What Hedd Wyn Taught Us
My first lesson of the week begins on Tuesday at 0800. I’m at a time in my life where teaching four days a week suits me well, although I also work in one way or another on Sundays and Mondays. I normally enjoy my work from home on Mondays. Normally, it is peaceful, and normally I work at my creative best. Before lunch, in the forest next to my house, I normally take my dogs for a walk, slightly longer than most other days, and even if I am thinking about work, I normally enjoy the walk and normally feel relaxed.
Last Monday was altogether different. In no sense was it normal. I worked fittingly, the television making a persistent, threatening hum in the background, the news as bleak as I ever remember it. I struggled to concentrate, hesitant, vacillating between a sense of despair and anger; but never fear, because I will not be afraid. I toiled, struggling to put my first lesson in place. What would be appropriate, and how meaningful could or would it be? I put the advertisements I had been intending to teach to one side and went to my bookshelves.
I flicked through some old poetry anthologies, discoloured, frayed and, if I’m honest, seldom visited. Eventually, I started to reread some poems by Hedd Wyn – a name that means ‘blessed peace’ in Welsh, and was this moniker of Ellis Humphrey Evans who, I believe, was referred to as the ‘shepherd poet’ in, or at any rate after, his brief lifetime. I settled on his poem, ‘War’, reproduced below, to take to and begin my first lesson. On Tuesday, I read the poem for my students, and then, from my own fragmented and partial knowledge, I told them this:
Hedd Wyn was a shepherd. He was born in 1887 and he died in 1917. His brother was conscripted into the British army, but Hedd Wyn, a pacifist, took his place and he went to fight with the Welsh Fusiliers at the Battle of Passchendaele. It was a battle that lasted for three months, and Hedd Wyn was killed on the first day of that battle. During the course of the battle, the so-called allies gained around five miles of ground. Some 310,000 of them died. Some 260,000 German soldiers also died. Before his death, while in France, Hedd Wyn sent back his final poem to Wales. Writing anonymously under a pseudonym, the poem addressed the theme of the hero, and it was entered into the National Eisteddfod where it won the coveted bard’s chair. In attendance at the event was the then prime minister of Britain, David Lloyd George. There were attempts to call Hedd Wyn forward to accept his prize, but it was a prize he could not receive, since he had died 6 weeks earlier.
Then I told my students about the British Member of Parliament, Bill Cash, who in a parliamentary debate in 2017 called Passchendaele ‘a wonderful battle’. And I asked them, what so wonderful, do you think, about Passchendaele?
I fell into the teaching the IB Diploma purely by chance. Serendipity. A job when I very much needed one. There was no significant intention, no missionary zeal. It’s the kind of story I’ve heard repeated by other teachers many times. But, in the decades that have followed since, I have come to believe in the IB’s undertaking to make the world a better and more peaceful place and to teach to that end, my own contribution infinitesimal. On Monday, I had started to wonder if I had completely failed, and I wondered if a life’s work had come to nothing. But now it’s Thursday, and I have spent a few days around young people, and I know there is hope, and I will keep on working in my small way for that thing I believe in. What other choice is there?
dmc, 3 March 2022
War
Why must I live in this grim age
When, to a far horizon, God
Has ebbed away, and man, with rage
Now wields the sceptre and the rod?
Man raised his sword, once God had gone,
To slay his brother, and the roar
Of battlefields now casts upon
Our homes the shadow of the war.
The harps to which we sang are hung
On willow boughs, and their refrain
Drowned by the anguish of the young
Whose blood is mingled with the rain.
Hedd Wyn (translated from Welsh by Alan Llwyd)