Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Playing 'Nuts In My Hand'
Playing ‘Nuts In My Hand’
Chwarae Cnau i’m Llaw
In love’s psalter, Ovid said
A lone lover is lost, stripped
Of tricks. He needs a llatai –
Good listener, with lighter
Conscience than a bird: a bard
Like himself, a bosom friend
Who’ll offer any balm, salve
Or poultice for love’s bruised slave.
There was no pair more brazen
Than we two – girl whose bosom
Heaved with a guileless frenzy –
She smiles, and won’t play falsely.
My llatai began the game;
I moaned. Oh! The sound was grim!
“By Eigr I’m enchanted!”
I cried. That’s why we cheated.
Llatai:
There are nuts in my right hand.
Poet:
My nuts! They’re for me to hold!
Llatai:
Hazel harvest – wind blowing –
Are these yours? By God, they’re big!
Poet:
Yes, mine! As strong as a knot!
Llatai:
Then you must count, nut by nut.
Look and see - and use no guile –
The heart of the lovely girl.
Poet:
Gossamer-faced Morfudd sent
These nuts. I swear by the saints!
Llatai:
What, she who blights all poets?
Poet:
She is sacrament; I – priest!
Check your palm: five my portion,
Each for a wound of passion!
By God and Deinioel! I grabbed
The nuts and ran! My girl, garbed
In sun, slender-browed, has sent
Fine jewels – no gift more sweet –
For my poem of crafty shape:
Pale cream of the hazel-crop!
Be true, omen! Yea! Amen!
In the woods I’ll be her man!
If you’re false, then I’m the mock
Of any piqued, tonsured monk,
But if true – why, she shall wend
Her way, meet me in the wood!
Brown wing-coverts of the trees,
Wood-crop, hanging like a tress
Of kernels, rattling in husks,
Hazel-studs, bell-claps for hawks,
Fingers of the autumn glade,
Thrust through green and gloved in gold,
Love’s buttons, badges of hope:
Be the hand that brings me help!
No tooth break you, fine pittance,
Good as Ysgolan’s penance.
No stone or other weapon
Shall crack you. I shall open
Each shell, by Christ, until these
Wise fruits of the forest trees
Bring her to me, while they durst,
Before they return to dust.
Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. The game of ‘Nuts In My Hand’ was a divinatory ritual similar to that played by Victorian girls plucking petals from a daisy: “He loves me, he loves me not, etc.” The difference was that the lover must have an accomplice (I have assumed that this is Dafydd’s love-messenger, or llatai – in this case, a fellow poet), who presumably picks a handful of nuts out of a sack. If the number is odd, “she loves him not” – and if it is even, their love is to be consummated. In this case, Dafydd makes it quite clear that he and his accomplice have engineered the right outcome, so that the divinatory exercise is transformed into a spell of entrapment. Scholars have worried about the fact that the Welsh original does not reveal the number of nuts in the hand of Dafydd’s accomplice, but the answer seems obvious: the nuts are of the same number as the wounds of Christ’s passion (two for the hands, two for the feet, and one for the side). It is almost certain that the game of Nuts In My Hand involved a prescribed formula of utterances. Dafydd’s twentieth century editor, Thomas Parry, reconstructs it:
A: I’ve nuts in my hand.
B. They are for me.
A. Why?
B. Because they were sent to me.
A. Who sent them?
B. My lover, [x].
A. Does she love you?
B. If she loves me, you have an odd number of nuts in your hand.
Dafydd is not the only mediaeval Welsh poet to have based a poem upon this game – Iolo Goch and Ieuan ap Rhydderch did too – but he is the only poet to subvert the theme so cheekily, by admitting that the result was rigged from the beginning, by alluding without much subtlety to the age-long appropriation of “nuts” as a euphemism for “testicles”, and by the wry admission at the end of the poem that the whole transaction must be carried out quickly before nature takes its course. It is difficult to think of a more subtly beguiling subversion of the Gospels and the Book of Genesis. It is also possible that the beginning of this poem offers the only textual proof that Dafydd had actually read some of the works of Ovid – he regularly cites him as an inspiration – since Ovid asserts in Remedia Amoris that lovers should avoid isolation and seek the company of friends. St. Deinioel was the patron saint of Bangor, and it is surely no coincidence that Dafydd’s first sighting of Morfudd was in Bangor cathedral (see: www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/4085337557/in/set-7215...). The exact details of the life of Ysgolan have been lost since the Middle Ages, but it is certain that he was renowned for enduring penance. Hazelnuts were often regarded as little repositories of wisdom in Celtic folklore: a hazelnut, swallowed when it dropped into a river, was what imbued the salmon with its wisdom, and a dim echo of this tradition can be heard in William Butler Yeats’s ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’, where the salmon has been replaced by a trout.
Playing 'Nuts In My Hand'
Playing ‘Nuts In My Hand’
Chwarae Cnau i’m Llaw
In love’s psalter, Ovid said
A lone lover is lost, stripped
Of tricks. He needs a llatai –
Good listener, with lighter
Conscience than a bird: a bard
Like himself, a bosom friend
Who’ll offer any balm, salve
Or poultice for love’s bruised slave.
There was no pair more brazen
Than we two – girl whose bosom
Heaved with a guileless frenzy –
She smiles, and won’t play falsely.
My llatai began the game;
I moaned. Oh! The sound was grim!
“By Eigr I’m enchanted!”
I cried. That’s why we cheated.
Llatai:
There are nuts in my right hand.
Poet:
My nuts! They’re for me to hold!
Llatai:
Hazel harvest – wind blowing –
Are these yours? By God, they’re big!
Poet:
Yes, mine! As strong as a knot!
Llatai:
Then you must count, nut by nut.
Look and see - and use no guile –
The heart of the lovely girl.
Poet:
Gossamer-faced Morfudd sent
These nuts. I swear by the saints!
Llatai:
What, she who blights all poets?
Poet:
She is sacrament; I – priest!
Check your palm: five my portion,
Each for a wound of passion!
By God and Deinioel! I grabbed
The nuts and ran! My girl, garbed
In sun, slender-browed, has sent
Fine jewels – no gift more sweet –
For my poem of crafty shape:
Pale cream of the hazel-crop!
Be true, omen! Yea! Amen!
In the woods I’ll be her man!
If you’re false, then I’m the mock
Of any piqued, tonsured monk,
But if true – why, she shall wend
Her way, meet me in the wood!
Brown wing-coverts of the trees,
Wood-crop, hanging like a tress
Of kernels, rattling in husks,
Hazel-studs, bell-claps for hawks,
Fingers of the autumn glade,
Thrust through green and gloved in gold,
Love’s buttons, badges of hope:
Be the hand that brings me help!
No tooth break you, fine pittance,
Good as Ysgolan’s penance.
No stone or other weapon
Shall crack you. I shall open
Each shell, by Christ, until these
Wise fruits of the forest trees
Bring her to me, while they durst,
Before they return to dust.
Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. The game of ‘Nuts In My Hand’ was a divinatory ritual similar to that played by Victorian girls plucking petals from a daisy: “He loves me, he loves me not, etc.” The difference was that the lover must have an accomplice (I have assumed that this is Dafydd’s love-messenger, or llatai – in this case, a fellow poet), who presumably picks a handful of nuts out of a sack. If the number is odd, “she loves him not” – and if it is even, their love is to be consummated. In this case, Dafydd makes it quite clear that he and his accomplice have engineered the right outcome, so that the divinatory exercise is transformed into a spell of entrapment. Scholars have worried about the fact that the Welsh original does not reveal the number of nuts in the hand of Dafydd’s accomplice, but the answer seems obvious: the nuts are of the same number as the wounds of Christ’s passion (two for the hands, two for the feet, and one for the side). It is almost certain that the game of Nuts In My Hand involved a prescribed formula of utterances. Dafydd’s twentieth century editor, Thomas Parry, reconstructs it:
A: I’ve nuts in my hand.
B. They are for me.
A. Why?
B. Because they were sent to me.
A. Who sent them?
B. My lover, [x].
A. Does she love you?
B. If she loves me, you have an odd number of nuts in your hand.
Dafydd is not the only mediaeval Welsh poet to have based a poem upon this game – Iolo Goch and Ieuan ap Rhydderch did too – but he is the only poet to subvert the theme so cheekily, by admitting that the result was rigged from the beginning, by alluding without much subtlety to the age-long appropriation of “nuts” as a euphemism for “testicles”, and by the wry admission at the end of the poem that the whole transaction must be carried out quickly before nature takes its course. It is difficult to think of a more subtly beguiling subversion of the Gospels and the Book of Genesis. It is also possible that the beginning of this poem offers the only textual proof that Dafydd had actually read some of the works of Ovid – he regularly cites him as an inspiration – since Ovid asserts in Remedia Amoris that lovers should avoid isolation and seek the company of friends. St. Deinioel was the patron saint of Bangor, and it is surely no coincidence that Dafydd’s first sighting of Morfudd was in Bangor cathedral (see: www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/4085337557/in/set-7215...). The exact details of the life of Ysgolan have been lost since the Middle Ages, but it is certain that he was renowned for enduring penance. Hazelnuts were often regarded as little repositories of wisdom in Celtic folklore: a hazelnut, swallowed when it dropped into a river, was what imbued the salmon with its wisdom, and a dim echo of this tradition can be heard in William Butler Yeats’s ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’, where the salmon has been replaced by a trout.