CHAPTER 2
Wales, Public Poetry,
and the Politics
of Collective Voice
In 1822, hundreds of participants gathered in London for an eisteddfod, the traditional Welsh music festival that had been restarted during the eighteenth century after long neglect.1 The 1822 festival, held in a tavern called Freemason’s Hall, had poetic recitations, competitions among musicians, and medals awarded for the best poems and essays. Participants could listen to Welsh national songs and instrumental music, including “singing with the Welsh harps after the manner of ancient Britons.”2 One correspondent enthused that these kinds of festivals were a new “dawning” for Wales that shed “light on the land.”3 Another reporter lauded the “festivity and good fellowship” he felt, approving of the “joy and enthusiasm with which all ranks participated in their national festival.”4 This national feeling and “good fellowship” was inspired by the perception that communal festivals revived traditional customs that had been gradually deteriorating over the preceding three centuries. The audience thus experienced a sense of bardic culture and could participate collectively in it. Some of the songs from the 1822 eisteddfod were arranged by the musician Edward Jones, who declared that Wales was a “land of song” and that Welsh music was the sound of “aboriginal Britons”5; those in attendance at the eisteddfod could imagine that they were listening to a distant, ancient Welsh past.
The revival of the eisteddfod was a significant part of the late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century reconstruction of Welsh regional, national, and ethnic identity as both literally and figuratively an audible voice.6 In the eighteenth century, as in the centuries that directly preceded it, Welsh cultural nationalists appealed to the past as a way to cultivate within their countrymen a sense of attachment to Welsh history and culture. In the early modern period, Philip Schwyzer argues, Wales was a “community of longing, united by a collective orientation toward its own vanished antiquity.”7 Eighteenth-century attitudes toward Welsh memory, while they engaged with this nostalgia for the past, considered “vanished antiquity” to be recoverable, believing that the past could be heard. Rather than being the sign of collective longing, the Welsh poetic voice could become the signal of and the mechanism for collective belonging. During a period when the British state was being simultaneously created and resisted, the oral past became a crucial element of resistant nationalisms, providing a sense of authentic culture that could counterbalance English cultural intrusions.8 If Great Britain, and the modern European nation-state more generally, resulted in part from print’s ability to inculcate a sense of belonging to an “imagined community” or a public sphere, then orality is often posed as the opposite of print nationalism; orality represents the residue of what is regional, authentic, and vestigial, a remnant of a time before the nation. In this interpretation, the oral past of British peoples, limited spatially in ways that print is not, is imagined as a cultural repository of local collectivities that do not align with the larger structures of an overarching British identity.9
The poetics of printed voice sought to adjudicate between these too rigid definitions of print as modern yet distancing and the oral as intimate yet local. Thomas Gray drew upon the authority of Welsh bardic voice to negotiate the publicity of the literary marketplace and the immediacy of spoken performance. This chapter explores how Gray’s experiment with poetic voice was recruited by Welsh authors to make the oral past audible, after which it was used as a means of building a distinctive Welsh national cultural identity. Welsh writers’ engagement with Gray challenges notions of English imperialism or British nationalism as being consistently set against resistant nationalisms of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Even as Welsh authors invoked their ostensibly authentic oral past, they adopted the experiments with Welsh bardic voices that originated in Gray, the most identifiable English poet of the era. The poetics of printed voice described here depend on English literary traditions as a means of fabricating these resistant nationalisms. Gray’s original speech acts were struggled over, revised, and enacted in various ways by his Welsh contemporaries. All of those who engaged with Gray’s imitations of Welsh voices sought out his experimental poetics and its (at times misunderstood) popular appeal. Gray’s bardic curses and prophecies supply a ready-made model of authentic Welsh speech that could be used to oppose English domination. According to current scholarship, Welsh authors should have rejected Gray’s models as inauthentic, as the impositions of an appropriating author. To understand this improbable combination of efforts and these unusual alliances and literary borrowings, we need a collaborative model of bardic nationalism in addition to our appropriative and nationalistic ones. This collaborative model was influenced by Gray’s innovative literary forms and was turned to what appears at first glance to be antithetical political goals by enthusiasts of the eighteenth-century Welsh cultural revival.
BARDIC NATIONALISM RECONSIDERED
The annexation of Wales by the English monarchy, the subsequent abolition of its legal system, and the progressive anglicizing of Welsh life after the sixteenth century so atrophied the bardic system, Prys Morgan argues, that “the very lifeblood of the nation seemed to be ebbing away.”10 The renewed interest in native Welsh voices that began in the mid-eighteenth century was a response to this cultural bloodletting. If Gray attempted to reform the mechanics of the literary marketplace by appealing to the authority of the oral world of Wales, then Welsh festivals, singing competitions, and bardic-inspired poetry were contemporaneous efforts to make that world’s voices audible. Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (1997) remains the most thorough description of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British literary nationalisms.11 While Trumpener focuses primarily on the Romantic novel in her study, her insights reconceive the formation of English literature, which she argues “constitutes itself … through the systematic imitation, appropriation, and political neutralization of antiquarian and nationalist literary developments in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.”12 In her theory, English literature is a form of aesthetic imperialism. English poetry in particular, she claims, utilized systematic appropriation—stealing cultural resources from marginal peoples and places—as a way to invigorate its own flagging imagination. This methodical theft centered on the bard. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she argues, English authors “adopt the bard as a figure of cultural fragmentation and aesthetic autonomy.”13 They “impersonate the bardic voice and imitate bardic materials, without grasping their historical and cultural significance”; consequently, the “refunctioning of the bard merely displays the nominalism of imperialism in a new, aesthetic register.”14 She asserts that Gray’s “The Bard” exemplifies the inauthentic use of others’ cultural materials and that Welsh responses to Gray’s poem were repudiations—attempts to revive authentic cultural materials and to reclaim them. By reviving their own culture and representing it in art, antiquarians and nationalists in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland opposed the deleterious effects of imposing English norms, claims Trumpener. For them, the bard was a figure of cultural situatedness and “a mouthpiece for a whole society” that otherwise might be lost.15
Bardic Nationalism produces a powerful generalization about the widespread tendency of peripheral British cultures to resist cultural imperialism. However, in her attempt to coordinate notions of appropriation and cultural change on the British Isles, Trumpener overlooks some important collaborations between these antiquarian artistic movements and English literary traditions. She provocatively suggests that the English “only have borrowed words,” but what if we see all words as borrowed and exchanged?16
With this question in mind, I reexamine Gray’s “The Bard” and consider one of its most intriguing responses, Evan Evans’s “A Paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, Alluding to the Captivity and Treatment of the Welsh Bards by King Edward I” (c. 1757–64), which rewrites Gray’s poem from a Welsh perspective, to pursue these linguistic politics of collaboration.17 The intertextuality of Evans’s poem, particularly its allusions to “The Bard,” suggests that we reconsider what is going on when cultural revivals like those of eighteenth-century Wales borrow from the ostensibly alien traditions they are resisting to formulate their own nationalism. Far from dismissing and rejecting the poetic voices of Gray’s “The Bard” and his folk imitations, Welsh poets insistently continued Gray’s experiment with the printed representation of bardic voice. Rather than substituting their voices for Gray’s last living Welsh bard, they aligned themselves with Gray’s images, settings, and innovative poetic techniques to establish their own voices. Their revisions of Gray’s poems show that Anglo-Welsh literary relationships in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not simply appropriative or anti-imperialistic but also collaborative, in ways that crossed national and ethnic boundaries. Repositioning Welsh poets as in dialogue with their English appropriators enables us to reimagine the politics of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literature and see that resistant literary nationalism emerges from an institutionalized system of cultural exchange and literary borrowing.
Because Evans was a pastor by profession but an antiquarian by passion, he corresponded, for a brief period of time in the 1760s, with Gray about Welsh poetry and, for a longer period, with Thomas Percy, the English ballad collector. Evans spent a large portion of his life traveling through Wales accumulating and translating ancient Welsh manuscripts in an attempt to preserve heroic traditions of the past. He was a member of the Cymmrodorion Society, a Welsh cultural society founded in 1751 in London, with participants in Wales, England, and the American colonies.18 Evans, who wrote in both Welsh and English, at times fashioned himself as a bard, under the names Ieuann Fardd and Ieuann Brydydd Hir. As part of his antiquarian interest, he repeatedly engaged with Welsh oral traditions, collecting what he called “specimens” of Welsh folklore. He was the period’s foremost expert on these traditions, producing Some Specimens of the Poetry of Antient Welsh Bards (1764) while completing a “dissertation” in Latin on the bards of Wales.
His interest in preserving oral and manuscript traditions spilled into his poetry as well. “A Paraphrase of the 137th Psalm” takes up the same legend of the massacre of the Welsh bards that inspired Gray. Evans’s “Paraphrase” is more than a retelling of the myth from a Welsh perspective, however; it elaborates the conceits and extends the voices that make up Gray’s poem. Evans explicitly dramatizes the textual collaboration between himself and Gray, transforming their epistolary exchanges into a poem. And, in imitating Psalm 137, which details the refusal of the Jews to sing during the Babylonian captivity, Evans connects political protest with oral performance.19 His poem’s speaker, a Welshman imprisoned in England after the bards have been killed, is asked to sing a song. Instead, he states:
And pity with just vengeance joined;
Vengeance to injured Cambria [Wales] due,
And pity, O ye Bards, to you.
Silent, neglected, and unstrung,
Our harps upon the willow hung.
(lines 6–10)
Like the Babylonian Jews, the Welsh hang up their harps and call for retribution. His speaker insists that he would rather “let the tyrant strike me dead” than “raise a song / unmindful of my country’s wrong” (49–51). The poem ends with this speaker’s long lamentation about Wales that explicitly invokes Gray’s poem for help:
There oft at midnight’s silent hour,
Near yon ivy-mantled tower,
By the glow-worm’s twinkling fire,
Tuning his romantic lyre,
Gray’s pale spectre seems to sing,
“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King.”
(69–74)
Most noticeable about this conclusion is that Evans makes the first line of Gray’s “The Bard” the last line of his poem. This results in two related effects. First, by emphasizing the fragmentation and ruin of the hallowed locations of bardic voice—such as Mona, an island off the coast of Wales and a traditional seat of the bards, and the Conway, a river running through what is present-day Snowdonia—bardic culture is portrayed as having been relegated to the past, much as Gray’s poem allegorizes the dissolution of the bards in his poem’s final suicide. Second, Evans’s poem, and by extension Gray’s text, which it cites, becomes the means by which bardic voices are recovered and made present again. Gray’s printed voice supplies one venue within which the reclamation of Welsh bardic voices might come to pass. Even if the bards are dead and the Welsh will no longer sing, the voices originated in “The Bard” and recalled in Evans’s “Paraphrase” continue a tradition that otherwise might be extinct. In this sense, Evans appeals to Gray’s literary representations to reinforce the Welsh cultural revival that Gray is seen as having undertaken.
Furthermore, Evans did not just borrow Gray’s image of the last living Welsh bard; he directly connected his poem with Gray’s imitation of Welsh bardic voice. Gray’s poem recalls the passion of “wild” Welsh prosody, a strange idiom that he translates into English. In lieu of a vibrant bardic culture, Evans relied on its representation and rearticulation by Gray. For Evans, it is Gray’s “pale spectre” who speaks when actual bards cannot. Rather than “raise a song,” Evans offers the curse of Gray’s last Welsh bard as a substitute for silence. Evans’s citation of Gray’s language establishes a textual continuity in which, after reading the “Paraphrase,” readers are immediately directed back to Gray’s poem, returning them not just to a predecessor form but to a prehistory for which the “Paraphrase” is a bittersweet epilogue. The poems are like ruins, their voices channeling the Welsh bards. That Evans combined his own call for silent resistance—“Our harps upon the willow hung”—with the initial vocal curse of Gray’s poem demonstrates that the speech acts of Gray’s last Welsh bard reverberated and resonated through the Welsh cultural revival in part due to the capacities of quotation, literary collaboration, and printed circulation to enunciate an earlier poetic voice.
What are we to make of this moment of interconnection between English and Welsh traditions? The quite literal way that these two poems speak to (and of) each other is a version of the self-reflexive dialogue involved in Anglo-Welsh literary forms, which the intertextuality of the poems makes evident. Trumpener’s model of bardic nationalism seems unable to account for this collaboration. For Trumpener and other commentators, “The Bard” exemplifies an English literary aesthetic that appropriated Welsh traditions, turning them into English inspiration. Trumpener claims that Evans’s “Paraphrase” shows that bardic nationalism developed in resistance to English appropriation, by refusing the “arrogant assumption of the English that other cultures are there to be absorbed into their own.”20 Evans’s poem, she continues, was part of an effort by Welsh authors to emphasize the “cultural rootedness of bardic poetry and its status as historical testimony.”21 Shawna Lichtenwalner acknowledges that Gray’s poem was taken up enthusiastically by Welsh authors, but she argues that this adoption “undermine[d]” Welsh cultural identity because “The Bard” presents an image of a “doomed race” that existed only in the past, not in the present, thereby damaging attempts “to create a living cultural heritage.”22
My position is closer to that of Sarah Prescott, who argues that Evans’s poem suggests the “dual processes of reciprocal influence and antagonistic distrust that … typify Anglo-Welsh relationships.” Yet she wonders if “the original act of cultural obliteration is strangely reenacted” in Evans citing Gray’s poem.23 Rather than being imperiled, I think Welsh nationalism is strengthened by the reference to Gray’s “pale spectre.” Evans adopts Gray’s bardic speaker and cites his exact written language as evidence for Welsh bardic traditions. Poems like “The Bard” and the “Paraphrase” recapitulate the practices that created them. That they thematize cross-cultural exchange as intertextuality is made most strongly apparent by Evans’s exact quotation of an English author whom he would be expected to reject and by his invocation of English forms that some have considered to be inauthentic. It is telling, for example, that Gray evokes Welsh oral prosody in his poems and Evans does not. One explanation may be that Evans, as an antiquarian who spoke and wrote Welsh and adopted a bardic name, did not need to imitate Welsh orality in an English medium. But the more striking explanation is that the authenticity ascribed to Evans’s poem results as much from his quotation of Gray as it does from his identity as a Welsh author or his repetition of Welsh oral forms. The “Paraphrase” is not concerned with retrieving bardic voice from English authors. In fact, Evans used Gray’s Welsh bardic voice to legitimize his own. In this sense, Evans did not undermine Welsh cultural development by quoting Gray; he accelerated it by making the poetics of printed voice collaborative and reciprocal.
Evans’s “Paraphrase” suggests a cultural nationalism based on adaptation and cultural translation as much as textual authenticity and purity of national origin or ethnic belonging. Some of his successors agreed that “The Bard” provided important opportunities for extending Welsh bardic voices. In 1798, a bardic festival on Primrose Hill in London awarded a prize for the best translation into Welsh of Gray’s ode.24 In 1822, the same year as the bardic congress at Freemason’s Hall in London, W. Owen Pughe published his Welsh translation of “The Bard,” which he titled in Welsh “Y Bardd,” the existence of which one reviewer called “peculiarly gratifying” because of the “historical events on which [Gray’s poem] is founded.”25 The review lauds Pughe for having “transfused into his version the wild abruptness of the original” while maintaining the “native energy and beauty of diction” of Gray’s poem. That the reviewer lauds Pughe’s ability to capture the “wild abruptness” and “native energy” of Gray’s poem shows the extent to which Gray’s bardic voices become an asset for defining Welsh culture. “Transfusion” functioned as a synonym for “linguistic translation” in the eighteenth century, but I think here it also connotes the more modern medical sense of transfer of blood.26 Early attempts at medical transfusion introduced alien blood through the mouth. In the late fifteenth century, for example, a dying Pope Innocent VIII is supposed to have swallowed the blood of three young boys as a curative. This technique, obviously unsuccessful, was motivated by the late medieval association of circulation with ingestion.27 The metaphor of transfusion captures Pughe’s fascination with injecting the wildness and energy of “The Bard” into the Welsh language, the presumed origin of that wildness. By appearing in the Welsh language—a return to its phantom cultural origins—Gray’s poem invigorates the voices of the culture from which it came. Setting the first sentences of Gray’s poem side-by-side with Pughe’s translation shows the degree to which Pughe preserved the innovative form of “The Bard.” The oracular, accusatory voice of Gray’s last Welsh bard is translated into Welsh, but with the crucial features of Gray’s poem—the quotation marks, the exclamation points—adopted precisely. Pughe rewrote the opening line of Gray’s poem (“ ‘Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!’ ”) in Welsh as “ ‘Rheibied tranc ti, vrenin trwch!’ ” (Fig. 8).
Sensitive to the formal “wildness” (described in Chapter 1) of “The Bard,” Pughe transfers not just the language but also the typographical innovations of Gray’s imitation of Welsh oral voices. The transfusion of energy comes in part from the translation of poetic structure, giving a sense of body and blood to the text and ink of the poem. Writing becomes an arterial pursuit that is life sustaining, and the Renaissance association of blood and mouth makes transfusion into an early metaphor for what we now might call cross-cultural poetics, in which Welsh culture was revitalized by its contact with other cultures, not its rejection of them. The politically active reiterations of the last Welsh bard’s startling curse do not replace or obliterate the silent harps of Evans’s “Paraphrase” or the energetic infusions of Pughe’s translation; imitation becomes reinvigoration as the Welsh cultural revival is made more vital by these poems’ citation of Gray’s bardic voices and the translation of his poetic forms. By disseminating their own adaptations of Gray’s voices, Welsh authors devised significant vehicles by which to enact politically that which they wrote about. Gray is presented both as an important origin and an authenticating figure for the national history that Welsh authors hoped to intensify with their own writing and performances. That this history is ostensibly one of the English invading Wales does not change the fact that for them an English author had become the best-known critic of this history and one of the most successful exponents of a resistant Welsh national identity.
Figure 8. Part of the first stanza of W. Owen Pughe’s “Y Bardd” (1822), his Welsh translation of Thomas Gray’s “The Bard” (1757). Throughout the poem, Pughe kept Gray’s typographical presentation of different voices. Courtesy of the British Library Board (872.i.41[2]).
THE ABORIGINAL AESTHETICS OF IOLO MORGANWG
Evans’s “Paraphrase,” Pughe’s “Y Bardd,” and the bardic festivals demonstrate that public performances and collaborations with English literary traditions were sources of experimentation for late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Welsh literature. A different approach to the authenticity of Welsh oral voices was devised by the author and political radical, Edward Williams, better known by his Welsh bardic name, Iolo Morganwg.28 Morganwg established a system of bardic performance by amalgamating cultural materials. These materials, Morganwg claimed, were aboriginal: he believed that the Welsh were the aborigines, the original people of the world. As evidence, he offered that the Welsh called themselves “Cymry; the strictly literal meaning of which is Aborigines.”29 They were the “ancients,” he writes, and had “been distinguished by that appellation in all ages … as if they considered themselves the Aborigines of the world.”30 Their language reflects this status; it is an “aboriginal, or primitive language,” which indicates “something very remarkable” for the Welsh people, that “remotest antiquity” is their “far nobler origin” (Poems, 2: 8); far nobler, that is, than the one typically ascribed to them by English authors, whom Morganwg felt were dismissive of Wales and its culture.
We typically think of aborigines as unfamiliar with the processes of modernization, making them important impediments to the globalization of commerce. Morganwg, however, thought of the Welsh aborigine as primitive yet sophisticated, updating the Enlightenment’s notion of the noble savage. His work portrays ancient Wales as a golden age of mountains and streams, its indigenous culture alive with the sounds of peaceful learned bards. But his aesthetics depends on a type of racism that distinguishes Welsh aboriginals from the “state of nature” popularized by Rousseau or the primitivist paradises that appeared in travel narratives of Tahiti and other Pacific islands.31 For example, when he disapproved of his Welsh contemporaries—something that seems to have happened frequently—Morganwg compared them to Africans. Closely identifying with southern Wales, Morganwg slandered the performances of northern Welsh authors in bardic competitions by claiming that they were “formed on Hottentotic principles,” referring to the name used for black South Africans. He complained of one Welsh-language publication that it was “nothing but rank Hottentotic” and lamented of a young Welsh bardic performer that his language was “in a Hottentotic degree barbarous.”32 He lambasted London, where he had failed to make a literary reputation during the 1790s, as enamored with the “Hottentotic arts,” referring perhaps to the popularity of exotic poetic voices from Africa, India, and the Pacific being published at the time (Poems, 2: 38).
The word “Hottentot” was invented in the seventeenth century, as Linda Merians points out, by Europeans who wanted a “politically useful” way to describe southern Africans. She suggests that because the English constructed themselves as the “world’s most superior society” they found it “equally necessary to imagine humanity’s worst.”33 This attitude informs Morganwg’s use of the term to discriminate among Welsh cultural nationalists. Hottentots served as the antithesis of sophisticated English culture, and Morganwg adapted this racial charge to distinguish Welsh aboriginality from fashionable but benighted exoticism. For him, the racial content of “Hottentotic” provided a means of controlling the aesthetics of Welsh cultural nationalism: that which did not fit Morganwg’s publicly performed version of aboriginality was made foreign and thus a betrayal of Welsh history. He advocated for his own home-grown primitivism, rejecting equally exotic, but degraded, overseas voices.
In his person and his public performances, Morganwg sought to personify this home-grown primitivism. In Poems Lyrical and Pastoral, he names himself a “BARD OF BRITAIN’S ISLE … reviv’d in yon supernal clime” and claims that he has been “finally restored” to his “true character and ultimate station, as originally destined by the CREATOR” (2: 207). In an article for the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1789, he styles himself the only remaining descendant of a long line of “Ancient British Bards,” making him the embodiment of the last Welsh bard of Gray’s poem, despite his complaints that Gray’s poem was “truly ridiculous to an Ancient British Mythologist … with its savage Scandinavian Mythology.”34 As Cathyrn Charnell-White describes it, Morganwg presented himself as “a piece of living archaeology,” as the manifestation of the vocal landscape divinely ordained by God to take a special station in world history.35
In Charnell-White’s sense, Morganwg hoped to make the ground and stones of Wales speak through him. He was the conduit by which the pure Welsh past could become audible, a past unadulterated by foreign customs and myths. During the 1780s, he literalized this role by organizing the gorsedd; this Welsh word he translated variously as “convention,” “national convention,” “bardic convention,” and “voice convention.”36 These multiple translations reveal the degree to which vocal performance, history, and cultural nationalism were aligned in his thinking, much as they were for other Welsh writers. The gorsedd was a poetry festival that Morganwg claimed was based on ancient druidic rituals he had rediscovered in the course of his research on Welsh history. In actuality, he invented the majority of the festival himself; he attributed it to a Welsh oral past as a means of legitimizing his gatherings.37 As with many other literary forgers of the eighteenth-century, like Thomas Chatterton, Morganwg went to great lengths to authenticate his work. He devised elaborate costumes for his bardic performances and planned assemblies at inspiring natural locations throughout England and Wales. He developed complex, arcane rituals for participants to follow and even composed a bardic alphabet and writing system that he asserted was based on ancient runes. Morganwg initiated followers, the Lichfield poet Anna Seward perhaps among them, and enveloped Welsh bardism in a pseudo-governmentality, complete with bardic certifications that included three levels of competence (ovates, bards, and Druids).38 His efforts were remarkably convincing; scholars did not notice his inventions until the early twentieth century. By then, many of the traditions he created had been absorbed into the National Eisteddfod that still occurs every year.
Morganwg went to such great lengths because he felt that the public performance of poetry was an essential part of speaking in the “Welsh manner” or the “old national Manner,” which was communal and tied to its aboriginal roots.39 This “old national Manner” is a kind of aboriginal aesthetics, ostensibly reconstructed Welsh oral traditions that make the voices of the past audible again. One of the first meetings of this new bardic festival was a small gathering on Primrose Hill in 1792 attended by a few guerilla bards in which the performers spoke poems out loud. Dressed in multicolored robes with symbolic props, such as sheathed swords, and standing on stones placed in a circle, they recited Welsh history. (Morganwg believed that any “regular Welsh bard can in a few minutes” give a better history than “all the cobweb’d rolls of antiquity.”40) Morganwg’s gorsedd requires publicly demonstrating the events of Welsh history. It also emphasizes the alignment of aboriginality with collective belonging and the public performance of communal voice, which Morganwg diagramed in a hand-drawn plan for the poetry gathering (see Fig. 9).41 It shows a circle of stones, with a few of the stones moved outward from the circle to make an opening. One edge of the opening points toward the “Summer Solstice,” the other toward the “Winter Solstice,” and the opening faces the “Equinox.” Participants are meant to stand “unshod and uncovered” beside the stones on the periphery of the circle directing their attention to the “Presiding bard,” who stands on the central stone (“Presidial Stone” or “Mean Gorsedd”).
Morganwg’s bardic gatherings were a means of perpetuating and reinstitutionalizing Welsh bardism. A handwritten note from the 1790s, written by Morganwg, calls the performers from the Primrose Hill gathering to perform on the “Long Field” behind the British Museum. He summoned them there to “produce poems and orations on given subjects,” threatening that anyone who did not attend would “renounce his claim to Title and character of Bard” and all the rights and responsibilities that came with it.42 This indicates that Morganwg was not just the inventor but also the organizer and proponent of his created traditions. He hoped through his revival of performances to retrieve the spirit of “ancient versification” and renew its aboriginality as a modern cultural institution.43 He wanted to endow a bardic school of poetry for “very ingenious young men of a poetic turn,” who would “hold frequent meetings in the ancient manner” to bring British bardism back from “oblivion.”44 In utilizing the mythology of circularity, collectivity, and aboriginality, and choosing locations like Primrose Hill and the British Museum, Morganwg pieced together a tradition that drew from both ancient customs and self-created rituals. More dramatically than other literary forgers, Morganwg constructed textual practices, public performances, and archaeological artifacts, linking them with scholarly and natural surroundings, to supplement and undergird the ostensibly autochthonous traditions of his bardic performances. This notion of rootedness and primacy was meant to display the deep cultural memory of Wales. By mixing elements of actual Welsh traditions with images of ancient oral festivals, Morganwg created voices whose origins preceded not just English but every literary tradition. Yet, while Morganwg may have rejected what he perceived as adulterated beliefs in favor of something historically pure, his aboriginal aesthetics are in fact derived from popular recreations of idealized oral traditions. One of his sources may have been William Collins’s “Ode to a Friend” (also known as “An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry”), a stanza of which Morganwg copied into one of his notebooks. Other passages came from Thomas Hanmer’s Chronicles, the Book of Exodus (28:31), and radical “freethinker” John Toland’s Miscellaneous Works.45 Morganwg mixed these traditions and passages with elements of radical philosophy and pagan religions, like Hinduism’s notion of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), to construct his own idiosyncratic institutional form of Welsh bardic performance.
Figure 9. Iolo Morganwg’s plan from 1792 for a gorsedd circle. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales.
One of the explicit tasks of his poetry was to fashion the metaphors and literary forms for institutionalized bardic performance by invoking communal voices and composing in collective pronouns. The opening stanza of Morgan-wg’s “A Song, usually Sung by the Society of Ancient Britons in London, At the Admission of Members” encourages participants:
… to the harp’s harmonious voice,
Attune our choral strain.
Around the bowl, a mirthful throng
Of BRITONS bold and free,
We swell the trills of native song,
All join’d in jocund glee.
(Poems, 2: 92)
The insistence on joining in a “native song” is repeated later when Morganwg boasts, “We Britain’s nervous tongue retain / in songs of high renown … a language still our own” (Poems, 2: 92, 95). Of course, boasting of possessing “a language still our own” appears odd in an English-language poem, making it an announcement that at once engages and perhaps undermines its political assertions. Still, the song’s chorus affirms the attachments of the “mirthful throng”:
New brothers, come, we’ll hold them dear
Sons of our Parent Land!
Raise high the shouts of joy sincere!
They join our social band.
(Poems, 2: 94)
In these instances, the exclamatory techniques and tones seek to create communities on the printed page: a “mirthful throng” and “social band” of vocal singers. The music of the harp is attuned to the choral strain, reinforcing one another and establishing a public that, by their voices, announces that they are “bold and free.” At times these communities seem almost to be physically touching—participants made tangible to one another—as the voices suggest that “New brothers, come” so that “we’ll hold them dear.”46
The act of singing together becomes a way of asserting the nativism of the Welsh revival that Morganwg would meticulously detail in the lyrics, settings, and accoutrements of his public performances. As the title of the song suggests, being inducted into the Society of Ancient Britons—or gathering for the gorsedd—is not just to be admitted as an antiquarian but to contribute to Welsh memories, which are also enactments of its specific politics. This politics is evident throughout Morganwg’s Poems, including his facetious rendition of “God Save the King,” which asks, “Sons of BRITANNIA’S Land, / Let us a loyal band, / Together cling” (Poems, 2: 134). As with his “Song” of the Society of Ancient Britons, this song interprets Britannia narrowly to mean Wales, supposedly the oldest inhabited part of the island. Collective pronouns are the mechanism by which a community of readers is invoked in text and in performance. This community is exclusive and limited in scope, perpetuating a vocabulary of social memory ostensibly drawn from ancient customs. As scholarly societies came into being and rejuvenated the performance of bardic poetry, poetic voice became an active part of a social agenda to preserve these memories and customs. Morganwg’s song, therefore, was a public proclamation of this agenda and a means of enacting it. The use of first person plural pronouns not only establishes an audience and collectivity for the poems but provides a mechanism for their commanding call to action.
Morganwg was not the only poet who signaled his desire for a circumscribed community of listeners by the use of both specific details and collective pronouns. “The Heroes of Cymru,” a poem by John Parry (1776–1851), ends with a cheer to Welsh warriors who
By gentler passions now are led,
And haste to throng the magic ground,
Where the Music’s charms and song abound,
To cheer the social train.
(Cambro- Briton, 2: 89–90)
An anonymous author used similar tactics when writing a poem in the persona of a Welsh bard singing lovingly to his native land:
CYMRU! As my days decline,
May such favour’d lot be mine,
Near some lonely mountain stream
Thus to chaunt my bardic theme,
Thus my social harp to ply,
Thus to live, and thus to die!
(Cambro- Briton, 2: 188)
The social aspect of bardic voice invoked by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Welsh authors arranges public speech as memory. The memories in Parry’s “The Heroes of Cymru” are grounded in a place where song “charms” and “cheer[s]” the “social train” of its audience. This sense of song as something that may unite readers is apparent as well in the apostrophe to “CYRMU!” (Wales) as the locale within which to chant a “bardic theme” and “ply” a “social harp.” The image of living and dying in Cymru gives a sense of how the metaphorics of voice are turned toward the goal of achieving a distinct Welsh identity that is founded on the retrieval of the audible past.
These poems, along with Morganwg’s, radically expanded the range of Welsh bardism, recreating it as a comprehensive system in which he was one of its most exuberant examples. He invented new traditions while simultaneously revivifying the present. He recognized the advancements that a complex bardic system could offer to poetry, and transferred these innovations from the page to the public performance and back again. The printed voices of Gray’s bards were refashioned into expressions of Morganwg’s publicity. Despite the fictional origins of his bardic system and his distrust of English authors, Morganwg’s institutionalization of Welsh oral performance popularized poetic forms that had thus far existed largely on the printed page.
LISTENING TO THE WELSH PAST
The creation of communities that were held together in part by vocal performances at public gatherings continued well into the nineteenth century. Felicia Hemans’s poem “The Meeting of the Bards, Written for an Eisteddvod, or Meeting of Welsh Bards, Held in London, 22 May 1822,” which was read aloud to the bardic festival attendants,47 summons the voices of the Welsh past, binding the audience together as a community. The imagery and metaphors of voice found in the poem anticipate this sense of communal belonging. The landscape depicted in the poem reverberates with moans and songs: the ground is “heaving to the blast” of the “blue resounding firmament” beside the “roar” of water that is “deeply mingling” with the noise of the wind.48 This audible landscape is a record of Welsh speech, in that it vocalizes “proud answers to her children’s voice” (line 38) in a nation-forming call-and-response:
… though our paths be changed, still warm and free,
Land of the bard, our spirit flees to thee!
To thee our thoughts, our hopes, our hearts belong,
Our dreams are haunted by thy voice of song!
(53–56)
Since, for Hemans, Wales was a text that spoke, she utilized the same first person plural as Morganwg’s “Song” and his public performances did. Her poem celebrates a combined listening and enunciation that portrays the past as manifest in haunting and ghostly voices. “The voices of the dead may speak freely now only through the bodies of the living,” claims Joseph Roach in his study of circum-Atlantic performance, Cities of the Dead (1996). He argues that memory is preserved through performance, which seeks to make the remote and ineffable present again through ritual and which transmits the knowledge that contains a community’s social identity.49 Hemans attempted to establish a similar continuum between her texts and the oral voices that haunted them, transforming culture into an enduring apparition. She convened a Welsh community around these nationalistic voices and their phantasmal forms, a community much like the ones that gathered around Morganwg’s bardic circles or that attended the eisteddfod of 1822 and heard her poem read aloud.
Hemans’s verse appeals both to structures of vocal performance and to a deeply sedimented history and a collective memory that inform those structures. This appeal is a crucial part of Hemans’s engagement with the traditions of the dramatic monologue and of public performance.50 For my purposes, it is more significant to recognize how her attempt to reinfuse wildness and vigor into Welsh poetic voices and to create viable publics around Welsh memories depended on the techniques of address that would eventually evolve into the dramatic monologue later in her career. This notion of address, apostrophe, and the listening publics that they imply—so significant to Morganwg (and to James Macpherson’s Ossian poems discussed in Chapter 3)—was harnessed by Hemans as a means of extending the “dawning” of Wales with its “festivity and good fellowship” that many felt during the eisteddfod at Freemason’s Hall in 1822.
At the time of the 1822 bardic meeting in London when her poem had its inaugural reading, Hemans was already a successful writer. Discouraged by her male contemporaries—Lord Byron wished that she would “knit blue stockings instead of wearing them”—she was consigned to being a “poetess” of “hearth and home.”51 But even if she was dismissed as domestic by many readers, she was lauded by Welsh writers and antiquarians as a champion of Welsh culture. Hemans’s poetic career, as Tricia Lootens has noted, was “devoted to the construction of national identity.”52 This national identity, however, could be unclear. Hemans was born in Liverpool, but she moved to Wales as a young child, where she adopted a Welsh identity.53 She was an honorary member of the antiquarian Cymmrodorion Society due to her “zeal in the cause of Welsh Literature.”54 Her poetry of Wales was not nearly as successful among readers as her explanations of English nationalism found in poems like “The Name of England” or “England’s Dead.”55
Hemans’s engagement with Welsh culture dates from her earliest poetry, necessitating that we read her not only through theories of nationalism and gender relations but also in ethnic and regional contexts. An 1808 poem, “Genius,” portrays a Welsh Ossian (“Cambrian Ossian”) who hears “airy music murmur’d in his ear” while he wanders through the countryside.56 Even as the poem complains of Wales that its “sweetest bards are dead / And fairies from the lovely vales are fled,” it admits, addressing Wales, “in thy songs the musing mind may trace / The vestige of thy former, simple race.” “Genius” elaborates multiple circuits of listening and speaking for the reader, each of which is meant to recapture the vestigial: Hemans’s poem is presented as the song of an ancient bard being heard by a Cambrian Ossian; this Cambrian Ossian is described in turn as an “ear” for the poem’s speaker, who will learn “the soft bewitching art” of performance and deliver it to Hemans’s readers.57 The reference to a Cambrian Ossian seeks to establish for Wales the community of readers that arose with the popularity (and controversy) of Macpherson’s Ossian poems. And the multiple interlocking layers of mediation in “Genius” recall the structure of William Collins’s ode on Scottish superstitions discussed in my Introduction. However, unlike the distant Scottish interlocutor of Collins’s poem, the Welsh bard of Hemans’s poem transcends the boundaries of time, permitting the poet to listen in on the past and align her “genius” with it. This poem is part of Hemans’s juvenilia, but it already shows enormous sophistication in its treatment of orality in print. “Genius” suggests that the voices of Welsh culture are, quite literally, in the air. The melancholy of loss (the “sweetest bards are dead”) matches the nostalgia of its speaker, who is enabled by the power of printed poetry to recover this ancient music. Listening becomes a refuge for rituals that no longer can be seen or experienced firsthand. The “genius” of the poem is its optimism that it can recreate in print the attitudes of ancient Wales from Welsh sonic remains.
This notion of a distinctive Welsh aurality rooted in the landscape but unmoored from time is developed further in Hemans’s later poem “The Rock of Cader Idris” (1822). Cader Idris, a mountain in northern Wales, has mythological significance; legend proclaims that whoever stays overnight on its slopes will become either insane or poetically gifted (proposing, of course, the identity of these two conditions).58 Hemans’s poem figures ancient traditions as a form of “deep music” and ghostly haunting: “phantoms” and spirits populate the mountaintop and around it “for ever deep music is swelling” (lines 2–3). These apparitions are vocal—the voices of bards, of the wind, of the mountain itself—so that the overpowering inspiration of Cader Idris is an ability to hear deeply into Welsh culture.
Things glorious, unearthly, pass’d floating before me,
And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.
I view’d dread beings around us that hover,
Though veil’d by the mists of morality’s breath;
(11–14)
These apparitions roll and sweep across the mountaintop, imbuing the speaker with the spirit of the past in the form of a “flame all immortal, a voice and a power!” (28). Hemans reworked the imagery of the Pentecost, in which tongues of flame descended to give the Apostles the ability to speak Christ’s ministry, into an image wherein to be given a voice is also to be given a power to speak the culture which is still audible atop this Welsh spiritual monument. “Genius” and “The Rock of Cader Idris” offer a theory of Welsh cultural continuity as voice and sound: a “deep music” that is sung through generations, suffusing the country’s atmosphere and terrain. Such continuity is evident because of Hemans’s poetry; deep music exists not just atop Cader Idris but also in “The Rock of Cader Idris.” By this logic, the vestigial voice can be revived and made readable if authors use specific types of cultural and textual mediation, techniques that have been developed by English poetry since the 1750s.
In addition to “The Rock of Cader Idris,” Hemans’s lyrics in the 1822 volume A Selection of Welsh Melodies also thematize the ability of poetry to take what is almost ineffable, “unearthly,” and aural, and give it material shape. This collection includes “imaginative recreations of Welsh history and loose translations of medieval poetry” in the form of songs, soliloquies, and dramatic addresses by poets, mythological heroes, and political figures, such as Owain Glyndwr, the fourteenth-century Welsh rebel who, for a brief time, expelled the English from Wales.59 These poems were published with Welsh music composed by John Parry. Parry combined Hemans’s words with his musical arrangements, noting that the appropriate mode of singing was based on the “manner of the Ancient Britons.” According to Hemans and Parry, this ancient manner involved improvisation, variation, and often the rotation of speakers and singers within a communal chorus.60 Even though subsequent editions of these poems were stripped of their explicit music, the atmospherics of oral culture abound—epic singing and heroic warriors courageous in battle, excessive in celebration, and unafraid of death—making these poems an example of what Hemans calls in “Cader Idris” the “deep music” of ancient Wales. Their monologues and soliloquies operate in communal voices and work in collective pronouns. Readers, modeled as listeners, are encouraged to imagine themselves as participants in the poem, facing down advancing English armies, listening to Welsh heroes, or cheering the Druids’ attempts to repulse the Romans with their song. The Welsh Melodies are preoccupied with creating models of continuity and cultural memory, as Lichtenwalner notes; Hemans imagined such continuity as ancient music and past voices that could be retrieved and heard in the present.61 The public effects of Hemans’s poems show that representing autochthonous speech that preserves oral traditions formed an important link between the eighteenth-century experiments with printed voice and the early Welsh-inspired poetry of Hemans.
In the “Lament of Llywarch Hen” and “Taliesin’s Prophecy,” for example, Hemans recalls two well-known Welsh poets who pine for an earlier time when the “bright hours return, and the blue sky is ringing / with song,” an era that had faded with the passing of Welsh autonomy (“Lament,” lines 1–2). The speakers of these two poems drift oddly between third- and first-person address. “Taliesin’s Prophecy” begins: “A voice from time departed floats among thy hills, O Cambria! Thus thy prophet bard, thy Taliesin sung!” (1–2); yet the poem continues in the voice of Taliesin, who delivers his prophecy, as if his floating voice has been made manifest by the poem. This dramatic structure mimics Gray’s “The Bard” in its use of external narrators—“Thus thy prophet … sung”—to frame these first-person enunciations.
Other Hemans poems give an immediate, specific sense of the audience being addressed that recalls Gray’s 1760s imitations. In “Howel’s Song,” a soliloquy of a fourteenth-century bard, Howel urges his steed on, declaring that “the maid I love,” who is dying, “looks o’er the fairy world below, / And listens to the sound!” (7–8). Much as with Parry’s evocations of Cymru as “magic ground,” in this poem Hemans has the maid looking down and listening to the ground, and what lies below it. In “Prince Madoc’s Farewell,” Madoc bids farewell to Wales before leaving for America. Madoc was a legendary Welsh navigator said to have discovered the North American continent in the sixth century. (Some nineteenth-century Welsh scholars argued that Native Americans were actually the descendants of these Welsh explorers.) Hemans turned this mythological figure into a powerful orator meditating on his homeland and its music. Madoc asks:
Why rise on my thoughts, ye free songs of the land
Where the harp’s lofty soul on each wild wind is borne?
Be hush’d, be forgotten! For ne’er shall the hand
Of minstrel with melody greet my return.
——No! no!——Let your echoes still float on the breeze,
And my heart shall be strong for the conquest of the seas!
(7–12)
As Madoc pays homage to Wales he addresses the “free songs of the land” and mentions the “harp’s lofty soul.” Wales itself seems to be a listener. Simultaneously, Welsh songs become apparitional echoes that “float on the breeze,” following him and sustaining him as he sails away from his homeland.
In the “The Dying Bard’s Prophecy,” the ability to speak or be silent is politicized, much as it was in Evans’s “Paraphrase.” Another retelling of Gray’s last Welsh bard, Hemans’s dying bard exclaims, “Saxon, think not all is won,” referring to the effects of his death (16). “Think’st thou,” the bard asks with his last breaths, “because the song hath ceased, / The soul of song is flown?” (21–22). The answer is an emphatic “No!”
No! by our wrongs, and by our blood,
We leave it pure and free;
Though hush’d awhile, that sounding flood
Shall roll in joy through ages yet to be.”
(25–28)
This song, the dying bard claims, will be left “upon our children’s breath” so that “Our voice in theirs through time shall swell” (35). Here, Hemans enlarges the conceit—evident even in her early poem “Genius”—that traditions are voices that can be heard and perpetuated in the present by speech acts and that their perpetuation is itself an important nationalistic triumph.
The importance of Welsh public voices becomes even more apparent in the “Druid Chorus on the Landing of the Romans.” In this poem, Hemans presents readers with the collective voices of Welsh Druids, reacting to the Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. Only the poem’s title indicates who speaks the poem’s violent prophecies. Such open perspective and point of view make readers at once both members of the chorus, singing out in anger, and Roman listeners, who are hearing an angry song. Of course, the fantasy of this poem is that speaking may possess physical power equivalent to the sword. In a series of questions and answers, the Druids articulate and enact these fantastical powers, hissing:
Know ye Mona’s awful spells?
She the rolling orbs can stay!
She the mighty gravel compels
Back to yield its fetter’d prey!
Fear ye not the lightning-stroke?
Mark ye not the fiery sky?
Hence!—around our central oak
Gods are gathering—Romans,
fly!
(9–17)
The speakers of this poem are a communal “we” invoking the past, speaking for a homeland, weaving a curse. The Druids function as a group, undifferentiated, singing the same vocal curse that made Gray’s “The Bard” seem so wild to its readers. The “Druid Chorus” is also a moment of Welsh wish fulfillment. They hope with their song to repel the Romans, an outcome their military power cannot deliver. (This wish fails, of course, since the Romans, like the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and the French after them, did not “fly.”)
The impulse for political fantasy only intensifies in Hemans’s “Chant of the Bards before their Massacre by Edward I.” This poem recalls the legend of Edward’s massacre of the Welsh bards retold by Gray, Evans, and Pughe. The substantial innovation of Hemans’s version of the legend is that she offers her readers only the bardic chorus, who begin immediately by addressing their English captors:
Raise ye the sword! let the death-stroke be given;
Oh! swift may it fall as the lightning of heaven!
So shall our spirits be free as our strains—
The children of song may not languish in chains!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Rest, ye brave dead! midst the halls of your sires,
Oh! who would not slumber when freedom expires?
Lonely and voiceless your halls must remain,
The children of song may not breathe in the chain!
(1–4, 9–12)
The imperative address and the dramatic exclamations (“Oh!”) give some sense of this poem’s “chant.” Unbounded by any identifying features besides the title, the poem seeks to create something akin to a collective monologue, a group of speakers that achieve one powerful, prophetic voice. The poems in Hemans’s Welsh Melodies tend toward this type of collective speech. They personify, modernize, and politicize Welsh historical figures and events to provoke a cultural nationalism, but in this poem, they also invoke the bards as an undifferentiated group who incite their English invaders. The bards’ deaths, oddly, mark both the cessation and the perpetuation of this song: the “halls of … sires” are made “[l]onely and voiceless,” and yet the bards’ musical strains, like their spirits, are made “free” (9, 11). In this sense, the “Chant” recapitulates many of the techniques seen elsewhere in Hemans’s Welsh poetry, in which physically absent voices produce a progeny of apparitional ones. These are the “children of song” who will not breathe in chains but will still survive in the ghostly singers and printed voices of Hemans’s verse.
All of these poems from her Welsh Melodies display some of the essential characteristics that eventually would develop into the more fully evolved dramatic addresses of her better-known poems, published in Records of Woman, such as “Properzia Rossi” (1828). Recent scholarship has begun to refocus on these dramatic voices in Hemans’s poetry.62 In their form, we might think of the poems from Welsh Melodies as transitional to Hemans’s better-known dramatic monologues from the 1820s and ’30s. But her melodies also reveal an earlier preoccupation with using individual monologues and collective speakers to articulate the political and cultural ends of Welsh nationalism. At times, these speakers hope to bring into existence the history they foretell, in much the same way that the prophecy of Gray’s last Welsh bard tells a story of cultural dissolution and revival that had already come to pass. Similarly, the grammatical and formal features of Hemans’s soliloquies, chants, and songs reinforce the impression that Welsh history is an audible past, whose political implications can be reanimated in the present through printed poetry and public performance. And, much like Evans’s “Paraphrase,” Hemans’s poetic lamentations of the fading Welsh voices are a means of restoring them, of arguing that the voices have transcended into more agile, apparitional forms, forms connected with yet informing Hemans’s solid verse. By dramatizing this imaginative history, Hemans created communities of Welsh authors and readers who may have conceived of themselves as the addressees of those speeches and voices. She and her contemporaries are the “children of song” who replaced the absent bards by reviving their traditions and memories. Their attempts to resurrect dead voices and recall the “deep music” of Welsh culture demonstrate how important dramatic address was to rooting the collectivities of Welsh nationalism within Britain and yet outside of its orbit.
DEAD VOICES REANIMATED
By experimenting with collectivity, community, and explicit cultural remembrance, Hemans seems to have believed that dead voices could be brought to life again, recruited into assisting the nation. The politics of doing so are evident in the controversial topics and speakers she chose. The past is necessary for Welsh poetry, because it is the repository from which the poetry draws its cultural authority; and in her poetry, Hemans makes the past available by imagining that it can be heard.63 These Welsh authors perceived themselves as uniquely attuned to these voices, but they also engaged with images and concepts created by English authors to create this sense of aural acuity. That they drew from English literature at all demonstrates that, for Welsh writers, national belonging could be considered a set of textual effects and literary collaborations, rather than an attribute of birth or a product of geographical location.
Making ancient Welsh voices audible necessitated the invention of new relationships to textuality predicated on formal innovation, not on ethnic belonging. In these experiments, the text becomes the way to hear the past speak, and reading texts aloud becomes a way to revive the ancient voices and to effect the politics of cultural revival. Gray, Evans, Morganwg, and Hemans all strove to create texts that seemed to be animate, alive. This striving occurred in different forms: Gray’s modified Pindaric ode, with imitations of Welsh prosody and sophisticated typography; Evans’s retranslation of biblical psalms; Morganwg’s public performances; Hemans’s deep listening into an audible cultural history. What joins each of them, however, is their attempt to mediate to readers something like the passionate oral performance and the context of a lost Welsh past and to apply them toward the construction of a Welsh national identity. Their experiments with printed voice and oral performance were critical because nationalism depends on what Schwyzer calls “a form of legitimized necromancy.”64 This necromancy, as Michael Taussig argues, is a “magical harnessing of the dead” to create a vehicle by which to invest abstract entities with being, resurrecting those who have died for one final national service.65 Voices of the past—massacred bards, defeated soldiers, forefathers and nation-founders—are brought back to life in poems and books to speak again. Rhys Jones, in the preface to his 1773 publication Gorchestion Beirrd Cymru, an edition of ancient and medieval Welsh poets such as Aneurin and Taliesin, expressed his belief that the revival of the Welsh language through publications like his would allow the dead to speak again. “I see the great love that gentry and commonalty have for the British tongue [Welsh],” Jones enthuses, “and for the works of the old bards too; and thus we shall soon see the Muse (in a very short time one hopes) bursting forth from the graves of the skilled bards in unalloyed splendor.”66 His fantasy of overturned graves might seem more fitting for a gothic tale, yet, for Jones, perpetuating the Welsh language and ancient bardic voices made the dead walk and talk again. The dead are revivified as printed texts; they are imagined to be escaping from the ground to remind the Welsh of a past that is both their inheritance and their political future.
Such a fantasy epitomizes the optimism of late-eighteenth-century Welsh authors about the powers of the poetic text. The resurrection of dead voices through inert text creates an almost alchemical reaction in which inanimate things somehow combine and imaginatively come to life. When texts reproduce voices, Jones suggests, graves can speak. The perceived authority of these voices helped compensate for the relative feeling of powerlessness often shared by the colonized peoples of the British Empire, whether in Wales, Scotland, and India, or even in Africa and the Caribbean. In this way, Gray’s “The Bard” set in motion a new paradigm for cultural nationalism, one that was forged by a set of innovative literary techniques for constructing and conferring voice. Gray, still considered to be the most esoteric, retreating British poet of the eighteenth century, paradoxically composed a poem that functioned as a primary articulation of these literary techniques and imaginative possibilities. The children of his song—Evans, Pughe, Hemans, and even at times Morganwg—looked to “The Bard” as a model from which they spoke their own nationalistic concerns. His techniques were recast by Welsh respondents for the ensuing seventy years. In the process of creating their own poetic voices, they further explored the possibilities and the limits of what a text could be imagined to accomplish.
Resurrected voices are not real, of course. Jones’s daydream of bards once again walking among the green hills of Wales while singing epic songs would not come to pass, as even he no doubt understood. The ghosts heard by Welsh authors are a metaphor that explained their experiment with new forms of printed voice and new types of nationalism that they helped to promote. Still, ancient Welsh voices, dead but made alive through the powers of textuality, re-injected the promise of passion and the hope for the continuation of ostensibly lost traditions. The authors voiced all of the parts, using the text as a way to negotiate between their image of the past and the new future they wished to create. Yet, even while literary experimentalism led to new attitudes, new forms, and new national hope, the voices of the dead had a way of continually constraining the conversation.
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