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Dafydd ap Gwilym Quotes

1315–1370 Wales

Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370) was a mid-14th century Welsh lyric poet whose works usually deal either with nature, with love, or with his own comic misadventures. Studies of his country's literature regularly describe him as the greatest Welsh-language poet.

Wales
Poets

Random Dafydd ap Gwilym quote

13 quotes

There never has been a time when I did not fall in love with one or two in a single day.

I never entertained the dreadful thought that my face was anything other than good and fair until, in an act of revelation, I picked up a mirror.

God is not so cruel as old men tell us: nor will God cut off the gentle soul of a man for loving a woman or a girl. Three things are loved by the whole world: women, fine weather, and good health, and girls are the fairest flower in Heaven next to God Himself.

Welkin's wind, way unhindered,
Big blusterer passing by,
A harsh-voiced man of marvels,
World-bold, without foot or wing.

Winnowing leaves, you steal nests,
None charge you, you're not halted
By armed band, lieutenant's hand,
Blue blade or flood or downpour.

Triumphant hours are the Lark's
Who circles skywards from his home each day:
World's early riser, with bubbling golden song,
Towards the firmament, guardian of April's gate.

Matins, he reads the lesson,
A chasuble of plumage on.
His cry from a grove, his brightshout
Over countrysides rings out,
Hill prophet, maker of moods,
Passion's bright bard of glenwoods.

Blue, round, miserable moon, full of magic, picture that draws like a magnet, pale-coloured, charmed jewel, made by sorcerers; swiftest of dreams, cold traitor, brother to the ice, most evil and unkind of servants, let hell consume the hateful, thin, bent-lipped mirror!

I have an equal right to make poems as you have to pray, I have the same right to sing for my bread as you to beg for it. Are not hymns and sequences but other kinds of odes and elegiacs? And are not the psalms of David poems to the good God?

I am twisted with passion – plague on all the girls of the parish! since I suffered from trysts which went amiss, and could never win a single one of them, neither gentle hopeful maid, nor little lass, nor hag, nor wife.

O sea-bird, beautiful upon the tides,
White as the moon is when the night abides,
Or snow untouched, whose dustless splendour glows
Bright as a sunbeam and whose white wing throws
A glove of challenge on the salt sea-flood.

A fine handsome youth rewarded me;
May is a generous, open-handed prince.
He sent me true coins:
Clean green leaves of May's gentle hazels.
Twigs' florins don’t disappoint me,
May's fleur-de-lys wealth.

Welcome, with your lovely greenwood choir, summery month of May for which I long! Like a potent knight, an amorous boon, the green-entangled lord of the wildwood, comrade of love and of the birds, whom lovers remember, and their friend, herald of nine score trysts, fond of exalted colloquies.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Dafydd ap Gwilym (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.