The Poems of Dafydd Ap Gwilym

THE POEMS OF

DAFYDD

AP GWILYM

OTHER BOOKS BY JOSEPH P. CLANCY

Poetry

The Significance of Flesh

Here & There

Ordinary Time

Passing Through

Translations

The Odes and Epodes of Horace

Medieval Welsh Lyrics

The Earliest Welsh Poems

Twentieth Century Welsh Poems

Living a Life: Selected Poems by Gwyn Thomas

The Plays of Saunders Lewis (4 vols.)

Bobi Jones: Selected Poems

The World of Kate Roberts

Saunders Lewis: Selected Poems

Where There’s Love: Welsh Folk Poems of Love and Marriage

The Light in the Gloom: Poems and Prose by Alun Llywelyn-Williams

Medieval Welsh Poems

Bobi Jones: Right As Rain (e-book)

Non-Fiction

Pendragon: Arthur and His Britain

Other Words: Essays on Poetry and Translation

Short Stories (as P. G. Thomas)

The Retired Life

Novel (with Gertrude Clancy)

Death is a Pilgrim: A Canterbury Tale

See www.ProfJosephPClancy.com for further details.

THE POEMS OF

DAFYDD

AP GWILYM

Translated by Joseph P. Clancy

Copyright © Joseph P. Clancy 2016

The right of Joseph P. Clancy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and

The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB

www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-78545-089-1

ISBN e-book: 978-1-78545-090-7

Cover design by Kevin Rylands

Internal design by Andrew Easton

Cover photograph by Joshua Fincher

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Pronunciation of Welsh

CELEBRATIONS, FRUSTRATIONS

A Celebration of Summer

The Seagull

The Girls of Llanbadarn

A Broken Promise

A Girl, A Bird, A Birch Tree

A Preacher’s Reproach

Gilding the Lily

Reassurance

Outside/Inside

The Peat Pit

In Winter, A Woodcock

Aubade

The Goose Shed

In Praise of His Uncle

Anima Christi

The Owl

GWYNEDD

One Night at an Inn

Newborough

A Gift of Wine

Pre-eminence

The Spear

Retaliation

The Mirror

The Black Friar’s Warning

In Praise of Hywel, Dean of Bangor

The Goodness of Providence

Pilgrimage

The Fowler

Denial

Perjury

Appeal

Reproach to His Penis

HEADING SOUTH

In Praise of Ieuan Llwyd

Madog’s Chaplet

A Garland of Peacock Feathers

Lament for Madog Benfras

A Bad Bard

Feeble Courtship

May

A Kiss

The Rattle Bag

Wild Creatures

Haggling

Razzle

Girlnapping

Lament for Gruffudd ab Adda

The Lady of Is Aeron

The Rood at Carmarthen

Lament for Rhydderch ab Ieuan Llwyd

MORFUDD

Affliction

The Sigh

Foster Son

The Dream

The Star

Under the Eaves

The Fool

Complaint

Farewell

Fancying a Nun

Twilight

The Grey Friar’s Advice

Recompense

Cowardice

Devotion

Today

Morfudd’s Embrace

The Vow

Goldsmith

Nuts in My Hand

The Fox

The Briar

A House of Leaves

The Woodland Mass

Love in Secret

A Matter of Months

Ice

The Holly Grove

The Wave on the River Dyfi

Tonsure

Reconciliation

The Woodcock’s Warning

Marriage

Rejection

Infidelity

The World’s Brittleness

Husbandry

EXILE AND IFOR

In Praise of Ifor ap Llywelyn

Incomparable Ifor

Summer

A Prayer to Dwynwen

The Skylark

Hidden Love

A Simile for Morfudd

Suspicion

Three Porters

The Birch Hat

Morfudd’s Hair

A Moonlit Night

The Wind

Ifor Hael

Basaleg

A Gift of Gloves

Farewell to Ifor

DYDDGU

Dyddgu

Dyddgu and Morfudd

Love’s Tears

Longing’s Lineage

An Invitation to Dyddgu

The Roebuck

Wooing Dyddgu

The Tune

A BARDIC QUARREL

A Bardic Quarrel

1. Gruffudd Gryg: Dafydd’s Wounds

2. Dafydd ap Gwilym:

Gruffudd’s Plagiarism

3. Gruffudd’s Reply

4. Dafydd’s Response

5. Gruffudd’s Retort

6. Dafydd’s Rejoinder

7. Gruffudd’s Last Word

8. Dafydd’s Last Word

Lament for Gruffudd Gryg

LOVE’S OBSTACLES

Four Loves

Paragon

Spellbound

Coursing a Hare

The Mist

Waiting in Vain

Forgetfulness

The Window

Winter Wooing

The Song Thrush

The Thrush’s Verdict

The Clock

Lament for His Uncle

A Fortress against Envy

Christ and His Apostles

Lament for Angharad

MORFUDD AND AGE

The Haycock

The Heart

Intoxication

A Wish for Eiddig

Seeking and Guarding

The Sword

Repentance

The Rival

Yesterday

Beauty Marred

Lament for Ifor and Nest

Shadow

The Magpie

Morfudd Grown Old

Love’s Journeying

The Ruin

The End of Love

Notes

Glossary

INTRODUCTION

‘Poetry,’ Seamus Heaney has said, ‘is language in orbit. It may start with recollected emotion or immediate anger or rapture, but once that personal boost has helped a poem to lift off, it runs on its own energy circuit. And the energy coursing in the circuit is generated and flows between the words themselves, between the words and the metre, the metre and the line, the line and the stanza, and so on.’¹

That is certainly true for the work of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. Poem after poem takes off in a thrust of controlled dynamic language that sustains it to the end. It is this, together with his range of experience and emotion, that makes Dafydd, in R. Geraint Gruffydd’s words, ‘perhaps the greatest of all Welsh poets and ... certainly one of the great poets of the European Middle Ages’.²

No one who can experience Dafydd ap Gwilym’s work at first hand is likely to dispute Professor Gruffydd’s judgment. For others, though, it can only be experienced through translation, and those most familiar with these poems tend to believe translating them to be impossible – as impossible, say, as translating the odes of Horace into English. ‘Much of [Dafydd’s] particular genius,’ writes Daniel Huws, ‘has to be taken on faith by the non-Welsh reader.’³

Translation, however, is always the art of the impossible – at its best, a laudable failure to those who know the original, a revelation and a blessing to those who do not. Poetic translation – what George Steiner has called ‘counter-creation’⁴ – can, I believe, whatever the losses, convey much of the experience of reading the original poem. My hope is that these translations will enable readers who do not read or understand Welsh to enjoy Dafydd ap Gwilym’s exuberant delight in the natural world and his sometimes joyous, sometimes bitter, sometimes comic depiction of the twists and turns of love, the force and freshness of his imagination, and even something of his melodic power – that these translations too ‘lift off’, even if it is into an orbit lower than their Welsh originals.

BIOGRAPHY

Mau einioes annudd – ‘mine’s a hidden life,’ Dafydd says in the poem I have entitled ‘Marriage’. Whatever he meant in the immediate context, it has certainly proved true for the facts of that life, despite his fame throughout Wales in his time and thereafter. This is hardly surprising – unlike his English contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, Dafydd ap Gwilym held no public offices and is not mentioned in contemporary records, though several people connected with him are. Most of the poems themselves – the largest surviving body of work, some 150 poems, by a medieval Welsh poet – were orally transmitted and not recorded until a century or more after his death.⁵

The date of that death, like the date of his birth, is unknown. It is likely that he was born c1315 and died c1360. The few poems with topical references indicate that they were composed in the 1340s and possibly, in several cases, in the early 1350s. Apart from this, and occasional other internal evidence, it is frustratingly impossible to determine the chronological order of composition and so view his work developmentally and in clear relation to his life.

The poems themselves provide enough biographical information, when combined with other sources, for Gruffydd to emphasize ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym’s rootedness in northern Cardiganshire’, to say that he ‘was the son of well-born parents who had fairly substantial landed interests’ and to conjecture that ‘as a young child Dafydd may have been sent for fostering to the household of his uncle Llywelyn ap Gwilym at Castell Newydd Emlyn, where the ambience would have been partly French and where Dafydd claims that he learnt verse-craft at his uncle’s feet’.⁶ This would account for the wide range of his vocabulary, which includes words imported from English and French. He may have had, as Rachel Bromwich thought, ‘sufficient means to travel at will through town and country’,⁷ a view Eurys Rowlands shares in seeing Dafydd travelling not as a professional poet but as ‘a gentleman, less wealthy than he’d like to be, composing for pleasure, earning a certain amount by his poetry, and also fashioning his poems as something of an excuse for his way of life’.⁸ It is a view suggested by the relatively few poems for patrons among his surviving works, as compared to the surviving poems of his younger contemporary, Iolo Goch. There are hints, however, in his eulogy for Ieuan Llwyd, in ‘Infidelity’ and ‘The World’s Brittleness’, that he may have lost or squandered much of his fortune, and that like other Welsh poets of his time, he made the regular bardic circuit of great houses and monasteries. It is evident from his eulogies and theirs that he was particularly acquainted with major poets of his own generation in northwest and northeastern Wales – Gruffudd Gryg, Madog Benfras, Gruffudd ab Adda, Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen and Iolo Goch – whom Geraint Gruffydd considers ‘to have been a fairly cohesive group: they were the avant-garde of their day’.⁹

Dafydd’s most important patrons, apart from his uncle, were the family of Ieuan Llwyd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd Foel of Parcrhydderch in Llangeitho, Ceredigion, who played an important role in Welsh literary history. In the 1330s they possessed Llawysgrif Hendregadredd, a manuscript in which Dafydd could read much of the work of the twelfth- and thirteenth- century Poets of the Princes, and to which was added his elegy for Ieuan’s wife and his stanzas praising the rood at Carmarthen. Ieuan’s son, as scribal patron or owner, gave his name to The White Book of Rhydderch: the manuscript contains most of the tales known to the modern world as The Mabinogion, with which Dafydd was well acquainted.

More of Dafydd’s poems to the man he called Ifor Hael (Ifor the Bountiful), in Gwent, southeast Wales, survive than to any other patron. Geraint Gruffydd, acknowledging that it is conjecture, believes that Dafydd was somehow banished from his native Ceredigion at the instigation of his lover’s jealous husband and that ‘this banishment ... provides the most credible context for Dafydd’s sojourn [with Ifor]’.¹⁰ A more cautious view is that ‘he was a regular visitor [to Ifor’s home], although whether early or late in the poet’s career it is impossible to say’.¹¹

POET AND PERSONA

More biographical information would certainly be useful to clarify circumstances which Dafydd at times assumes are known by his immediate audience. But what matters literarily, as with any poet, is the person we encounter in the poems, the imagined self Dafydd created from actual or fictitious experience, and which he dramatizes in a rich variety of roles.

As pencerdd, master-bard, he performed as had Welsh court poets since Taliesin in the sixth century, composing eulogies and elegies (‘In Praise of Ieuan Llwyd’, ‘A Gift of Gloves’) for patrons who belonged like himself to the uchelwyr, the landed gentry who in the fourteenth century formed the highest Welsh social class. It is in this role, as well as that of affectionate nephew, that he mourns the man he honours as both patron and bardic teacher (‘Lament for His Uncle’). And it is in this role too that he presents himself as wooer of the wives and daughters of uchelwyr (‘The Lady of Is Aeron’, ‘Paragon’), often addressing them under pseudonyms alluding to legendary beautiful women, e.g., Indeg, Enid, Fflur. This had been the accepted mode for eulogizing noblewomen since the twelfth century. But while externally, so to speak, these poems fulfilled a social function, they are nonetheless love poems: internally, they express hyperbolically a courtly lover’s vision and celebration of ideal beauty embodied in a sexually desirable woman.

By contrast, in a number of poems Dafydd depicts himself as compulsive womanizer (‘Razzle’, ‘Aubade’, ‘Reproach to His Penis’). It is a role, however, in which he is often frustrated (‘The Girls of Llanbadarn’, ‘The Rattle Bag’, ‘One Night at an Inn’) – as poet, he is here very much the entertainer, while as character he is a baffled philanderer, a figure of fun when tryst turns to farce.

At least one-third of Dafydd’s surviving poems concern a capricious woman named Morfudd, and in these he portrays himself as devoted, frequently exasperated, spellbound lover – praising her beauty and complaining of her cruelty (‘The Sigh’, ‘Devotion’); rejoicing when she returns his love (‘Morfudd’s Embrace’, ‘The Vow’, ‘Love in Secret’); denouncing her bitterly for betraying him by marrying (‘Rejection’, ‘Infidelity’); pursuing her nonetheless, sometimes successfully, despite her jealous husband (‘The Birch Hat’, ‘Yesterday’), in an on-and-off affair that lasted, it would seem, until her death (‘Morfudd Grown Old’, ‘Love’s Journeying’). It is a role that allows Dafydd to cast himself, sometimes ironically, as courtly lover, but also at times as comically frustrated suitor (‘Under the Eaves’, ‘Three Porters’). And it is in this role that Dafydd ap Gwilym dramatizes the widest and most complex emotional range of any medieval Welsh poet – perhaps, indeed, of any medieval European poet.

It is chiefly as lover, courtly or not, that Dafydd relates to the natural world. Although he will vilify mist or briar or moonlight when they become obstacles to a tryst, he is most often a celebrant – of summer as the season of fertility and fulfilment; of the grove as metaphoric court or church, a haven from social constraints and ecclesiastical strictures; of seagull, thrush and skylark, roebuck and wind, as llateion, creatures asked to carry his message of love to a desired woman.

Above all, though, it is as believing, worshipping Christian, if in some respects a wayward and unorthodox one, that Dafydd portrays himself in his experiences of love and nature, as indeed throughout his poems. In praising a painting of Christ with his apostles and in meditating on the eucharistic prayer ‘Anima Christi’, he is, as Sir Thomas Parry maintained, ‘a true son of the Catholic Church, well acquainted with all its religious usages’.¹² So, too, as might be expected, in Dafydd’s elegies, and for that matter, in his colloquial swearing by God, Mary and a variety of Welsh saints. But it is in poems where ‘his whole attitude to Nature and the objects of Nature is utterly different from that of any Welsh poet before him’¹³ that he expresses most fully thanks and praise to its creator and sustainer. It was ‘a commonplace of patristic and medieval theology ... that nature is a book in which we read of God’,¹⁴ but Dafydd goes much further. His poems constantly voice a paradisal experience of the natural world – an experience shadowed, however, by awareness of its transiency, as in the poem ‘Summer’: ‘Woe’s us, Adam’s feeble race,/Surge of grace, how short the summer.’

R. M. Jones has contrasted Dafydd’s theological stance with Thomas Aquinas’ definition of ‘nature’ as separate from ‘grace’,¹⁵ and a recent summary of Catholic theology states that ‘Catholicism holds ... there is an essential difference between nature and grace’.¹⁶ According to the modern theologian Richard McBrien, ‘the problem of the relationship between nature and grace is as fundamental a problem as one will come upon in all of Christian theology’.¹⁷ It was no problem for Dafydd. To him, Professor Jones declares, ‘Gras yw Natur’, Nature is Grace. He would presumably agree with some modern Thomists that distinguishing nature from grace is essentially a hypothetical philosophical abstraction, since in reality ‘Human existence is already graced existence’.¹⁸ The closest Dafydd comes to playing theologian, though, is in ‘The Grey Friar’s Advice’, and his credo there is basically the Pauline assertion that ‘everything God has created is good’ (1 Timothy 4: 4–5).

‘Everything’ includes serch – eros, sexual desire, passionate love. And so, says Jones, for Dafydd ‘Gras yw serch’, love is grace,¹⁹ a belief he expresses most fervently in ‘The Vow’. In this Dafydd is at the opposite pole from the ‘vehemently anti-sexual bias’ of much patristic and medieval theology²⁰ which he encounters in the preaching of Dominican and Franciscan friars. And Dafydd goes well beyond the usual view of love in medieval European literature, as only possible when it is free from the social bases and constraints of marriage, in his affirming it as divinely given and blessed.

Some modern readers, Christian or not, may be disconcerted less by Dafydd’s cheeky attempt to seduce a nun than by his petitioning Saint Dwynwen for assistance in his adulterous affair with Morfudd, his thanking God that ‘Yesterday’ was not, like the day before, sinless, and his turning from devout praise of a skylark to requesting the bird to act as his love-messenger. Most Catholics, I suspect, modern or medieval, would find in such moments – as in a fifteenth-century poem, surely influenced by Dafydd, in which the lovers give up adultery for Lent²¹ – credible and wryly amusing instances of how curious and complicated the relations between believing and behaving can be.

R. M. Jones has remarked that Dafydd ‘acknowledged, to be sure, his own adultery; but to him, this wasn’t much different from small boys stealing apples’.²² Yet the tension between believing love is a God-bestowed natural good and orthodox sexual morality finds expression in ‘The Heart’ and ‘Repentance’. Geraint Gruffydd compares the latter poem to the traditional marwysgafn (death-bed poem) of earlier Welsh bards,²³ as does Rachel Bromwich in translating it under the title of ‘A Recantation’ and comparing it to Chaucer’s ‘retractation’ appended to The Canterbury Tales.²⁴ It strikes me, on the contrary, that this poem is markedly different from the poems of death-bed repentance by the Poets of the Princes, and from a confessional poem by Dafydd’s contemporary Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen²⁵ – as much closer, in fact, to Augustine’s famous prayer, ‘Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet’. Dafydd’s complaint, as so often, that he is dying for love of Morfudd, leads this time to thoughts of his eventual actual death, but these produce not present repentance and reformation but the hope for divine forgiveness and mercy at that final moment. Dafydd expresses, however briefly, a much stronger sense of sin and fear of judgment in the closing lines of ‘Love’s Journeying’ – an ending quite different from that of ‘Repentance’, or the very plausible but humorous thanksgiving and prayer for forgiveness that concludes ‘One Night at an Inn’.

Reading Dafydd ap Gwilym is like turning a kaleidoscope. Through experiencing the poet’s versions of himself in multiple roles and varying tones