File:The Clock (4019006839).jpg

The Clock Y Cloc

Well-meaning, and right-mindedly I sing. Fate is kind to me: My soul takes flight to the fair town With round tower at crag’s crown, Finds a girl, of former fame: My unforgotten old flame. Through my Dream, moonlight fleeting Beams on her a Dream of greeting. Nightly now, her fetch shall fly To tryst with me and linger nigh,

Or when, as in exhausted sleep, My soul, unfettered, comes to creep Within her chamber, I’ll appear And speak with her till day is near Like an angel, though my head Lies pillowed in a distant bed. Thus my otherworldly thought Finds the lover I have sought For age on age. The spell will break The very moment I awake.

Damn the clock beside the dyke That awoke me with one strike Of the tongue between its teeth! Curse the ropes and wheels beneath, The stupid balls that dangle, The hammer, the iron rectangle Of its frame! Curse its quacking And its endless mill-wheels clacking! Churlish clock with canting clatter, Clodhopping cobbler’s chatter, Lies and treachery in your guts! Hound-whelp’s maw that chews and gluts On garbage, clapping jaws of spite! Owl’s mill grinding through the night! No saddler, crupper caked with crap Could withstand the endless tap- Tap-tapping of your ticker! The very angels bark and bicker!

I had enjoyed – until this – A dream of Heaven, untold bliss, Wrapped within this woman’s arms My head between her breasts. Charms Of Eigr, beyond all cost. Dong! Dong! Dong! And all are lost!

Come, my Dream, and seek once more The airy highway to her door And set my golden girl aglow With slumbering love. My soul! Flow To meet her! Moth! Take flight And plunge into her orb of light!

Source material: Poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. Mechanical clocks of the kind derided in the poem were a newfangled technology in the fourteenth century, and are also mentioned by Chaucer and Jean Froissart. Once again, this poem draws on the llatai tradition, but in this case, the love-messenger is not the clock, but the poet’s Dream, which confers upon him the ability to fly by night to his beloved Eigr. As with Dafydd’s other beautiful dream poem, ‘Y Breuddwyd’, there are strong affinities with ‘The Dream of Maxen’ in the Mabinogion. It has been suggested that the town with the round tower on a hill is Brecon, which, with its marvellous setting, surrounded by the Black Mountains and the Brecon Hills, would seem to be an ideal place for souls to take flight. The poem implies that his soul can only make contact with that of his beloved when both of them are asleep and dreaming, and at the end of the paraphrase, I have introduced the soul-moth motif, which is a common feature of Celtic folklore. Cathedral cities such as Wells, Salisbury and St Albans did possess clocks of the type described by Dafydd, with chimes to mark the hours for the monastic offices, but it is impossible to know with which clock Dafydd was acquainted, and in the context of this poem, it appears that the clock was far removed from Brecon. For a more detailed examination of the historical background to this poem, see the notes to Rachel Bromwich’s prose translation, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Poems, Ceredigion, 1982, pp. 123-4.