The characters in both poems are Welsh farmers who are portrayed very differently. It is obvious that Thomas is sided with Job Davies the character in Lore as he grants him a voice in the poem but denies Cynddylan this in Cynddylan On A Tractor.
It is evident that the tone used in Cynddylan on a Tractor is of a sardonic nature;
“As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.”
Whereas Lore is written with optimism;
“It needs more than the rain’s hearse,
Wind – drawn, to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.”
As part of the wide variety of imagery in Lore Thomas relates Job’s years as;
“eighty–five
Winters old,”
This emphasises the harshness of Job’s life and the effects of the weather on him.
The weather is depicted as an enemy of Job. In the first quatrain the weather’s cruelty is reinforced by the dramatic use of a pair of metaphors;
“After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons”
The imagery seen at the beginning of Cynddylan On A Tractor is of Cynddylan moving from the old to the new.
The lines of the poem;
“Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil;
He’s a new man now, part of the machine,”
This invokes the idea that the tractor has broken Cynddylan’s link to the land and that it has removed the pressures that tied him down to the old methods of working the fields. This may have been beneficial to Cynddylan but not in the eyes of Thomas as he feels Cynddylan has become an extension of the machine.
This feeling of the weather being against Job is again seen in the second quatrain with Job’s optimism shining through. He has been asked the question;
“Miserable?
But to show his optimism he says;
“Kick my arse!”
It needs more than the rain’s hearse,
Wind-drawn, to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.”
In this quatrain Thomas is saying no matter how dire the circumstances are Job will not allow the dismal side of life to dampen his spirits. As well as focusing on the optimism he cleverly inserts eye-rhyme. The eye-rhyme consists of the words arse and hearse. The reader sees the rhyme but does not hear it when it is read aloud. The purpose of this was to show great contrast as one is rude, coarse and rough whilst hearse is gloomy and melancholy. The two used together gives an element of shock.
During Cynddylan’s transition from the old to the new he has become inhuman explained in this metaphor;
“His nerves metal and his blood oil.”
Thomas goes on to criticise Cynddylan as he hasn’t quite mastered the new controls and gears to operate the tractor. This is told to the reader when Thomas writes;
“The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo he’s away”
Thomas suggests the tractor almost had a mind of its own taking off like a rocket;
“Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.”
The metaphor;
“What’s living but courage?”
Is a representation of the courage Job shows in his life while working through the hardships with an optimistic outlook.
The lines;
“What’s living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge,”
Incorporate a half rhyme that shortens the vowel sound to achieve this. Thomas refers to the tea as being;
”Peat-black”
These two simple words are a link to some of the important aspects in Thomas’s life. The reason for including the peat originates from the surrounding area in which he lives, a small Welsh village called Chirk. Chirk had a large Peat bog nearby and his influence to include it came from his wife Mildred Eldridge. She was a landscape painter and she often painted the bog. Thomas compares the tea to the blackness of the peat which gives me the impression of it being very strongly brewed and heavy.
“Riding to work as a great man should”
This sardonic remark may sound as though Thomas shows compassion to Cynddylan but in fact he uses it to gain a very critical cutting effect. It is these subtle sardonic comments that permeate throughout the whole tone of the poem. Another example of this, is the metaphor talking about Cynddylan;
“He is a knight at arms breaking the fields’
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.”
Thomas suggests here that Cynddylan is no longer a protector of the Welsh countryside but he now destroys it with his tractor. Thomas will have felt strongly about the annoyance of the animals caused by the tractor, especially the birds. This is because he was the Welsh president of the RSPB and the devastation the machines cause in nature will have really touched a nerve with him.
The fourth quatrain of the poem Lore paints a nice rich image of the Welsh countryside and makes a comparison to the Garden of Eden. The two lines that paint this image are;
“Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew”
The next two lines;
“Rhythm of the scythe
Kept his tall frame lithe.”
use onomatopoeia and repetition of the “ythe and ithe” to allow the reader to almost hear the scythe swishing through the long grass.
“The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges,”
This is a metaphor that is describing the wonderfully fiery colours that the early morning rising sun turns all the hedgerows along the fields.
The final quatrain in the poem Lore is Thomas cleverly giving advice to the reader. He does this by asking the Rhetorical question to Job;
“What to do?”
The advice that Job gives comes in the form of;
“Stay green,
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls.”
This last point is a very important metaphor used by Thomas in both the poems. It is seen again in Cynddylan On A Tractor when it is rephrased to;
“Who runs his engine on a different fuel.”
These two dramatic metaphors are a very profound attempt by Thomas to alert people to the damage he sees mechanisation will cause, not only to the Welsh landscape but to the human. He is hinting that the machine eats up the human’s individuality and spirit to make them all part of the machine.
The last line of the poem Lore is a Aphorism and it is a continuation of the advice that Job gives. It says live large, man, and dream small. Here Thomas is telling the reader to live to life’ full potential but do not fantasise about what could be. Cynddylan On A Tractor on the other hand finishes with the rhyming couplet;
“All the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.
The first line of this couplet is metaphorically saying that no matter what is said to try and stop the advance of mechanisation it will all be in vain. The second line then is a final sardonic remark about Cynddylan.
The poems written by Thomas are of a very high quality as he uses a wide range of poetic methods and he cleverly installs his ideas and beliefs throughout the
Poems. To make the poems so impacting on the reader and to have a strong contrast between the two characters he used a medieval technique known as the ideal and the complaint. Here Job Davies is the ideal and Cynddylan is the complaint.
Stephen Lynn
