Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Loving a Nun
LOVING A NUN
Caru Lleian
I’m off my food, lean for love:
A dark-eyed girl blights my life.
I must be mad: love behoves
Me, on Another One’s behalf!
Long is my love, sore my hurt,
Biting like the fang of hate:
Woe to me Mair, should I lose
My girl, and deride my loss.
Can it be true? Would you spurn
My budding birches, and return
To sit inside that dour house
Telling beads, and then rehearse
Those psalms? Are you nun, or saint?
Choir’s beloved, without taint,
Abjure bread and water. Christ
Commands: strive to give up cress.
Be done with beads, for Mair’s sake,
And with carousing monks who seek
Your bounty. Do not be chaste
In springtime: get it off your chest!
I bet you blush beneath your veil,
Yet ring and mantle you revile.
Come within the birch tree court,
Join instead the cuckoo’s cult!
High time it is that we strove
To reach for heaven in the grove.
Among the vines, atop the hill,
I shall atone, cheating hell.
God and the saints, as I’m alive,
Are sure (I hope) to pardon love.
- Attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. All of the extant manuscripts name Dafydd as the author, or leave the author unnamed. An entire sub-genre was devoted to poems about wooing nuns, although few are quite as blatant as this one in its exhortation to leave the convent for the greenwood. The reference to “cress” is a taunt about the penitential monastic diet. Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Apocrypha (1996) suggests that the line “Os myfi a’th gâr I arall” ought to be interpreted as “I love you just so someone else my win you”. I have capitalised the reference to this personage, on the grounds that the poet appears to me to be jealous of the fact that the nun has taken vows as a “bride of Christ”.
The picture shows the remains of Llanthony Priory, Black Mountains, Brecknockshire. It was in fact an abbey for Augustinian monks.
Loving a Nun
LOVING A NUN
Caru Lleian
I’m off my food, lean for love:
A dark-eyed girl blights my life.
I must be mad: love behoves
Me, on Another One’s behalf!
Long is my love, sore my hurt,
Biting like the fang of hate:
Woe to me Mair, should I lose
My girl, and deride my loss.
Can it be true? Would you spurn
My budding birches, and return
To sit inside that dour house
Telling beads, and then rehearse
Those psalms? Are you nun, or saint?
Choir’s beloved, without taint,
Abjure bread and water. Christ
Commands: strive to give up cress.
Be done with beads, for Mair’s sake,
And with carousing monks who seek
Your bounty. Do not be chaste
In springtime: get it off your chest!
I bet you blush beneath your veil,
Yet ring and mantle you revile.
Come within the birch tree court,
Join instead the cuckoo’s cult!
High time it is that we strove
To reach for heaven in the grove.
Among the vines, atop the hill,
I shall atone, cheating hell.
God and the saints, as I’m alive,
Are sure (I hope) to pardon love.
- Attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. All of the extant manuscripts name Dafydd as the author, or leave the author unnamed. An entire sub-genre was devoted to poems about wooing nuns, although few are quite as blatant as this one in its exhortation to leave the convent for the greenwood. The reference to “cress” is a taunt about the penitential monastic diet. Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Apocrypha (1996) suggests that the line “Os myfi a’th gâr I arall” ought to be interpreted as “I love you just so someone else my win you”. I have capitalised the reference to this personage, on the grounds that the poet appears to me to be jealous of the fact that the nun has taken vows as a “bride of Christ”.
The picture shows the remains of Llanthony Priory, Black Mountains, Brecknockshire. It was in fact an abbey for Augustinian monks.