Sculpture of Dafydd ap Gwilym by W. Wheatley Wagstaff in Cardiff City Hall.
"The Seagull" (Welsh: Yr Wylan) is a love poem in 30 lines by the 14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, probably written in or around the 1340s.[1] Dafydd is widely seen as the greatest of the Welsh poets,[2][3][4][5] and this is one of his best-known and best-loved works.[6][1]
The poet addresses and praises a seagull flying over the waves, comparing it to, among other things, a gauntlet, a ship at anchor, a sea-lily, and a nun. He asks it to find a girl whom he compares to Eigr and who can be found on the ramparts of a castle, to intercede with her, and to tell her that the poet cannot live without her. He loves her for her beauty more than Myrddin or Taliesin ever loved, and unless he wins kind words from her he will die.
Imagery
The poem in BL Add. MS 14997, a manuscript dating from c. 1500.
The academic critic Huw Meirion Edwards considered that "The Seagull"’s imagery goes far beyond anything that had come before it in Welsh poetry,[7] and Anthony Conran wrote that "pictorially it is superb…[it] has the visual completeness, brilliance and unity of a medieval illumination, a picture from a book of hours".[8] Dafydd wrote several love-messenger poems, and is indeed considered the master of that form.[6] They follow an established pattern, beginning by addressing the llatai, or messenger, going on to describe it in terms of praise, then asking the llatai to take the poet's message to his lover, and finally in general adding a prayer that the messenger return safely. But in "The Seagull", as with Dafydd's other bird-poems, the gull is more than just a conventional llatai: the bird's appearance and behaviour are observed closely, while at the same time Dafydd shows, according to the scholar Rachel Bromwich, "an almost mystical reverence" for it.[9] The image of the seagull's beautiful, white, immaculate purity suggests that of the girl,[10] while the bird's flight embodies the idea of freedom, in contrast with the dominating and enclosing castle.[1] This castle has not been positively identified, although Aberystwyth[11] and Criccieth[12] have both been suggested. The girl herself is unusual in two respects, firstly in the paucity of physical detail in Dafydd's description of her as compared with the women in his other love poems, and secondly in that she is a redhead, as very few women in medieval Welsh poetry are.[13]
Poetic art
The seagull is described in what has been called "a guessing game technique"[14] or "riddling",[15] a technique known in Welsh as dyfalu comprising the stringing together of imaginative and hyperbolic similes and metaphors.[16] Dafydd also uses devices for breaking up syntax known as sangiad ("insertion, interpolation") and tor ymadrodd ("interruption of sentence"). So, for example:
A bydd, dywaid na byddaf, Fwynwas coeth, fyw onis caf.
—lines 19-20
Translation:
And be, say that I shall not be, An elegant kind-servant, living unless I win her.
The translator Idris Bell explained the sense of this as "Have the kindness in courteous wise to give her the message that I shall die unless she will be mine."[17]
Construction
The poem consists of 30 lines (or 15 rhyming couplets) in the cywydd metre. In this metrical form, each line has 7 syllables, with a break usually after the 3rd or 4th syllable, but sometimes after the 1st or 2nd. The final word in each half-line has a stress.[18] Some words which in modern Welsh are pronounced with two syllables were treated as monosyllables in earlier Welsh, e.g. llanw, eiry, lythr.[19]
In each couplet one line (either the first or second) ends in a monosyllable and the other in a polysyllable, ensuring that the rhyme occurs in a stressed syllable in one line and in an unstressed one in the other, e.g. béll, chástell or hánnerch, férch.
Cynghanedd ("Sound-harmony")
As usual in cywydd poems, each line makes use of the technique known as cynghanedd, or sound-harmony. Three different types are used in this poem:[20]
Cynghanedd groes, in which all the consonants except the last in the first half of the line are repeated in the same order in the second half (lines 1, 4, 8–12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27):
Yr wylan dég, ar lanw dióer
—line 1, repeating R L N D
Translation:
O beautiful seagull on the flood-tide, God knows,
Darn fal hául, dyrnfol héli.
—line 4, repeating D R N F H L
Translation:
Like a piece of the sun, (or like) a gauntlet of the sea
Na Thaliésin ei thlýsach
—line 24, repeating TH L S
Translation:
Nor (did) Taliesin (ever love a girl) more beautiful than her
When both halves of the line end in a monosyllable, as in line 1, only those consonants before the stressed vowel are repeated; but if either half of a line ends in a polysyllabic word, as in lines 4 and 24, the consonants following the stressed vowel in the first half are also repeated, provided that the final letter of each half is different. Ideally, they must be arranged round the stressed vowel in the same way in each half: thus in line 24, TH and L come before the stressed vowel, and S immediately after it.[18]
Cynghanedd draws, in which there are some consonants at the beginning of the second half which do not repeat any consonants in the first half (lines 2, 6, 7, 14, 15, 22, 28):
Unlliw ag eiry neu wenlloer
—line 2, repeating N and LL
Translation:
The same colour as snow or a bright moon
Esgudfalch edn bysgodfwyd
—line 6, repeating S G D F
Translation:
Speed-proud, fish-eating bird
Cynghanedd sain, in which one of the words in the second half of a line (but not the last) rhymes with one of the words in the first half; there may also be repetition of one or more consonants (lines 3, 5, 13, 18, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30):
Dilwch yw dy degwch di
—line 3, rhyming -wch, repeating D
Translation:
Immaculate is your beauty
Siprys dyn giprys, dan gopr
—line 25, rhyming -prys, repeating D N G P R
Translation:
(Wearing) fine linen,[21] a girl (arousing) rivalry, beneath (hair of) copper
In cynghanedd sain, the line is divided into three parts instead of the usual two; the first two parts have rhyme and the second and third parts often have repeating consonants.
References to older poetry
Eigr, with whom Dafydd compares his beloved, was in Welsh tradition the wife of Uther Pendragon and mother of King Arthur. She is the heroine he most often cites as the archetypical beautiful woman.[22] The legendary figures of Myrddin and Taliesin are often invoked together in Welsh verse, and in some early poems Myrddin is presented as a lover, though Taliesin was not, making Dafydd's mention of him in this role rather odd.[23] It has been argued that these two figures are introduced as a tribute to one of the wellsprings of Dafydd's work, the native Welsh poetic tradition, while on the other hand the terms in which he describes his submission to the girl acknowledge one of the other great influences on him, the literature of courtly love, stemming from Provence but by Dafydd's time to be found across Europe.[24]
Adaptations
Glyn Jones wrote a poem, "Dafydd's Seagull and the West Wind", which gives the seagull's response.[25]
John Hardy set "The Seagull" as part of a song-cycle called Fflamau Oer: Songs for Jeremy.[26][27]
David Vaughan Thomas wrote a musical setting of the poem in 1924 which was published posthumously in 1950.[28][29]
Robert Spearing set the poem, together with some lines from Romeo and Juliet, in his cantata for tenor and piano She Solus.[30]
English translations and paraphrases
Anonymous (1 October 1873). "The Poems of Dafydd ab Gwilim". The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review. 100 (198): 379. Retrieved 15 April 2021.
Bell, David, in Bell, H. Idris; Bell, David (1942). Fifty Poems. Y Cymmrodor, vol. 48. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. pp.177, 179. Retrieved 2 July 2015. With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
Bromwich, Rachel, ed. (1985) [1982]. Dafydd ap Gwilym: A Selection of Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p.74. ISBN0140076131. With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
Clancy, Joseph P. (1965). Medieval Welsh Lyrics. London: Macmillan. p.23. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
Loomis, Richard Morgan, ed. (1982). Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems. Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies. pp.222–223. ISBN0866980156. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
Rev. repr. in Loomis, Richard; Johnston, Dafydd (1992). Medieval Welsh Poems. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. p.77. ISBN0866981020.
↑ Baswell, Christopher; Schotter, Anne Howland, eds. (2006). The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1A: The Middle Ages (3rded.). New York: Pearson Longman. p.608. ISBN0321333977.
↑ Roberts, Sara Elin (2008). "Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 14th century)". In Sauer, Michelle M. (ed.). The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600. New York: Facts on File. p.138. ISBN9780816063604. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
↑ Bell, H. Idris; Bell, David (1942). Fifty Poems. Y Cymmrodor, vol. 48. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. pp.45–46, 178. Retrieved 3 July 2015.
1 2 Hammond, M. (2012). "The phonology of Welsh cynghanedd". Lingua, 122(4), 386-408.
↑ John Morris-Jones (1922), An Elementary Welsh Grammar, p. 17.
↑ For the meaning "fine linen" see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. siprys. Other scholars translate siprys as "Venus" or "Aphrodite" (i.e. Cypris, the "Cyprian goddess"), associating it with copper, the alchemical metal of Venus; cf. Giles Watson (2012) Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and Palimpsests, p. 55 note. Similarly Kenneth H. Jackson (1971) [1951], A Celtic Miscellany pp. 100–101 translates it as "She is a Venus". However, there is some doubt since this meaning does not occur in other Welsh authors.
Edwards, Huw Meirion (2010). "The Literary Context"(PDF). Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym. Welsh Department, Swansea University. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
Evans, Dylan Foster (2012). "Castle and town in medieval Wales". In Fulton, Helen (ed.). Urban Culture in Medieval Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. pp.183–204. ISBN9780708323519. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
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