Saw a window

Harmoniously I loved, my embrace a wanton song under the tangled banks of the wood where my girl slept. How good it was seeing her beauty through the leaves, framed in the shape of love by the oaks as in a mighty aerial window!

I asked a kiss from her through the narrow oak window, and she refused me, did me wrong, my gentle jewel; did not want me. The window, which old and worn faces the bright rays of the sun, obstructed me . . . may I never age like that same window ! A strange vitality mounted huge within me, like that enormous love which once drove Melwas to seize your daughter Cogyfran Gawr, coming from Caerlleon, fearing nothing in his passion. But I, it was scarcely likely I should take my love through a window, seeing I had never seized her in Melwas' manner, and favours are not got by the colour of the pining check . . . O let me be with my lovely jewel face to face at midnight!

Without hope of her, without the light of a star, with no hope of taking her between the joists of the window, my anger rises, rages at the white walls Standing on every side like a boundary stone between me and her. Our noses cannot touch, nor can our lips come together through the lattice, but kiss the Wood . . . O false perplexing torment, trying embraces through a narrow window!


No one has been tormented, set sleep-less between the night and a lattice window as I am sleeplessly tormented: may the devil break this windowed dungeon, and take a crowbar to its pillars! Sharp anger spins through me, shut weeping salt tears outside, weeping at these strong, obstructing, hindering window-frames, which kill my song and keep me from her.

But my hand took up a saw, and soon cut away what kept me sleepless and kept me from the place where my love was.