Love's Spear
The girl in the bright shining gold
Whom I saw, happy and lively and bright her voice,
In gold from head to toe
4 A beautiful girl, the two colours of day,
Was listening to a song of Noah's Ark
In the quire of Deiniol Bangor yesterday.
Loveliness enough for the whole world;
8 two pains, face of Fleur, to her generous brother,
[was] to see the fair girl of goodly beauty,
woe the day! Mine is a deep suffering.
She shot me with a seven-edged spear,
12 and stiffness, impudent anger;
a strong poison, I know I am getting weaker,
this was the wish of the jealous men of Anglesey.
Nobody under the starry sky can take it out,
16 the pain is within the heart.
A smith did not beat it,
it was not sharpened by hand,
neither its praiseworthy colour,
20 nor the form of the cruel weapon which wounded me is known;
I have become mad
losing my true joy and sight for the candle of Gwynedd.
Woe is me, my true love has caused a spear
24 [to affect me] for a long time, the fair one like Mary.
Hard in me there is a spear of eighteen sufferings,
an unhappy lad makes my face wrinkled.
It pains me cruelly, it pays with poison,
28 a sharp spear, a skewer of anguish.
One the image of Esyllt gives it to me through anger,
the thatch-spar of the bone of the chest split in two,
it is very sad within me to be remembered for a long time,
32 the sharp instrument of the worn and broken chest.
The painful situation of the awl of love,
the three pains of an arrow will be the foster brother of
treachery.