Yr Hen Iaith part forty nine: Love, Protest and the Ideology of Free-Metre Poetry

We continue the history of Welsh literature to accompany the second series of podcasts in which Jerry Hunter guides fellow academic Richard Wyn Jones through the centuries. This is episode forty nine.

Jerry Hunter

One of the many unique things about Welsh-language literary culture is the fact that strict-metre poetry is still so popular today. These traditional metres and the associated  cynghanedd internal line ornamentation are to a great extent the complex products of the relationship between professional poets and their patrons in the Middle Ages.

When I first studied English literature in school I thought that the sonnet was a complex thing, given the rules governing the amount of syllables in each line and the rhyme scheme linking lines. Looking at that from a Welsh perspective now, it is a simple form; after all, it is not bound by the intricate rules of cynghanedd.

The difference between free-metre verse and the strict metres is stressed in different ways in Welsh culture. On an informal level, this includes jibes sometimes aimed by practitioners of y canu caeth (strict-metre poetry) at poets who only compose canu rhydd (free-metre verse).

The difference is played out formally and very publicly each year during the National Eisteddfod week, with the Crown awarded for free verse on the Monday and the Chair given for strict-metre poetry on the Friday.

Praise singing

Most of the verse discussed on Yr Hen Iaith so far has been strict-metre poetry. After all, medieval bards and their descendants in the sixteenth century wouldn’t have dreamed of using one of the simple free metres to sing praise to a patron. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that, by the later Middle Ages, professional praise poets looked down upon lower-status versifiers who used the free metres.

One of the many developments making the sixteenth century such an interesting period in Welsh literary history as that free-metre poetry of the type not previously recorded begins to be appear in manuscripts.

This is due to a number of reasons: literacy was increasing, so more people and different kinds of people were creating manuscripts; paper was cheaper than the vellum used in medieval manuscitps; the foundations of the bardic profession were being shaken (as discussed earlier in this series); and, while traditional forms and themes continued, literary tastes were also changing.

One of the exciting things about this is that, for the first time, we have a record of what we might call folk poetry. This kind of verse had surely existed throughout the centuries, but it had only been transmitted orally and not recorded in writing until these factors brought about this transformation in Welsh manuscript culture.

Among other things, this change means that we have more poetry by women (or, to be extremely technical, poetry by anonymous poets composed using female personas and narrative voices).

Composition
Concentrating first on form, scholars note that these free metres fall into two categories. First of all, there are traditional Welsh free-metres, many of them very old. Remember, again, that they are ‘free’ because they do not have cynghanedd.  One of these was the traethodl.

Like the strict-metre cywydd, this form uses rhyming couplets of seven-syllable lines, but unlike the cywydd it does not have cynghanedd ornamenting those lines. As we saw in episode twenty six of Yr Hen Iaith, Dafydd ap Gwilym used the traethodl (or traethawdl) form in the fourteenth century when satirizing a religious brother who surely used that simple verse form to disseminate religious teachings.

The fact that this metre had continued as part of the oral – and, for the most part, unrecorded – tradition is proven by the fact that it crops up when that free-metre poetry begins to appear in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts.

One of these poems, usually entitled ‘Crys y Mab’ (‘The Lad’s Shirt’) is one of those anonymous compositions cast in a female voice. It tells a story centering on faithfulness in love, and begins with a memorable image:

Fal yr oeddwn yn golchi
Dan ben pont Aberteifi
A golchffon aur yn fy llaw
A chrys fy nghariad danaw
Fo ddoeth ata’ ŵr ar farch
Ysgwydd lydan, buan, balch
Ac a ofynnodd im a werthwn
Grys y mab mwya’ a garwn.

‘As I was washing clothes

Beneath the Cardigan bridge,

With a golden washing-stick in my hand

And my love’s shirt beneaeth it,

A man came to me on a stallion,

Wide-shouldered, fast and proud,

And he asked me if I would sell

The shirt of the lad whom I loved most.’

Folk poetry

One might ask why this women is washing clothes with a golden rod, if this is folk poetry which we can contrast with the strict-metre praise sung in the halls of wealthy patrons. However, that kind of over-literal reading excludes the artistry and imagination of this anonymous poetry, who clearly uses the imagine of the golden golchffon to suggest the value of her love.

The suggestion is that the man on horseback is in fact the wealthy one, and that he is trying to use his wealth and status to seduce her. She, however, refuses worldly riches and stays faithful to her love:

Ac y ddoedais i na werthwn
Er canpunt nac er canpwn
Nac er lloned y ddwy fron
O fyllt a defed gwynion
Nac er lloned dau goetge
O ychen dan eu hiefe
Nac er lloned Llanddewi
O lysiau wedi sengi
Fal dyna’r modd y cadwn
Grys y mab mwya’ a garwn.

‘And I said that I would not sell it

For one hundred pounds or one hundred sacks [of money],

Nor for two slopes full of

White wethers and sheep,

Nor for two hedge-enclosed fields

Full of yoked oxen,

Nor for the fil of Llanddewi

Of prepared vegetables.

That is how I kept

The shirt of the lad whom I loved most.’

Rhyme

The awdl-gywydd is another of the old Welsh free-metres, a cruelly confusing term, given the fact that we use both awdl and cywydd to refer to various kinds of strict-metre poetry. It makes more sense when we explain that awdl was originally the same word as odl, ‘rhyme’, and that cywydd meant something less specific like ‘poem’ or ‘song.’

This form was employed to compose what is to my mind one of the most interesting free-metre poems from the period, ‘Coed [‘the Forest of’] Glyn Cynon. History classes usually tell us that the industrial revolution began in the eighteenth century.

However, there was a great deal of deforestation in Wales during the sixteenth century as trees were cut down to provide charcoal for the growing iron industry. This is a protest poem lamenting the destruction of a familiar landscape:

Aberdâr, Llanwynno i gyd,
Plwy’ Merthyr hyd Lanfabon,
Mwyaf adfyd a fu erioed
Pan dorred Coed Glyn Cynon.

‘Aberdâr, all of Llanwynno,

The parish of Merthyr all the way to Llanfabon,

The greatest affliction that ever

Was when the Forrest of Glyn Cynon was cut down.’

Like so much love and nature poetry in the strict-metre cywydd form, this free-metre composition refers to the theme of the oed (meeting) between two lovers in the woods. Like Dafydd ap Gwilym’s fourteenth-century verse, this sixteenth-century poet describes a wooded locale metaphorically as a cosy room.

The destruction entailed ‘Cutting down many a pure parlour’ (torri llawer parlwr pur) which served as the ‘resort’ (cyrchfa) of ‘men and lads’ (gwŷr a meibion). If a woman came ‘to stroll along the river’s bank’ (i rodio glan yr afon), she and her loved could find ‘a fair place’ (teg . . . lle) ‘for arranging a tryst’ (i wneuthur oed).

The value which this poet placed in the forest is also articulated with a political inflection, as the wooded landscape made it easier for a Welshman to hide from the ‘foreign’ authorities:

O bai ŵr ar drafael dro
Ac arno ffo rhag estron,
Fo gâi gan eos lety erioed
Yn fforest Coed Glyn Cynon.

‘If it happened that a man

Had to flee from a foreigner [foreigners, foreign (oppression)]

He could also get lodging with the nightingale

In the Forest of Glyn Cynon.’

This charged Welsh-vs-English inflection is manifest passionately when the poet blames ‘the English’ for all of this deforestation:

Llawer bedwen las ei chlog
(Ynghrog y bytho’r Saeson!)
Sydd yn danllwyth mawr o dân
Gan wŷr yr haearn duon.

‘Many a green-cloaked birch tree

(My the English be hanged!)

Is now a great conflagration of fire

With the men of the black iron.’

This bitter sentiment is articulated repeatedly in the poem:

Gwell y dylasai’r Saeson fod
Ynghrog yng ngwaelod eigion,
Uffern boen, yn cadw eu plas
Na thorri glas Glyn Cynon.

‘It would be better that the English

Were hung at the bottom of the sea,

Hell’s pain, keeing their place there,

Than cutting green Glyn Cynon.’

He dreams of a striking kind of poetic revenge, imagining that the animals figuring in love and nature poetry serve as court officials and prosecute ‘the English’ for this ecological crime:

Mynnaf wneuthur arnynt gwest
O adar onest ddigon,
A’r dylluan dan ei nod
A fynna’ i fod yn hangmon.

‘I demand that they be brought to trail

By sufficiently honest birds,

And the owl marked to serve

I demand for a hangman.’

Perhaps not surprising given the sentiments which he voices, this poet ends by refusing to give his name:

O daw gofyn pwy a wnaeth
Hyn o araeth creulon, –
Dyn a fu gynt yn cadw oed
Dan fforest Coed Glyn Cynon.

‘If it happens that somebody asks

Who made this cruel utterance –

It was a man who used to meet with his lover

In the forest of Glyn Cynon.’

Landscape

Rather than giving us his name, he identifies himself with his region and with the landscape which has been destroyed.

Despite this poet’s vehement anti-English sentiments, some aspects of English culture were being welcomed whole-heartedly in Wales at this time. This brings to the second kind of free metre used to compose Welsh poetry in this period. It is important to remember that Welsh poetry and Welsh music where often two sides of the same kind (as the terms cerdd dafod and cerdd dant suggest).

Many English tunes were becoming popular in Wales during the second half of the sixteenth century. Poetry cast in the traditional Welsh metres wouldn’t fit these different rhythmic structures, so Welsh poets began composing verse using these new ‘foreign’ forms.

We might image a sixteenth-century phenomenon similar in some ways to what was happening in the 1970s and ‘80s when bands composed new Welsh-language songs influenced heavily by Anglo-American rock music.

And then comes an astounding development. Some poets began experimenting imbuing these new ‘foreign’ metres with cynghanedd. They couldn’t do that with the traditional Welsh free metres as the very definition of those metres meant that they were without cynghanedd.

If you imbue every line of the free-metre traethawdl with cynghanedd it is no longer a traethawdl (indeed, if you also align the end rhymes accordingly, it becomes a strict-metre form, the cywydd). People sometimes say that there is nothing more Welsh than cynghanedd.

We might say that those poets who adopted English free metres and then adorned with cynghanedd were taking possession in a very Welsh well of these new forms. This episode in literary history provides a dizzying look at the interaction between what we might call – using very inadequate adjectives – the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ as well as the ‘native’ and the ‘foreign’.

Further Reading:

Brinley Rees, Dulliau’r Canu Rhydd 1500-1650 (1952).

Cennard Davies, ‘Early Free-Metre Poetry’ and Nesta Lloyd, ‘Late Free-Metre Poetry’ in R. Geraint Gruffydd (ed.), A guide to Welsh literature c.1530-1700 (1997).

Christine James, ‘Coed Glyn Cynon’, in Hywel Teifi Edwards (ed.), Cwm Cynon (1997).

Episode twenty six in this series can be found here.