The Seagull (poem)


"The Seagull" is a love poem in 30 lines by the 14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, probably written in or around the 1340s. Dafydd is widely seen as the greatest of the Welsh poets, and this is one of his best-known and best-loved works.

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 academic critic Huw Meirion Edwards considered that "The Seagull"’s imagery goes far beyond anything that had come before it in Welsh poetry, and Anthony Conran wrote that "pictorially it is superb… has the visual completeness, brilliance and unity of a medieval illumination, a picture from a book of hours". Dafydd wrote several love-messenger poems, and is indeed considered the master of that form. 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. The image of the seagull's beautiful, white, immaculate purity suggests that of the girl, while the bird's flight embodies the idea of freedom, in contrast with the dominating and enclosing castle. This castle has not been positively identified, although Aberystwyth and Criccieth 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.

Poetic art

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

Construction

The poem consists of 30 lines in the cywydd metre. In this metrical form, each line has 7 syllables, with a break usually after the 3rd or 4th syllable, but sometimes after the 1st or 2nd. The final word in each half-line has a stress. Some words which in modern Welsh are pronounced with two syllables were treated as monosyllables in earlier Welsh, e.g. llanw, eiry, lythr.
In each couplet one line ends in a monosyllable and the other in a polysyllable, ensuring that the rhyme occurs in a stressed syllable in one line and in an unstressed one in the other, e.g. béll, chástell or hánnerch, férch.

("Sound-harmony")

As usual in cywydd poems, each line makes use of the technique known as cynghanedd, or sound-harmony. Three different types are used in this poem:
  • Cynghanedd groes, in which all the consonants except the last in the first half of the line are repeated in the same order in the second half :
Ideally, the matched consonants must be arranged round the stressed vowel in the same way in each half: thus in line 24, TH and L come before the stressed vowel, and S immediately after it. But the final letters of the two half-lines must not match.
  • Cynghanedd draws, in which there are some consonants at the beginning of the second half which do not repeat any consonants in the first half :
  • Cynghanedd sain, in which one of the words in the second half of a line rhymes with one of the words in the first half; there may also be repetition of one or more consonants :
In cynghanedd sain, the line is divided into three parts instead of the usual two; the first two parts have rhyme and the second and third parts often have repeating consonants.
The twin requirements of rhyme and cynghanedd mean that often words are chosen for their sound as much as for their meaning.

Adaptations

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

English translations and paraphrases

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