... there our Paradise

Dyddgu, brilliant creature, with your soft dark hair your secret lover I invite you to the Manafon dingle. Here is no coarse food spread for you, nor gluttonous eating in a hut; nor porridge nor stirabout, the reapers' small profit: nor a bite of a ploughman's dinner, nor lean Lent meat. Nor have I invited any Englishman with his loud drunken friends, nor a labourers' feed celebrating their coming to manhood; I promise you nothing but mead and the song of a nightingale, the brown-backed nightingale with her light dancing song, and the thrush with his strong pleasant tongue. What better place than this, deep over-hung by the green birch-trees. While we lie out there under the leaves, the splendid trees hang over our celebration, and high above us the birds play in the branches. Ringed about us are nine trees, the finest in the wood; below them we lie in a round hollow, a green belfry above us, and all around the fresh white clover, heaven's flour. There two people, or three can lie by the hour untroubled, where the gentle roebuck seeks wild oats, where birds sing, where I am glad. Where the blackbird builds his thick nest, where the majestic trees stand, where hawks feed their young, there is our new dwelling of leaves, there is our ready passion, there our Paradise. There is the pale light in the shade of the hanging branches, by the still water in the smokeless air, in the tangled bushes where no meal-beggar nor scraggy cheese-beggar shows himself, there let us two go, I and my girl with her eyes bright as a glow-worm, skin white as a wave, there will we two lie tonight.
Daffyd ap Gwilym

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