blowlamp to remove paint
from the front door. The smell reminds Roberts of the aftermath of the bombing raid
on the Temple Road and East End of London, described in another poem, ‘Crossed and
Uncrossed’.

This was the title poem of the collection Eliot turned down.

corbeau: dark green;
corbeau
is French for ‘raven’.

cynometer: an instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky.

Branwen: in the Mabinogion, the daughter of Llyr and Penarddun; she married the Irish
king Matholwch, but he banished her to the kitchen. She taught a starling to talk
and sent him to tell her brother of her plight. War between Wales and Ireland followed.

Rhiannon: Rhiannon was the wife of Pwyll, King of Dyfed, and mother of Pryderi. In
her first appearance she rides a magical horse. To her belong the birds of Rhiannon,
who sang for those who returned from Ireland.

Cimmerian age: the age of darkness.

cambutta: a pastoral staff used in the ancient Celtic church.

cyperous: Cyperus is a species of aromatic marsh plant.

‘Bruska’ was the name of Roberts’s flower-arranging business. See also Keidrych Rhys’s
poem, ‘Ephemerae for Bruska’, in
The Van Pool and Other 
Poems
. ‘Bruska’s Song’ is not listed in the table of contents of
The Fifth Pillar
, but its pagination makes clear that it was part of it. On the
manuscript
is written, and deleted, ‘Child’s Song or Bruska’s Song’, and ‘Dedicated to Posy,
the Youngest’.