Poetry in Medicine: Hearing the Bells of Rhymney

[This month I return to poetry that seeks to “heal with words.” The poem below is by Carolyn L. Tipton, Ph.D., poet, translator, and professor, living in Berkeley, California. She has translated two books of poems by Spanish poet Rafael Alberti: the first, To Painting, won the National Translation Award; the second, Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance, won the Cliff Becker Translation Prize. She is also the author of The Poet of Poet Laval, a collection of her own poetry, recently published by Salmon Poetry of County Clare, Ireland. She has been awarded fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. She earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, where she has taught for many years in the Fall Program for Freshmen. She also taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and San Francisco State University. “The Bells of Rhymney” is a poem by Welsh coal miner and poet Idris Davies (1905-1953). Davies has said that the poem was inspired by two major events in the Welsh coalfields, the 1913 Senghynydd disaster in the southern end of the Rhymney valley, in which 439 miners were killed, and the failure of the 1926 general strike. Dylan Thomas, championing other Welsh poets, reprinted a few of Davies’ poems in his Quite Early One Morning. Reading this volume, Pete Seeger discovered “Bells,” and in 1957 set it to music, and it became a folk-rock standard. In the ballad, the lyrics highlight worsening conditions for Welsh miners in the early twentieth century: amid economic hardship and social unease, mine owners took advantage of the miners whose dangerous work resulted in loss of life; the bells speak for the lost miners. In “Hearing the Bells of Rhymney,” Tipton envisions such bells invoking “communal feelings” of hope and change in the midst of the recent pandemic: instead of the “black bells of grief / we’ve all been hearing,” the bells would “lift us /from our grey habit of sadness” and “ring out green.” The editorial assistance of Cathy Chance Harvey, Ph.D., of Tylertown in the preparation of this poem is gratefully acknowledged. Physicians are invited to submit poems for publication in the Journal either by email at drluciuslampton@gmail.com or regular mail to the Journal, attention: Dr. Lampton.]—Ed.