The Seagull (poem)

"The Seagull" (Welsh: Yr Wylan) is a love poem in 30 lines by the 14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, probably written in or around the 1340s.[1] Dafydd is widely seen as the greatest of the Welsh poets,[2][3][4][5] and this is one of his best-known and best-loved works.[6][1]

For other uses, see Seagull (disambiguation).
Sculpture of Dafydd ap Gwilym by W. Wheatley Wagstaff in Cardiff City Hall.

Summary

The poet addresses and praises a seagull flying over the waves, comparing it to, among other things, a gauntlet, a ship at anchor, a sea-lily, and a nun. He asks it to find a girl whom he compares to Eigr and who can be found on the ramparts of a castle, to intercede with her, and to tell her that the poet cannot live without her. He loves her for her beauty more than Myrddin or Taliesin ever loved, and unless he wins kind words from her he will die.

Imagery
The poem in BL Add. MS 14997, a manuscript dating from c. 1500.

The academic critic Huw Meirion Edwards considered that "The Seagull"’s imagery goes far beyond anything that had come before it in Welsh poetry,[7] and Anthony Conran wrote that "pictorially it is superb…[it] has the visual completeness, brilliance and unity of a medieval illumination, a picture from a book of hours".[8] Dafydd wrote several love-messenger poems, and is indeed considered the master of that form.[6] They follow an established pattern, beginning by addressing the llatai, or messenger, going on to describe it in terms of praise, then asking the llatai to take the poet's message to his lover, and finally in general adding a prayer that the messenger return safely. But in "The Seagull", as with Dafydd's other bird-poems, the gull is more than just a conventional llatai: the bird's appearance and behaviour are observed closely, while at the same time Dafydd shows, according to the scholar Rachel Bromwich, "an almost mystical reverence" for it.[9] The image of the seagull's beautiful, white, immaculate purity suggests that of the girl,[10] while the bird's flight embodies the idea of freedom, in contrast with the dominating and enclosing castle.[1] This castle has not been positively identified, although Aberystwyth[11] and Criccieth[12] have both been suggested. The girl herself is unusual in two respects, firstly in the paucity of physical detail in Dafydd's description of her as compared with the women in his other love poems, and secondly in that she is a redhead, as very few women in medieval Welsh poetry are.[13]

Poetic art

The seagull is described in what has been called "a guessing game technique"[14] or "riddling",[15] a technique known in Welsh as dyfalu comprising the stringing together of imaginative and hyperbolic similes and metaphors.[16] Dafydd also uses devices for breaking up syntax known as sangiad and tor ymadrodd. So, for example:

A bydd, dywaid na byddaf,
Fwynwas coeth, fyw onis caf.

And be, say that I shall not be,
An elegant kind-servant, living unless I win her.

—lines 19-20 —Translated by Idris Bell

The translator Idris Bell explained the sense of this as "Have the kindness in courteous wise to give her the message that I shall die unless she will be mine."[17]

References to older poetry

Eigr, with whom Dafydd compares his beloved, was in Welsh tradition the wife of Uther Pendragon and mother of King Arthur. She is the heroine he most often cites as the archetypical beautiful woman.[18] The legendary figures of Myrddin and Taliesin are often invoked together in Welsh verse, and in some early poems Myrddin is presented as a lover, though Taliesin was not, making Dafydd's mention of him in this role rather odd.[19] It has been argued that these two figures are introduced as a tribute to one of the wellsprings of Dafydd's work, the native Welsh poetic tradition, while on the other hand the terms in which he describes his submission to the girl acknowledge one of the other great influences on him, the literature of courtly love, stemming from Provence but by Dafydd's time to be found across Europe.[20]

Adaptations
  • Glyn Jones wrote a poem, "Dafydd's Seagull and the West Wind", which gives the seagull's response.[21]
  • John Hardy set "The Seagull" as part of a song-cycle called Fflamau Oer: Songs for Jeremy.[22][23]
  • David Vaughan Thomas wrote a musical setting of the poem in 1924 which was published posthumously in 1950.[24][25]
  • Robert Spearing set the poem, together with some lines from Romeo and Juliet, in his cantata for tenor and piano She Solus.[26]

English translations and paraphrases
  • Bell, David, in Bell, H. Idris; Bell, David (1942). Fifty Poems. Y Cymmrodor, vol. 48. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. pp. 177, 179. Retrieved 2 July 2015. With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
  • Bromwich, Rachel, ed. (1985) [1982]. Dafydd ap Gwilym: A Selection of Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 74. ISBN 0140076131. With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
  • Clancy, Joseph P. (1965). Medieval Welsh Lyrics. London: Macmillan. p. 23. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  • Conran, Anthony; Caerwyn Williams, J. E., eds. (1967). The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 139–140.
  • Ford, Patrick K., ed. (1999). The Celtic Poets: Songs and Tales from Early Ireland and Wales. Belmont, Mass.: Ford & Bailie. pp. 284–285. ISBN 9780926689053. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
  • Green, Martin (1993). Homage to Dafydd ap Gwilym. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN 0773493182.
  • Gurney, Robert, ed. (1969). Bardic Heritage. London: Chatto & Windus. pp. 130–131. ISBN 0701113286. Retrieved 28 June 2015.
  • Heseltine, Nigel, ed. (1968) [1944]. Twenty-Five Poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym. Banbury: Piers Press. pp. 4–5.
  • Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone, ed. (1971) [1951]. A Celtic Miscellany. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 100–101. ISBN 0140442472.
  • Johnes, Arthur James (1834). Translations into English Verse from the Poems of Davyth ap Gwilym. London: Henry Hooper. pp. 11–12. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
    • Repr. in Lloyd, D. M.; Lloyd, E. M., eds. (1963) [1953]. A Book of Wales. London: Collins. pp. 320–321. Retrieved 19 July 2015.
  • Jones, Glyn. "The seagull". Poetry Quarterly (51): 214. Winter 1950. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
  • Lewes, Evelyn (1914). Life and Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. London: David Nutt. pp. 48–49. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
  • Loomis, Richard Morgan, ed. (1982). Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems. Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies. pp. 222–223. ISBN 0866980156. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
    • Repr. in Wilhelm, James J., ed. (1990). Lyrics of the Middle Ages. New York: Garland. pp. 273–274. ISBN 0824070496. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
    • Repr. in Loomis, Richard; Johnston, Dafydd (1992). Medieval Welsh Poems. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. p. 77. ISBN 0866981020.
  • Merchant, Paul; Faletra, Michael (2018). Unless She Beckons: Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. La Grande, Oregon: Redbat. p. 43. ISBN 9780997154993. Retrieved 15 February 2020. With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
  • Norris, Leslie (1996). Collected Poems. Bridgend: Seren. p. 158. ISBN 1854111329.
    • Repr. in Stephens, Meic, ed. (2008). Leslie Norris: The Complete Poems. Bridgend: Seren. p. 230. ISBN 9781854114679.
  • Thomas, Gwyn, ed. (2001). Dafydd ap Gwilym: His Poems. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p. 229. ISBN 0708316646. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  • Watson, Giles (2014). Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and Palimpsests. npp: pp. p. 55. ISBN 9781291866803. Retrieved 16 February 2020.

Footnotes
  1. Evans 2012, p. 183.
  2. Koch, John T. (2006). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Volume 5. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 1770. ISBN 1851094407. Retrieved 19 July 2015.
  3. Bromwich, Rachel (1979). "Dafydd ap Gwilym". In Jarman, A. O. H.; Hughes, Gwilym Rees (eds.). A Guide to Welsh Literature. Volume 2. Swansea: Christopher Davies. p. 112. ISBN 0715404571. Retrieved 18 July 2015.
  4. Baswell, Christopher; Schotter, Anne Howland, eds. (2006). The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1A: The Middle Ages (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson Longman. p. 608. ISBN 0321333977.
  5. Kinney, Phyllis (2011). Welsh Traditional Music. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p. 6. ISBN 9780708323571. Retrieved 18 July 2015.
  6. Conran 1992, p. 21.
  7. Edwards 2010, p. 16.
  8. Conran 1992, p. 22.
  9. Bromwich 1985, p. xxiii.
  10. Edwards 2010, p. 17.
  11. Bowen, D. J. (1977). "Dafydd ap Gwilym a'r Trefydd Drwg". Ysgrifau Beirniadol. 10: 190–220.
  12. Conran 1992, pp. 37–43.
  13. Conran 1992, pp. 21–22.
  14. Roberts, Sara Elin (2008). "Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 14th century)". In Sauer, Michelle M. (ed.). The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600. New York: Facts on File. p. 138. ISBN 9780816063604. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  15. Thomas, Gwyn (Spring 1973). "Dafydd ap Gwilym the nature-poet". Poetry Wales. 8 (4): 31. Retrieved 3 July 2015.
  16. Bromwich 1985, pp. xviii, xxiii.
  17. Bell, H. Idris; Bell, David (1942). Fifty Poems. Y Cymmrodor, vol. 48. London: Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. pp. 45–46, 178. Retrieved 3 July 2015.
  18. Bromwich 1985, pp. 63, 94.
  19. Bromwich 1985, p. 94.
  20. Conran 1992, pp. 23–27.
  21. Stephens, Meic, ed. (1996). The Collected Poems of Glyn Jones. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p. 60. ISBN 0708313884. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  22. "John Hardy". British Composers Project. Music Now. 1998–2010. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  23. "Yr Wylan, by John Hardy". British Music Collection. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  24. "Wylan Deg, Y / Seagull Fair, The - Thomas, D. Vaughan". Cerdd Ystwyth Music. n.d. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  25. Crossley-Holland, Peter (1954). "Vaughan Thomas, David". In Blom, Eric (ed.). Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Volume VIII: Sp–Vio (5th ed.). London: Macmillan. p. 695. ISBN 0333191749. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  26. Spearing, Robert (2010). "She Solus" (PDF). Commentary on the Portfolio of Compositions (Ph.D.). Retrieved 1 July 2015.

References
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