though remembered rather as novelists, have bequeathed a considerable body of verse. That Petrarch's influence did not extend to the Welsh mountains may be taken for granted; but, curiThe Welsh ously enough, at the very time he was Petrarch. airing his grief about Laura there flourished in the West Davydd ab Gwilym, commonly known as the Welsh Petrarch. Davydd's Laura was a certain Morvudd, with whom he eloped, but whom he had the mortification to see united by parental constraint to the "Little Hunchback." The pair again ran away, but force again parted them, and Davydd was condemned to pay a heavy fine. The men of Glamorgan, admiring his talents, came forward and discharged the fine, but could not release the bard from his unlucky attachment. Although he has been called the Welsh Petrarch, Davydd's poetry rather contrasts with Petrarch's, especially as regards appreciation of Nature. The following lines, from a translation by A. J. Johnes, will afford some idea of his style: "Thou Summer! father of delight, With thy dense spray and thickets deep; Thou painter of unrivalled skill, And thou hast sprinkled leaves and flowers, And bid thy youthful warblers sing Burst loudly from the woodbine tree, Till all the world is thronged with gladness, This is more like Chaucer and Walther von der Vogelweide than Petrarch; and at least one English poet agrees with Welsh ideas of beauty. Like the bards, he admires trees of equal growth. In Iarlle sy Ffynnawn, Kynon, in relating his adventures, says:— And it chanced at length that I came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were trees of equal growth." Similarly, in a tale by Gruffydd ab Adda, a bard slain at Dolgellan about 1370, we find: In the furthermost end of this forest he saw a level green valley, and trees of equal growth." With these passages compare the description in the Flower and the Leaf of an arbour : "Wrethen in fere so well and cunningly, That every branch and leafe grew by mesure, Joy in sky, and sea, and field is a characteristic shared by Davydd ab Gwilym with the somewhat Bards and older Rhys Goch. The bards loved birds. -the cuckoo, the nightingale, the lark, the thrush, &c.—and Rhys Goch, by these aerial couriers, sends messages to his lady-love: birds. "I placed my affection Upon a slender-waisted maid, One who is a second Essyllt, Of the hue of the waves of the raging sea; Became to me an arrow, For she shot me With her glances. Go, thou Blackbird, To the proud and slender maid, And unto her show How much for her I grieve; Singing on beautiful branches, To the brilliant fair," 1 &c. Between Rhys Goch and Davydd ab Gwilym, however, exists an important difference in technique. Rhetorical Although there had long been an element artifice. of alliteration in Welsh verse, it had been based in the main on the ordinary rules of prosody and rhyme. This may be seen from the original of the above quoted lines: "Serch y rhoddais, Ar ddyn feinais, O'i golygon," &c. It was, however, a common artifice to compose whole 1 Translated by Thomas Stephens. stanzas, and even poems, of lines commencing with the same letter and in some cases with the same word-e.g., "Oedd breisg freisg ei fyddin Oedd brwysg rwysg rhag y godorin, Oedd balch gwalch golchiad ei lain,” &c. We find traces of the same thing in Troubadour verse. Arnaut de Marueil, in one of his poems, addresses his mistress thus: "Vos saluda; e vostra lauzor, Vostre gen cors, vostre dos riz, And Dante, in his inscription over Hell-gate, twice repeats the opening words Cynghanedd. "Per me si va nella citta dolente, Here it is evident the solemn iteration is peculiarly effective, and answers the purpose for which it was no doubt designed. In Welsh poetry it was more a question of sound than sense, and out of this practice grew that poisonous cynghanedd, destined until the present century to be the bane of Kymric literature. The beginnings of this pest are already perceptible in the writings of Davydd ab Gwilym. All that is signified by the word cynghanedd cannot be noted here. It had something in common with Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon alliteration, which, as a tax on ingenuity, seems bad enough, but cynghanedd, or consonancy, is much worse. The englyn, before the introduction of cynghanedd, ran thus: "Nid oes ym Davyt dawn orvod—ar bawb Cadyr rwyf cadarn glwyf glybod Can Ilonyt byw yn dyt bod." The only noticeable features in this stanza are the retention of the same rhyme in the four lines, and the recurrence of the consonants r, b in the first and second lines. After the introduction of cynghanedd, the correspondence of consonants was compulsory in every line-e.g., Bervain yw'r avr a barvog,—arwav lais Un hirvlew a chorniog; Naid hyd llethrau creigiau crog A'i nawdd yw'r graig ddanneddog." In Walter's Dissertation on the Welsh Language, the following lines are given as a specimen of cross consonancy" in English, but, though clever, they are far from reflecting the complex and exacting nature of full-blown cynghanedd: "A fiend in Phoebus' fane he found, But at the noon of night." L |