The horns circle fast, but their fountains will last,
As the stream passes ever, and never is past:
Exhausted so quickly, replenished so soon,
They wax and they wane like the horns of the moon.
Fill high the blue horn, the blue buffalo horn;
Fill high the long silver-rimmed buffalo horn:
While the roof of the hall by our chorus is torn,
Fill, fill to the brim, the deep silver-rimmed horn.
DAFYDD AP GWILYM TO THE WHITE GULL.
Bird that dwellest in the spray,
Far from mountain woods away,
Sporting,—blending with the sea,
Like the moonbeam—gleamily.
Wilt thou leave thy sparkling chamber
Round my lady’s tower to clamber?
Thou shalt fairer charms behold
Than Taliesin’s tongue has told,
Than Merddin sang, or loved, or knew—
Lily nursed on ocean’s dew—
Say (recluse of yon wild sea),
“She is all in all to me.”
TO THE LARK.
By Dafydd ap Gwilym.
“Sentinel of the morning light!
Reveller of the spring!
How sweetly, nobly wild thy flight,
Thy boundless journeying:
Far from thy brethren of the woods, alone
A hermit chorister before God’s throne!
“Oh! wilt thou climb yon heav’ns for me,
Yon rampart’s starry height,
Thou interlude of melody
’Twixt darkness and the light,
And seek, with heav’n’s first dawn upon thy crest,
My lady love, the moonbeam of the west?
“No woodland caroller art thou;
Far from the archer’s eye,
Thy course is o’er the mountain’s brow,
Thy music in the sky:
Then fearless float thy path of cloud along,
Thou earthly denizen of angel song.”