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Welsh poet

Idris Davies (6 January 1905 – 6 April 1953) was a Welsh poet. Born in Rhymney, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, he became a poet, originally writing in Welsh, but later writing exclusively in English. He was the only poet to cover significant events of the early 20th century in the South Wales Valleys and the South Wales Coalfield, and from a perspective literally at the coalface. He is now best known for the verses "Bells of Rhymney", from his 1938 Gwalia Deserta (meaning literally "Wasteland of Wales"), which were later adapted into a popular folk song.

Davies was born at 16 Field Street, Rhymney, Monmouthshire, the Welsh speaking son of colliery chief winderman (mine lift operator) Evan Davies and his wife Elizabeth Ann. having been introduced to the work of Shelley by a fellow miner. He qualified as a teacher through courses at Loughborough College and the University of Nottingham. During the Second World War he took teaching posts at various schools in London, where he became friends with Dylan Thomas. Before his first book was published in 1938, Davies' work appeared in the Western Mail, the Merthyr Express, the Daily Herald, the Left Review and Comment (a weekly periodical of poetry, criticism and short stories, edited by Victor Neuburg and Sheila Macleod). In 1947 he returned to teach at a school in the Rhymney Valley. The poems for his second anthology, published by Faber and Faber in 1945, were chosen by T. S. Eliot. Eliot thought that Davies' poems had a claim to permanence, describing them as "the best poetic document I know about a particular epoch in a particular place".

Davies died from abdominal cancer, aged 48, at his mother's house at 7, Victoria Road, Rhymney on Easter Monday, 6 April 1953. He was buried in Rhymney Public Cemetery. and at the town library. In September 2006 a refurbished grave memorial was unveiled, at a re dedication service, in the town's cemetery.

"The author of this lyrical sequence is moved by a fine indignation born of experience. His poem, therefore, is the outcry of a community as well as that of an individual. It expresses the hopes, betrayal, and suffering of the people of South Wales. It has the simplicity of folksong, of a modern folksong rich with the idiom and image of the contemporary scene and outlook on life. These songs ring true and their appeal is more than a literary one. The author takes his place with Welsh poets such as W. H. Davies and Huw Menai as one authorised by his people to sing for them, and to show the world in music what they have suffered and are still suffering in actuality"— Gwalia Deserta, frontispiece, 1938

The editor's frontispiece from Gwalia Deserta provides a useful summary of Davies' outlook. In a diary entry Davies wrote: "I am a socialist. That is why I want as much beauty as possible in our everyday lives, and so I am an enemy of pseudo poetry and pseudo art of all kinds. Too many 'poets of the Left', as they call themselves, are badly in need of instruction as to the difference between poetry and propaganda  These people should read William Blake on Imagination until they show signs of understanding him. Then the air will be clear again, and the land be, if not full of, fit for song."

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 valleys. The "Bells of Rhymney" verses, perhaps Davies' most widely known work, appear as Part XV of the book. The stanzas follow the pattern of the well known 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 Conservative MP David Davies and Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams, in a Parliamentary debate concerning health care in Wales. The 2017 album Every Valley, by London based alternative band Public Service Broadcasting, includes a version of Gwalia Deserta XXXVI set to music and re titled Turn No More. It is sung by Manic Street Preachers' singer James Dean Bradfield.