A Welsh Poetic Hero

A lovely few days last week visiting North Wales with my daughter; it's a part of the world where I feel completely at home (although a South Walean by birth) and tremendously inspired by the fantastic scenery and the welcome that is always accorded. This visit was special in that it included a morning at the cottage of the Welsh poet Hedd Wynn (Ellis Humphrey Evans), where we were enertained by his nephew Gerald, a delightful 85 year old who lived there alone - without the benefit of electricity or any other modern convenience - until a couple of years ago.

The parlour of the cottage contains the six bardic chairs won by Hedd Wynn at eisteddfodau at the beginning of the last century. The story of the most prestigious, that from the 1917 National Eisteddfod, is a sad one. At the chairing of the bard ceremony the winning poem was announced as Yr Arwr ("The Hero"), written under the nom-de-plume Fleur-de-Lis, and the winner was asked to come forward; no one came to claim the prize. For it had been written by Hedd Wyn, who had been killed at Passchendaele six weeks beforehand. The chair was draped in black and the Archdruid spoke of "the festival in tears and the poet in his grave". He had been thirty years old and at the peak of his creative genius.

"The harps to which we sang are hung / on willow boughs, and their refrain is / drowned by the anguish of the young / whose blood is mingled with the rain" War by Hedd Wynn