Translations into English Verse from the Poems of Davyth ap Gwilym/The Snow

by Dafydd ap Gwilym

For works with similar titles, see Snow.

THE SNOW.

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To-day I may not quit my home;
For maiden’s love or maiden’s plight
I dare not o’er my threshold roam;
For field and flood and vale and height
Are chained with frost, with snows are white!
Close as the scales on dragon’s breast,
Those flakes would cluster round my vest;
And in a miller’s lowly guise,
Conceal the bard from beauty’s eyes!
Brightly to all created things
The lime-white vest of winter clings;
Fair as a grey stoled hermit’s robe
It wraps this dark and dreary globe!
O’er every wood, o’er every grove,
Its veil of dazzling light is wove;
Spotless and glittering as mail,
Those snowy showers at random sail;
Not April’s choicest flowers outvie
Those chilly blossoms of the sky.
Those show’rs of foam intensely driven,
In fleecy clouds from earth to heaven!
They seem mid Gwyneth’s stormy skies,
Like the white bees of Paradise^[1]!

And hill and glen, and rock and height,
Are one wild maze of beauteous blight!
What soul their native home can guess,
What band those silv’ry floods restrain,
Vanescent, beauteous, numberless,
Like the blue pavement of the main!

1. According to an old Welsh superstition the colour of bees was white till they were banished together with Adam from Paradise. I have endeavoured to give the leading ideas of this poem rather than to translate it closely.