Yr Hen Iaith fifty eight: A Puritan Taliesin: Morgan Llwyd

Jerry Hunter

In 1656 Morgan Llwyd published a book with a playfully alliterative title: Gair o’r gair, neu Sôn am Sŵn (‘A Word from the Word, or Talking about Sound’).

The work is an extended meditation on the relationship(s) between worldly language and the language of God.

This Puritan mystic’s musings on the divine Word might not appeal to many readers today, but even the most committed atheists have to marvel at this book’s intriguing prose; once again, we find Morgan Llwyd using the Welsh language in new ways, crafting sentences which are rhythmically enticing and which present extremely complex ideas in beautiful prose.

It is so beautiful that we are drawn to it, even if we don’t agree with the Christian theology driving it.

Heavenly language

Gair o’r Gair takes as its starting point the proposition that the eternal heavenly language can be heard through the babel of worldly sounds. The opening sentence states that ‘God has naught but one language’ (Ni does gyda Duw . . . ond un Iaith), and presents the mystical premise that it is a language spoken ‘without Tongue’s Voice, nor the Sound of Words, but quietly, heavenly and powerfully before Him’ (‘heb Lais Tafod, na Sŵn Geiriau, ond yn ddistaw, nefol, a nerthol o’i flaen Ef).

Interestingly, Morgan Llwyd must grapple with a paradox central to his authorial agenda, for he is using an earthly language in order to urge readers to listen to that heavenly language.

And, like his other Welsh-language publications, Gair o’r Gair combines what most contemporary readers would’ve seen as a strange and even threatening kind of spirituality with a pronounced articulation of – and pride in – Welsh identity.

Revelations

Using the language of Revelations to herald the Second Coming, this Puritan adapts that biblical mode of prophecy to describe a call heard first in Wales:

WELE, y mae’r awr hon y seliau olaf yn ymagoryd, a’r Utgyrn olaf yn seinio yng Nghymru, yn Lloegr, yn Ewrop, ac yn holl Gonglau y Ddaear.

‘SEE, it is at this time that last Seals open, and the last Trumpets sound in Wales, in England, in Europe, and in all Corners of the Earth.’

Eager to save the souls of his country people first and foremost, Morgan Llwyd urges the Welsh to prepare. While this message is central to the works which he published three years earlier (and discussed in the previous two instalments of this series), this time the method of spiritual preparation is described as working through the distracting noise of a multitude of earthly languages in order to hear the Word of God, all-powerful and resounding though quiet.

This spiritual guidance can be aligned with one of the tenets of the Quakers that the believer should seek God inside her/himself and follow the light within.

Yet, while describing the noise of earthly languages as a problem, as the babel of Babylon which keeps the Christian from reaching Zion, Morgan Llwyd simultaneously confirms the value and importance of writing and publishing in Welsh.

Welsh identity

The book’s final chapter opens by asking the reader to contemplate traditional articulations of Welsh identity:

Fe ddywedwyd am y Cymry gynt, fel hyn: Eu ffydd a gollant a’u Hiaith a             gadwant. Ond yr awron y dywedir: Y Ffydd a geisiant, a’r wir Iaith a gânt.

‘It was said of the Welsh in the past, like this: They will lose their faith and keep their Language. But now it is said: they will seek The Faith, and they will have the true Language.’

The individual Christian is advised to look inwards in order to find and understand y Gair, ‘the word’, while also listening inwards in order to hear the voice of God.

And this mystical turn is explained with reference to that potent text, Y Broffwydoliaeth Fawr, ‘The Great Prophecy’, quoted for centuries by many generations of Welsh poets and writers and often attributed to the supernatural ur-poet of Welsh tradition, Taliesin. This popular prophecy was enmeshed in the mechanisms of brut/brud, that traditional Welsh ideational system holding the past, present and future of the Welsh nation in productive association. We might suggest that Morgan Llwyd is taking that mantle, reworking it, and presenting himself as the Puritan Taliesin.

Like other writers who have grappled with Morgan Llwyd’s work, I have been calling him a ‘mystic’. We can define ‘mysticism’ in the Christian context as a desire to experience God’s presence in a direct manner and the various methods employed in order to achieve that special condition or experience.

Mystical

Given that a mystic’s experiences are by very definition out of the ordinary, mystical writers often struggle to use earthly language to describe them. Another canonical Welsh literary figure, Ann Griffiths (1776-1805), has also been described by some as a mystic. As several scholars have noted, one of the clearest ways in which she expresses her spiritual experiences in her poetry is by repeated use of the word rhyfedd (‘a wonder’, ‘strange’, and, used adjectively, ‘wondrous’).

A precedent for this can be found in a work which Morgan Llwyd published in 1657, Gwyddor Uchod.

While a consider amount of unpublished poetry in both Welsh and English by Morgan Llwyd has survived in manuscript, Gwyddor Uchod is the only poetry he published in his lifetime. The title can be rendered as ‘The Elements Above’, although the noun gwyddor (which has since come to be used to mean ‘science’) was also used in the early modern period to refer to an abstract essence which might be described as  ‘foundations [of learning or knowledge]’ or ‘fundamental principles’.

This free-metre poem, nearly thirty pages in length, is an extended mediation on the spiritual knowledge achieved by studying the heavens above, described by M. Wynn Thomas as ‘a work of Christian astrology.’[1] It opens by versifying (and slightly rewording)  Salm 8.3-4, linking observation to meditation and the wonder which that entails:

Wrth Edrych ar y nefoedd faith,

            a gweled gwaith dy fysedd,

Yr Haul a’r lleuad gron, ar Sêr

            mewn trefn ag amlder rhyfedd.

Pa beth yw dyn? (Rhyfeddwn i.)

‘When I look on your expansive heavens,

and see the work of your fingers,

The Sun and the round moon, and the Stars

in order with a frequency of wonders.

What thing is man? (I do wonder.).’

A later section in the work contains a series of eight quatrains, each line beginning with the word rhyfedd, the first line repeating the word three times at the start in order to establish the governance of this ‘wonder’ as the all-encompassing experience under consideration (note that the italics are in the original publication):

Rhyfedd, Rhyfedd, Rhyfedd, Arglwydd.

Rhyfedd medd pob Angel dedwydd

Rhyfedd wyti, medd dy seintiau,

Rhyfedd hefyd medd dy eiriau.

‘Wonder, Wonder, Wonder, Lord.

Wonder says every contented Angel

A wonder you are, says your saints,

A wonder says your words as well.’

The word is repeated 37 times in 32 lines of poetry; this part of Gwyddor Uchod is a rapturous hymn to the wonders of creation, using the repetition of that central world to also describe the power of the divine Word (dy eiriau, ‘your words’) among the foundational elements found on high (or uchod, ‘above’).

Totalitarian rule

Morgan Llwyd would die in 1659. And it is very likely that he died a profoundly disappointed man: not only did the political reality of Cromwell’s increasingly totalitarian rule undermine hope that a wondrous new era was dawning, but also it must have been increasingly clear to this Welsh Puritan that he had failed to win many Welsh hearts and minds over to his kind of Christianity.

However, like the astoundingly original books he produced at the start of his publishing career, these two books, Gair o’r Gair and Gwyddor Uchod, produced during his final three years of life, have proven to be wonderfully unique works of Welsh literature, in many ways still unparalleled in their audacious originality.

Further Reading:

Thomas E. Ellis (ed.), Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd o Wynedd: two volumes (1899 a 1908).

Wynn Thomas, Morgan Llwyd (1984).

Jerry Hunter, ‘Perygl Geiriau, Oferedd Print: Cyd-destunoli Pryderon Llenyddol Morgan Llwyd’ yn Ysgrifau Beirniadol XXXV [:] Gweddnewidiadau.

[1] M. Wynn Thomas, Morgan Llwyd (1984), page 18.