John Ormond, the only child of Arthur and Elsie Ormond Thomas, was born John Ormond Thomas on April 3, 1923, in Dunvant, a village west of Swansea. He grew up in a small, closely knit, non-conformist community, dominated, as he once said, by the chapel (Artists in Wales 2, p.158): his father was the village shoemaker and many of his relatives worked in the nearby coal mines. English and Welsh “existed side by side in the life of the village,” and services in the chapel were conducted in both languages, but “there was little Welsh” spoken in his home (Artists in Wales, p.158). He attended Dunvant Council School and then Swansea Grammar School. As Glenys Ormond describes it, Dunvant offered the “warmth and feeling of community which appealed to John and stayed with him throughout his life and which remained an important part of his writing and especially his poetry” (In Requiem and Celebration, a film by Richard Trayler-Smith for the BBC). In 1941, he entered University College, Swansea, where he studied under the renowned American philosopher Rush Rhees and once argued with Ludwig Wittgenstein “about concepts of time” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 160). He earned a final degree in English and philosophy in 1944 and an honours degree in English language and literature the following year. Years later, when he was offered a teaching fellowship at Swansea “to talk about poetry and film,” he said that “it was lovely to be asked. My parents had such trouble to keep me when I was scholarshipless at university” (Letter, March 7, 1977). 

     In his final year in Swansea Grammar School, he discovered the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas: he read Owen’s “Exposure” and Thomas’s “The Force that through the Green Fuse” for the first time within an hour on a single evening in “April or perhaps May 1941,” and “life was never to be the same again” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 157). At the University, he began, as he put it, “to try to write” (Letter, October 3, 1892), and he published poems in Dawn, Swansea’s literary magazine, and in other outlets in England and Wales.  At the same time, he attended classes in life-study drawing at the Swansea School of Art “as the means,” he wrote later, “of training the eye in the discipline of observation” (Letter, October 3, 1982). His interest in art continued throughout his life: he recognized the significance of composition in both film and painting, and he later made films about the Welsh painters Ceri Richards (who was also born in Dunvant) and Kyffin Williams. 

     In 1943 Indications, a collection of poems by John Bayliss, James Kirkup, and John Ormond Thomas, was published in London by Grey Walls Press.  The reviews were generally favorable and judged John a promising poet. On August 21, 1943, the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote that Ormond “tends as often to exploit . . . imagery for his clever purposes as to create it out of an inward necessity. But there is more than cleverness in his verses, a lyrical probing of the dark mine of experience and a sinuous verbal craft that promises much” (p.404). Many of John’s early poems were heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas whom he finally met in 1946 when he wrote an article about him for Picture Post. Looking back at it some thirty years later, he had come to “regret that in my early work sound so heavily overbore sense,” although he still felt that “when a poem of mine lacks a sensual texture, especially a sense of the tactile, it is far less likely to succeed” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 163). 

     John met his classmate, Glenys Roderick, in their first year at University College, Swansea, but only in their last year did they (in the words of Glenys Ormond) “become close” (p. 43). At Swansea, John, who in his “early teens” had become “a convinced pacifist on Christian grounds” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 158), registered as a conscientious objector, and, as Glenys Ormond recalls, “encountered a fair bit of resentment and hostility from some students and a great deal of antagonism from certain members of staff” (p. 42). John and Glenys were married the year after they left Swansea, on September 21, 1946, and settled into a flat in Datchet, some twenty miles from London, where their first child, Rian, was born. 

     In London John became a staff writer for Picture Post. “I merely wrote and asked for a job and when asked for samples of my writing I sent every poem I had managed to publish.  On the strength of that rubbish [Sir Thomas Hopkinson] took me on as one of the six writers on the staff of a major journal which helped change the face of Britain after the war” (Letter, September 28, 1982). In London he got to know not only Dylan Thomas, but C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, George Barker, and other poets.  He resigned abruptly from Picture Post in 1949—“to come back to Wales where I felt I belonged” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 161)—and accepted a position in Swansea as a subeditor of the South Wales Evening Post, mistakenly “thinking [as he later admitted] that a job that occupied me from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. would leave me the evenings free to work in” (Artists in Wales 2 p.161).  He moved to Cardiff in 1955 to establish a news department for the BBC in Wales: “I’d been taken-on,” he wrote, “as not a Television News Assistant but the one and only one” (“Beginnings,” p.1). Two years later he was named the head of a new documentary film unit, a position he held until his retirement from the BBC in 1983. 

     John Ormond had a distinguished career as a film maker for the BBC. He made more than thirty films over the next eighteen years and was recognized in Britain and abroad for the quality of his work. His second film on Dylan Thomas, I Sing to You Strangers, the last one he made for the BBC, was shown in November, 1983, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Dylan’s death. Norman Shallow, writing in Factual Television (London: Focal Press, 1966), celebrated John’s seminal work as a documentary film maker:  “it may well be that the television of our own time will . . . be remembered . . . for the programs of a small group of men who have used the television documentary as a means of expressing their own vision of our age” (p.176). He went on to name John Ormond as one of the film makers who have in “the personal documentary” given television “its finest creative moments” (p.176). 

     Although he continued to write poems after the publication of Indications (“My Dusty Kinsfolk,” for example, was begun around the time of his father’s death in the early 1950s), the demands of journalism and then filmmaking no doubt distracted him from poetry and inevitably refocused his creative energies. At the same time, Vernon Watkins had advised him not to collect his poems again until he was thirty. He had moreover come to regard the poems he had written as “rubbish.” As a result, “there was,” as he described it, “a great bonfire on the potato patch when I came home from London to Dunvant, one August, of perhaps 300 or more pieces. I mean not drafts, but ‘complete.’ Though in those days I hadn’t much of the pattern of revision and rewriting that later became the norm” (Letter, October 3, 1982). Thus began what John Ormond once called his “long silence.”

     That silence was broken at last in 1965. Four years earlier John had brought a crew to Arezzo to make the film that would be called From a Town in Tuscany. He explained the importance of his trip to Arezzo in “A Letter from Tuscany” (Poetry Wales, 24:1, 1989). 

I was walking alone up a narrow street early one morning and passed a church called Santa Maria delle Pieve [sic], with a vastly complex façade with three tiers of I don’t know how many small pillars, each one carved differently.  Workmen had already climbed up in the high campanile and they were hammering away and happily singing though I could not see them.  It was the moment I recalled many months later, and wrote my poem “Cathedral Builders” in 20 minutes flat.  It just seemed to come down my arm without my thought, and it broke the blockage that had kept me virtually silent for too many years.  It was also like nothing that I had ever written before (p.23). 

He had “at that moment,” as he put it in another telling of the story, “learned, or had somehow contrived, to use the details of memory” (Letter, October 3, 1982). 

     With the publication of “Cathedral Builders” (in the first issue of Poetry Wales in 1965), John entered upon a new phase of his career: the poems he subsequently published reflected the apparently unadorned, resonant, quietly crafted language upon which his reputation now rests. “Cathedral Builders” has none of the conspicuous or gratuitous verbal techniques that characterized his earlier poems. Although he contended that “it just seemed to come down my arm without my thought,” the poem appears as carefully wrought as the cathedral whose builders it celebrates. The subtle idiosyncrasies of diction, the alternating rhythms of the first three stanzas, the periodic structure of the whole poem (which is a single sentence) and of the last stanza in particular make it a deft and moving celebration of the labour by which ordinary men and women create, in the course of their mundane lives, in the face of their inescapable mortality, something both lasting and beautiful.

                                                      .          stood in the crowd

                 Well back from the vestments at the consecration,

                 Envied the fat bishop his warm boots,

                 Cocked up a squint eye and said, “I bloody did that”. 

While the poem may have been written in twenty minutes, it seems finally the result of John’s work, probably over twenty years, to hone and perfect his craft, to make, as he does in “Cathedral Builders,” craft and meaning one. 

     John now began once more to publish individual poems in magazines both in Wales and elsewhere, poems that reflected “the pattern of revision and rewriting” that now characterized his work. And then finally, “to exorcise the devil of that long silence” (quoted in Jenkins, p.19), he collected poems he had written over the past twenty-five years as Requiem and Celebration, published by Christopher Davies in 1969. The poems were not arranged in a strict chronology and represented (as John explained in an introductory note) “only very roughly the order in which they were written.” The collection contains poems in the more elaborate style of his earlier work as well as in the quieter, more colloquial style of “Cathedral Builders.”  “It was an arrangement,” John later told Richard Poole, “like an exhibition of pictures, you put in things which hang together and bounce off one another even if they are separated in time, in years and often many years” (“Conversations,” p.40). Some of the poems were written or at least begun much earlier: “First Sleep,” for example, was a revised version of a poem first published in the New Welsh Review in 1946, and “City in Fire and Snow” was written between 1948 and 1952. Others were more recent: “Instruction to Settlers” was probably begun sometime in the 1960s when John made his film about the Welsh in Patagonia. Among the best poems in Requiem and Celebration are those that seem to grow out of his memories of Dunvant and the small community of family and friends among whom he was born and raised. 

     Requiem and Celebration won a Welsh Arts Council Prize in 1970. John Ormond’s “unrelenting struggle,” as Glyn Jones put it, “to find his own true subject matter and a way to deal with this subject matter in his own personal manner” (quoted in Dannie Abse, “John Ormond,” pp. 127-8) had come to an end, for he had at last escaped the burden of Dylan Thomas and found his own voice as a poet.  In 1971, John recorded some of his later poetry for Argo’s Poets of Wales series (PLP 1156), and Dannie Abse included a selection of his poems in  Corgi Modern Poets in Focus:5.  In 1973 a new collection, Definition of a Waterfall, was published by Oxford University Press, accepted by Jon Stallworthy “five days after I’d posted the manuscript” (Letter, March 7, 1977).  It included eleven poems from Requiem and Celebration and seventeen previously uncollected.  It too won a Welsh Arts Council Prize.  In a long essay for The Anglo-Welsh Review (23, 1974), Jeremy Hooker wrote: “I believe that in Definition of a Waterfall, which he publishes at the age of fifty, John Ormond has emerged as a major poet” (p. 5). In 1975 he received the Cholmondeley Award, and in 1979 a new selection of poems, including some not previously collected, appeared (with those of Emyr Humphreys and John Tripp) in Penguin Modern Poets 27. 

     On March 4, 1977, The Times Literary Supplement printed John’s poem “Homing Pigeons” in its “six pages on Wales.”  John was somewhat uneasy about the term “Anglo-Welsh”: poems, he once said (in a note on the sleeve of his Argo recording) “should be good poems in the English language. The Welshness, if it is to be there at all, will look after itself.” But “Homing Pigeons” nonetheless seemed an appropriate choice for an issue on Wales because it recalls not only the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the traditional Welsh poetic forms that are characterized by strict patterns of alliteration.  (Although John did not consider himself a speaker of Welsh, he had read a book on Welsh prosody while still in Swansea Grammar School and had got to know something of the rules that govern it). But the poem seemed an appropriate choice for another reason as well.  While it is not his best or most ambitious poem, it suggests in a concise and accessible form the central vision of John’s poetry and the skill, the careful craftsmanship through which he expressed it. 

     “Homing Pigeons” is a remarkable technical achievement, a poem that reflects the poet’s struggle to discipline his language so that, as John once put it, “the music—by which I mean the sound and rhythm—and the meaning” are made “one thing” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 163). The poem is carefully balanced: two parallel stanzas of seven lines are separated by a stanza of four lines.  In the opening line, “Out of a parsimony of space unclenched,” “parsimony of space” (a basket) sounds appropriately clipped and thus produces the rhythmic release of “unclenched.” The periodic structure of the first three lines, which brings particular emphasis to “they ascend out of their hunger,” seems to reproduce in the third line the upward movement of the pigeons. 

     The next two clauses, roughly parallel in structure but with the second longer than the first, suggest the lengthening arcs the pigeons make. Then, with the enjambment and the absence of syntactic breaks in the last two lines (“Then blend to a common tangent and so render/Themselves to the essence of what they are”), the movement becomes quicker, more fluid, less labored and broken, as the pigeons gather together and fly swiftly and easily home. While the rhythmic movements of the stanza parallel the flight of the pigeons, the words “arcs,” “circumflexions,” and “tangent” not only describe it visually, but suggest as well the instinctual pattern and order by which the pigeons reveal their essential nature. 

     In the second stanza a new rhythm underscores the expository qualities of the lines. The question that begins the stanza, “What beguilement shepherds the heart home,” seems quiet and conversational after the description of the pigeons. It also contains, as John pointed out, “a truly Anglo-Welsh pun but deeply buried: bugail [pronounced bee-guile] is the Welsh for shepherd” (Letter, February 18, 1977). The next three lines, with the triple stress on “late lode-stone’’ and the three syntactic breaks, move slowly and thoughtfully to the emphatic close of the last line—“a fixed star.” In the third stanza the alliteration becomes more insistent. The fl sounds at the beginning of the stanza recall the clumsy sounding beat and flutter of wings when we disturb a flock of pigeons. The lines, broken by appositives, now suggest the somersaults of tumbler pigeons whose forward flight is broken by their tumbling. The last four and a half lines, with their several syntactic breaks and insistent alliteration, are, like the flight they describe, choppy and labored. 

     The final lines form one long periodic sentence. The two phrases that precede the main clause (the last line of the poem) are themselves interrupted three times by parenthetical elements, and thus both the rhythmic movement and the entire syntactic structure, which seem simultaneously to pull us forward and yet unable to reach the final statement we expect, suggest precisely both the mysterious attraction that draws us home and the difficulty of the flight, the tentativeness of the commitment, the distractions that can take us off course.

               And, despite awkwardness, being, as best we can,

               Committed, in the chance weather we approach,

               To what and where, without a sense of reward,

               We may reach and trust to be fed. 

The rhythm, the syntax, the content of these lines contrast sharply with those of the first stanza and so make clear that, while we can define tangents and essences, our emblem is not the homing pigeon, but the tumbler. At the same time, the periodic structure and frequent parentheses create a sense of expectation by conspicuously withholding the main clause of the sentence. As a result, the last line of the poem (the main clause), when we do finally get to it, has—with the  heavy stress on “reach,” the pause, and the gentle fall of “trust to be fed”—a quiet, even triumphant finality that suggests we have, indeed, at last, despite all the difficulty, come home.

     But that quiet, hesitant triumph is further qualified by “may reach” in the last line, for the words seem to admit either of two meanings:  “we are able to reach” or “we may or may not reach.” It seems a linguistic instance of the rabbit and the duck: as we hear the line one way it suddenly reverses itself and we hear it the other way. But what we actually hear is John Ormond’s struggle to find order and meaning, his persistent search in his poems for “the lost word,” for the answer the angels on motorbikes (in “Waiting in the Garden”) might bring, for a way to make sense of the human condition.

     When he wrote about his work in Corgi Modern Poets in Focus, John recalled the words of Vernon Watkins, “I am aware,” he said, “that I am continually concerned with ‘life’s miraculous poise between light and dark’” (p. 133). Light and dark, joy and sorrow, requiem and celebration, meaning and absurdity, life and death: these tensions are persistently at play in John’s poetry and shape its vision of the world in which we live. Like those of Wallace Stevens, a poet he admired (he said in the W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture “I was so bowled over by a reading of one of his poems on the radio [‘The Idea of Order at Key West’] that I ran out next day and ordered in W.H.Smiths  . . .  anything in print by Stevens”), John’s poems reflect the rage for order, a longing for “signals,” as he put it in his film on R.S. Thomas, “from an ever-present reality, glimpses of the eternal; sources at which a man can strengthen and renew his vision of an order beyond time” (p.56). But that longing can never be satisfied, and, in the end, the poems find only our world of time and change with its reasons to rejoice and to mourn.  In denying neither the truth of our mortality nor the joys of the mortal world, neither our “lust for secrets” nor our inability to learn them, the poetry of John Ormond sees clearly the elemental uncertainty in which we live and thus resists both the blinding brilliance of presumption and the blinding darkness of despair. John’s best work makes clear the joys and sorrows of our own lives, the beauty and fragility of creation, and returns us to the world with a sharpened sense of its wonder and worth. 

     In the summer of 1981, John Ormond returned to Italy and for the first time visited Cortona, the Tuscan town which he then said “has nothing much to distinguish it except for its position on a marvellous mountainside and two divine Fra Anglico’s in its little art gallery” (Letter, August 17, 1981). But he nonetheless returned to Cortona for about six weeks almost every summer until his death:  the little Tuscan hilltown soon became “not the place I visit, but the other place I live” (“A Letter from Tuscany,” p.22). Something beyond the beautiful landscape and its vibrant people, something more deeply vital to his art, seemed to draw him back to Cortona each summer. 

     In “A Letter from Tuscany,” John recalled that “the first time I ever had any inkling that I would benefit as a writer from spending some time abroad was in Segovia in central Spain.” He described his walk alone around “the little square behind the cathedral.” 

I had felt, not-at-home, but, part of that place; with a mixture of belonging and not belonging.  I could half see myself (as in a silent film) searching for a room in that small plaza.  It would turn out to be furnished with just a table and chair and a bed.  And what would happen?  I’d write, out of isolation (having little of the language), out of the easiness and warmth of the air; not about Segovia, or even Spain, but poems (p. 20). 

The room he took at the Albergo Italia in Cortona resembled the room he imagined for himself in the little square in Segovia.  

     Living each summer in Cortona initially gave him, as he put it, “a more intense sense of the sheer range of English, its vocabulary and music,” as well as “new images” for his poems (“A Letter from Tuscany, p.22). But it gave him something more.  Although Glenys joined him there from time to time and he visited Georgetown University’s Villa Le Balze for a few days each summer to read his poetry, he was for the most part alone in Cortona. Years before he had acknowledged, as he put it, “the truth of what Robert Graves meant when he said ‘a poet must be of the world, but also not of the world’” (Artists in Wales 2, p. 164), and his residence in Cortona each summer seemed to give him the mixture of belonging and not belonging that he needed, temperamentally and creatively, to feel.  A summer visitor without Italian, he could never truly enter into the life of the place, and yet in some ways he found a home Cortona and came to know at least some of its residents who, he said, were happy to have the poet Ormond return to their town each year.  Cortona, he believed, unlocked words in him “as though there were some small room in which unrealized poems are in safe keeping, waiting to emerge from a clasped book” (“A Letter from Tuscany,” p.22). John’s friend, the poet Ted Walker, thought the “Italian poems are more important, more deeply felt, more immediately accurate in their imagery” than any John had written (In Requiem and Celebration).

     But, at the same time, as “Waiting in the Garden” suggests, the Italian poems continue to engage John’s enduring vision of the human condition, “life’s miraculous poise between light and dark.”  “Waiting in the Garden” recalls the mythic apparition of the angel Gabriel to Mary as she reads in her garden, an image John would have seen in Fra Angelo’s painting of the scene in the Museo Diocesano in Cortona. But the poem is actually set in what seems his wife’s garden in Wales and rests on the tension between our longing for certainty and our inability to find it, between the joy that is humanly possible and the darkness that will inevitably overtake it. Similarly, while “Tuscan Cypresses” (probably the most ambitious poem he ever wrote and quite possibly his best) grows clearly from the landscape of Tuscany, it nonetheless confronts questions with which he had wrestled in his poetry for years.  In a long meditation on human history, the speaker defines and redefines the cypresses, seeing in their enduring and indifferent presence a “still point,” a figure of permanence in the bent and mutable world. But the trees remain mute and mysterious and seem at once to embody the existential enigma of the world and to possess the hidden knowledge that might expound it. The cypresses John observed each day from the window of his room in Cortona came to figure forth the enigmatic silence, the unfathomable mystery, the answer forever just out of reach that had troubled the poetry (and the poet) throughout his life.   

     John Ormond suffered a stroke on Sunday, April 22, 1990. He had in August 1989 received a Bicentennial Medal from Georgetown for his achievements as a poet and film maker, and he was at the time working on Cathedral Builders, an illustrated edition of his poems for Gwasg Gregynog. (It was eventually edited by his daughter, Rian Ormond Thomas, and published with her introduction in 1991). John was immediately hospitalized, suffered a second stroke, and died two weeks later, on May 5, 1990, at the age of 67. Glyn Jones and Dannie Abse wrote tributes to him in the next issue of Poetry Wales (26:2, 1990). They were followed first by several more articles in a special issue of Poetry Wales in December 1990 (27:3) and then by Richard Trayler-Smith’s film. While he had not been in robust health, John’s death was unexpected, premature, and he had several plans for writing, including a sequence of poems called “Italian Suite,” when he died. But as John courageously recognized, we must be grateful for what we have received even as we mourn what we have lost. As he wrote in “The Gift,” “Enough that it was given, green, as of right, when,/Equally possible, nothing might ever have been,” although with the poems he might still have written and the joy he might still have brought to those who knew and loved him, it is difficult to say “enough.” 

References

I thank Poetry Wales and Gale Research for permission to adapt some previously published material.  The citation “Letter” refers to correspondence from John Ormond to me.  John Ormond: Collected Poems is published by Seren. 

“John Ormond.”  Artists in Wales 2.  Ed. Meic Stephens.  Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1973, 156-64.  [An autobiographical essay]. 

Ormond, Glenys.  “’J.O.’ and ‘Rod.’”  Poetry Wales 27:3 (1990), 42-5. 

“Beginnings.”  Wales in Vision: the People and Politics of Television.  Ed. Patrick Hannan.  Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1990, 1-10. 

Jenkins, Randal.  “The Poetry of John Ormond.”  Poetry Wales 8:1 (1972), 17-28.

Poole, Richard.  “Conversations with John Ormond.”  The New Welsh Review 2:1 (1989), 38-46.

Abse, Dannie.  “John Ormond.” Corgi Modern Poets in Focus:5.  London: Corgi, 1973, 127-33.  Rpt. (with revisions) as “John Ormond, a Neglected Poet.”  Dannie Abse.  The Two Roads Taken.  London: Enitharmon Press, 2003, 153-9. 

“John Ormond Writes.”  Corgi Modern Poets in Focus:5.  Ed. Dannie Abse.  London: Corgi, 1973, 133-5. 

In Place of Empty Heaven.  Swansea: University College Swansea, 1983.  [The W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture delivered at University College of Swansea on December 7, 1982]. 

“R.S. Thomas: Poet and Priest.”  Poetry Wales 7:4 (1972), 47-57.  [A transcript of John Ormond’s film for B.B.C. Television, broadcast on April 2, 1972].