Welsh Poems

Welsh Poems: Sixth Century to 1600 by Gwyn Williams gathers a millennium of verse from the oldest heroic laments to the late Renaissance, rendered into agile, musical English by one of the language’s most gifted translators. In a lucid introduction, Williams frames Welsh poetry’s signature “burning tree” mood—its dazzling yoke of contraries: battle and desire, spring and winter, sanctity and transgression—and traces how this sensibility shapes form as well as feeling. Rather than the single vanishing point of classical design, early Welsh composition moves like interlaced knotwork and stone circles: themes recur, echo, and braid, giving listeners (these poems were first heard, not read) a collateral, time-defying experience. Alongside heroes who “pay for their mead” with their lives, readers meet the courtly innovators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Dafydd ap Gwilym, Hywel ab Owain, and others—who entwine love, landscape, and liturgy; later poets test new stanzas and worldly subjects without abandoning the discipline of cynghanedd, the language’s intricately patterned consonance and rhyme.

Williams’s translations balance fidelity to sound with clarity of sense, introducing the major forms (englyn, cywydd, awdl) and the cultural world that produced them: raiding halls and churchyards, woodland sanctuaries and bustling ports, prophetic politics and macabre love elegies. His notes orient newcomers to metrics and historical reference, while the introduction situates Welsh poetics within (and against) Greco-Roman conventions and English analogues from The Seafarer to Donne and Dylan Thomas. The result is both anthology and argument: that Welsh literature’s “dispersed design” offers a durable alternative modernity, alive to paradox and resistant to flattening. Essential for readers of medieval and early modern poetry, Celtic studies, translation, and sound-based poetics, Welsh Poems: Sixth Century to 1600 is a brilliantly curated gateway to one of Europe’s oldest and most inventive lyric traditions.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.