The Enchanted Mist

THE ENCHANTED MIST Y Niwl Hudolus I made a tryst with an enticing girl -- A quick elopement was my goal -- Pretty as daylight, potent as doom. Such delusion! What a dream! I went out early for the tryst And like the twilight loomed the mist The silent spectre strangled light And cloaked the heavens with the night. I took one step, and all too soon Land and sky could not be seen: No home nor hill, no sea nor shore Nor birch tree grove in all the shire. Sulphurous fog, engulfing all. My curse! You will not lift your pall. Your sooty cassock cloaks the land, A choking blanket without end. The clouds have sunk and spread a mantle; A black web binds the world in mortal Anguish: a hellish mire Like black smoke upon a moor Straight from Annwn: from fairy fire! A hooded habit hiding fear, A gleaming lattice laden with hate, A coal-cloud smoking without heat. The day is daubed with dripping night And all my hopes have come to naught! Hoar-frost's grandsire, father-thief, You vault the hill, and further off From January's trodden snow You hurl forth ice, and madly slough Great shreds of hoar-frost . Hell Has come to hilltop and to heath Right to the tip of every peak. You spread a sea, your aspect bleak. A black magician, there you ride Hard at the head of a Faerie Rade Like a crow with a gaping beak Bereft of colour. Black. Black. And down in every hollow skulks A horde of blackened mocking sprites. There is no hole that is not dank: A swamp of hell, and swooning dark. I'll make no tryst, though she is dear, My lust is quenched. There's only fear. - Attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. One eighteenth century manuscript attributes the poem to Siôn ap Hywel ap Llewelyn Fychan, but all others attribute it to Dafydd. The reference to the Faerie Rade is not quite as explicit in the original: the frost is personified "like a world's magician flying/ from the homestead of the Fairy Folk" (Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Apocrypha, 1996), but the fearful atmosphere is certainly just as palpable.