Dumb Instrument

Compiled by Jean-Louis Chevalier from Welch's papers held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and published by the Enitharmon Press, the anthology contains 58 poems, none of which had appeared in print before.

Chevalier's stated criteria for selecting the poems include: clearly completed works rather than unfinished, those not "privately personal" [12] and those which are not in some way a repetition of another.

O I lie hereOn my bed in the darkAnd out beyondThe lights are burningLights on the roadAcross the fieldsSpeeding on and never returning[17] Another feature of Welch's poems, almost absent from his prose, is a sense of the ongoing war.

It features either implicitly, and often contrasted to his own personal circumstances, as in "Evil lives in men's hearts"[18] or as a backdrop to his experiences in the Kent countryside, in "Mushroom heart": I was all aloneIn the fieldsBy the concrete pill-boxHouse where no fightingWas ever done[19]One of the longest, and perhaps one of the most ambitious poems in the collection is "The Fear and the Monkey", dated Monday 24 February 1947, just under two years before his death.

Chevalier identifies that this poem had two further suppressed stanzas, perhaps indicating that Welch harboured even bigger ambitions for it, already exceeding in length as it does any of his other surviving poetry.

A final, incomplete stanza reads:(And) I was left forever to watch the stonesTo feel the turning of the bonesUnder [...]Oh all was wasted, all was gone.

[22]Dumb Instrument is illustrated with a number of Welch's 'decorations' taken from his poetry notebooks, including the cover from the notebook dated 1943 (frontispiece) and an unidentified full-page illustration as a tailpiece bearing the legend 'The End' surrounded by familiar, if bleakly rendered, Welch motifs (shells, shrouded figures, mythical beasts).

"[23] Writing in Études Anglaises, Sylvère Monod shared Chevalier's view that much of Welch's poetic skill lay not here but in his prose.