GDG 81; HGDG 145–50.

This poem claims that the Jealous Husband's breath has tarnished his wife's white skin. The girl in question is not named, but this is most likely Morfudd. A similar theme is found in 'Morfudd yn Hen' (150), where beauty is seen to be destroyed by the pasage of time. Note in particular the correspondence between the final lines of the two poems.

17. Enid leddf   The adjective perhaps recalls the mistreatment which Enid ferch Yniwl suffered at the hands of her husband in the Arthurian romance Geraint fab Erbin.

20. Eigr   wife of Gorlois and mother of Arthur according to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

21. banhadlen   The oily sap of broom would produce dirty smoke.

25. delw o bren gwern dan fernais   The use of wood for statues was fashionable for a period of about forty years c. 1290–1330, particularly by sculptors of the Westminster school, see Lawrence Stone, Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1955), 147–8. The 'thick gesso covering and the painted and gilt finish' described by Stone is the varnish referred to here. Stone also notes that wooden statues were easier to transport than marble ones, and so the products of London workshops reached as far as Monmouthshire in this period. An example of a wooden statue which Dafydd might have seen is the image of John, second baron of Hastings, in the church of St Mary's Priory, Abergavenny (c. 1325), see Lord, 2003, 125–6.

45. Cadfan   See 140.23n. Cadfan's Well at Tywyn was famed for healing skin diseases (see LBS III, 6), and the suggestion is perhaps that the girl should go and bathe in the well (cf. line 22 above).