GDG 89

The scenario described in this poem, where the anguished lover waits under the eaves of the girl's house at night pleading for admittance, bears a striking similarity to the popular European genre of the serenade, just as 'Dawn' (69) corresponds to the genre of the dawn–song or aubade. Dafydd's elegy for his uncle Llywelyn ap Gwilym apparently contains an ironic echo of the serenade convention, where he urges the dead man in his grave to open up his house to his nephew as before (6.5–8). The exaggerated, self–deprecatory description of the desperate suitor shivering in snow and soaked by the torrents that fall from the eaves is typical of Dafydd's poetic persona, and the poem may be read as a parody of a familiar medieval genre. It should, however, be noted that the need to endure inclement weather for the girl's sake is among the features of the serenade as it appears in the thirteenth–century poem Le Roman de la Rose and in later French poetry. Dafydd suffers a similar fate in 'The Ice' (54) and 'Courting in Winter' (55). Whereas in those poems the ice is described over several couplets by means of dyfalu, the emphasis here is on the poet's suffering and the girl's cruel silence.

For discussions of the poem in relation to the serenade and to other poems recounting nocturnal visits to a girl's home, see David Johnston, 'The Serenade and the Image of the House in the Poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym', CMCS 5 (Summer 1983), 1–19; Edwards, DGIA 157–75.

27. y Gaer yn Arfon  Caernarfon castle, one of Edward I's four main castles in Gwynedd along with Harlech, Conwy and Beaumares. It was completed around 1330. As Bromwich notes, SPDG 160, there may be a reference to a prisoner who was well known to Dafydd's audience.