Yr Hen Iaith part 65: Pantycelyn’s Pilgrim

Jerry Hunter

Pererin wyf mewn anial dir,

 Yn crwydro yma a thraw;

Ac yn rhyw ddisgwyl bob yr awr

Fod tŷ fy Nhad gerllaw.

‘I am a Pilgrim in a desolate land,

Wandering here and there;

And in a kind of expectation every hour

That the house of my Father is near.’

So begins a well-known hymn by William Williams Pantycelyn. Though composed more than two hundred and fifty years ago, these words are readily understandable to Welsh speakers today. The language Pantycelyn used in his hymns is simple, direct and accessible.

Yet it is not without poetic embellishment. While Welsh sentences normally begin with the verb, it is possible to switch things up, as Pantycelyn does here, writing pererin (‘pilgrim’) wyf (‘I am’), rather than employing the more common construction, rwyf yn bererin.

This allows him to create an enchanting rhythmic balance, with the three syllables of pererin leading to the stressed single-syllable verb wyf in the first half of the line, and the three syllables of mewn anial leading to the stressed monosyllabic dir at the end.

Poetic license

He employs poetic licence as a get out of jail card to free himself from grammatical constraints in another way as well; while the adjective normally follows the noun it modifies in Welsh, he places anial (‘desolate’, ‘desert(ed)’, ‘uninhabited’) before the noun tir (‘land’), resulting in the word’s initial mutation, dir. Part of the strategy allowing him to end the line with that single-syllable anchor, it also creates a phrase which strikes our ears in a more unique way than tir anial would, catching our attention and inspiring thought.

This is an excellent and simple example of how a poet can use grammatical strategy to emphasize meaning. Beginning with the word pererin focuses our minds on that word, foregrounding the persona whom we hear speaking – or singing – to us. He is ‘a pilgrim’ travelling through the wasteland of this sinful, earthly life, trying to reach God’s house in heaven. The tone is intensely personal and even confessional (in a later verse he admits to deviating from the path – Mi wyra weithiau ar y dde’, / Ac ar yr aswy law, ‘I sometimes swerve on the right, / and on the left-hand side’).

Yet these words were meant to be sung, and each singer is thus invited to identify as a pilgrim undertaking a similar journey, the group experience of collective worship fired by the intense personal expression of religious commitment.

This hymn, bearing no title and only a number (‘XLIII’), was first published in Carmarthen in 1772 in the collection Gloria in Excelsis: Neu Hymnau o Fawl i Dduw a’r Oen. Yr Ail Ran  (‘Gloria in Excelsis: Or, Hymns of Praise to God and the Lamb’).

Towards the end of Pantycelyn’s long life and long literary career, this was twenty-eight years after the appearance of his first collection of hymns.[1]  Prolific writers often recycle elements of their own work, and given the fact that William Williams published many hundreds of hymns, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that he had used the pilgrim persona many times before. Indeed, he had even employed some of these exact same words in the exact same way.

Pilgrimage 

Take, for example, the Aleluia collection of hymns, published in six parts between 1744 and 1747. Looking at the first two of these six parts, Glyn Tegai Hughes observed that they contain some half-dozen hymns constructed around the pilgrimage theme and that three of them begin ‘Pererin wyf” (‘I am a pilgrim’). Other hymns in later parts of Aleluia also begin with these two words.

Thanks to the translation by Peter Williams, ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah’ became a popular English hymn.

When Pantycelyn published his original Welsh version, he described it as Gweddi am Nerth i fynd trwy Anialwch y Byd, ‘A Prayer for Strength to go through the World’s Desert’), providing a prose rewording of the ‘anial dir’ (desolate land)’ imagined in that other hymn. The first two lines are rendered in English thus by Peter Williams: ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, / Pilgrim thro’ this barren land’, following Pantycelyn’s original Welsh ‘ARGLWYDD arwain trwy’r anialwch / Fi Bererin gwael ei wedd’. And many more examples could be found in many other hymns by Pantycelyn.

There is no mistaking the influence of John Bunyan’s popular book, Pilgrim’s Progress. Stephen Hughes published a Welsh translation, Taith y Pererin, back in 1688. As was mentioned in our fifty-third instalment, this was part of a publishing agenda followed by Hughes aimed at establishing a canon of Welsh-language puritan literature. He succeeded in doing just this. If the astoundingly original prose published by Morgan Llwyd in the seventeenth century failed to bring large numbers of Welsh people over to the puritan camp, the work done by Llwyd’s younger contemporary, Stephen Hughes, provided a literary fuel which helped fire the work of eighteenth-century Welsh reformers such as Williams Pantycelyn.

Influence 

His hymns provide ample evidence of this influence, but if a smoking gun be needed to prove the case, it can be found in the introduction to a book published by Pantycelyn in 1764, Bywyd a Marwolaeh Theomemphus, o’i Enedigaeth i’w Fedd (‘The Life and Death of Theomemphus, from his Birth to his Grave’).

While Williams is remembered primarily as a hymnist today, he was a versatile writer, composing prose and long, experimental poetry as well as his many hymns. Theomemphus is a book-length epic poem presenting an allegorical religious narrative, the origins of which he describes fascinatingly in the work’s prose introduction:

Fe redodd y llyfr hwn allan o’m hysbryd fel dwfr o ffynnon, neu we’r pryf copyn o’i fol ei hun. Y mae yn ddarn o waith newydd nad oes un Platform iddo yn Saesonaeg, Cymraeg, nac yn Lladin, a’r wn i.

‘This book ran out of my spirit like water from a well, or the web of a spider from its own stomach. It is a piece of new work for which there is no platform in English, Welsh or in Latin, as far as I know.’

(By the way, he claims that the work is not an allegory, ‘am fod y personau yn wir ddynion’, ‘because the characters are real people’, but we’ll agree to disagree with him over that and move on.)

While claiming that the work is without precedent, he also acknowledges one big influence: Y llyfrau gorau o’r dull hyn a welais yn descrifio Credadyn yn ei argyhoeddiadau, ofnau, cysuron, a’i demtasiynau, yw Bunyan . . . yn enwedig Taith Pererin’,  ‘the best books of this style which I’ve seen describing a Believer in his convictions, fears, comforts, and temptations is Bunyan . . . especially Pilgrim’s Progess’.

Welsh pilgrim

Bunyan’s Welsh pilgrim followed a long and winding journey. While researching the influence of Pilgrim’s Progress on Welsh-language literature, I came across a book published by Tomas Dafydd in Brecon in 1774 which bears the title Taith y Pererin. I thought it would be a reprint of the translation published by Stephen Hughes in 1688 or perhaps a new Welsh translation of the English classic.

However, when I saw the book itself it turned out to be a short collection of hymns. Presented as Rhagymadrodd yr Awdwr, ‘The Author’s Preface’, the first hymn begins by styling both this composition and all of the other hymns in the booklet as a ‘letter’ to Welsh-speaking Pilgrims:

Hyn o Lythyr wyf yn ddanfon,

‘Nawr attoch rasol Bererinion,

Rai sydd â’ch Henaid prudd yn brefu,

Am gael teimlo Cariad Iesu.

‘This letter I am sending

Now to you, gracious Piligrims,

Ones whose earnest Souls are wailing,

To get to experience the Love of Jesus.’

Other hymns in this forgotten collection enforce the perception that it is a small versified Welsh distillation of Bunayn’s work, as its title declares.

But here’s the question: was Tomas Dafydd influenced first and foremost by (Welsh translations of) Bunyan, or was he following directly in the footsteps of his much more famous contemporary, Williams Pantycelyn?

I’d say that both answers are correct. However, it’s more complicated than that; given the popularity of Welsh Bunyan and Pantycelyn’s hymns, Dafydd was surely influenced by the former as well as the later’s many poetic reworkings of the former.

This is a memorable example of the ways in which different texts interact in the telescoping and kaleidoscoping processes driving the evolution of a literary tradition.

Further Reading:

Glyn Tegai Hughes, Williams Pantycelyn [Writers of Wales], (1983).

Episode Fifty Three of Yr Hen Nation in Nation.Cymru:  https://nation.cymru/culture/yr-hen-iaith-fifty-three-sin-in-llanymddyfri-and-puritan-appropriation/

[1] With thanks to E. Wyn James for confirming this fact. Negotiating the huge body of Pantycelyn’s work is no small task, and this is not the first time I’ve benefited from Wyn’s great knowledge and even greater generosity while attempting to do so.