Description Dafydd is not quite serious in this poem, and I have tried to retain the spirit of that! And this is more or less my internet debut on the guitar. Sad, isn't it? I have also made a lame - but creditably laborious, I hope - attempt at reading Dafydd's fourteenth century Welsh at the end. Took me ages to do this. Sigh.
The Sigh
Y Uchenaid
A rasping, stertorous sigh
Is splitting my tunic awry:
An exhalation, frigid
As frost, shall rend my rigid
Breast. The quaking, baleful strain
Shall split me with searing pain.
From my pregnant, brooding breast,
Like the sigh of brainsick beast,
Comes a queer, dissonant note,
Constriction at my throat,
Commotion of recollection,
Candle's callous extinction,
Cywydd's vortex, cruelly spinned,
Cold barrage of misty wind.
When I am vexed, all presume
I'm a piper, as the fume
Comes snorting from my hollows
Loud as a blacksmith's bellows.
A sigh like this will make fall
A stone from a sturdy wall.
A roar to shake a man's length:
A girl's anger quakes my strength.
A withered cheek, wind-squall wet
Marks my autumn of regret.
This wild anger at defeat
Would hull oats or winnow wheat.
A year's anguish in this sigh:
Give me Morfudd, or I die.
Source material: Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. The mark of Dafydd's authorship can be seen in the self-mocking overstatements and the somewhat hyperbolic agricultural metaphors.
