Love's Journeyman

Love’s Journeyman

Taith i Garu

 

Who else has toiled in travel,

Worn with tyrant love’s travail,

As I have? Hoar-frost, wind,

Snow and rain: through these I wend

My heedless way, at her word.

Fatigue is my one reward:

My feet drag in Cellïau’r Meirch

Drawn by her across Eleirch

And barren moors, day and night;

She is never once in sight.

 

“Oh my God,” I bawl it out

In Celli Fleddyn – grim shout –

Plaintively professing love,

Yet she barely knows I live.

Bysaleg, a babbling brook,

Water churning at the bank ,

I ford each day for her sake –

Cold christening – then I seek

Her – not repenting our sins –

In the Pass of Dafydd’s sons,

And on up the wooded combe,

To glimpse her fine hair, I climb.

I muddle on in mist, grope

The fork of Gyfylfaen gap;

Where the valley opens fair,

I seek my girl, garbed in fur,

Elusive as a mirage.

Her stealth withholds her image

Though in my zeal I seek her

At Pant Cwcwll in summer.

At Castell Gwgawn I claw

Like a gosling searching straw

For grain. At Heilin’s household,

I pant like a husky hound.

 

Below Ifor’s court I crept

Like a monk who haunts a crypt,

Vainly seeking meetings with

Shy, coy, vanishing Morfudd .

Either side of Nant-y-Glo

There is no hill nor hollow,

No twist, no wind, no portion

That has not known my passion:

A second Ovid: I bawl

At Gwern-y-Talwrn (my call

She answered here once: a glimpse

She gave me – I got a glance

Beneath her gown). Here, I know,

There’s a place where grass won’t grow:

Here, like Adam, once I made

Our leafy bed in the glade.

 

Woe-betide the soul that walks

Chained to the body, and works

Without wages: poor the pay

When the body leads the way.

 

Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilm, paraphrased by Giles Watson. The poem makes reference to a number of places – some of which can still be found today – in the triangle of country between Aberystwyth, Tal-y-bont and Ponterwyd. Dafydd (and presumably his beloved Morfudd) spent his early days at Brogynin, and the modern village of Elerch is a little over a mile away. Cellïau’r Meirch was probably a homestead. Oral history evidence suggests that the current River Stewy was known as the Saleg in the early nineteenth century, and a record from 1937 attests that Bwlch Meibion Dafydd was a track leading from Brogynin to Elerch. Bwlch y Maen is a convergence of a number of paths two miles east of Elerch, changed to Gafaelfwlch y Gyfylfaen by Dafydd because of its consonance. The whereabouts of Pant Cwcwll is unknown, but Tal Pont Cuculh was given to the monastery of Strata Florida (Ystrad Fflur, Dafydd’s most likely place of burial) in 1336. Castell Gwgawn was also given to the monastery, and has since vanished, at least by name. Nant-y-Glo is the name of a small farmstead half a mile from Brogynin. Ifor is a common mediaeval Welsh name, and the one mentioned here is not Dafydd’s later patron, Ifor ap Llywelyn of Morgannwg – nor is the stream Bysaleg to be confused with Basaleg, the latter’s home. The last four lines are an ironic reference to a mediaeval Welsh poetic tradition: the didactic dialogue between the body and the soul. Interestingly, Iolo Goch also parodied this tradition in a poem which took his reader on an imagined tour of the lands he travelled as a court bard.

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