Gwalia Deserta lacks the political sophistication of such a passage - or rather, it inhabits a less sophisticated world, in which the individual agency behind oppression is less thoroughly hidden. In 1938 the structure of a mining concern was still relatively intimate, there was still a memory of men who identifiably owned mines and lived nearby in mansions, as in Zola's Germinal . In fact mining remains of all mass industries the one whose violence is hardest to conceal. A mine is necessarily earthbound. A vast pit where land should be, muddy lakes, railheads, sheds the size of cathedrals, mountains of grit, lines of thunderous HGVs suddenly reduced to the size of earwigs.
Lyric poetry is the expression of emotion.
That is its liberation. It is not constrained to be correct, to say the true thing, to think the right feelings, because obviously everyone has different emotions at diferent times and they are not constrained, they happen. Hence, different poems may contradict each other. Some poems in Gwalia Deserta express disgust at the impotence of the dreamer. Other poems proclaim the potency of dreams.