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The Struggle and the Dream Continue
Hughes used a bardic title derived from the little valley in which he was born, Glyn Ceiriog, in Llanarmon Dyffryn Clwyd, in an area only a few miles from the English border yet which even today has retained much of its Welsh culture and language. He was yet another Welsh poet who received little formal education.
It was while working as a grocer in the large, industrial city of Manchester in northern England that Hughes learned the traditions of Welsh poetry, mainly under the guidance of two close friends. R. J. Derfel (1824-1905), the socialist poet and dramatist who so severely criticized "The Treachery of the Blue books" and William Williams (1814-69), who convinced him that he should write simple, natural poetry to express his deep feelings for rural Wales. Thus Hughes specialized in expressing the feeling of nostalgia for the rural scenes and characters and music of one's childhood, a feeling known in Welsh as hiraeth.
In the 1860's Ceiriog's Oriau'r Hwyr (Late Hours) was the best selling Welsh language book next to the Bible, over 30,000 copies being sold in 12 years. Ceiriog is a name known to just about every person today lucky enough to have the benefit of an education in Wales. He certainly deserves to be better known to the English-speaking world. Alfred Perceval Graves translated a selection of Hughes' poems in 1926.
The following lines are translated from the sequence of songs in Alun Mabon, whose marriage and life as a farmer are idealized by the poet in his "What Passes and Endures." It is of Wales:
Still the mighty mountains stand
And the great winds about them roar;
And all around we hear at dawn
The shepherds' old-time songs
And daisies growing in cleft and rock
Still thrust and grow and thrive
Tis only the shepherds who are new
Among these timeless, mighty hills.
Year succeeds year; the customs change
Old gives place to new.
The generations come and go
Some with gladness, others tears
Freed from storm and stress,
Alun Mabon finds his rest
Yet the old tongue lives on
And the old songs endure.
It is no wonder that Ceiriog is so revered in Welsh schools today, for the following century saw the most rapid decline in the percentages of people speaking Welsh. Not so well known, yet, paradoxically, an important figure in Welsh literature is novelist Daniel Owen, from Mold, a town in Flintshire that had managed to keep much of its Welsh identity despite the rapid anglicization of much of the county by the end of the century.
Owen (1836-95) was brought up in extreme poverty; apprenticed to a tailor at age 12, he had little schooling, but at 23 entered Bala College to prepare for the ministry. At Bala he immersed himself in English literature and upon his return to Mold would read aloud, favorite passages from such writers as Eliot, Thackeray, Scott and Dickens to his fellow tailors. Owen did not stay at Bala, returning to Mold to care for his sick mother and sister and becoming enmeshed in the politics and social intrigue of the Seiat (the fellowship meeting that was the seat of influence in the affairs of the Welsh chapel). Here, his involvement helped him greatly in the themes and characters in his writings.
It was in the next century, however, that the true Welsh novel, written in Welsh or in English, came into being. It is also in the next century that the literary renaissance of Wales began to include writers who used the English language--the school of the Anglo-Welsh. It was also the next century that saw the growth of a new political consciousness in Wales that had enormous effects both within and without its borders: the struggle intensified, and the dream continued.
Chapter 19: Political Consciousness
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