Читать книгу The Cambrian Tourist, or, Post-Chaise Companion through Wales: 1834 онлайн

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O’i wiw y ŵi weu ê â, a’i weuau

O’i ŵyau y weua;

E’ weua ei ŵe aia’,

A’i weuau yw ieuau iâ.

“I perish by my art; dig mine own grave:

I spin my thread of life; my death I weave.”

The other a distich on thunder, the grandeur of which is scarcely to be surpassed in any language.

Tân a dŵr yn ymwriaw,

Yw’r taranau dreigiau draw.

“The roaring thunder, dreadful in its ire,

Its water warring with aërial fire.”

The metre of the Welsh poetry is very artificial and alliterative, possessing such peculiar ingenuity in the selection and arrangement of words, as to produce a rhythmical concatenation of sounds in every verse. The old British language abounded with consonants, and was formed of monosyllables, which are incompatible with quantity; and the bards could reduce it to concord by no other means than by placing at such intervals its harsher consonants, so intermixing them with vowels, and so adapting, repeating, and dividing the several sounds, as to produce an agreeable effect from their structure. Hence the laws of poetical composition in this language are so strict and rigorous, that were it not for a particular aptitude that it has for that kind of alliterative melody, which is as essential as harmony in music, and which constitutes the great beauty of its poetry, the genius of the bard must have been greatly cramped. To the ears of the natives, the Welsh metre is extremely pleasing, and does not subject the bard to more restraint than the different sorts of feet occasioned to the Greek and Roman poets. From the reign of Llywelyn to that of Elizabeth, the laws of alliteration were prescribed, and observed with such scrupulous exactness, that a line not perfectly alliterative was condemned as much by the Welsh grammarians, as a false quantity was by the Greeks and Romans.