The Funeral of the Poet, Killed Outright by Love
Angladd y Bardd
Lily’s pallor on your face,
Chaste as ice, you wear a lace
Of spiderweb to keep you chaste.
Mair! I’m doomed, and it’s a waste!
Your family has sown fear
Within you, and I can’t fare
Well. “Farewell” fits like a glove:
(Gasp of unrequited love.)
Fine, fickle girl, if you kill
One who calls you “perfect jewel”,
Guilt shall be your sad token
When I lie dead and broken.
Leaves shall be my humble grave
In the lowly birchwood grove;
Ash-tips and birch-tops will read
A wind-voiced rite, and the Rood,
A crossed twig, will bless my shroud
Of clover, my pall a cloud
Of living leaves. The wild place
Will sing plaintive psalms of grace,
My bier: eight branches entwined
With flowers of lime and woodbine.
Seagulls from the ocean swell
Fly in thousands, bearing well
My bier, and a lilting breeze
Wafts me down a nave of trees.
Maiden-tresses of the birch
Are the windows of the church.
Like two icons framed with leaves,
Two nightingales sing of loves
Perished. Wreaths of wheat, stacks
Of wood, an altar of sticks,
Choirstalls of logs. Elm-seed jewels
Stud the floor, though the Jealous
One denies me. Birds are friars
Singing plainchant, and each phrase
Is perfect Latin, the leaves
Of their breviaries alive
With greenness. The organ plays:
A fresh wind amid the hay.
There in Gwynedd’s birchwood glade
Lies my grave, all spilt with gold
Of sunlight. The nightingale’s
Parish mourns. Muse of the groves,
The chantry cuckoo sings my soul
To sleep. Trees, flowers, soil
Offer orisons and psalms.
Roots are everlasting arms.
My Mass shall fill summer’s months,
My soul aflight like white moths.
By God’s grace the poet flies,
Spiralling to Paradise.
Poem attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson, 2012. When Thomas Parry published his edition of the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym in 1956, he excluded this delightful poem from the canon on the grounds that the cynghanedd is imperfect in several of the lines (in other words, the consonantal repetitions do not follow the strict rules observed by many of the poems whose attribution to Dafydd is secure). However, there are some compelling reasons for questioning Parry’s judgement. All of the eleven manuscripts attribute the poem to Dafydd. The poem shares the theme of the creatures of the woodland offering religious devotion with another of Dafydd’s poems (‘The Woodland Mass’), and like it, the poem teeters deliciously on the brink of heresy with its depiction of woodland birds performing the sacraments. There is also the unmistakable suggestion of Dafydd’s lightness of touch in the subtle transition between the self-mocking over-dramatisation of the opening of the poem, and the lyrical beauty of its climax – unmistakable enough to suggest that if this is not the work of Dafydd himself, it is that of a talented and likeminded disciple. In a marvellous essay on ‘Tradition and Innovation in the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Rachel Bromwich argues that this poem was influenced by French “bird-debate” poems, and by one in particular which insists, as the poet does here, that the birds sing in Latin (Rachel Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, Cardiff, 1986, pp. 77-78). However, as with Dafydd’s appropriation of that other great French tradition, the fabliau, there is in this poem a lightness of touch and a tone of gentle self-mockery which has much in common with a number of other works by Dafydd ap Gwilym.
