Monochrome Monday

Oh god, there was the morning light
as Dafydd ap Gwilym would whisper. Perhaps. ;-)

Blimey!

17 years!

Beers & Books CCLV – Dafydd ap Gwilym

Clicking the label
Dafydd ap Gwilym
soon you will agree with me:
There's no bard like him.

Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370)

Dafydd ap Gwilym (XVI)

 It's St. David's Day again.

May the Welsh enjoy celebrating their Saint.

Omnium is celebrating their Poet.

Voilà.

It's a pity for me that the girl whose praises I am always singing, and who holds her court in the wood, does not know of the conversation I had about her with the grey friar today.

I went to the friar to confess my sins. I admitted to him that I have been without any doubt an idolatrous poet since I have always loved and adored a certain lovely girl with dark eyebrows, "And", I told him, "I have never had a single favour from my murdress, nor has my lady ever allowed me a moment of happiness: in spite of this I love her continually and am wasted with pining for my darling. I carry her praise through the whole land of Wales, and in spite of this I live without her, though I long to hear her in my bed between me and the wall."

The brother spoke this to me: "I will give you good advice: if you have loved this foamwhite girl (merely the colour of paper) for so long, it is time now to think of lessening your punishment on that dreadful day which comes to all of us, for all this is of no benefit to your soul. Cease from making rhymes and accustom yourself instead to saying your prayers, for God did not redeem the souls of men that they might make rhymes and elegiacs, and your minstrels' songs are nothing but flattery and idle bawling. This praise of the body is not good, and leads the soul to the devil."

Then I answered each word that the friar had spoken.

"God is not so cruel as old men tell us: nor will God cut off the gentle soul of a man for loving a woman or a girl. Three things are loved by the whole world.: women, fine weather, and good health, and girls are the fairest flowers in heaven next to God himself. Every man of all peoples is born of woman save these three: Adam, Eve, Melchizedek, and so it is not surprising that man loves girls and women. Gladness falls from Heaven, all misery comes from Hell.
Song makes glad old and young, sick and healthy, and I have an equal right to make poems as you have to pray, I have the same right to sing for my bread as you beg for it. Are not hymns and sequences but other kinds of odes and elegiacs? And are not the psalms of David poems to the good God?

God does not feed man with one food and one relish, he gives him time to eat and a time to worship, a time to pray and a time to make poems. Song springs up at every feast to give pleasure to the ladies, paters are said in church to seek the land of Paradise. Yscuthach drinking with his poets spoke the truth:
'A happy face, his house is full
A sad face, evil and bitterness.'

Though some love holiness, others love being glad together, and there are few men who can make a sweet verse though everyone can say a prayer. And so, my holy brother, I do not think that singing is the greatest sin. When men are as ready to hear paters as the harp, as ready as the girls of Gwynedd are to hear gay songs, then my right hand I'll say paters all day and for ever without ceasing. Till then shame on Dafydd if he sings paters instead of poems!"

Dafydd ap Gwilym c. 1320 – c. 1370

Reminder

A birchtree
letting me think of
Dafydd ap Gwilym

the story of Dafydd ap Gwilym

16 weeks after I had ordered it
for the third time
and almost given up hope,
Wednesday I could hold it in my hands.
I paid the original price.
It's werth it.

Dafydd ap Gwilym
Gwyn Thomas (2 September 1936 – 13 April 2016)

Monochrome Monday

A reminiscence.
I can see the bard smiling.
Daffyd ap Gwilym.

Night-in-gale

Hidden or not hidden ....

This cloak of white feathers

I do not sleep at night nor go out by day, I am sad because the world has disappeared, nor is there food nor bank left, nor open grounds nor fields. Nor will I be enticed out of my house by any girl's invitation while this plague continues, this cloak of white feathers sticking close to dragon's scales, but tell her that I do not want my coat made white like a miller's garment. After New Year one must go wrapped in fur, and during January God makes us start the year as hermits.

Now God has whitewashed the dark earth all around till there is no undergrowth without its white garment, no coppins that's not covered with a sheet: fine flour has been milled on every stump, heavenly flour like April blossoms. A cold veil lies over the woods and the young trees, a load of chalk bows down the trees; ghostly wheaten flour which falls till a white coat of mail covers all the fields of the plain. The soil of the ploughed fields is covered with a cold grit, lying like a thick coat of tallow on the earth's skin, and a shower of frozen foam falls in fleeces big as a man's fist. Across North Wales the snow-flakes wander like a swarm of white bees. Why does God throw down this mass of feathers like the down of his own geese, till here below the drifts sway and billow over the heather like swollen bellies big as heaps of chaff and covered with ermine? The dust piles in a drift where we sang along the pleasant paths.

This garment of snow holds us in grip while it remains cementing together the hills, valleys and ditches und a steel coat fit to break the earth, fixing all into a vast monument greater than the graveyard of the sea. What a great fall lies on my country, a white wall stretching from one sea to another! Who dares fight its rude power? A leaden cloak lies on us. When will the rain come?

Dafydd ap Gwilym

(Y)our shadow knows all ...

I was yesterday under the good leaves, sheltering from the rain under a green cloak of birch leaves, waiting like a young fool for Gwen with Helen's brow; when Standing dismally before me face to face, I saw a figure; at which, though it stood mild and harmless, I shuddered, and against some evil Visitation crossed my body with a holy charm.

"Speak! Break your silence! If you are a man, what are you?"

"I! - I am your shadow, strange. For Mary's sake be silent, and not hinder me from telling you ... kindly, I am come here, and stand naked at your side, showing you by enchantment, your own image.

"Why should you, a sheltered shrinking creature, follow me? Are wages paid you, long-legged scarecrow, by Jealousy, that cold and wailing wolf, for watching me?"

"Dear man, I am no spreading ghost, no hideous chimera ..."

"Then what? A giant's offspring? A bald and monstrous spirit? No more of a doddering old man an apparition of bitter yet not even in your shape a man; with the shanks of a hag limping on black crutches; herdsman of a foul pack of ghosts, bogey in a bald monk's form! Like the heron that plucks at the reeds of the bog, or rises on ghostly shanks over the corn, with the face of a palmer and a blockhead rolled in an old rag, your back smeared dark with mud Where were you rolled then? In the muck of the farmyard?"

"Secretly I follow you for ever among the pleasant woods: weak though I am, remarking your deceits and thousand tricks. Your whole day I could describe to you, and this I know ..."


"Which of my faults should you know, more than the whole world knows? You with your pitcher's neck, the devil's dung to you! I've not disowned my country, nor killed a dog, you slanting shadow! Nor killed hens with a hurling-stone, nor frightened little children, nor have I offended against virtue, in interfering with strange women!"

"But if I told these things I know to some who do not know them, then would their rage quickly be loosed and ... faith! You would be crucified!"

"Then draw a knot tight against publishing these things, and on these faults of mine, sew up your lips against the world."

Dafydd ap Gwilym

A fitting end to life

Your forehead is like a lily, slender you stand as if under a web of gold! I have loved you a long time, and with all my strength. O Blessed Mary! How shall I be delivered?

I have no sight of you, fearing your people and their vengeance, only my despair is left me and bitter sighing in my desire of you. If in my madness I am destroyed by the bright jewel of your beauty, then you are guilty of my death -
O sacred powers save her from this murder!

But I shall be laid in a grave in the shade of the soft leaves and the fresh trees, tomorrow the young birch-trees will hold my funeral under the branches of the ash. I shall have a shroud around me, a gay garment of summer clover, and the coffin fit for me to seek God's grace shall be all of young leaves. The flowers of the wood shall be my winding-sheet, my bier eight branches, a thousand sea-gulls will come to carry my bier. A host of fine trees, laymen I tell you of pleasant temper, will escort me, and they will be my church, forming a summer cloister with their high places. The two statues will be for worship, namely the two nightingales that you chose: and by the wheat fields there shall be raised altars on the dappled ground.

And a choir shall sing that does not know Jealousy, that does not angrily shut the door; and brothers that do not know the brotherhood of age, shall speak the Latin tongue in true metre from books of leaves and fine-bound grammars of the trees. And from the hayfield a splendid organ shall sound, and the music of bells ringing.

And there in the pleasant country of Gwynedd my grave is ready for me, a fresh green place ...Llan Eos, grove of inspiration, a fitting end to life. And the cuckoo shall sing a chant for my soul, sounding like an organ in the green wood; and prayers and supplications and psalms and other voices shall arise for me, and sacrifices and sweet messages, and in the summer months Love will visit me in my grave. And may God keep tryst with his poet in Paradise.

... 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

All poems posted here so far you will find by clicking the labels for this post. Enjoy.

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.

Dafydd ap Gwilym XVI

It's St. David's Day again.

May the Welsh enjoy celebrating their Saint.

Omnium is celebrating their Poet.

Voilà.

It's a pity for me that the girl whose praises I am always singing, and who holds her court in the wood, does not know of the conversation I had about her with the gray friar today.

I went to the friar to confess my sins. I admitted to him that I have been without any doubt an idolatrous poet since I have always loved and adored a certain lovely girl with dark eyebrows, "And", I told him, "I have never had a single favour from my murdress, nor has my lady ever allowed me a moment of happiness: in spite of this I love her continually and am wasted with pining for my darling. I carry her praise through the whole land of Wales, and in spite of this I live without her, though I long to hear her in my bed between me and the wall."

The brother spoke this to me: "I will give you good advice: if you have loved this foamwhite girl (merely the colour of paper) forso long, it is time now to think of lessening your punishment on that dreadful day which comes to all of us, for all this is of no benefit to your soul. Cease from making rhymes and accustom yourself instead to saying your prayers, for God did not redeem the souls of men that they might make rhymes and elegiacs, and your minstrels' songs are nothing but flattery and idle bawling. This praise of the body is not good, and leads the soul to the devil."

Then I answered each word that the friar had spoken.

"God is not so cruel as old men tell us: nor will God cut off the gentle soul of a man for loving a woman or a girl. Three things are loved by the whole world.: women, fine weather, and good health, and girls are the fairest flowers in heaven next to God himself. Every man of all peoples is born of woman save these three: Adam, Eve, Melchizedek, and so it is not surprising that man loves girls and women. Gladness falls from Heaven, all misery comes from Hell.
Song makes glad old and young, sick and healthy, and I have an equal right to make poems as you have to pray, I have the same right to sing for my bread as you beg for it. Are not hymns and sequences but other kinds of odes and elegiacs? And are not the psalms of David poems to the good God?

God does not feed man with one food and one relish, he gives him time to eat and a time to worship, a time to pray and a time to make poems. Song springs up at every feast to give pleasure to the ladies, paters are said in church to seek the land of Paradise. Yscuthach drinking with his poets spoke the truth:
'A happy face, his house is full
A sad face, evil and bitterness.'

Though some love holiness, others love being glad together, and there are few men who can make a sweet verse though everyone can say a prayer. And so, my holy brother, I do not think that singing is the greatest sin. When men are as ready to hear paters as the harp, as ready as the girls of Gwynedd are to hear gay songs, then my right hand I'll say paters all day and for ever without ceasing. Till then shame on Dafydd if he sings paters instead of poems!"

Dafydd ap Gwilym XV

A lock has been put on the door of the house, I am sick with loving you: hear me! Let me come and see you for God's generous sake and for your own. You are the girl I have celebrated in song (why should the song end in madness?) I swear by the Blessed Virgin who punishes me for it.

With my cold clumsy fingers I broke the latch while giving our signal of three clicks, then quickly the door was locked. Do you hear me now? The lock sounded loud as a bell to me out here. Morfudd, my chaste jewel, you are the nurse of all the deceit in the Principality. I make my bed against your wall, and call and pray to you my dear: have pity on my sleep lessness, the night is dark and I have been deceived. My feet know only weariness, alas! for the wretched weather that falls from the sky tonight. Torrents stream from the roof like eager weapons on my flesh, yet the rain is not harsher than my wound nor the snow under which I stand. I have been shut out and the snow lies on me like a cold yoke of tallow: I shiver under your eaves and the gray snow falls on me.

So I stand shivering, no greater punishment could be inflicted on a dead skin than the care which racks me: the Man who made me could not use me worse. In Carnarvon my prison was not worse than this road: there I would not be out all night, nor would I groan because of you, nor suffer the nightly ache of loving you. Nor would I now be out in rain and snow except for you. In my distress I would even forgive the whole world for your sake.

Here am I then enduring the cold, and you with all your grace and charity are in the house: my soul is with you there, my ghost is here outside. I doubt if I can suffer here much longer and remain alive my dear. By day I cannot meet you, at night my madness brings me here to the tryst which you yourself made with me. I am here now, and where are you?

Dafydd ap Gwilym VIII

Unhappy the man who is in love except in the summer, fruitless his prayers and great his desires. After the one night I had with the girl, all that is left me of that love-affair is my recollection of it, and the winter, I swear, is angry, black and bare after Christmas: and the snow, sure sign of the cold, and the frost and numerous icicles.

Coming drunk from the tavern, disgruntled and in a wretched humour, I went to look for her, terrified lest I find her making love to some other handsome man. Through the wood in the valley I went, feeling no love at all, till I arrived at the stone wall inside which the beauty lives.

There was a dismal sound of dripping from the eaves like an overflowing cheesepot; but when I arrived there I felt a kind of relief because of the danger close at band beyond the wall. Thick under the edge of the cold roof were the frosty icicles, freezing cold, and cleverly the drops contrived to fall into my mouth as I stood at the mercy of the frost and the whistling rime of the ice. The frost bit me like a rake, and the cold went through me like the tender teeth of a harrow. As I stood in the porch the drops fell angrily on me from Jealousy's fine candles of ice, like freezing tears, and the snow drove every recollection out of me but that of black frost.


While my head endured the pangs of the drips from these cold spindles and the dismal sounds, I knocked on the window with my band, hearing within the sounds of those in their first sleep, the man louder than the woman. Suspicious he nudged the pretty creature with his cold elbow, easily persuaded that someone was looking diligently for his money. Then the withered oaf rose out of his bed like a draught of foul air, enraged and terrified and calling "Villain" after me. And this was a dangerous journey for me, for he set a scoundrelly pack on me consisting of the whole town; and he, promising a candle to Mary at every sight of my footprints, bellowed after me with a hundred voices, "After him there! he's barefoot!"

So I fled with painful haste along the black back of the frost, till I came to the pleasant birch-wood which used to hide me in summer, thinking it to be, as I remembered it, a house of leaves under a fine roof, where the birds loved me and I saw the girl in May. But this was no trysting-place now, but a place of grief, even in the grove of the wood. No sign of love nor anything else did I see, nor any person nor any leaf, for the barren winter had winnowed the green warp of the leaves to the ground. And so I am begging May for a thaw before I freeze to death: I am a man imprisoned in winter; good luck to the summer and may it not be long coming!

XIX by Daffyd ap Gwilym

Miserable poet, fear filling him, harrassed and stumbling. Dark is the night on the cold bog. Dark - O God a torch! Dark over all, how shall I come out alive? Dark - great madness grips me! Dark now is the treacherous bog, dark the growth of the moon. Miserable man, that the sun, the good sun, is hidden. Dark it is for me, a poet, shut out with all my fame in dark and bitter winds outside. And if I were found here in the one land that hates me, bared to the guile and treachery of strangers, how should I and the gray horse escape?

Worse though, if I were caught, drowned in the bog-hole as I went with my horse in the mud at the bottom of the bog, after all the reverence I have had. Who can escape the bog-hole filled with the fishes of Gwynn of the Mist, a pit between crag and moor, place of ghosts and of their children, a lake of vinegar and bloody waves where swine wash?

I ruined my good Carnarvon stockings on this wrong road, I do not know why, except ill-luck, my horse and I fell in the bog-hole. The cold first overcame the lout, then was he heated as he dug and scrambled out. So now I am come to land, and can freely give the bog my blessing.

I by Dafydd ap Gwilym

What a weekend. 39 hours ago I intended to write some light-hearted posts, but then, in the deepest den of my heart suddenly the snakes Irony and Sarcasm woke up - or rather were awaken - and since they were darting, trying to lure my fingers to squirt their venom via keyboard into the blogosphere. And no one and nothing able to becalm these creatures.

My quest to withstand the tempters seemed almost lost, when while I was watching her an Irish seagull whispered* to me: Dafydd ap Gwilym.

And immediately both snakes cuddled close, coiled up, fell smilingly asleep, and I knew: It's over - for this time.

Fair seagull on the tide, of a colour indeed
with the snow or the white moon,
your beauty is clear as a piece of the sun,
or a glove of shining crystal salt!
Lightly over the spreading fertile ocean
swiftly the bird flies fishing.
Sea-lily, together we will go,
hand in hand beyond the horizon:
for you are my only letter to her,
pure white and lying like a nun
in the trough of the waves of the sea.
Go where you see the shape of camp and castle,
where the fame of woman is: there will
your fame, my messenger, be spread. 
Look seagull and see,
a maid of light in shining castle,
give her this summons in my words ...
let her choose me!
Go to her now! Let it be she!
With this bold welcome be cunning
with the gentle creature.
Be my fine messenger and tell her
unless I can have her I shall die:
I am her lover and sad is my condition.
O men! Was there ever such a loving!
Did Merlin feel desire hotter,
Taliesin love a lovelier girl?
Mixed yellow grain falling on copper,
excellence on excellence! O seagull
if you see the loveliest human cheek
in christendom .... I tell you
unless I have some kindly word from her,
this girl will be the ending of me!

* :) Yes, dear readers, there do exist whispering seagulls. All you need is silence. :) Well, and a little fantasy. In case you don't believe me, just ask your children ... 

XIII by Dafydd ap Gwilym

Sitting - no, not under a birch - under this hazel, listening to the late afternoon's silence I thought it would be nice to welcome July with another poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym.

I have learned to carry on my nimble love boldly in secret, not in public like a boor: but now is the time to celebrate my secret love with fitting words.

The man who languishes and loves in secret loves best of all: when she and I (vain couple!) walked among crowds we talked so pleasantly together but none guessed our answers. For a long while we embraced and played at being outlaws for a joke, but now we must move with strictest secrecy because of evil tales and a foul tongue that destroys us with such stories, putting a slanderous stain on our innocent names with his words. We were proud of our care in keeping our love hidden, and I believed and worshipped under the young leaves where my golden love was. There was sweet opportunity and a pleasant life for us under the leaves of the young birch-trees.

Pleasant it was to keep our secret, hiding and adoring in the wood; to wander on the shore of the sea, or stay within the boundaries of the wood; to plant birch-trees, or weave the plumage of the wood in patterns; to tell my love to the slim girl or stand with her and look out over solitary meadows.

Going to the woods with her lover is a fine way for a girl to pass the day, there to sit silent or suddenly smiling, laugh lip to lip. So we took our pleasure together in the groves of the wood, avoiding all people, sharing our complaints or drinking mead together, or making love or lying still .... keeping our love hidden. That was a perfect time .... more than "perfect" I can say nothing.