FE) 
 
 w 
 
 k'q mmroborion 
 lI>nblications, . 
 
 CDe Citcrarp Relationsbips 
 of Dafpad ap 6u)iipm. 
 
 BY 
 
 PROFESSOR W. LEWIS JONES, M.A. 
 
 From the " Transactions", Session l^oj-oS. 
 
 LONDON : ISSUED BY THE SOCIETY, 
 NEW STONE BUILDINGS, 64 CHANCERY LANE, 
 
(•fornell ItiinerHitg Slibrarg 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 FISKE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE BEQUESTOF 
 
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 LIBRARIAN OF THE UNIVERSITY 1868-1863 
 
 1905 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PB 2273.D12J79 
 
 3 1924 026 877 120 
 
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 Library 
 
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THE LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS OF 
 DAFYDD AP GWILYM.^ 
 
 PROFESSOR W. LEWIS JONES, M.A. 
 
 Daptdd ap Gwilym occupies not only a unique place in the 
 history of Welsh poetry, but is one of the most original 
 singers who appeared in Europe before the Eevival of 
 Learning. He stands well-nigh without a kinsman among 
 the poets of the Middle Ages— a lyric singer, whose "native 
 wood-notes wild" are the utterance of a singularly indi- 
 vidual and strong poetic impulse, and whose "first, fine, 
 careless rapture" has never been quite recaptured by any 
 Welsh poet who followed him. Despite the limitations 
 imposed upon him by the rigorous structure of the cywydd, 
 Dafydd's poetical gift was pre-eminently lyrical, and his 
 supremacy among the Welsh bards of his own and subse- 
 quent times lies in the consummate skill with which he 
 has subdued so difiicult a metrical form as the cywydd to 
 every mood of the lyric muse. Among the mediaeval poets 
 of Europe the famous German Minnesinger, Walther von 
 der Vogelweide, is perhaps his nearest congener as a lyric 
 singer, and in those of their poems which show the clear 
 influence of the songs of the Troubadours there are many 
 close resemblances between the Welsh poet and the German. 
 But deriving much though Dafydd ap Gwilym did, as we 
 
 1 Read before the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion at 20, 
 Hanover Square, 28 May 1908 ; Chairman, Sir Francis Edwards, 
 Bart., M.P. j^^ 
 
THE iilTERAET EELATIONSHIPS OF BAt'YDD Af GWlLYM. 3 
 
 shall see, from the conventional love-poetry of the Trouba- 
 dours, he was too ingenuous and wayward a child of Nature 
 to order his expression of the most elemental of human 
 passions according to any literary precedent or to the 
 requirements of any artificial poetical "code". Moreover, 
 it is less in his love-songs than in his nature-poems that 
 Dafydd's prime poetic gift most distinctively appears. 
 Indeed, his lyrics of Nature — among which his poems 
 on birds stand out as signal examples — are so unlike 
 anything else in the whole range of mediaeval literature 
 as to constitute, in their kind, the most original contribu- 
 tion of the native genius of Wales to the world's poetry. 
 
 But, however original a poet's natural gift and. manner 
 of utterance may seem to be, he is, after all, the child 
 of his age, and must of necessity owe much to the 
 literary culture which was his birth-right. Dafydd's own 
 countrymen, in particular, have been too much in the 
 habit of regarding him as an untutored genius, and 
 of scouting the suggestion that his poetry may have 
 owed anything to external influences. The truth, how- 
 ever, is that Dafydd ap Grwilym was, for his time, a 
 considerable scholar, and that, in his poetry, he drew 
 largely both upon such books as were accessible to him 
 and upon all the poetical lore and precept that came his 
 way. My object in this paper is to trace some of the more 
 obvious of his relationships with his predecessors in the 
 art of poetry, and, more particularly, with the Proven9al 
 Troubadours. Several critics have already written a good 
 deal about Dafydd's relation to the Welsh bards who 
 preceded him, and of his indebtedness to those classical 
 writers, chiefly Latin, who were popular in the Middle 
 Ages. A very full and suggestive account of Dafydd's 
 indebtedness to Latin literature appears in the 1905-06 
 volume of this Society's Transactions, from the pen of 
 
4 THE LI'fBEAEY RELATIONSHII'S 
 
 Dr. Hartwell Jones ; and his article derives additional 
 interest from the parallels he draws between Dafydd and 
 the mediseval Italian poets. I need, therefore, say but 
 little upon this branch of my subject. 
 
 Historically, Dafydd ap Grwilym ushers in what is usually 
 styled the third, and the most brilliant, period in the 
 history of early Welsh poetry. Flourishing in the four- 
 teenth century, he is the first great figure, and the most 
 inspired singer, among the Welsh bards of the Renaissance. 
 To begin with, his poems, or the collection of cywyddau that 
 go under his name — for it is now well known that all the 
 poems attributed to him in the printed editions cannot be 
 authentic works of his'— stand in striking contrast, both 
 in subject-matter and in form, to the poetry of his bardic 
 predecessors in Wales. He is, beyond any question, our 
 first great master of the cywydd. The editors of the 1789 
 edition of his poems even call him the inventor of the 
 cywydd. It may be as difficult to prove this as it 
 apparently is to account for the development of the 
 cywydd form from the earlier measures used in Welsh 
 poetry. The most obvious, as it may very well be the 
 correct, explanation of the origin of the cywydd is that the 
 last two lines of an englyn suggested to Dafydd, or some 
 one else, the possibilities of a poem composed entirely of a 
 succession of such rhyming couplets. It is scarcely credible 
 that foreign influence had much, if anything, to do with 
 it, for the main principles of the measure — cynghanedd 
 and the variation of accent in each line of the couplet — 
 appear to have been developed in Wales on entirely inde- 
 pendent lines. It should not, however, be forgotten that 
 the most popular poems in mediseval French were composed 
 
 ' The determination of the authenticity of the various poems 
 printed in the 1789 edition is one of the tasks that imperatively 
 demand the attention of our Welsh scholars to-day. 
 
Oi" DAFTbD AP GWlLYM. 5 
 
 in short rhyming couplets, and that, therefore, the idea of 
 combining short couplets in Welsh in the form of an ex- 
 tended poem may have been derived, to some extent, from 
 the French.^ What is of greater importance is that the 
 odes of Daf ydd ap Gwilym are our earliest finished examples 
 of the cywydd form, and that it was he who gave the 
 cywydd its vogue and sanction as the most popular bardic 
 measure containing cynghanedd from his day down to our 
 own. His own contemporaries and their successors, from 
 Gruffydd Gryg and lolo Groch dov?n to Tudur Aled and 
 William Llyn, turned out cywyddau by the hundred, 
 and "the golden age of Welsh poetry", as it has been 
 called, is emphatically the age of the cywydd. But Dafydd 
 ap Gwilym surpasses all his brother bards in his easy 
 mastery of his metrical instrument. He sings of Love and 
 of Nature with such compelling force and fervour as to 
 make the closely-knit lines of the cywydd musical with the 
 strains of an apparently unpremeditated art. 
 
 But, far more than in form, Dafydd's poetry stands out 
 in contrast to that of his Welsh predecessors in its subject- 
 matter. The second well-marked period in the history of 
 Welsh poetry extends, roughly, from the beginning of the 
 twelfth century down to the death of Lly welyn ap Gruffydd 
 in 1282, and may be called the age of the Princes. The 
 twelfth century was in Wales, as elsewhere, the beginning 
 
 1 Mr. W. J. Gruffydd, the Welsh Lecturer at Cardiff University 
 College, has some suggestive remarks on this point in a paper on 
 " The Connection between Welsh and Continental Literature in the 
 14th and 16th Centuries" (p. 34), published in The Transactions of the 
 Guild of Graduates, 1907-8. I had the pleasure of hearing his paper 
 read at Bangor a few weeks before I was to read the present paper in 
 London. As his paper, so far as it deals with D. ap Gwilym, traverses 
 so much of the same ground as my own, I ought to say that the 
 present paper had been written many months before, and for another 
 purpose than a Cymmrodoriou address. 
 
6 SHE tlTERART EBiiATiONSHI?S 
 
 of a period of remarkable literary activity, and, with the 
 growth of the power of the Welsh princes, bards found 
 both stimulating themes to sing of and conditions emi- 
 nently favourable to the cultivation of their art. More- 
 over, some of the princes — Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd and 
 Owain Cyfeiliog, for example — were among the most 
 famous bards of this period, and remind us of those 
 Courts of Southern France where the Troubadour's art 
 became the study and the pastime even of tings. 
 And, like Provence, Wales became, during the period 
 of the Princes, a veritable "nest of singing birds". A 
 mere list of the bards who are recorded to have sung 
 from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries fills 
 nearly four pages of Stephens's Literature of the Kymry. 
 But, even apart from the difficulties of its language, 
 the poetry of this period, as a whole, presents singularly 
 few features of interest for us now. The bulk of it 
 consists of eulogies and elegies of nobles and high-bom 
 dames of the day. Occasionally a fresh note is struck in 
 some spirited lyric of Love, such as Hywel ab Owain's 
 celebrated "Can y Dewis", or a brief lay of Nature, such 
 as Grwalchmai's "Delight". But most of the bards found 
 that their duty and profit alike lay in chanting the praises 
 of their princes and their patrons. It is curious to note 
 how, in an age of Romance, purely romantic subjects 
 appear to have had no charm whatever for the Welsh 
 bards. It is not to her poets that Wales owes her one 
 supreme contribution to the greatest of the mediaeval 
 romantic cycles, but to her prose writers. We have, 
 indeed, occasional allusions to the chief characters of 
 Arthurian fable in bardic compositions, but to most of the 
 bards, as to Dafydd ap Gwilym himself, Arthur and Guine- 
 vere, Peredur and Gwalchmai, Melwas and Medrawt are 
 but names dimly syllabled on "the shores of old romance". 
 
OF DAFTDD AP GWILYM. 7 
 
 Although Dafydd, like the rest, is comparatively in- 
 different to romantic fable, the themes of his poetry 
 introduce us to a world all but unknown to his pre- 
 decessors. In him we find a poet alive, as no other Welsh 
 bard who preceded him was, to the romance of Love and of 
 Nature, and one whose relations with Morfudd constitute 
 themselves a romantic episode not unworthy of a place 
 side by side with the attachments celebrated in verse by 
 the greatest of the Proven9al Troubadours. And it is by 
 reason of this, more than all, that Dafydd is entitled to be 
 called an innovator, and the harbinger of a new epoch in 
 the poetry of his country. Many of the new elements he 
 brought into Welsh poetry were, as I have said, due to his 
 native genius alone. His "eye to see" and his "daring 
 to follow" Nature were Grod's gifts. No foreign poet 
 could have taught him this, or those felicities of imagery 
 and phrase which are the finest gems of Welsh poetic 
 diction. But other, though intrinsically less important, 
 features in his poetry are directly traceable both to his 
 Latin culture and to his familiarity with the stock themes 
 of the early lyric poetry of France, especially that of the 
 Troubadours. Thus it is that in Dafydd's odes we detect 
 the first considerable foreign influence upon the poetry of 
 Wales. They bring Wales, for the first time, so far as 
 poetry is concerned, into touch with the main currents of 
 European literature. 
 
 The modern lyric poetry of Europe is the creation of 
 the "early Renaissance" of the twelfth century, and the 
 cradle of that lyric poetry was Provence. As Hallam long 
 ago pointed out, "the songs of Provence became the source 
 from which poetry for many centuries derived a great 
 portion of its habitual language". But there were other 
 forces at work besides the influence of the Troubadours of 
 Provence which made for the growth of lyric, or lighter. 
 
8 THE LITERAET RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 forms of poetry — and one or two of .these have to he 
 briefly noted in any account of Dafydd's literary relation- 
 ships. The first is the Latin literature, ancient and 
 medieval, which the bard found to his hand. There can 
 be no sort of doubt that Dafydd ap Gwilym knew Latin. 
 Apart from the evidence furnished by his poems, it is 
 obvious that a man brought up, as he was, in a courtly 
 environment, would not lack knowledge of the language 
 which was the chief instrument of culture in his time. 
 And there were certain Latin books which no educated 
 man of the time could be ignorant of. Chief among them 
 were the works of Ovid. Virgil and Horace, also, were 
 largely read, but, for the love-poets and the aspiring lyrists 
 of the central Middle Age, Ovid was the supreme source of 
 inspiration and suggestion. As I have already said. Dr. 
 Hartwell Jones has so fully illustrated Dafydd's obligations 
 to Latin writers as to make it unnecessary for me here to 
 expatiate upon that side of his literary relationships. I 
 need only say that Dafydd frequently refers to "Llyfr 
 Ofydd" — Ovid's book — and that by it he means, more 
 than all, Ovid's "Art of Love".' But why the first editors 
 of Dafydd's works should have called him "the Ovid of 
 Wales", it is dif&cult to discover. No two poets could 
 well be more different in their exposition of the art of 
 love. The Welsh bard is no morbid analyst of various 
 phases of the passion, but is one whose gallantries seem 
 to take their place naturally in the free life of a man who, 
 largely in protest against the cloistral hypocrisies of his 
 time, elected to fleet his days carelessly as a child of 
 
 1 Mr. W. J. Gruftydd, in the paper already mentioned, maintains 
 that by Uyfr Ofydd, Dafydd "understood a particular book, and that 
 book was Chrestien do Troyes's French translation called the 
 Commandements d' Omde". He gives a suggestive parallel quotation 
 to prove his point. 
 
OP DAPTDD AP GWILTM. 9 
 
 Nature and the open air. Moreover, no love adventure 
 ever seems to have so engrossed Dafydd's interest as to be 
 incapable of suddenly undergoing a change 
 
 "into something rich and strange," 
 
 which found exquisite expression in song. At the same 
 time, there is no mistaking the actual, downright direct- 
 ness of Dafydd's courting of his various mistresses; his 
 odes breathe, all too palpably, the ardour of keen and 
 resolute pursuit. They who would idealise Morfudd, and 
 make of her a phantom representative of her sex, or a 
 Beatrice of the Welsh highways, or a symbolical figure 
 typifying the bard's country groaning under a foreign 
 yoke, have, in my opinion, quite missed the secret of 
 Dafydd's love-poetry. His love-songs, to any unsophisti- 
 cated reader, bear every mark of being the records of 
 very real, and often enough very lively, episodes in the 
 career of an exceedingly impressionable and reckless 
 gallant. Never were more- overt and sincere poetical 
 ofBerings tendered at the shrine of Venus. These candid, 
 fervid, and forthright utterances of passion are very 
 difEerent indeed from the highly artificial and exotic love- 
 poems of Ovid. 
 
 It is obvious, however, that Dafydd ap Gwilym was 
 acquainted with Latin literature written at a very much 
 later time than Ovid's, and it is difficult to believe that 
 he was ignorant of those Latin poems which were the 
 direct product of that early Eenaissance of which he 
 was himself the child. No history of raediseval lyric 
 poetry can leave out of account the Latin songs of the 
 Wandering Students of the twelfth and the thirteenth cen- 
 turies — songs which, from the very circumstances and habits 
 of these students, found their way into every civilised 
 European land. These songs, says the most distinguished 
 
10 THE LITEKAET RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 English student and translator of them — the late Mr. J, 
 Addington Symonds — on the one hand, express that 
 delight in life and physical enjoyment which was a main 
 characteristic of the Renaissance ; on the other, they 
 proclaim the corruption of Papal Eome, which was the 
 motive-force of the Reformation.' This statement might 
 stand as a definition of the two main themes of Dafydd ap 
 Gwilym's poetry. 
 
 The two chief collections of these Latin songs of the 
 Wandering Students are a volume published at Stuttgart 
 in 1847, under the title of Carmina Burana, and — what is 
 better known in England — a volume, edited by Thomas 
 Wright in 1841, of the Latin Poems commonly attributed to 
 Walter Mapes (or Walter Map) . Of the two, the Carmina 
 Burana, as Symonds points out, "are richer in poems 
 which form a prelude to the Renaissance". I can only 
 touch very briefly here upon points in these Latin songs 
 which bear resemblance to characteristic features of Dafydd 
 ap Gwilym's poetry. First of all, Nature is sung of in 
 terms of surprising freshness in these Latin lyrics. "As 
 a background to their love-songs", writes Symonds, "we 
 always find the woods and fields of May, abundant flowers 
 and gushing rivulets, lime trees and pines and olive trees, 
 through which soft winds are blowing" (p. 35). Again, 
 " the quality of love expressed is far from being either 
 platonic or chivalrous. It is love of the sensuous, im- 
 pulsive, appetitive kind, to which we give the name of 
 Pagan .... Meanwhile, nothing indicates the character 
 or moral quality of either man or woman. The student 
 and the girl are always vis-d-vis, fixed characters in this 
 lyrical love-drama. He calls her Phyllis, Flora, Lydia, 
 Glycerion, Csecilia." Here, at any rate, is some plausible 
 
 1 Wine, Women and Song, by J. A. Symonds, p-. 7. (New edition in 
 "King's Classics", Chatto and Windus, 1907.) 
 
OP DAFTDD AP GWILTM. 11 
 
 evidence that Morfudd and Dyddgu may hare been, for 
 Dafydd, but fancy names. Once more, Symonds notes 
 "the particularity with which the personal charms of 
 women are described" — "one girl has long tawny tresses, 
 another, masses of dark hair". Witness Dafydd describ- 
 ing Morfudd : 
 
 " Y fun dawel wallt-felen, 
 Eurwyd y baich ar dy ben/' 
 ["The gentle maiden with yellow hair — of gold is the bnrden on 
 thy head."] 
 
 and 
 
 "Dyddgu a'r gwallt gloywddu, glan." 
 
 ["Dyddgu, with her clean, shining black tresses."] 
 
 Had I time, I might quote several poems from Symonds' 
 translations which bear a remarkable similarity to Dafydd 
 ap GAvilym's odes; but I have too much ground to cover 
 to allow me to do so.' 
 
 The Latin songs I have just referred to differ from the 
 songs of the Proven9al Troubadours in being far less arti- 
 ficial, and more true to the facts of what we might call 
 commonplace or vulgar amours. There is yet another 
 class of mediaeval lyrics which, derived largely from the 
 poetry of the Troubadours and inheriting something from 
 the frank songs of the Wandering Students, show close 
 affinities with the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym. They are 
 the songs of the German Minnesingers. The Minnesingers 
 were direct inheritors of the lyrical poetry of Provence, and 
 among them there arose one who, as I have already hinted, 
 alone challenges Dafydd ap Gwilym's supremacy among 
 the mediaeval lyrists — Walther von der Vogelweide. It 
 can hardly be possible that Dafydd knew anything at all of 
 
 1 Those who care to work out the parallels further will find the 
 necessary matter to their hand in the recent reprint of Symonds' 
 work in the " King's Classics". 
 
12 THE LITEEAET EELATIONSHIPS 
 
 the works of his G-erman predecessor. They both drew, 
 unconsciously, from the same Provenfal sources. But the 
 resemblance between them, in a few poems, is very re- 
 markable, and serves to illustrate how close were the ties 
 that united the commonwealth of poetry in those stirring 
 and experimenting times. Allow me to quote one or two 
 translated extracts from Walther's poems which will at 
 once recall familiar passages in Dafydd ap Gwilym's 
 works : — 
 
 " Under the Jinden 
 
 On the heath, 
 
 There our double bed we made ; 
 
 There might you find 
 
 Fair as well as 
 
 Broken flowers and grass, 
 
 In front of the forest in a valley — 
 
 Tandaradei ! 
 
 Sweetly sang the nightingale. 
 
 "I wandered 
 To the field ; 
 
 Thither was my beloved come. 
 There was I so taken — 
 
 Blessed Lady ! that I shall evermore be happy. 
 Did he kiss me. O, a thousand times 
 Tandaradei ! 
 See how red my mouth is ! "^ 
 
 Again, "Winter has done us all manner of harm ; 
 heather and forest have both lost their colour, but many a 
 voice will soon sound there again. Would that I might 
 sleep away all the hours of Winter ! for, watching and 
 waiting, I grow angry that its power should spread far 
 and wide. God knows it must soon give place to May, and 
 
 1 In spite of the fact that the speaker in this poem is a woman, the 
 note struck in it is curiously similar to that of many a song of 
 Dafydd's. The translation here quoted is from an article by Mr. 
 Edmund Gosse (mentioned in Cowell's well-known Cymmrodorian 
 paper on Dafydd) in the Cornhill Magazine, vol. xxxiii. 
 
OP DAFYDD AP GWILYM. 13 
 
 then we shall have flowers again where now we have 
 frost." Listen to Dafydd's lament, "O Golli yr KM":— 
 
 "Weithian o'n gwlad yr aethost, 
 A daeth bar hyd daear dostj 
 Mae pob llwyn ar dwyn a dol 
 Ysdyddiau yn gystuddiol 
 
 "Gaeaf sy'n lladd y gwiail 
 A dtig o goedyd y dail ; 
 A'i chwithig wynt yn chwythu, 
 A'i ruad arth, a'i rew du.'' 
 
 Eto, fe ddaw'r Haf i 
 
 "roi dail a gwiail ar goed, 
 A'th degwch i berth dew-goed 
 A doldir yn llawn deildai, 
 A thrydar man adar Mai." 
 
 ["At length (O Summer), thou has left our land, and sorely afflicted 
 lies the earth ; every holt on hill and dale hath for days lain forlorn. 
 Winter is killing the boughs, aud robbing the trees of their leaves ; 
 its cross winds are blowing, with their bear-like roar and their black 
 frost." But, Summer will once more return "to give back to the 
 woodland its foliage and its boughs, and to the thick-leaved bushes 
 their beauty, when the meadow-land shall be covered with leafy 
 mansions, and the little birds of May shall be chirping."] 
 
 But, after full account is taken of these and other re- 
 semblances between them, Walther is a poet of a more 
 serious order than Dafydd — though whether he gains 
 thereby is a question which depends on the "taste and 
 fancy" of the critic' 
 
 It is high time, however, that I should come to my main 
 theme — Dafydd's relation to the Troubadours. Dafydd ap 
 
 1 Had I space, I could quote many more parallels between the 
 poems of Walther and those of Dafydd. The curious student of such 
 things will find excellent translations of Walther's poems in a volume 
 of Selected Poems of W. v. d. Vogehmide, by W. Alison Phillips (Smith, 
 Elder and Co.) ; and in The Minnesingers (vol. i), by J. Bithell (Long- 
 mans, 1909). The latter work is of great interest in its bearing upon 
 the development of mediaeval lyric poetry. 
 
14 THK LITEEABY RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 Grwilym, we read in The Welsh PeopW "may be regarded 
 as a Welsh troubadour, whose lyric muse was devoted to 
 singing what the French called the amour cowrtois". "But 
 what", your patriotic Welsh critic may ask, "could this 
 ' wild Welshman', who wandered about the Principality in 
 search of indiscriminate amours, know of Provence, or of 
 the courtly singers who paid their tribute of high-flown 
 verse to the grandes dames of the Midi ? Dafydd lived in 
 regions too remote, and was withal too spontaneous and 
 original a poet, to be affected by or to copy the elaborate 
 effusions of the Proven9als.''" 
 
 But the fact is that neither Wales in the Middle Ages 
 was so far removed from Continental culture, nor Dafydd 
 himself so destitute of linguistic knowledge or of literary 
 curiosity as to make it impossible for the poetry of the 
 Troubadours to have influenced him. Welshmen, long 
 before Dafydd's time, had taken part in the Crusades. 
 In his own day they swelled the ranks of Edward Ill's 
 armies in France. Throughout the Middle Ages there 
 was an unbroken intercourse between Wales and Rome. 
 Knights-errant and travelling scholars, mendicant friars 
 and vagrant minstrels, kept up a constant social and 
 intellectual commerce between Wales and the Continent. 
 Moreover, there is ample evidence that during the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries several famous Troubadoui's were 
 brought into close association with the English Court, and 
 that some of them even visited Britain. The marriage of 
 Eleanor of Aquitaine with Henry II, in 1152, brought a 
 large part of southern France under the dominion of the 
 English crown, while in the next century, the marriage of 
 another Eleanor, the daughter of a count of Provence, 
 with Henry III, actually drew a crowd of Provencals to the 
 
 1 First ed., p. 605. 
 
OP DAPYDD AP GWILYM. 15 
 
 court of the English king. The celebrated Troubadour, 
 Bernart of Ventadorn — whose songs, as we shall see, bear 
 many points of resemblance to those of Dafydd ap Grwilym 
 — was a protege of Eleanor of Aquitaine's, and almost cer- 
 tainly visited England in her train. Another well-known 
 Troubadour, Bertram of Born, was closely connected with 
 Henry II's court, while Peire Vidal and Arnaut Daniel — 
 both celebrated names in the history of Provencal poetry — 
 were for a time in the entourage of the Troubadour king, 
 Richard I. 
 
 For two centuries the Troubadours were the master- 
 singers of Europe. The poet-princes and the other high- 
 born bards of Wales must have been well aware of their 
 repute and of the themes upon which they sang. The 
 great host of German Minnesingers drew their inspiration, 
 and took their models, from the courtly poetry of Provence. 
 Through various channels, and most of all through 
 wandering minstrels of every grade and kind, the influence 
 of Proven9al poetry gradually pervaded all Western 
 Europe, until, as Hallam says, "the songs of Provence 
 became the source from which poetry for many centuries 
 derived a great portion of its habitual language". Thus 
 Dante and Petrarch, Chaucer and Erangois Villon, 
 Walther von der Vogelweide and Dafydd ap Gwilym, 
 were, in their several ways and countries, direct inheri- 
 tors of the art of the Troubadours.' 
 
 Dafydd ap Gwilym can hardly have had any very close 
 acquaintance with the language and the actual poems 
 of the Troubadours. But the resemblances that exist 
 
 1 " Chaucer's well drew from the Arno, and the Arno rose in Provence. 
 Another line of inheritance gave us even more; French was for 
 centuries the upper-class language of England, and it was a French 
 leavened with Troubadour poetry."— Smith's The Troubadours at Home, 
 vol. ii, p. 376. 
 
16 THK LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 between many of his odes and Proven9al songs are too 
 remarkable to let us believe that the Troubadours, no less 
 than the particular kinds of poetry which they cultivated, 
 were not well known to him by report. He knew enough 
 Latin and, probably, enough French to acquire a distant 
 acquaintance, at least, with the most potent international 
 factor in the development of the poetic art of his time.' 
 Thus, while it would be rash to claim Dafydd as a direct, 
 or conscious, imitator of the Troubadours, no critical treat- 
 ment of his poetry can well leave out of account those 
 features in it which, explain them as we may, reflect the 
 very impress of "Provencal song" and of the "sunburnt 
 mirth" of the South. 
 
 The late Professor Cowell,^ of Cambridge, was the first 
 to suggest the possible indebtedness of Dafydd to the poets 
 of Provence. "The resemblance between Ap Gwilym's 
 
 1 After the Norman Conquest there was established a close con- 
 nection between the Norman Lords and South Wales. "Kobert, earl 
 of Gloucester, acquired, early in the twelfth century, the lordship of 
 Glamorgan by marriage with Mabel, daughter of Robert Fitzhamon, 
 conqueror of Glamorgan. Robert, like his father, was a liberal and a 
 diplomatic patron of letters. It was to him that William of Malmes- 
 
 bury, the greatest historian of his time, dedicated his History 
 
 On his estates at Torigni was born Robert de Monte, abbot of Mont 
 St. Michel, a chronicler of renown, and a lover and student of Breton 
 legends. Above all, it was under his immediate patronage that 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth compiled his romantic History of the Kings of 
 Britain^' [I have ventured, here, to quote from a chapter of my own" 
 on "The Arthurian Legend" in The Cambridge History of English 
 Literature, vol. i.] The literary traditions of Glamorgan, thus 
 fostered by the Normans, are too well-known to need any comment. 
 What is certain is that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, if 
 not later, there must have been constant intercourse at the courts of 
 the great lords of South Wales between Norman-French trouv&res and 
 Welsh bards, and that these bards, out of the very necessity of their 
 position in their lords' courts, must have had a knowledge of the 
 French then spoken by the nobility and sung by the poets. 
 
 ^ In an article in Y Cymmrodor, vol. ii (1878). 
 
OF DAPTDD AP GWILYM. 17 
 
 poems and the chansons of the Troubadours," he writes, 
 "will strike anyone who compares the two. Ap Grwilym is 
 a greater poet than any troubadour, and his lyre has some 
 deeper notes than theirs ; but the essence of their niusic is 
 
 the same A portion of his odes are so like 
 
 Proven9al chansons in their subject and matter, that one 
 might almost believe they were direct imitations. These 
 are the somewhat wearisome semi-metaphysical disquisi- 
 tions on the nature and lineage of love, the golden 
 hair of Morfydd, 'Yr Hiraeth' (The Longing), etc. 
 These are the staple of Provencal poetry ; but in Ap 
 Gwilym they are only a very small portion." "In 
 Dante and Petrarch", Cowell continues, "we have the 
 very apotheosis of the Proven9al idea. The poetry of 
 Provence, at its best, was feeble and artificial ; it 
 was a delicate hot-house plant nursed by court pat- 
 ronage and shielded from all the rough winds of real 
 life, and striking its roots into a soil of fancy and senti- 
 ment, so that its shoots always betray the original 
 weakness of the stock, 
 
 Invalidique patrum referunt jejunia tiati. 
 
 But in Italy the transplanted shoot found a more fertile 
 soil, and struck its roots down deep into the very heart of 
 human nature and reality; and though Dante's 'Beatrice' 
 and Petrarch's 'Laura' were originally the reflections of 
 Proven9al poetry, the genius of Dante and Petrarch have 
 created them anew and made them symbols of beauty for 
 all time. And so Ab Gwilym seems to me to have similarly 
 borrowed the Provengal idea, and then reproduced it as a 
 new creation by his own genius. We can thus trace in 
 him a new line of ProvenQal influence, derived, I suppose, 
 through France or Italy." 
 
 "Lord-service, lady-service, and God-service were the 
 
iS THE LITEBABT RELATIONSHIPS , 
 
 three great offices of the troubadour.'" In two of these 
 offices, at least, Dafydd ap Gwrlym was pre-eminent, and, 
 if we accept as authentic certain pious poems alleged to 
 have been composed during his declining years, he made a 
 belated attempt to qualify himself in the third. His odes 
 in praise of his patron, Ivor the Generous, will bear com- 
 parison with the best Welsh examples of bardic "lord- 
 service", and those who are familiar with the history of 
 Welsh poetry up to his time will know that Dafydd ha:d 
 no need to turn to Provence for instruction in the art of 
 courtly panegyric. It is in the poems dedicated to the 
 service of ladies that he appears most of all to borrow the 
 gay singing-robes of a Provencal troubadour. The entire 
 series of odes addressed to Morfudd are based upon a 
 relationship, which finds its nearest analogue in the amour 
 courtois which evoked from the Troubadours their service 
 of song. But Dafydd's passion for Morfudd, if she really 
 existed, had little of the chivalric courtliness, or of the 
 idealism which usually characterised the homage paid to 
 the great dames of the courts of Provence by their mins- 
 trel lovers. The Welsh bard's fashion of making love to 
 Morfudd, as to his other mistresses, is marked above every- 
 thing by a frank admiration of her person and by open 
 
 1 The Troubadours at Hoine, by Justin H. Smith, vol. i, p. 76. This 
 charming work contains by far the best account of the Troubadours 
 and their poetry available in English, and I have made copious use of 
 it in this paper. Another English work which gives much biograph- 
 ical and other information concerning them, together with brief trans- 
 lated specimens of their poetry, is Miss Ida Parnell's Lives of the 
 Troubadours (Nutt, 1896). A French treatise which furnishes an 
 exhaustive account of the origins and of the influence of their poetry 
 is Jeauroy's Les Origines de la Pohie Lyrique en France au Moyen Age 
 (2nd ed., Paris, 1904). The best known and most accessible reper- 
 toires of Provencal poetry are Bartsch's Chrestomathie Provengale 
 (6th Ed. revised by Kosohwitz; Marburg, 1904), and Appel's Proven- 
 zalische Chrestomathie (Leipzig, 1895). 
 
OF l)AFTt)D AP GWiLTM. , 10 
 
 ^ 
 
 confession of a desire to have her as his own. His aflBnity 
 with the Troubadours, how-ever, appeai^s less in the general 
 character of the Morfudd episode than in^the various types 
 of love-song which he adopted, and in frequent resemblances 
 of phrase and sentiment. Nor is it his love-poetry alone 
 that reYninds us of the Troubadours. His satirical tirades 
 against priests and his verse-bouts with bardic rivals are in 
 the direct line of literary tradition from the sirventes and 
 the tensos of the Provencals. 
 
 Of the many types' of poems' common among the Trou- 
 badours, four, in particular, might almost have served as 
 models for a large proportion of the odes of D&,fydd ap 
 Gwilym. They are the canson, the sirventes, the t'enso, and 
 the alba.^ The canson, or chanson, was the name given to 
 the more elaborate form of love-song in which the poet 
 usually either hymned his lady's praises, or complained of 
 her obduracy, or of other obstacles which left him a prey 
 to the unrequited pains of love. The sirventes, or service- 
 
 1 For a full account of the various kinds of Provencal poems see 
 Smith, Troubadours at Home, vol.ii, pp. 449-451. In the elaboration 
 of verse-forms the Welsh bards, thgir " twenty-four measures " not- 
 withstanding, were altogether outstripped by the Troubadours. 
 "The 'Law of Love'" — the treatise on poetical writing compiled in 
 the thirteenth century by the College of The Gay Science at Toulouse 
 — "describes thirty-four different ways of rhyming, each with a name 
 of its own, and seventy-two kinds of stanzas, all of them labelled in 
 a similar way." — Smith, Troubadours at Home, ii, p. 286. 
 
 2 These four, it should be noted, are not the only Provenijal types 
 with which one can find parallels among Dafydd's poems. Several of 
 eywyddau recall, for example, the pastorela, or pastourelle, in which a 
 gallant of high degree makes love to a maiden of inferior rank, and 
 where the maid's fear of her father and mother is a stock convention. 
 Again, there is the chanson de femme mal marUe, in which the poet 
 declares his love for a woman married to an old man. Akin to this 
 type are the lampoons on husbands, where the husbands are always 
 pourtrayed as grotesque and ill-favoured. Compare with these 
 Dafydd's eywyddau tuckan against "Eiddig" and the "Bwa Bach". 
 
20 THE tiTERARY EEtiATIONSHIPS 
 
 poem, took mainly the form of a war-song or an eulogy of 
 a great lord's prowess and personal virtue ; but the title 
 also covered elegies (planh), and even satires. The tenso 
 was a debate between two poets, and the alba (Fr. auhe, 
 aubade) a dialogue between two lovers at the break of day. 
 Every reader of Dafydd will at once recognise how closely 
 related these Provencal forms are to a large number of his 
 poems. 
 
 Of all the Troubadours Dafydd's nearest poetical kins- 
 man is, unquestionably, Bernart of Ventadorn (flor. 1148- 
 1195). "Full of life himself and of a temper essentially 
 happy", writes Smith,' "it was the blithe and hearty side 
 of creation that appealed to Bernart. 'AH that is', he 
 cried — 'AH that is gives itself up to joy, and chants and 
 sings aloud, fields and parks and gardens, valley, plain, 
 and wood.' Sadness he often felt and could express 
 with vivid figures — the withering foliage, the cold and 
 stormy days, the ship tossing in the waves, the fish 
 struggling on the hook, the victim consumed by flames ; 
 but his songs of joy and exultation were more spontaneous 
 and more original, and in this mood his thoughts dwelt 
 lovingly on the gentle spring-time, the clear, bright 
 weather, the soft green of the fields, the tender verdure of 
 the boughs, the swelling buds, the blossoms opening behind 
 the leaves, the many-coloured flowers, and the gay little 
 birds— long silent— that began to sing again in the trees. 
 But all this was only the background, and upon it he 
 painted the feelings and the thoughts of the lover in hues 
 the truest, the freshest, the most varied that a poet has 
 ever used. Here, transmuted into thought and sentiment, 
 we find again the colour and perfume of the rose, the 
 music of the nightingale, and the genial splendour of the 
 May-day sky." 
 
 ' The Troubadours at Home, vol. ii, p. 179. 
 
Of DAPYbt) AP GWILYM. 21 
 
 This is how Bernart sings to Bel Vezer, viscountess of 
 Ventadorn : — 
 
 "Whene'er green leaves and grass appear, 
 And budding flowers from branches spring, 
 And nightingales do strong and clear 
 Uplift their voice and 'gin to sing — 
 Joy do they bring me, joy the flowers' sweet grace, 
 Joy my own heart, but most my lady's face ; 
 And I am girt with joy on every side, 
 But she is joy who doth all else o'er-ride. 
 
 " It marvels me that I can be. 
 And ne'er my love to her reveal. 
 For when my lady's eyes I see. 
 Their beauty all my senses steal ; 
 Almost to her from very love I rvin, 
 And, but for fear, already were it done ; 
 Ne'er was one seen of form and hue so fair. 
 Thus slow her faithful vassal's love to share. 
 
 " To find her all alone, what bliss ! 
 Asleep, or else but seeming so. 
 Then would I steal of her a kiss. 
 Since ne'er could ask it one so low ; 
 Betwixt us few the deeds of love, pardy ! 
 Time speedeth onwards, all our best days flee ; 
 By secret signs could we sweet converse hold, 
 And cunning use, instead of action bold."' 
 
 To the same Bel Vezer, Bernart addresses another 
 chanson, which opens with the striking stanza : — 
 
 " Whene'er the lark's glad wings I see 
 Beat sunward 'gainst the radiant sky 
 Till, lost in joy so sweet and free, 
 She drops, forgetful how to fly — 
 Ah, when I view such happiness 
 My bosom feels so deep an ache, 
 Meseems 4 or pain and sore distress 
 My longing heart will straightway break."^ 
 
 This reminds us of Dafydd ap Grwilym's frequent 
 
 ' Farnell, Lives of the Troubadours, p. 29. 
 2 The Troubadours at Home, ii, p. 162. 
 
a THE tITEllAftT fiELATIONSHIPS 
 
 allusions to the sky-lark — "the bird of restless voice, that 
 
 soars unto sheer breathlessness with an ode to the heights 
 
 of heaven".' Like Dafvdd, Bernart loves the birds; and 
 
 to him, as to the Welsh poet, the nightingale is the master 
 
 love-singer among them. "The nightingale rejoices by 
 
 flower and bough", sings Bernart, "and such a longing 
 
 seizes me that I can but sing ; yet I know not of what or 
 
 of whom [to sing], for I am in love neither with myself 
 
 nor with another." "The sweet song of the nightingale 
 
 awakes me at night when I sleep — T awake overwhelmed 
 
 with joy but made thoughtful and anxious by love."^ The 
 
 nightingale, like so many other birds, serves Dafydd ap 
 
 Gwilyra as a love-messenger, and though no Troubadour 
 
 is so intimately familiar with the birds as he, more than 
 
 one of them anticipate him in invoking birds to convey 
 
 messages of love to their mistresses. Thus, Pierre of 
 
 Auvergne, who flourished about 1150-1200, sends the 
 
 nightingale to his mistress with an affectionate greeting, 
 
 and bids him bring back what message he can : — 
 
 "Now unto my lady's dwelling 
 Hie thee, nightingale, away, 
 Tidings of her lover telling, 
 Waiting what herself will say ; 
 
 Make thee 'ware 
 
 How she doth fare ; 
 Then, her shelter spurning. 
 
 Do not be 
 
 On any plea 
 Let from thy returning."^ 
 
 1 " Yr ehedydd, aflonydd ei lais, 
 Yn myned mewn lludded llwyr 
 A chywydd i entrych awyr." 
 ^ These extracts are taken from Smith, The Troubadours at Home, 
 vol. ii, p. 416. 
 
 ■' The Troubadours at Home, i, p. 315. Another Troubadour, 
 Marcabrun, sends the sparrow with a message to his lady-love. Dur- 
 ing the twelfth and fourteenth centuries "there was ", says Jeanroy, 
 
6F DAFTDt) AP GWlLTBt. 23 
 
 Another Troubadour whose lore-songs closely resemble 
 Dafydd ap Gwilym's in sentiment and expression is 
 Arnaut of Marvoil, or Maruehl. Arnaut sings to his 
 mistress, the Lady Alazais : — 
 
 " Fair to me is April, bearing 
 Winds that o'er me softly blow, 
 Nightingales their music airing 
 While the stars serenely glow ; 
 All the birds, as they have power, 
 While the dews of morning wait, 
 Sing of joy in sky or bower, 
 Each consorting with his mate. 
 
 "And as all the world is wearing 
 New delight while new leaves grow, 
 'Twould be vain to try forswearing 
 Tjove which makes my joys o'erflow ; 
 Both by habit and by dower 
 Gladness is my rightful state, 
 And when clouds no longer lower 
 Quick my heart throws off its weight. 
 
 " Helen were not worth comparing, 
 Gardens no such beauty show : 
 Teeth of pearl — the truth declaring, 
 Blooming cheeks — a neck of snow, 
 Tresses like a golden shower, 
 Courtly charms, for baseness hate — 
 God, who bade her thus o'ertower 
 All the rest, her way make straight ! 
 
 "an entire series of poems which formed a sort of 'cycle of birds'. It 
 is well known that a bird is charged to convey messages of love in 
 many pieces, both ancient and modern'' See Jeanroy, Les origine.s de 
 lapoHie lyrtqv^en France au moyen age, p. 133. Cf. "The nightingale, 
 indeed, plays a conspicuous part in all this (mediieval love) poetry. 
 His song is the symbol of amorous passion, and be himself is appealed 
 to as the confidant and adviser of lovers, the go-between who bears 
 messages from heart to heart." (E. K. Chambers, Early JEnglish 
 Lyrics, 1907, p. 270.) This little volume, in addition to others already 
 mentioned, contains much that is suggestive on the history of the 
 mediaeval lyric. 
 
24 THE LITERARY RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 "Kindness may she do me, sparing 
 Courtship long and favor slow, 
 Give a kiss to cheer my daring — 
 More, if more I earn, bestow ; 
 Then the path where pleasures flower 
 We shall tread nor slow nor late — 
 Ah, such hopes my heart o'erpower 
 When her charms I contemplate."' 
 
 These verses are pitched in the very key of the Welsh 
 bard's invocations to Morfudd, as are also the follovring 
 lines addressed by Arnaut to the Countess of Burlatz: — 
 
 " Ah ! sweetest lady, might it chance, 
 Whate'er the hour or circumstance. 
 That, once in life thy faithful slave 
 That rapture know, he long does crave, 
 Of clasping thee within his arms. 
 And gazing on thy peerless charms. 
 Kissing thine eyes, thy red lips sweet, 
 That mine in one long kiss should meet, 
 Till that I swoon with great delight — 
 Too much I've spoke, yet, such my plight, 
 Once, only once 1 needs must say, 
 What long upon my heart does weigh. 
 And speaking thus all speech I leave, 
 With drowsy lids one sigh I heave. 
 And sighing sink into repose. 
 Then wandering my spirit goes. 
 Makes, Lady, eager search for thee, 
 With whom it ever fain would be ; 
 Quick finds the joy, for which I yearn, 
 When day and night for thee I burn, 
 And freely thy dear love possesses. 
 And freely thy dear self caresses. 
 Ah ! might I ever sleep like this, 
 No kindly lot were such rare bliss. 
 'Tis better thus sleep life away 
 Than waking grieve the live- long day; 
 And Kodocesta, nor Biblis, 
 Blancaflor, nor Semiramis, 
 
 ' The Troubadours at Home, i, p. 169. 
 
OF DAFYDD AP GWILYM. 25 
 
 Tibes, nor Seida, nor Elena, 
 Antigone, nor else Ismena, 
 Nor Isold, with the hair of gold. 
 Did never know such joy untold, 
 When with their lovers they have been. 
 As mine is then with thee I ween. 
 Whereon my lips a sigh does part. 
 And I do waken with a start. 
 Open my eyes and gaze around, 
 To see if thou perchance be found 
 Hard by ; but, Lady, woe is me ! 
 For nowhere thy loved form I see."* 
 
 A favourite form of love-song with the Troubadours, 
 and one which is akin to the class of poems called tensos 
 or "disputations", is the love-dialogue/ and several of 
 these Proven9al debates between lovers are very similar to 
 what we find in Dafydd.^ Here is one by Aimeric of 
 Peguillan (1205-1270) :— 
 
 "Lady, for thee I dwell in grievous pain. 
 
 ' Sir, thou'et unwise, small thanks from me thou'Ut gain.' 
 
 Lady, pardy, let me not love in vain. 
 ' Sir, all thy prayers unheeded will remain.' 
 
 Good lady, mine is love that cannot wane. 
 ' Sir, more than all men else I thee disdain.' 
 
 Lady, for this, grief o'er my heart doth reign. 
 'I, sir, am merry nor from joy refrain.' 
 
 ^ Farnell, Lives of the Troubadours, p. 72. 
 
 ^ Love-dialogues are, of course, very ancient in their origin. Cp. 
 the well-known Oaristus (Idyll xxvii) of Theocritus. 
 
 3 "There are several very celebrated Provencal poems of this kind, 
 as, for instance, the dialogue between Eaimbaut d'Orange and his 
 mistress Beatrix, Countess of Die ; and that between Peyrols and 
 Love, who reproaches him for having deserted his service ; and that 
 between Raimbant de Vaqueisas and a Genoese lady, who remains 
 obdurate to his flatteries. Ab Gwilym has several dialogues of this 
 kind. I need only mention here the dialogue with a maiden (No. clxxx), 
 that under a maiden's window (No. clii) , the wonderful dialogue between 
 the bard and his shadow (No. clxxi), and that with the cuckoo (No. ccx), 
 as well as that with the same bird (No. Ixx), when it tells him that 
 Morfudd is married."— Cowell, Y Cymmrodor, vol. ii, p. 106. 
 
26 THE LITEKAEY RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 "Lady sans mercy, I must go my way. 
 ' Sir, prithee go, it boots not to delay.' 
 
 Lady, not I, Love holds me 'neath his sway. 
 ' Against my will, good sir, he bids thee stay.' 
 
 Lady, cruel answers my fond words repay. 
 'Sir, worse than all I hate thee, by my fay.' 
 
 Then, lady, wilt thou ne'er my grief allay ? 
 'Sir, verily 'twill be as thou dost say."'i 
 
 Dafydd's love-dialogues are of a sprightlier, and often, 
 it must be confessed, of a grosser quality than this 
 specimen, but they are identical with it in their form. 
 Compare, for example, the following translation of one of 
 his best-known dialogues : — 
 
 Bard. Now, tell me, maiden, an thou be not dumb ! 
 
 Maid. Do I not tell thee ? What more would'st thon P Come ! 
 
 B. Is there of loving thee, fair maid, no gain ? 
 
 M. No, none at all, thou fool ! Thou lov'st in vain. 
 
 B. Shall I then only have what I have had ? 
 
 M. That, only ! To ask more would prove thee mad. 
 
 B. But tell me — one word does it, yea or nay — 
 Am I, or am I not, to have thee, pray ? 
 
 M. Marry, so I retain my senses, no ! 
 
 I'll swear not what might happen, should they go. 
 
 B. Why question thus, and wedlock's joys delay ? 
 
 M. Tempt me no further, hateful one ! Away ! 
 
 B. I'll seize thee, willy nilly, Olwen fair ! 
 
 M. Marry, I'll shriek for rescue, an thou dare ! 
 
 B. Come — let us straight a priest's due sanction crave ! 
 
 M. Vain is thy thought to cozen me, thou knave ! 
 
 B. But what at last am I to hope for ? Say ' 
 
 M. An assignation on a summer's day. 
 
 B. Alas ! unfeeling maid, I'll wive the while. 
 
 M. And I a husband, friend, will to me wile !^ 
 
 From the love-dialogue one naturally passes to the tenso, 
 or dispute, in which two poets engage in what often 
 
 1 Parnell, JAws of the Troubadours, p. 21.5. 
 
 2 Ode clxxx. Although it is hopeless, in my opinion, to attempt to 
 put Dafydd into English verse, I have here ventured an experiment 
 in rhyme. 
 
OF DAFYDD AP GWILYM. 27 
 
 becomes a fierce and vituperative debate. The original 
 model of the tenso is the pastoral singing-match of 
 classical poetry, in which two rival poets, in the guise of 
 shepherds, 
 
 et cantaye pares, et respondere parati, 
 
 endeavoured to out-do each other in clever banter or in 
 praising their several mistresses. The Proven 9al tenso, 
 however, became something much more elaborate than the 
 conventional singing-match as we find it in Theocritus or 
 Virgil. A closer parallel to the pastoral singing-match is 
 what was known to the Troubadours as the joa partit or 
 partimen. "In the tenso the poets spoke their real 
 sentiments and ideas, and very likely each wrote a whole 
 poem. The partimen was to the tenso like the tournament 
 to the battle. One poet proposed a debatable question, 
 and allowed the other disputant to choose his side ; they 
 then composed stanzas in turn.'" Dafydd ap Gwilym's 
 poetical debates, or cywyddau ymryson, with G-ruffydd Gryg 
 are quite in the style of the Proven9al tensos. The bard 
 probably engaged in many such bouts during his lifetime, 
 and in one of his odes,^ in reply to Gruffydd Gryg, he tells 
 us that he once exercised his powers of bardic repartee 
 upon one E.hys Meigen, with such effect that his rival 
 died of the shock. The poem that did the execution is 
 included in the printed editions of his works.' 
 
 Yet another type of Proven9al poem which has its 
 counterpart in several odes of Dafydd is the sirventes. 
 "The direct antithesis of the canson was the sirvente, a 
 poem of praise or censure ; public or private ; personal, 
 moral, or religious, or political; entirely free as regards 
 
 ^ The Troubadours at Home, ii, p. 449. Some of the beat known 
 Provencal tensos are those which passed between Beinart de 
 Ventadorn and Peirol, and between Bertram de Born and Amfos II, 
 the poet-king of Arragon. 
 
 ^ No. cxxv. " No. ccxxx. 
 
28 THE LITEKART BELATIONSHIPS 
 
 form.'" Sirventes was thus a term of wide application, 
 
 and would cover both panegyrics and elegies, satires and 
 
 devotional poems. But the particular species of sirventes 
 
 to which some of Dafydd's poems bear most resemblance 
 
 was the satire, or poetical tirade, directed especially 
 
 against priests. A Troubadour who indulged in some 
 
 signally scathing denunciation of priests and friars was 
 
 Peire Cardinal {flor. 1210-1230). One of his poems starts 
 
 with the following vehement diatribe : — 
 
 "Vultures fierce and kites, I ween. 
 Scent not rotting flesh so well 
 As the priests and friars keen 
 Scent the rich where'er they dwell ; 
 Soon the rich man's love they gain, 
 Then if sickness, grief or pain 
 Fall on him, great gifts they win, 
 Robbing thus his kith and kin. 
 
 " Priests and Frenchmen ever seek 
 All ill to praise for love of gold ; 
 By usurers and traitors eke 
 Is this world of ours controll'd ; 
 Lies and fraud to men they've taught. 
 And confusion 'mongst them brought ; 
 Order none can be discerned 
 That this lesson has not learned."^ 
 
 "The priests", he complains in another poem, "call 
 
 1 Smith, The Troubadours at Home, ii, p. 449. " In replying to a 
 sirvente, a poet was bound to use the same form. Special forms of 
 the sirvente were the Lament (Planh), which was original with the 
 Troubadours, and the crusading-song. A piece specially composed for 
 a joglar might be called sirventes joglar esc. The sirvente was originally 
 composed, it is now held, by a sirvent, i.e., a paid soldier of adventure, 
 as the joglar was a paid entertainer. This is probably the correct 
 explanation of the name, a point much debated. As Jeanroy says, 
 about every event of importance to the Midi from 1150 until almost 
 1300 left its mark in the sirventes of the time." Smith, it will be 
 seen, coins an English word " sirvente " from the original sirventes. 
 
 2 Farnell, Lives of the Troubadours, p. 218. 
 
OF DAFTDD AP GWILYM. 29 
 
 themselves shepherds, but are in truth murderers; by 
 their clothing they have the semblance of holiness, yet 
 therein they mind me of Sir Tsengrim, who upon a day 
 would enter into a sheepfold, but for fear of the dogs put 
 on sheep's clothing, wherewith he beguiled the sheep, and 
 thereon swallowed up all such as pleased him." Passages 
 such as these breathe the fervour of a genuine moral 
 indignation, and Cardinal, the greatest satirist among the 
 Troubadours, was a reformer who waged deliberate war 
 against the religious and social abuses of his day. Dafydd 
 ap Gwilym had little, if any, of the moral passion which 
 inspired Cardinal, or Langland, to denounce the black 
 sheep of the Church. His was more the temper of 
 Boccaccio and Chaucer, and monks and friars were to him 
 objects of good-humoured contempt i-ather than of any 
 profound moral antipathy. His amours brought him into., 
 constant conflict with envious priests, and it is in frank 
 defence of his own "natural religion" that he taunts them 
 with their hypocrisies and lies. The maid who is exhorted 
 to leave her nunnery and to "win a soul" by making him 
 happy in the dingle "does nothing worse than what they 
 do at Rome or at St. James's (of Compostella) ".' There 
 is "a religion of the greenwood and of the cuckoo" as well 
 as "the religion of the monks of Rome".^ "God is not so 
 cruel as old men affirm : it is the priests, reading their 
 mouldy sheepskins, who tell us lies."' So he bids the 
 priests do their worst. Let them curse him with bell, 
 book, and candle, if they will ; he will take his chance of 
 salvation with the best of them. "God will never damn a 
 good man's soul for love of wife or maid. Three things 
 there be loved all the world over— woman and sunshine 
 and health. Yea, in heaven the fairest flower found, save 
 God himself, is woman.'" There could be no truce 
 I Ode X. '^ Ibid. ^ Ode cxlix. * Ibid. 
 
30 THE lilTEEAEY EELATIONSHIPS 
 
 between priests and one who gave free utterance to such 
 bold heresies as these.' 
 
 There remains to be noticed one other, and not the least 
 remarkable, point of resemblance between Dafydd and the 
 Troubadours. Tvro of his best-known odes''' are clear 
 imitations of the Proven9al alba, or morning-song. The 
 alba was a song turning entirely upon the leave-taking of 
 
 ^ It is worth noting, in connection with the "sirvente", that Professor 
 Cowell ( Y Cymmrodor, ii, p. 107) discovers in a Provenfal poem that 
 would come under this name some lines which furnish what he calls 
 'a curious parallel" to a passage in one of Dafydd's odes. "It may 
 be", says Cowell, "accidental in itself, but I mention it because it so 
 singularly illustrates the comparison which I have tried to institute 
 between them. In Poem xcix Ab Gwilym describes Bwa-bach as 
 sailing to France with a detachment of three hundred men, under the 
 command of Rhys Gwgan, to join the army of Edward III, and he 
 utters his wishes that he may be drowned on his voyage or killed by 
 a French archer. I quote the lines in Mr. Arthur J. Johnes's trans- 
 lation : — 
 
 ' Soon shalt thou pay the debt I owe 
 
 To jealousy, the poet's foe. 
 
 Like bird of ocean he shall whirl 
 
 From wave to wave and shoal to shoal, 
 
 As the wild surges fiercely curl 
 
 Around the shores, sordid soul ! 
 
 May Hwynyn, demon of the sea, 
 
 Thy headsman on the voyage be ! 
 
 And thou, cross-bowman, true and good, 
 
 Thou shooter with the faultless wood. 
 
 Send me an arrow through his brain, 
 
 i(Who of his fate will e'er complain ?) — 
 
 Haste with thy stirrup-fashioned bow. 
 
 And lay the hideous varlet low ! ' " 
 
 Guillaum Adh^mar has a similar poem, in which he implores 
 Alphonse IX, the king of Li5on (who died in 1230), to start on a 
 crusade. "If king Alphonse, the best count in Christendom, would 
 but raise an army against the Saracens, and carry with him the 
 jealous husband who keeps my lady a close prisoner, there is no sin 
 of which he should not get the pardon ! " 
 ^ Nqs. Jix and xcvii. 
 
OF DAFYDl) AP GWILTM. 31 
 
 two lovers warned of the approach of dawn. Sometimes 
 it was a friend — the Watcher — who gave the warning; 
 sometimes it was the rising sun — sometimes the skylark, 
 "the world's morning sentinel", as Dafydd calls him,' 
 The Tagelieier, or day-songs, of the G-erman Minnesingers 
 are modelled on the Proven9al alba,^ while "in the dialogue 
 between Romeo and Juliet beginning : 
 
 'Wilt thou be gone ? It is not yet near day ; 
 It was the nightingale and not the lark,' 
 
 we find the old lovers' dialogues of the albas in its most 
 
 ideal form."- A striking parallel to these two lines from 
 
 Borneo and Juliet is quoted by Jeanroy from an old French 
 
 aube: 
 
 II n'est miejors, saverouze au cors gent, 
 Si m'ait amors, taloette nos mant. 
 
 "It is not yet near day, my sweet one ; love be my help, 
 the lark lies."' The entire dialogue in the beginning of 
 
 ^ "The 'Tagelied' is really an old national form of verse, but in 
 Minnesong it shows the influence of Romance models very markedly. 
 Thus the figure of the Warder, who plays so important a part in 
 nearly all the later songs of this class, appears first in the ProvenQal 
 'alba', from which it was probably introduced into German Minne- 
 song by Wolfram von Eschenbach." Nicholson, Old German Love- 
 Songs (Fisher Unwin, 1907), p. xliii. Translated specimens of German 
 tagelieder will be found in Bithell's The Minnesingers, vol. i (cf. pp. 16, 
 195, and 196), a work already referred to. In his Appendix (p. 203) 
 Mr.Bithell has an excellent note on the Tagelied. 
 
 ^ Farnell, Lives of the Troubadours, p. 77. 
 
 ' See Jeanroy, Les origines de la po4sie lyrique, etc., p. 68. In one of 
 his notes (p. 70) on the aube Jeanroy quotes from a Chinese poem, 
 dating back beyond the seventh century of our era, a curious parallel 
 to these medieval morning-songs. The extract, given in a Latin 
 translation, is a dialogue between a king and his queen at break of 
 day. The queen hears the cock crow, and the king replies that " it 
 was not the cock, but the hum of flies". "In the east the dawn 
 appears", the queen rejoins, " and there is already the stir of men in 
 royal halls." "Nay", says the king, "it is not the dawn, but the light 
 of the rising moon." "But the hum of flies on the wing grows 
 
32 THE LITEKART RELATIONSHIPS 
 
 Act III, Sc. 6, of Borneo and Juliet, reproduces the conven- 
 tional features of the primitive alba. Eomeo, after pro- 
 testing that — 
 
 "It was the lark, the herald of the morn, 
 No nightingale," 
 
 points out how — 
 
 "Jocund day 
 
 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." 
 
 Juliet rejoins — 
 
 " Yond light is not day-light, T know it, I ; 
 It is some meteor that the sun exhales," 
 
 and Eomeo is "content, so she will have it so" : — 
 
 "I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye, 
 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow." 
 
 In one of his odes' Dafydd ap Gwilym tells how Morfudd 
 and he were together at break of day, and how the fear of 
 the husband — Biddig, "the jealous one" — ^fell upon him 
 as he watched the light increasing. Morfudd seeks to 
 quiet him with the assurance that, were day near, they 
 would have heard the cock crow. "But I see the daylight", 
 the bard cries, "peeping under the door." "That", Mor- 
 fudd rejoins, "is the newly-risen moon, and the stars that 
 shoot their beams between the pillars." "Nay rather, my 
 fair one, 'tis the sun in his splendour — pardee, 'tis a good 
 hour of the day!" "How fickle are thy ways! Take thy 
 choice, and depart!" In another poem^ the mistress it is 
 who first becomes restive and points to the advancing 
 
 louder", the queen protests, and insists that her consort should rise 
 lest he should " incur the reproach of others on her account." Cora- 
 pare with this Ode lix in Dafydd's poems. The alba, it should be 
 said, was by no means indigenous to Provence, but was a popular 
 form of song common to many countries, and hence not very ex- 
 tensively cultivated by the Troubadours. See Smith, Troubadours at 
 Home, vol. ii, p. 451. 
 ' Ode xcvii, 2 Qde lix. 
 
OF DAFYDD AP GWILTM. 83 
 
 mornmg light, and it is the bard's turn to pretend that 
 what they see is "the inoon and its attendant stars". 
 "We should rest well", the lady replies, "were that the 
 truth ; but why croaks the crow up above?" The bard's 
 further protestations are cut short by a peremptory com- 
 mand to "cease from his shifts", and to make good his 
 escape before some spy should waylay him. These dia- 
 logues, like that in Romeo and Juliet, are but variations on 
 the theme of the Proven9al alba, and reproduce the stock 
 devices of the dawning light, the warning bird, and the 
 nearness of the jealous husband. Compare the following 
 lines from the famous morning-song of Giraut de 
 Borneil: — "Fair comrade, whether you sleep or wake, 
 sleep no more ; sleep no more, sweetly wake, for in the 
 east I see the star waxed that brings the day, for well have 
 I marked it; and soon will come the dawn." "JPair com- 
 rade, in singing I call you ; sleep no more, for I hear sing 
 the bird that goes looking for day through the copse, and 
 I fear lest the jealous one assail you ; and soon will come 
 the dawn." "Fair comrade, come to the window and 
 behold the stars of the sky; you will perceive whether T 
 am a faithful messenger to you. If you do it not, yours 
 will be the harm from it, and soon will come the dawn."^ 
 
 These parallels between Dafydd ap Gwilym and the 
 Troubadours,^ interesting though they may be to the 
 student of comparative literature and of poetical "origins", 
 only serve to show, when all is told, how much greater a 
 poet the Welsh bard is than any Troubadour. 
 
 In genuine lyric rapture, in brilliant flashes of fancy, 
 
 1 The Troubadours at Home, vol. ii, p. 443. 
 
 2 Further parallels between Daf jdd and the Troubadours and 
 Minnesingers will be found in Stern's learned and exhaustive study 
 of the Welsh bard's work printed in the Zeitschrift fur Celtische 
 Philologie (vii Band, 1 Heft, 1909), in the section entitled 
 "Romanische Einfliisse", p. 238. 
 
34 THE LITEEAEY EEtATIOMSItlPS 
 
 and, above all, in the profuse wealth of their imagery, his 
 love-songs far surpass anything to be found in Proven9al 
 poetry, while his poems of Nature evince a quickness of 
 perception, a power of vivid description, and a passionate 
 delight in the wild life of the fields and the woods which 
 are altogether foreign to the songs of the Troubadours. 
 Not one of them has sung of Nature in strains which 
 suggest even the barest lines of a serious comparison with 
 the songs of Dafydd.' He had, in the words of the old 
 Welsh Triad, "an eye to see Nature, a heart to feel Nature, 
 and the daring to follow Nature". Proven9al poetry was 
 altogether too artificial and exotic a product to conform to 
 this precept. Much of the poetry of the Kymry is no less 
 artificial and conventional and monotonous than that of 
 the Troubadours ; and Dafydd stands in striking contrast 
 even to his Welsh predecessors and contemporaries as a 
 poet of Nature. But "what worlds away" he is from the 
 Troubadours when he sings of Nature, as he saw and felt 
 her in his careless rambles along the vales and the hills 
 of his native country ! For the Proven9al poets, " the 
 natural world", writes Smith, " had not yet opened its 
 unending vistas of significance : and while the Troubadours 
 were not without a keen sense of the beauties of nature, 
 they were too much a part of nature themselves to study 
 and enjoy her deeply, and their eyes, like their minds, 
 lacked the generations of experience and culture absolutely 
 needed to make them see the natural world artistically."^ 
 Dafydd ap Gwilym had no more " experience and culture" 
 than they, but he did "see", and sing of, "the natural 
 
 1 " It is noteworthy that while the Troubadours use more or less 
 frequently a nature-picture as an introduction to a piece, only three — 
 B. de Ventadorn, G. de Borneil, and P. Vidal — refer to nature in the 
 body of a song ; and these references are slight." — Smith, Troubadours 
 at Home, vol. i, p. 446. 
 
 ^ The Troubadours at Home, vol. i, p. 194. 
 
OP fiAPYDn AP GWILYM. 35 
 
 world artistically", simply because be followed Nature 
 implicitly and trusted to ber unaided tutorsbip for the 
 measure and the quality of bis art. Later poets have 
 turned to Nature for a " message", a " religion", a 
 "philosophy". Dafydd, as we have seen, knew of "a 
 religion of the greenwood", and formed a most original 
 conception of its rites and its creed. But bis paramount 
 distinction and charm as a poet of Nature consists in his 
 absolutely unclouded vision, and in his direct expression of 
 what he himself saw and beard, thought and felt. "I can- 
 not keep silence", be cries in one poem, "any more than 
 the nightingale on the tree, even though my song be 
 unrequited."' AJl true poetry of Nature obeys the same 
 irresistible impulse ; the poet 
 
 " sings because he must, 
 And pipes but as the hnnets sing." 
 
 This brief survey of features common to the ancient 
 poetry of Provence and of Wales would be incomplete 
 without a passing reference to the literary fellowship 
 which, quite unconsciously on either side, prevails between 
 the two countries even to-day. Just as in Wales the 
 best living bards continue to work in the tradition of 
 Dafydd ap Gwilym, so in Provence are there " modern 
 Troubadours"^ who were first inspired by the illustrious 
 Mistral, who seek to revive the glories of their poetic 
 prime. The Felibrige,' or "League of the Poets", of 
 
 1 •' Ni thawaf, od af heb dal 
 Mwy nag eos mewn gwial." 
 
 2 See a most interesting article on "The Modern Troubadours" in 
 the Quarterly Revieiv for October, 1901. 
 
 3 " The designation 'Felibre', equivalent, in common parlance, to 
 Troubadour, minstrel, poet, but originally signifying rather a bard in 
 the Celtic sense, a singer and poet, but also a priest and a doctor of 
 the divine law and the history of men, was found by Mistral in an 
 
36 THE UTBRARY EI!tAT10]^fSHIPS 
 
 modern Provence, is an institution curiously resembling 
 the Welsh Eisteddfod, and the felibres are as sedulous 
 in cultivating the poetical forms of the medieval Trou- 
 badours and the language in which they sang as are the 
 Eisteddfodic bards and the scholars of modern Wales 
 in emulating and studying the works of the older Welsh 
 poets. "When, in our day, Teodor Aubaneu (Aubanel) 
 sings his famous 'Quan canto soun mau, encanto' — 'Who 
 sings his own sorrow, enchants ' — he is but saying, out of 
 the same Provenfal heart,, in the same Proven9al tongue 
 (a tongue of many dialects, but a single language, as a 
 trailing wild-rose has many blooms), and in the same Pro- 
 ven9al land, what Duke Guihem the Crusader sang in 
 1100, 'A song I'll fashion from my grief; and it might be 
 either Gaucelm Faidit of Malemort, the twelfth-century 
 Joglar, or Theodore Aubanel of Avignon, the nineteenth- 
 century Catullus of Provence, who writes — 
 
 'L'amour es la vido, 
 La vido es l'amour ; 
 L'amour nous convido 
 A ouie la flour.' 
 
 "Both groups of poets, old and new — the Rudels and 
 Marcabrus, the Arnauts de Maruelh and Bernarts de 
 
 old Provencal canticle Neither he nor other philologists, 
 
 however, have yet definitely settled its derivation, though, among 
 other specialists, Mistral himself thinks it possible, and Gaston Paris 
 and d'Arbois de Jubainville are convinced, that the word is one of 
 the many Celtic survivals in the Proven9al language, composed of the 
 ancient Erse /ilea and ber, and equivalent to chief-singer or arch- 
 poet. As for the contemporary meaning of the word and its deriva- 
 tives, Felibre is a poet who is a native of Provence, and composes in 
 Provencal — a recognised term certainly preferable to the outworn 
 'troubadour' or 'trouvere'; FelihHe, a bardic gathering, the EisteMfod 
 or Mod of the Provencals. . The Felibrige is the organised fellow- 
 ship of the Felibres."— '■ The Modern Troubadours" {Quarterly Review, 
 Oct. 1901). 
 
OF DAPTTJD AP GWILYM. 37 
 
 Yentadorn, the Gaucelms and Guihems of to-day, and the 
 Jasmins and Eoumanilles, the Mistrals and Aubanels of 
 that dim, remote, golden age of song— to reverse the mere 
 accident of nomenclature, — have a common inspiration, a 
 manner in common, a heart and soul alike. 'La cigalo di 
 piboulo, La bouscarlo di bouisson, Lou grihet di ferlgoulo, 
 Tout canto sa cansoun' — 'The tree-locust in the poplar, 
 the thrush in the wayside bush, the grasshopper in the 
 wild thyme, each sings its own song"" Even so, in 
 Wales, the bards who to-day achieve the highest artistic 
 excellence in their compositions are those who have best 
 learnt the great language and caught the clear accents 
 of Dafydd ap Gwilym and his contemporaries. They can- 
 not, indeed, well emulate D^fydd's franker type of love- 
 song; but they have no better teacher to turn to for 
 inspiration in "daring to follow Nature", or for instruction 
 in diction and style. For to himself, of all the poets of 
 his time, are justly applicable the words which he 
 generously used of another,^ "the law-book of the right 
 
 language " — 
 
 "Llyfr cyfraith y iaith iawn." 
 
 1 "The Modern Troubadours" {Quarterly Remeio, Oct. 1901). 
 
 2 Gruffydd Gryg. Although Dafydd composed tensos against 
 Gruffydd, their rivalry did not prevent him from recognising that 
 bard's signal poetic gifts. See Dafydd's elegy on G. Gryg (Ode 
 cxxviii).