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"The Seagull" (Welsh: ''Yr Wylan'') is a love poem in 30 lines by the 14th-century Welsh poet
Dafydd ap Gwilym
Dafydd ap Gwilym ( 1315/1320 – 1350/1370) is regarded as one of the leading Welsh poets and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages.
Life
R. Geraint Gruffydd suggests 1315- 1350 as the poet's dates; others place him a little ...
, 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
Myrddin Wyllt (—"Myrddin the Wild", kw, Marzhin Gwyls, br, Merzhin Gueld) is a figure in medieval Welsh legend. In Middle Welsh poetry he is accounted a chief bard, the speaker of several poems in The Black Book of Carmarthen and The Red B ...
or
Taliesin
Taliesin ( , ; 6th century AD) was an early Brittonic poet of Sub-Roman Britain whose work has possibly survived in a Middle Welsh manuscript, the '' Book of Taliesin''. Taliesin was a renowned bard who is believed to have sung at the courts ...
ever loved, and unless he wins kind words from her he will die.
Imagery
![BL Add](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/BL_Add._MS_14997.gif)
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…
thas 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
Rachel Bromwich (30 July 1915 – 15 December 2010) born Rachel Sheldon Amos, was a British scholar. Her focus was on medieval Welsh literature, and she taught Celtic Languages and Literature in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic a ...
, "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
Criccieth ( cy, Criccieth ) is a town and community on the Llŷn Peninsula in the Eifionydd area of Gwynedd in Wales. The town lies west of Porthmadog, east of Pwllheli and south of Caernarfon. It had a population of 1,826 in 2001, reducing ...
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
simile
A simile () is a figure of speech that directly ''compares'' two things. Similes differ from other metaphors by highlighting the similarities between two things using comparison words such as "like", "as", "so", or "than", while other metaphors c ...
s and
metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wi ...
s. 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."
References to older poetry
Eigr, with whom Dafydd compares his beloved, was in Welsh tradition the wife of
Uther Pendragon
Uther Pendragon (Brittonic) (; cy, Ythyr Ben Dragwn, Uthyr Pendragon, Uthyr Bendragon), also known as King Uther, was a legendary King of the Britons in sub-Roman Britain (c. 6th century). Uther was also the father of King Arthur.
A few ...
and mother of
King Arthur. She is the heroine he most often cites as the archetypical beautiful woman. The legendary figures of Myrddin and Taliesin are often invoked together in Welsh verse, and in some early poems Myrddin is presented as a lover, though Taliesin was not, making Dafydd's mention of him in this role rather odd. It has been argued that these two figures are introduced as a tribute to one of the wellsprings of Dafydd's work, the native Welsh poetic tradition, while on the other hand the terms in which he describes his submission to the girl acknowledge one of the other great influences on him, the literature of
courtly love, stemming from
Provence
Provence (, , , , ; oc, Provença or ''Prouvènço'' , ) is a geographical region and historical province of southeastern France, which extends from the left bank of the lower Rhône to the west to the Italian border to the east; it is bor ...
but by Dafydd's time to be found across Europe.
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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*
Bell, David, in With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
* With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
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** Rev. repr. in
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Jones, Glyn.
** Repr. in
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** Rev. repr. in
* With the Middle Welsh original in parallel text.
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Footnotes
References
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External links
Full text in Middle Welsh at Welsh WikisourceThe Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson translationThe Glyn Jones translationA reading of the poem in Welsh and EnglishA paraphrase of the poem by Giles Watson"Yr Wylan" sung to a harp accompaniment
{{DEFAULTSORT:Seagull (poem), The
14th-century poems
Birds in popular culture
Love poems
Poetry by Dafydd ap Gwilym