Elegy for Dafydd ap Gwilym

ELEGY FOR DAFYDD AP GWILYM

 

Yesternight when Dafydd died

A yawning morn of dolour dawned;

A knot of minstrelsy untwined,

In waking Wales a gaping wound.

Praise-shaper, bard of wonder,

Girl-blesser, abbess-wooer,

Craftsman of the silken word,

Cuckold-maker of his weird,

Hawk of girls, baiting lasses:

Constricting codes, taut jesses,

Cannot constrain tiercel-flight

Gyring, stooping, swooping light,

And crooked-clawed for catching love:

Words to take the prey alive

And turn her, at a soaring height,

Into the falcon of his heart.

 

I am a dog! Poet damned!

A world bereft of him is doomed

To live at a slower rate:

Dafydd sang; I merely prate,

Respectable and refined.

He the core, I the rind,

He the seedling, I the husk,

He the dawning, I the dusk,

I the pilferer of praise,

He the thrush who with no pause

Pours out songs into the wind:

His pinions hope, bill a wand

Of changing, making girls gold,

Raising bowers out of mould.

Roebuck’s antler, sharp of tine,

Salmon-scale, borne of brine,

Jackdaw-jester, raven’s craw,

Fiend of love, delight of war –

A path of thorns lies ahead

Now that vision’s voice is dead.

Pale Morfudd of mourning brow

Only Mair can claim him now.

 

- I began by paraphrasing Iolo Goch’s elegy for the great bard, but could not penetrate the rather formal style of the surviving poet, who was about ten years younger than Dafydd. The thirteenth line of Iolo’s elegy invokes the image of the “hawk of girls”, but instantly drops it again; I have chosen to sustain it for the rest of the first verse paragraph. Iolo praises Dafydd’s learning, but accuses him of “presumption” at one point. It is clear that Iolo did not know Dafydd at all well on a personal level, even though the former was the inheritor of the cywydd verse form which Dafydd pioneered. I have replaced most of Iolo’s stately praises in the second verse paragraph with images of Dafydd’s own, and in view of my own exceedingly minor status as a poet, have, I hope, lent the poem a humility which the original seems to lack. This is not to suggest that Iolo was not a supreme wordsmith. His own ‘Description of a Girl’ must surely have brought a smile to Dafydd’s face, assuming that he lived to read it.

 

Done