Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/670

WELSH LITERATURE] of the poems attributed to him are undoubtedly the work of later hands, but even after making all possible deductions, there is still an infinite variety among what remains, ranging as his poems do from a sturdy denunciation of monkish fraudulence to the most delicate and pathetic recollections of departed joys. He has, besides, considerable importance as a teacher, as when, for instance, he invites the nun “to leave her watercress and paternosters of Romish monks,” and to come with him “to the cathedral of the birch to listen to the cuckoo’s sermons,” for, “were it not an equally worthy deed to save his (Dafydd’s) soul in the birch-grove as to do so by following the ritual of Rome and St James of Compostella”? Even in his old age, when he is beginning to repent of his rash and merry youth, nature has not deserted him,—the very tree under which in the old days he used to meet his sweetheart has become bent and withered in sympathy with him. Though Dafydd yields not the palm to any poet of his class throughout the world, and though his influence is still a potent factor in the literature of Wales, we are certain of hardly a single fact about his life. He flourished between 1340 and 1390. His works were published in London in 1789. This edition was reprinted by Ffoulkes of Liverpool in 1870. See L. C. Stern, ''Zeitschr. f. celt. Phil.'' vol. vii.

Sion Cent was chaplain to the Scudamores of Kentchurch in Herefordshire, and though, therefore, in orders, was a most bitter opponent of the pretentious and the evil life of the monks of his time. All his writings show signs of the influence of the moralists of the middle ages, and treat of religious or of moral subjects. His poetry is strong and austere, interfused here and there with the most biting satire. He died about 1400. Like many of his contemporaries, Dunbar, Villon, Menot and Manrique, his dominant note is that of sadness and regret.

Rhys Goch Eryri had a sprightly muse which deals with fanciful subjects. His themes are often similar to those of Dafydd ab Gwilym, but whereas the subject of Dafydd’s muse was nature and his treatment universal, Rhys Goch’s are simply natural objects which he treats in a vigorous but narrow and cold manner.

Iolo Goch, that is, Iorwerth the Red, deserves a special mention as the poet who voiced the aspirations of a new Wales when Owen Glyndwr began to rise into power, and it is to one of his poems that we owe a most minute description of Sycharth, Owen Glyndwr’s home. His poetry is slightly more archaic in diction than that of his contemporaries, as his subject—war and the glory of Welsh heroes—belonged more properly to the age before his own. In one very striking cywydd composed after Glyndwr’s downfall, he calls upon this hero to come again and claim his own, and addresses himself fancifully to all the countries of the world where his hero may be in hiding. He died after 1405, and, if the dates generally given for his birth be even approximately correct, he must have lived to a prodigious age (cf. Gweithiau Iolo Goch, by Charles Ashton, London, 1896).

Rhys Goch ap Rhiccert claims to be named with Dafydd ab Gwilym as a writer of lyrics in praise of beautiful women. He has one advantage, however, over his more famous contemporary in the variety of his metres. The musical lilt and the delicate workmanship of his poems, with their recurring refrain, give him a unique position among his medieval contemporaries as the first purely lyrical poet. His floreat is probably a little later than that of Dafydd ab Gwilym, for we must not be misled by the late orthography of his poems.

Dafydd Nanmor is chiefly famous for two exquisite cywyddau, Cywydd Marwnad Merch, or Elegy of a Maiden, and Cywydd i wallt Llio, or Cywydd to Llio’s Hair. In both these poems he shows elegance rather than depth, and a fancy as bold as that of his great master Dafydd. In the first of these cywyddau his grief is so great that he wishes that he were but the shroud around his dead sweetheart, and, in the second, Llio Rhydderch’s golden hair over her white brow is compared to the refulgence of lightning over the fine snow. He is supposed to be a younger contemporary of Rhys Goch Eryri, but there are many facts to warrant a supposition that he lived much later, even as late as 1490.

Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen deserves to be mentioned as the author of the famous Marwnad Lleucu Llwyd, an elegy which is far more convincing in its sincerity than Dafydd Nanmor’s cywydd. Few of his compositions are extant, but the one already mentioned is sufficient to place him in the first rank of the poets of the period. He lived approximately from 1330 to 1390.

The other poets of this period who deserve some mention are Dafydd Ddu o Hiraddug, who wrote poems on religious subjects, and who is supposed to have translated part of the Officium Beatae Mariae into Welsh; Gruffydd Grug, between whom and Dafydd ab Gwilym a most fierce poetic quarrel raged, but who is the author of a beautiful elegy on his opponent; Gruffydd Llwyd ab Dafydd, who was the poet of Owen Glyndwr, and whose cywydd in praise of his patron is one of the best of that type; Hywel Swrdwal and Gwilym ab Ieuan Hen.

5. The Silver Age of the Cywydd, 1440–1550.—The insurrection of Owen Glyndwr, though originally the result of a private quarrel, was the general revolt of a nation against the conquerors whom it hated, and the English king knew well enough that the discontent with his rule was fanned by the older and more national Welsh institutions, and by none more than by the system of wandering bards. The conditions which had given rise to this system were fast dying out, but the noblemen, who fortunately were still intensely Welsh, were loth to give up their family bards, and the bards themselves, never a too industrious class, were too glad of their freedom and easy life to turn to more profitable work. We find, therefore, that a law was passed in 1403, the fourth year of Henry IV.’s reign, prohibiting bards “and other vagrants” from exercising their profession in Gwynedd or North Wales. This law, however, like its predecessor in the reign of Edward I., failed utterly in its purpose. By prohibiting the Welsh noblemen from giving their patronage to the bards, and, therefore, from distinguishing between the real bards and the mendicant rhymesters, this law took away the only safeguard against the latter class, with the result that by about 1450 they had become a pest to the country. About that time there flourished a poet called Llawdden, who, noticing the very unsatisfactory state of poetry in Wales, induced his kinsman, Gruffydd ab Nicolas, a nobleman living in Y Drenewydd (Newtown), to petition Henry VI. for permission to hold an eisteddfod similar in purpose to the three Eisteddfodau Dadeni of the last period. This famous eisteddfod

was held at Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen) in 1451, and shortly before the actual eisteddfod was held a “statute” was drawn up under the direction of Llawdden, regulating the different orders of bards and musicians and setting in order the cynghaneddion a mesurau, the different kinds of alliterative verse to be presented to the assembled bards at the meeting. Among those present at that eisteddfod the most distinguished was Dafydd ab Edmwnd, who then made famous the dictum that the purpose of an eisteddfod was “to bring to mind the past, to consider the present, and to deliberate about the future.” He, therefore, proposed emendations in “the rules of Welsh verse,” making them more strict, so as to keep the unlearned rhymesters from the privileged bardic class. This measure had a most important effect on Welsh literature. It effectively put an end to the charming spontaneity which distinguishes the poetry of Dafydd ab Gwilym and his contemporaries, and by introducing an arbitrary set of rules gave an artificial tone to almost all the poetry of the next two hundred years. It had, indeed, exactly the same retarding effect on Welsh poetry as the Unities had on the French drama. So that, whereas the poems of Dafydd ab Gwilym, though written in the difficult alliterative metres, are nearly all light and have a sweet lyrical re-echo, the poetry of Dafydd ab Edmwnd and his successors is often heavy and nearly always artificial. After making, however, all these deductions, it is a debatable point whether the hard and fast rules which now regulated Welsh poetry did not eventually justify their existence. They have helped, by inciting to carefulness, to keep the idiom and the language pure and undefiled, and to this day style in Welsh