A Dream from Annwn : 無料・フリー素材/写真
A Dream from Annwn / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | A DREAM FROM ANNWNY BreuddwydWithin my grove once I stole,Courting sleep profound and still.Day began to squint and yawn,A dream upon the brow of morn.Greyhounds loping at my sideStalking down a woodland ride,I saw a mansion, no mean hut,Unleashed my hounds, let them hunt,And through the wood, echoed sounds:Hot for blood, my baying hounds.Flushed with chasing, soon I sawA white doe dash the forest floor;On her trail, in hot pursuit,My hounds – I followed in a sweat –She shot across a wooded ridge,Along two spurs. With lusty rageMy hounds chased her back again,Stag-swift, snapping in her train,When at once she turned, and cameAs if for mercy, quaking, tame.Her naked nostrils brushed my arm- And I awoke, as by a charm.A witch I sought, to say sooth- For I was thirsty now for truth –Bidding her, by second sightExplain the portents of the night:“Wise woman, spin your spell,Unwind my wyrd, by God or Hell,Search my soul, read my dream,And I shall hold you in esteem.”“Man, forsooth, it augurs well.Raise your hopes, awake your will:The hounds revelling in the huntWho hurtled on and would not haltAre llateion, and their zestSurely aids your ardent quest.The doe’s the lady that your heartPursues for love, alive with heat.She shall come. Unclench your fist.God prepare you for the tryst.”Source material: Dafydd ap Gwilym, paraphrased by Giles Watson. It is clear from other poems that the fourteenth century bard was well-versed in the tales of the Mabinogion, and it is difficult to avoid a suggestion of their influence here. Perhaps the narrator is Pwyll, a one-time visitor to Annwn, and no stranger to the supernatural hunt. Perhaps the lady is Rhiannon, who eluded Pwyll and his men when they gave chase, but turned and sought his hand in marriage when he called for her. In this poem, the magical context is overt: the dreamer seeks the advice of a wise-woman: a fortune teller who can read his dream, and her response makes it clear that the llatai convention was more than just a poetic device. The llatai, or love-messenger, nearly always took the form of a mammal or bird, or occasionally an elemental force, and in the context of the present poem, the llatai hounds seem to represent the poet’s own fetch, sent out in his sleep to seek his beloved. There is a further parallel to the ‘Dream of Maxen’ in the Mabinogion, which also combines a hunting scene with a dreaming vision of a beloved woman, but the idea that the dream must be interpreted by a woman with magical powers is at least as old as Ovid. Even here, however, Dafydd achieves a realism that defies convention and suggests personal experience: note, for example, the fact that the sleeper is awoken as soon as he is touched by the nostrils of the doe. At the end of the poem, I have chosen to highlight a further mediaeval convention: the rather disturbing metaphor which compares the entrapment of a desired woman to the driving of a deer towards a trysting tree, where a lord or king lurks in wait for the kill. See, for example, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, lines 1527-1535. |
| 撮影日 | 2009-10-10 10:15:48 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
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| 撮影地 | |
| カメラ | E8700 , NIKON |
| 露出 | 0.012 sec (1/85) |
| 開放F値 | f/7.1 |