Giles Watson's poetry and prose
The Fox
The Fox
Y Llwynog
Loitering with intent, avid
For love (well learned of Ovid),
I crept beneath the branches –
Our trysting trees: those birches –
Waiting for Her Petulance.
Looking out, I spied, perchance,
A simian shape sidling by
For fear of hounds slinking nigh:
A fox, squatting near his earth
Like a hound sits by my hearth.
I aimed – for it lay just so
In my hands – my yew-tree bow,
Hoping (for my eye is sharp)
To prove well my marksmanship:
As he shot, by ridge, furrow,
To transfix him with an arrow,
This ruddy fox. In my zest
To loose bowstring at this pest
I tugged too hard, more fool me:
The bow splintered into three.
I was undeterred but wroth
To watch him melt like a wraith
Into undergrowth. He loves
Chicken flesh, and spurns the lives
Of foolish fowl. He coughs dark
With his rasping, backwards bark,
Scorning horns, red as gravel,
Loping laughingly to grovel
In the greenwood: there he goes
Across the field, craving goose-
Flesh! Scarecrow upon the hill!
Furrow leaper, red as hell!
Raven-mammal; magpie-hound!
Red Welsh dragon, underhand
Rabble-rouser! Hen-gobbler!
Pelt with teeth! Gristle-grubber!
Gimlet gouging through the earth!
Lantern in the dark and dearth!
Light of footfall, coat of bronze,
Bloody-muzzled firebrand!
No easy task: to follow
To Annwn such a fellow!
Elusive fiend, fleet of foot,
Who fools his foes, leaves them faint,
Like a lion runs through gorse
With a dart stuck in his arse.
Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym; paraphrased by Giles Watson. One of Dafydd’s freshest and most ironic poems. It begins by conforming to the convention of the woodland tryst, complete with the obligatory reference to Ovid’s Amores, but abandons this notion after the fifth line (I have called Dafydd’s lover Her Petulance; he merely concedes that she has made him weep). Then Dafydd flirts for a while with the noble idea of the hunt, before descending mercifully into fabliau and self-mockery. The fox is more clever and duplicitous than he is, and in its wily behaviour, he gladly comes to recognise the admirable qualities of the Welsh in their cultural (and soon to be military) conflict with the English. Had Dafydd lived as late as Iolo Goch, eager Welsh nationalists might well have seen in the fox a veiled description of Owain Glyndwr, and they would only be encouraged by their pursuit of this conceit by Dafydd’s willingness to compare the fox with the red dragon of the Celts, who in Welsh mythology is released from a cavern beneath the earth to do battle with the white Saxon dragon. This same cavern is, of course, Annwn, the Celtic underworld, which fits nicely with the fact that the fox makes his home underground, turning him into a sort of vulpine version of Arawn, the poet’s weird. Line 33 is very obscure, but clearly makes reference to the magpie and the raven: perhaps Dafydd has observed that the fox occupies a similar ecological niche to that occupied in avian circles by the corvids. For metrical reasons, the leopard in the second last line has been transformed into a lion for this paraphrase. The fact that Dafydd thought the fox was ape-like in form and movement is doubtless not a flaw in his powers of observation as concerns the fox, but it does suggest that he was not very familiar with apes. One can only speculate whether he was also familiar with early forms of the Reynard stories, elements of which were starting to appear in church decorations and manuscript illuminations at about this time.
The Fox
The Fox
Y Llwynog
Loitering with intent, avid
For love (well learned of Ovid),
I crept beneath the branches –
Our trysting trees: those birches –
Waiting for Her Petulance.
Looking out, I spied, perchance,
A simian shape sidling by
For fear of hounds slinking nigh:
A fox, squatting near his earth
Like a hound sits by my hearth.
I aimed – for it lay just so
In my hands – my yew-tree bow,
Hoping (for my eye is sharp)
To prove well my marksmanship:
As he shot, by ridge, furrow,
To transfix him with an arrow,
This ruddy fox. In my zest
To loose bowstring at this pest
I tugged too hard, more fool me:
The bow splintered into three.
I was undeterred but wroth
To watch him melt like a wraith
Into undergrowth. He loves
Chicken flesh, and spurns the lives
Of foolish fowl. He coughs dark
With his rasping, backwards bark,
Scorning horns, red as gravel,
Loping laughingly to grovel
In the greenwood: there he goes
Across the field, craving goose-
Flesh! Scarecrow upon the hill!
Furrow leaper, red as hell!
Raven-mammal; magpie-hound!
Red Welsh dragon, underhand
Rabble-rouser! Hen-gobbler!
Pelt with teeth! Gristle-grubber!
Gimlet gouging through the earth!
Lantern in the dark and dearth!
Light of footfall, coat of bronze,
Bloody-muzzled firebrand!
No easy task: to follow
To Annwn such a fellow!
Elusive fiend, fleet of foot,
Who fools his foes, leaves them faint,
Like a lion runs through gorse
With a dart stuck in his arse.
Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym; paraphrased by Giles Watson. One of Dafydd’s freshest and most ironic poems. It begins by conforming to the convention of the woodland tryst, complete with the obligatory reference to Ovid’s Amores, but abandons this notion after the fifth line (I have called Dafydd’s lover Her Petulance; he merely concedes that she has made him weep). Then Dafydd flirts for a while with the noble idea of the hunt, before descending mercifully into fabliau and self-mockery. The fox is more clever and duplicitous than he is, and in its wily behaviour, he gladly comes to recognise the admirable qualities of the Welsh in their cultural (and soon to be military) conflict with the English. Had Dafydd lived as late as Iolo Goch, eager Welsh nationalists might well have seen in the fox a veiled description of Owain Glyndwr, and they would only be encouraged by their pursuit of this conceit by Dafydd’s willingness to compare the fox with the red dragon of the Celts, who in Welsh mythology is released from a cavern beneath the earth to do battle with the white Saxon dragon. This same cavern is, of course, Annwn, the Celtic underworld, which fits nicely with the fact that the fox makes his home underground, turning him into a sort of vulpine version of Arawn, the poet’s weird. Line 33 is very obscure, but clearly makes reference to the magpie and the raven: perhaps Dafydd has observed that the fox occupies a similar ecological niche to that occupied in avian circles by the corvids. For metrical reasons, the leopard in the second last line has been transformed into a lion for this paraphrase. The fact that Dafydd thought the fox was ape-like in form and movement is doubtless not a flaw in his powers of observation as concerns the fox, but it does suggest that he was not very familiar with apes. One can only speculate whether he was also familiar with early forms of the Reynard stories, elements of which were starting to appear in church decorations and manuscript illuminations at about this time.