Analysis with clarity. Commentary with heart. Unpacking Poetry.
Instructions
I strongly recommend you read the poem first. Even if you already know it. It’s at the end of this post.
Read it – out loud, preferably – and have a think about it for 5 minutes before moving on.
Note on pronunciation: Cynddylan is broadly pronounced cun-THI-lan. (At least in North Wales)
Context
First, who on earth is Cynddylan?
Cynddylan was a legendary seventh-century Welsh prince, associated with the region of Wales bordering modern Shropshire. The epic (but quite short) poem which mourns his death – ‘Marwnad Cynddylan’ – repeatedly uses the refrain, ‘Grandeur in battle!’1
There’s plenty of grandeur in RS Thomas’ poetry, I think, but as we will see, it’s often a magnificence on the wane, soon to be forever lost. What is replacing it IS magnificent, but at the same time, not so.
I’m not Welsh, so it feels almost disrespectful to use the term – but when I read his work Thomas often conjures a sense of ‘hiraeth’ (pron. hi-RYE-th): that impossible-to-translate word which mixes nostalgia, homesickness, and the impossibility of mourning something which never existed, too.2
I wonder about Thomas’s experience of ‘hiraeth’.
Meic Stephens tells us that despite being born in Cardiff, it was only as a grown man that the poet began to really feel Welsh. For him, mastering the language was ‘the sine qua non of Welsh nationality’.3 This led to a fairly peripatetic career as a churchman, constantly disappointed to find himself in parishes where the English language dominated.
But the irony is that his poems in English are unmistakably Welsh.
Reading them, I don’t think you can believe yourself anywhere else. And the voice in my mind speaks them to me with a North-Walian accent. Perhaps this was his way of expressing his ‘hiraeth’.
Overview
A number of Thomas’s poems provide little vignettes of the changing world of rural Wales during the mid-twentieth century, by focussing on an individual.
Here, ‘Cynddylan’ is a farmer whose life – perhaps his personality, as we’ll explore below – has been transformed by the purchase of a fabulous tractor. An unnamed narrator comments on the transformation as he ‘passes proudly up the lane’ on it.
Commentary and Analysis
If poetry was easy, it would be boring.
Search, and you will find differing opinions on ‘Cynddylan On A Tractor’. That should please students, teachers of literature, and poetry fans, too – it does me. So bear in mind, as I often say:
This is A reading – not THE reading.
Let’s deal with the two characters in the poem first – the speaker and Cynddylan.
Is the poet the persona? Swansea University makes a decent case for the structure being a complex and uneasy representation of this liminal moment in time.4 It’s freer, looser, and at 16 lines, longer than a sonnet, with a rhyme scheme and metre which feels constantly obscured by something else, as the rural way of life seems obscured, eroded by the arrival of this new machine. The poem certainly plays to Thomas’s concerns, and in my reading, it has some of the sharpness he was known for. But I just as easily picture the speaker as another farmer or member of that rural community, leaning against a gate and delivering his verdict.
Back to my original question – who IS Cynddylan?
I think this helps unlock the poem.
It could simply be the name the tractor-driver was baptised with, but I think it’s far more fun to imagine it a caustic epithet pronounced as a condemnation of the tractor’s owner and his fancy new toy. It mocks the subject as delightfully as we might label someone a ‘Lancelot’, or a ‘Don Juan’.
But there is a Celtic edge, too. This man is figuratively the heir of Cynddylan – the steward of a culture and way of life which, as we’ll see later, he seems to be throwing away, oblivious to the cost of his actions.
So, the first half of the poem focuses on the transformation of this latter-day knight in shining armour. He was once as intimately ‘yoked’ to the soil as the animals he keeps, and whilst this metaphor might dehumanise him, the connection was deep, visceral, perhaps ancestral. Human.
‘He’s a new man now, part of the machine.’
I hear real scorn from the speaker now. This is where the dehumanisation takes place – and it’s very modern, and horrifying imagery which creates a hybrid, almost androidised entity, with ‘nerves of metal and his blood oil’. The poem was first published in 1952, but the fear is resonant in the age of AI.
We could simply dismiss the persona – dismiss RS Thomas – as a stick-in-the-mud, a Luddite irrationally opposed to progress. Perhaps you do, and that’s fine, of course. I think there could be undeniable admiration in a semantic field which includes ‘new’, ‘obey’, ‘great’, and perhaps in ‘knight at arms’. Technology is impressive. And seductive.
But in this reading, his case is more persuasive than the seductive whispers of the new, because it foregrounds what is being lost.
If you read my work regularly, you’ll know that I can’t resist ‘intertextuality’ – the idea that no text sits in isolation, but is connected to, and a product of, those which have gone before (‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, etc).
This is why I want to stop and look in that broken mirror: ‘the fields’ mirror of silence.’
A poet in the tradition of RS Thomas isn’t going to break a mirror without knowing that it means something more than seven years’ bad luck. Frequent readers – bless your patience – know that I’m going back to Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’. And A-Level students should half-expect it, too.
In ‘Shallot’ the mirror cracking triggered a curse – one which ended in death. Whilst the ‘tractor-man’ keeps chugging along, I see more than an individual’s way of life dying as the poem progresses.
Foxes and Squirrels and Jays, oh my!
All I know is that literature exponentially rewards intellectual curiosity.
And if I can get excited about a broken mirror, I can as easily about the animals named in the poem. So why these three (after the domestic disturbance suggested by the ‘scattering hens’)?
You don’t need me to tell you that foxes signify cunning, adaptability, and above all – intelligence. Jays like all corvids, enjoy that reputation too. But (and I fully appreciate that at this stage I might be relying too much on personal experience) my garden reminds me that jays and squirrels build the forests of the future. I see it every year, when the seeds and nuts they have buried make an appearance in our lawn.
In my reading, the trio signifies a loss of knowledge about the land, but also a loss of the land’s future …
As we move towards the poem’s end, I think we see an increasing gulf between man and Nature, and perhaps this is most apparent in the idea of the sun ‘Kindling all the hedges.’ Literally, a glorious early-morning spectacle. Or a portent of things to come. Or even better, both at the same time, as William Empsom would say.5
All we know is that Cynddylan is oblivious. Thomas tells us the farmer ‘runs his engine on a different fuel’, again conflating man and machine in a disturbing way. He ignores the ‘vain’ pleading of the birds with their ‘bills wide’ as if begging.
Something has changed. Someone has changed. Something is lost. And as the persona returns to that mocking epithet for the farmer, with the plosives emphasising his hubris in ‘passing proudly’, that thing has been lost without anyone realising. That’s the most poignant aspect of it all.
Is this ‘simply’ an elegy documenting the death-throes of a way of life? Is there a broader message here, a wider analogy with RS Thomas’s views about what it meant to be Welsh in an increasingly anglicised country?
I’ll leave that one to you.
Related Poems
Ted Hughes: The Horses
Seamus Heaney: Digging
Philip Larkin: Going, Going
About Poetry Unpacked
Poetry Unpacked is a series of long-form readings for students who want to think seriously about poems – and enjoy doing so. These aren’t model answers, but worked examples of how meaning can be made through patient attention to language, and informed by relevant context.
Previous ‘Unpackings’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Eagle https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unpacking-poetry-01-eagle-abel-guerrero-nquhc
Christina Rossetti: No, Thank You, John https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unpacking-poetry-02-thank-you-john-abel-guerrero-efduc
Philip Larkin: Talking In Bed https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unpacking-poetry-03-talking-bed-abel-guerrero-grfvc
John Donne: The Canonization https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unpacking-poetry-04-canonisation-abel-guerrero-zepde
Sylvia Plath: Spinster https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/poetry-unpacked-05-spinster-abel-guerrero-nunae
🔗 External links are correct on day of publication. Please report any broken links or unexpected content.
The Poem
Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil,
He's a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey [5]
His least bidding, and lo, he's away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields'
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood [10]
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain, [15]
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.
- ‘Marwnad Cynddylan’, at http://www.kmatthews.org.uk/history/marwnad_cynddylan/index.html ↩︎
- Hiraeth’, at https://www.wales.com/about/history-and-heritage/welsh-traditions-myths-and-legends/hiraeth ↩︎
- Poetry 1900-2000: One hundred poets from Wales, ed. by Meic Stephens (Cardigan, Parthian: The Library of Wales, 2007) ↩︎
- Swansea University: ‘ https://www.swansea.ac.uk/media/Cynddylan-on-a-Tractor—R-S-Thomas.pdf ↩︎
- William Empson, The Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930) ↩︎
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