Adam Pearce, Editor, Llyfrau Melin Bapur
The name of Robert ‘Silyn’ Roberts is likely not as familiar to readers of Welsh poetry as are those of his more famous contemporaries like T. Gwynn Jones, Eifion Wyn or W. J. Gruffydd. However, for a brief period at the start of the twentieth century he was one of the most prominent young poets in the country, and the quality of his work speaks of a poet who deserves to be better known than he is.
Born in 1871, Silyn took his middle name from the valley in Gwynedd in which the family home (now in ruins) stood. His father had been a quarryman but had managed to develop and grow the family’s land enough to take up as a smallholder full time. The young Silyn inherited this pioneering, self-made spirit; and though he also spent a short period in the quarry he was clearly destined for greater things, and earned a scholarship which enabled him to take his place among the early intakes of students at what was then known as the University College of North Wales, which was later to become Bangor University.
It was during his student years that Silyn met the two men who were Silyn’s closest poetic relations. The first of these was the lecturer John Morris-Jones, whose views on poetry Silyn absorbed completely. In contrast to the fatuous so-called ‘Bardd Newydd’, Morris-Jones favoured brevity and clarity, and the influence of Silyn’s teacher is clearly visible in the poems of Silyn’s first collection, Telynegion (‘Lyrics’), which date to the last years of the 19th century.
The other was W. J. Gruffydd. Ten years Silyn’s junior, the young Gruffydd was just a teenager when the two met, but already developing his voice, and indeed Telynegion was a collaboration featuring poems by both men, though at this stage Silyn’s were (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more sophisticated in the collection. Although the two were friends and the book’s preface describes the process as collaborative, Gruffydd was later rather ambivalent about the collection, claiming (with characteristic bitterness) that Silyn had insisted he make various changes to his own poems whilst refusing point blank to entertain any of Gruffydd’s ideas about his own works. Gruffydd would later write off his contributions as juvenilia
The Telynegion were well-received without being a sensation, but would go on to assume some considerable retrospective significance as marking the dawning of what is usually termed a ‘dadeni’ (renaissance) in Welsh poetry. Certainly, they established Silyn as a key young poet, to be admired by his contemporaries and successors and derided by the old school. It can be hard now to appreciate the radical nature of the short pamphlet, much of which can seem rather sentimental to modern eyes; but the stronger poems – mainly Silyn’s – hold up pretty well, and show that Silyn was already moving beyond Morris-Jones’s rather limited conception of poetry.
Two years after the publication of Telynegion, Silyn would reach the peak of his fame as a poet when he won the Crown at the 1902 Bangor Eisteddfod. The subject that year was Trystan ac Esyllt (Trystan and Isolde), whilst Ymadawiad Arthur (the Departure of Arthur) was the subject for the chair, which was won by T. Gwynn Jones with one of the most famous poems to win that prize. The setting of Arthurian themes for both main competitions, and the fact both were won by poets of the new school, showed that the new era was well and truly underway.
Silyn’s Pryddest has often been overshadowed by the fact that some felt that it not have won at all. Many commentators even at the time felt that the judges had opted for Silyn’s poem – with its relatively conventional and morally conservative take on the Trystan story – over the effort by none other than Silyn’s erstwhile collaborator W. J. Gruffydd, which was more daring.
Still, if Gruffydd had been wronged, then Silyn can hardly be blamed for that. It’s worth acknowledging that the most vocal commentator in favour of Gruffydd’s poem was Gruffydd himself! Regardless, this focus on the poem that didn’t win undermines the achievement of the one which did: Silyn’s is a fine narrative Pryddest, and at the time of its awarding was easily superior to any poem that had previously won the Crown. Among its most memorable lines is this beautiful quatrain, spoken by Esyllt:
Fe’m carodd fel y câr yr haul y ddaear:
Bedyddiodd fi â gwres ei fynwes hawddgar;
Fe’i cerais ef fel câr y lloer yr aig
I’w yrru a’i guro’n greulon ar y graig.
(He loved me like the bright sun loves the earth:
He baptised me in the warmth of his gentle heart;
I loved him like the bright moon loves the sea;
To cruelly drive and break upon the rocks.)
The poem gave its title two years later to Silyn’s second published volume, of which it formed a significant part. Its publication, however, would come at the peak of Silyn’s fame as a poet, which he would never regain.
After leaving Bangor he did what many intelligent young men of his class and culture did: he trained as a minister, taking up ministries in first London and later Blaenau Ffestiniog. It was during his time in London that the first of three improbable coincidences took place in Silyn’s life. All three were insignificant in and of themselves, but either connected Silyn tangentially with major historic events, or had significant implications for Silyn personally.
The first of these happened in 1902 when Silyn struck up a brief conversation with a young foreigner in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Some sources describe what happened between the two as a ‘friendship’, but in reality it was no more than a single chance encounter, and Silyn did not realise until decades later who the young foreigner he had spoken to actually was: Vladimir Lenin.
Though the encounter was a coincidence, it is easy to believe that the two could have got along. Silyn had always been politically active, and had been describing himself as a Socialist during the 1890s. In the second half of the 1900s Silyn turned his attention to political activity and writing, and would become a significant figure in the history of Welsh socialism. He was a active in the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party, and served as an ILP Councillor in Meirionnydd; many encouraged him to stand for a seat in parliament, though he refused.
Whilst he wrote little or no poetry in the second half of the 1900s, he did publish three novels in Y Glorian, of which he was the editor at the time: Llio Plas y Nos, an interesting work which transplants the medieval romance to the twentieth century and is perhaps the only example from the time of a Gothic Novel in Welsh; the adventure story Y Ddeilen Aur (which remains unpublished beyond its first serial) and Bugail Geifr Lorraine, a translation of a novel about Joan of Arc by Breton author Émile Souvestre. These works in different ways are all expressions of Silyn’s Romanticism.
It was Silyn’s politics which led him away from the church: not in any sense in terms of faith (he remained a committed Christian Socialist), but simply because he felt guilty to be making his living at the expense of his parishioners, many of whom lived in poverty. He leaped at an invitation to visit the United States on the payroll of the industrialist David Davies to raise funds for a TB foundation, and it was whilst on his way home in mid-April 1912 that the second unlikely coincidence took place: Silyn’s ship crossed a patch of the North Atlantic that would be the scene of the sinking of the Titanic a few hours later.
Upon returning to Wales he took a sideways step into education administration, and during the last two decades of his life he was active as a social reformer, founding the North Wales branch of the Workers’ Educational Association with his wife Mary, a remarkable woman in her own right.
Around the First World War Silyn took up poetry again, publishing works (some under the pseudonym ‘Rhosyr’) in various magazines including the Welsh Outlook, of which he was the poetic editor. Silyn was no longer a young man, and the Welsh poetic scene was more crowded. Many of the younger poets who had followed Silyn’s example in the previous decade had already moved beyond him, but his later period sees Silyn himself in very much the same vein as his earlier work: romantic, lyrical, and direct, Silyn remained a disciple of Morris-Jones until the end. If there is a frustration with Silyn it is that his radical politics left so little mark on his poetry. Indeed, even events like the First World War seemed to barely register with Silyn the poet, though he did write a pair of sonnets describing Paris before and after the destruction brought on by the conflict.
What had been radical in 1900 appeared rather reactionary in 1925, and it is no slight on Silyn to say that he was a significant poet for only a few short years at the turn of the century. Nonetheless on its own terms there is much to admire in the later work, which includes many of his best poems, including Anobaith Serch (‘Love’s Despair’) which gives its title to our new volume, the first to be published since Silyn’s death in 1930. Silyn’s work can seem almost escapist in its yearning for a simpler world of good and evil, beauty and truth, unencumbered by the ambiguities of modernity; and whilst it is refreshing, one can’t help but read into it a certain naivety, which came through in other aspects of his life. In 1929 he accepted an invitation from the Soviet Union to tour the country: it was an ‘official visit’, and Silyn was clearly shown a sanitised version of life under Communism.
Silyn was inspired; and it seems likely he would have written something about the experience – an essay or piece of travel writing perhaps – but he never had the chance. The third improbable coincidence occurred during his voyage home: he was bitten by a mosquito. Within a few weeks of his return the bite had developed into a fever, and Silyn died in 1930, aged 59. His wife Mary took over from him as the secretary of the North Wales WEA. Silyn was a Romantic until the very end, and it is fitting that Angharad Tomos’s recent novel Arlwy’r Sêr (2023), which will have brought Silyn to the attention of many readers, is a love story.
R. Silyn Roberts’s Anobaith Serch a Cherddi Eraill is available now from www.melinbapur.cymru for £9.99+P&P, as are his novel Llio Plas y Nos and his translation Bugail Geifr Lorraine (both currently at the discounted price of £4.99 each).
Also new from Melin Bapur this month are Jerry Hunter’s Y Rhawnbais (£9.73), and T. Rowland Hughes’s novel Y Cychwyn (£11.99).
Arlwy’r Sêr (2023) by Angharad Tomos is available from Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
The post The Radical Romantic: R. Silyn Roberts appeared first on Nation.Cymru.