Independent of Davyth ap Gwilym’s general merits as a poet, there is one characteristic of his versification worthy of particular notice, connected as it is in an essential manner with the genius of the Welsh tongue, and the singular structure of Welsh verse. I mean the remarkable felicity with which he generally adapts the diction to the immediate subject. Pre-eminent as the advantages are, which his materials afforded in this respect, he has availed himself of them with an effect hardly conceivable, and not to be adequately explained to one unacquainted with the Welsh language. Thus, nothing can exceed, in harmonious sweetness, some of his love-poems; while in instances of another nature, as in his description of a thunder-storm, the sound is accommodated to the sense with an appalling fidelity. Few equally successful attempts of a similar kind are to be met with in the works of any poet, ancient or modern.
[1]But it is not merely in the mechanism of his poetry that Davyth ap Gwilym excels. As monuments of his powerful and fertile imagination, and as pictures of the manners of the age and country in which he lived, his writings possess more commanding and permanent claims on our attention. So vividly do they reflect the prominent ideas and objects of his time, that, in the absence of historical evidence of the fact, we should feel no difficulty in referring their production to the fourteenth century.
In the time of Davyth ap Gwilym the principality
- ↑ The following remarks have, for the most part, been added by the translator.
