External Influences and Analogues: II

Abstract The cywydd to the lark discussed in the previous chapter is one of the finest illustrations of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s deep religious reverence for the natural world as God’s creation and a manifestation of God on earth. It is a feeling which pervades his nature poetry, and the view that a poem such as GDG 122 (‘Offeren y Llwyn’) is, as I for Williams suggested long ago, an irreverent parody of the established religion comparable with the outrageous burlesques of the Latin scholars cannot, I think, be justified. The phrase ‘careglnwyf a chariad’ (GDG 122.34), ‘a chalice of passion and love’, is audacious in the extreme, but despite the element of parody the spirit of the holy service is not actually undermined. Dafydd’s celebration of love in terms of the sacrament is a challenge, not to religion as such, but to the kind of extreme asceticism preached by the mendicant friars. His answer to the doom-laden warnings of the Grey Friar-that ‘God is not as cruel as old men claim’ (GDG 137.37-8), is a terse reminder that the religion of self-denial is not for everyone, and that the worship of God in and through his Creation, of which feminine beauty and earthly sensuality are essential parts, is equally valid. The image of the woodland love-mass is, of course, reminiscent of the notion of a ‘religion’ of love which is so dear to the troubadours and trouveres; but while the poems of Dafydd and his contemporaries are, inevitably, filled with the language and imagery of religious experience, unlike French and Provern;:al love-poetry there is no coherent ‘system’ with its God of Love, its earthly paradise, and its recurrent metaphor of repentance, penitence, and salvation. However, Dafydd ap Gwilym’s cywyddau serch do contain a num ber of concepts and images drawn from the world of religion which are analogous with Continental love-poetry.