Pennod 51 – ‘Hoff Rediad ei Phriodi’: Cyngor Mam a Galar Gŵr

‘The Beloved Path of Being Married to Her’:A Mother’s Counsel and a Husband’s Grief

After First noting that there is a great amoung of Welsh strict-metre poetry from the period and naming some of the important bards whom we don’t have time to discuss, we concentrate on two poems from early in the seventeenth century which offer insight into the life of one family of uchelwyr – Dafydd Llwyd and his wife Catrin Owen from yr Henblas, Llangristiolus, Anglesey.

We look First at a cywydd composed by Dafydd when Catrin died in 1602, a poem which expresses the husband’s grief in a personol and memorable manner. Then we discuss a series of englynion which Catrin had composed when their son, Siôn, went to study at Oxford. This poem presents the mother’s counsel to her son, and the nature of this counsel is amazingly similar to what one might expect parents to say to their children today!

Siôn was in the middle of his course of study in Oxford when his mother died, and so these two poems together offer an opportunity for us to see inside the life – and death – of this family and consider the way in which poetry offered them a medium for expressing their feelings.