Idris Davies - Work

Work

Gwalia Deserta XXXVI

In the places of my boyhood
The pit-wheels turn no more,
Nor any furnace lightens
The midnight as of yore.

The slopes of slag and cinder
Are sulking on the rain,
And in derelict valleys
The hope of youth is slain.

And yet I love to wander
The early ways I went,
And watch from doors amd bridges
The hills and skies of Gwent.

Though blighted be the valleys
Where man meets man with pain,
The things by boyhood cherished
Stand firm, and shall remain.

Davies' first published volume was the 1938 extended poetical work Gwalia Deserta. The verses it contained were inspired partly by such mining disasters as that at Marine Colliery at Cwm near Ebbw Vale in 1927, and by the failure of the 1926 UK General Strike, the Great Depression in the United Kingdom and their combined effects on the South Wales coal mining valleys.

The Bells of Rhymney verses, perhaps Davies' most widedly known work, appear as Part XV of the book. The stanzas follow the pattern of the wellknown nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". In the late 1950s the verses were adapted into a folk song by Pete Seeger and became a folk rock standard. The song, entitled "The Bells of Rhymney", has been covered by many others since. More recently some of the other stanzas from Davies' Gwalia Deserta have also been set to music by Welsh performer Max Boyce as the song When We Walked to Merthyr Tydfil in the Moonlight Long Ago.

In February 2010 Davies' work was mentioned, by Conserative MP David T C Davies and Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams, in a Parliamentary debate concerning heath-care in Wales.