One of the earliest poets of this period whose productions we can be certain of is Meilir, bard of Trahaern, whom Gruffydd ab Cynan defeated at the battle of Carn, and afterwards of the conqueror Gruffydd himself. His best piece is the Death-bed of the Bard, a semi-religious poem which is distinguished by the structure of the verse, poetic feeling and religious thought. Meilir was the head of a family of bards; his son was Gwalchmai, one of the best Welsh poets; the latter had two sons, Einion and Meilir, some of whose poetry has reached us. In Gorhoffedd Gwalchmai, Gwalchmai’s Delight, there is an appreciation of the charms of nature, medieval parallels to which are only to be found in Ireland. His Arwyrain i Owain is an ode of considerable beauty and full of vigour in praise of Owain Gwynedd, king of North Wales, on account of his victory of Tal y Moelvre, part of which has been translated by Gray under the name of “The Triumphs of Owen.” Kynddelw, who lived in the second half of the 12th century, was a contemporary of Gwalchmai, and wrote on a great number of subjects including religious ones; indeed some of his eulogies have a kind of religious prelude. He had a command of words and much skill in versification, but he is pleonastic and fond of complicated metres and of ending his lines with the same syllable.
Among the other poets of the second half of the 12th century may be mentioned Owain Kyveiliog and Howel ab Owain Gwynedd. The first named was prince of Powys, and was distinguished also as a soldier. The Hirlas, or drinking-horn, is a long poem where the prince represents himself as carousing in his hall after a fight; bidding his cup-bearer fill his great drinking-horn, he orders him to present it in turn to each of the assembled warriors. As the horn passes from hand to hand he eulogizes each in a verse beginning Diwallaw di venestr, “Fill, cup-bearer.” Having thus praised the deeds of two warriors, Tudyr and Moreiddig, he turns round to challenge them, but suddenly recollecting that they had fallen in the fray, and listening, as it were, to their dying groans, he bursts into a broken lamentation for their loss. The second was also a prince; he was the eldest of the many sons of Owain Gwynedd, and ruled for two years after his father until he fell in a battle between himself and his step-brother Dafydd. He was a young man of conspicuous merit, and one of the most charming poets of Wales, his poems being especially free from the conceits, trivial commonplaces, and complicated metres of the professional bards, while full of a gay humour, a love of nature and a delicate appreciation of women. The Welsh poets went on circuit like their Irish brethren, staying in each place according as hospitality was extended to them. When departing, a bard was expected to leave a sample of his versification behind him. In this way many manuscripts came to be written, as we find them in different hands. Llywarch ab Llywelyn has left us one of those departing eulogies addressed to Rhys Gryg, prince of South Wales, which affords a favourable specimen of his style.
The following are a few of the poets of the 13th century whose poems are still extant. Davydd Benvras was the author of a poem in praise of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth; his works, though not so verbose or trite as bardic poems 13th century poets. of this class usually are, do not rise much above the bardic level, and are full of alliteration. Elidir Sais was, as his name implies, able to speak the English language, and wrote chiefly religious poetry. Einiawn ab Gwgawn is the author of an extant address to Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of considerable merit. Phylip Brydydd, or Philip the poet, was household bard to Rhys Gryg (Rhys the hoarse), lord of South Wales. One of his pieces, an apology to Rhys Gryg, is a striking example of the fulsome epithets a household bard was expected to bestow upon his patron, and of the privileged domesticity in which the bards lived, which, as in Ireland, must have been fatal to genius. Prydydd Bychan, the Little Poet, was a South Wales bard whose extant work consists of short poems all addressed to his own princes. The chief feature of his Englynion is the use of a kind of assonance in which in some cases the final vowels agreed alternately in each quatrain, and in others each line ended in a different vowel, in both cases with alliteration and consonance of final consonants or full rhyme. Llygad Gŵr is known by an ode in five parts to Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, written about the year 1270, which is a good type of the conventional flattery of a family bard. Howel Voel, who was of Irish extraction, possessed some poetical merit; his remonstrance to Llywelyn against the imprisonment of his brother Owain is a pleasing variety upon the conventional eulogy. It has many lines beginning with the same word, e.g. gŵr, man. The poems of Bleddyn Vardd, or Bleddyn the Bard, which have come down to us are all short eulogies and elegies. One of the latter on Llywelyn ab Gruffydd is a good example of the elaborate and artificial nature of Welsh versification.
The most illustrious name among the poets of this century is Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch, “Gruffydd, son of the Red Justice,” who wrote many religious poems of great merit. His greatest work, however, is the elegy to Llywelyn ab Gruffydd, the last prince of Wales. It is easily first among all the elegies written in the Welsh language. We do not find in it that artficial grief which is too evident in the Marwnadau of the Welsh poets; it re-echoes an intense personal grief, and throughout the whole piece the poet feels that he stands at the end of all things,—the end of his own ideals, the extinction of all Cymric hopes. So poignant is his grief, and in so universal a manner does the catastrophe of Llywelyn’s death present itself to him, that he imagines that all the natural features of the Welsh fatherland know that the last great Welshman is dead; the winds howl over the mountains, the rain-clouds gather thick, the waves rage with grief against the Welsh coasts, and far away on the hills the giant oak-trees beat against each other in the fury of their passion. Sadly, in this manner, closes the second period of Welsh literature.
4. The Golden Age of the Cywydd, 1340-1440.—Just as, after the loss of the North, the Welsh muse was hushed, so after the final subjugation of Wales in 1282, hardly a note was heard for many a long year. The ancient patrons of literature were dead, and the country had not yet settled down to the steady rule of England. Indeed, the conquest of Wales effectively put an end to the older Welsh poetry of that type which we noticed in the last period. These older bards were without exception subjects of the princes of North Wales, where the old heroic poetry was still popular, and when the power of these princes came to an end the old poetry too ceased. When the Welsh muse emerges again from the darkness of this interval she is no longer of the North; the new poets are drawn from the Welshmen of the South, a land which had practically ceased to be a part of an independent Wales shortly after the Norman conquest of England. We find, too, that the poetry which poured forth from the Welsh bards of the south is of an altogether different type, it is modern in all its essentials, in diction, in language, and, comparatively speaking, in sentiment. Indeed, there is an infinitely greater difference between Dafydd ab Gwilym and Gruffydd ab yr Ynad Coch than there is between him and any poet writing in the alliterative metres in the 19th century. So that we must suppose that at the time when the poets of North Wales still sang of war and mead-drinking in a style and diction that was an inheritance from the times of the Gododin, the poets of the South, unharassed by wars, were developing a new poetry of their own, a poetry that had relinquished for ever the Old Welsh models and was at last in line with the great poetical movements of Europe. And, judging from the fact that the earliest of these poets whose works are accessible to us are in the full zenith of their poetical development, we must believe that their work is the consummation of a period, that is to say, that they must have had a long line of predecessors whose works were lost during the period intervening between the loss of Welsh independence and the rise of Dafydd ab Gwilym. These men wrote, as we have already said, in South Wales, a country which was then under the rule of the Norman lords, who, with the lapse of years and the rise of new systems, were fast becoming Welsh. It is no wonder, then, that the poets who wrote under their patronage should show unmistakable traces of Norman influence. Most of the barons still spoke French, and it was only natural that they should be well versed in French poetry. The poets followed the lead of their patrons, and their work was modelled to a very great extent on French and Provençal poetry. Nor does this account altogether for the wonderful similarity between Welsh cywyddau and other poems of this period and the French lays; we must remember that the Welsh poets lived under conditions similar to those under which the troubadours and the trouvères lived, and it was natural that the same environments should produce the same kind of work. The Provençal alba and the French aube, the serenade and other forms, became well known in South Wales and were of course read by the Welsh poets. We find continual references in the poets to “books of love” under the name of llyfr Ofydd, or the “book of Ovid,” and a reference in one of Dafydd ab Gwilym’s poems shows conclusively that one particular llyfr Ofydd was a work of the French poet Chrestien de Troyes. Indeed, one of the commonest names among the poets of this period—the llatai,[3] or love-messenger—may be a Romance word borrowed through the Norman-French from the Italian Galeotto, originally the name of the book of the loves of Galahaad, but afterwards the ordinary word for a go-between. This book of Galeotto, by the way, was the book which taught Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, in Dante’s Divina Commedia, the tragic secret of love.
Another movement also was favourable to the rise of the new Welsh poetry. The iron hand of the church, which had been the censor of poetry for so many centuries, was slowly relaxing its grasp, and the men who a few years before would have sung religious hymns to the Virgin, now laid their tributes at the feet of divine womanhood as they saw it in the Welsh maidens and matrons living among them. The pale queen of heaven no longer held hearts captive; they had transferred their allegiance to the “brow that was as the snow of yesternight,” and “the cheeks that were like the passion-flower.” The Iolo MSS. assert that some time between January 1327 and November 1330 there were held, under the patronage of Ivor Hael, Dafydd ab Gwilym’s patron, and others, the three Eisteddfodau Dadeni, or the Eisteddfods of the Revival of the Muse, to reorganize the bards, and to set in order all matters pertaining to Welsh poetry. The most important bards who are reported as present at some or all of these meetings were Dafydd ab Gwilym, Sion Cent, Rhys Goch of Eryri, and Iolo Goch. It is now, however, generally agreed that this account is a fabrication and that the date of all the poets is later.
Dafydd ab Gwilym is certainly the most distinguished of all the Welsh poets, and were it not for the absolute impossibility of adequately translating his cywyddau he would rank amongst the greatest poets of medieval times. By Dafydd ab Gwilym. far the greater part of his poetry is written in the metre called cywydd, with heptasyllabic lines rhyming in couplets. It was he who imparted so much lustre to this metre that it became the vehicle of all the most important poetry from his time to the 19th century, and he is generally referred to by his contemporaries as the special poet of the cywydd—Dafydd gywydd gwin, “Dafydd of the wine-sweet cywydd.” Most of his poems deal with love in the spirit of the medieval writers of France and of Provence, but with this very important difference, that the French writers must base their reputation on their treatment of love as a theme, whereas Dafydd’s claim to fame is based on his treatment of nature and of out-door life. In many cases, indeed, love is only a conventional peg whereon he may hang his observations on nature, and Welsh literature may claim the distinction of having had its Wordsworth in the 14th century. His treatment of nature is not merely realistic and objective, it has a certain quaint and elusive symbolism and a subjectiveness which come as a revelation to those who are acquainted with the medieval poetry of other nations. Many 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).