The Bramble

The Bramble

 

Out of luck – too much in love –

I courted Tegau, a slave

To her embrace. It was more

Than a crush: much like a mire

Of longing tugging me down.

I decided – awful dream –

To go to her, and make

Wild love. Face it: a mistake.

 

I regret I took that road –

So winding. I can’t get rid

Of the memory: my bright yawn

Half an hour before the dawn.

No one knew; no one awoke.

What a futile thing is hope!

 

Just to glimpse her slim beauty

Is a poor bard’s rich bounty:

A bright pleasure – so I thought.

My credentials at her court

Were weak. I knew my sly feat

Could only work by deceit

And not by trust – so my goal

Was to avoid any soul

Out wandering. Poets will

At least admire my stealth, skill

And duplicity. I left

The path. People only laughed

Afterwards: the bold bard leaps

Among the oaks, tumps and lumps,

Traversing miles in the birch,

Midway between wilds and church,

Skulking under shade of trees –

For lust’s perfect cloak is leaves –

He stumbles, and his right foot

Is caught on a projecting root.

He flies into a bramble:

Hedge-intestine, twined trouble,

Blighted snare, taut and tightening

Like a maw round my twitching

Limbs – toothy spectre, shame’s twine,

Strop of bleeding, barbed and thin!

He flails about, sharply trussed –

Trades a limp for all that lust.

 

My fall was fast, ungainly,

As I plummeted grimly

Down a steep bank, entangled

In tight, tenacious brambles:

Nasty plight. A churlish snare

Incising a livid scar

On a poet’s tender flesh:

Its thousand teeth seethe and gnash,

Mutilate a poet’s legs –

Vainly he writhes and tugs,

Speared still more. Its ugly crop

Of bulbous blackberries flop

About on barbed stems, each withe

Ripe for scourging – whips of wrath

Etchers of beech-boles, savage,

Barbed halters, miser’s salvage,

Wires enmeshing fallen logs,

Branches thin as herons’ legs,

Nets of hatred, archly cast

To trap a man, justly cursed,

Tripwire snaking down a scree,

Harsh string binding tree to tree.

 

Come, you fires, and raze to ash

These whips giving me the lash:

Burn until the scourge is gone;

Scorch their teeth out, one by one!

 

Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. Once again, Dafydd’s keen sense of self-irony is at work in this poem, not only in the candid expression of his own indignity, but also in his all-too-familiar impulse to take out his frustrations on an inanimate object: a piece of slapstick which has not diminished in comic potential from the days of the fabiliaux to the moment when Basil Fawlty bashed up his mini with a branch. Tegau is not the girl’s real name. It is derived from the Welsh Triads, in which Tegau Eururon (Gold-Breast) has a chastity-testing mantle, and is one of the “three faithful wives of the island of Britain”. Graham Thomas published a version of her story in the late eighteenth century: “Arthur’s sister was wife to Urien Rheged, and she was killed in sorcery. She sent to Arthur’s court three chastity-testing objects – a mantle, a drinking-horn, and some slices of bacon. Only Tegau was successful in the mantle-test, and only her husband in the other two tests”. (See Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydain: The Triads of the Island of Britain, Cardiff, 2006, pp. 503-4.) If this story is of mediaeval provenance, then it is likely that Dafydd’s “Tegau” was his beloved Morfudd, who was by this stage married to Bwa Bach, the spiteful “Eiddig” of Dafydd’s poems.

 

Note: on the website, dafyddapgwilym.net, this poem has been given the title "The Briar". With all due respect to a team of scholars who have produced a marvellous and endlessly inspiring resource, Dafydd makes it clear that his adversary is a bramble and not a briar, since its fruits are blackberries, and not rosehips, and it clearly scrambles across the ground.

 

I have added an alternative illustration below, and am interested to hear about the preferences of my Flickrite friends.

Done