Few love poems are as quietly stripped down as "Cymric Love Song" by Rolfe Humphries. Its speaker remembers a single afternoon, or perhaps a single season, spent with a woman on a hillside in April, and then does something unusual: instead of piling up flattering comparisons, he simply declares that nowhere else on earth could compete. The poem's whole argument is that happiness this complete needs no decoration.
The title does a good deal of work before the first line begins. "Cymric" means Welsh, and the word sets up an expectation of something old and song-like, perhaps even bardic. The poem then plays against that expectation. The speaker asks, "Do you ask me to tell / Of myth or of marvel?" and the very asking raises the ghost of legend only to wave it away. He is not going to give us dragons or enchanted hills. What he offers instead is a plain statement of fact: "On the side of a hill / In the month of April / I was with her." The grandeur is in the plainness. The poem suggests that an ordinary hillside, when shared with the right person, is marvel enough.
The form reinforces this modesty. The poem runs in two-line stanzas, each a tiny unit of thought, and the lines are short, often only four or five syllables. The rhymes are gentle and sometimes slant rather than perfect: "April" and "wonderful weather" chime softly through their shared sounds, "marvel" is answered by "hollow" only at a distance, and "country" pairs with "be" in a way you feel rather than hear. This looseness keeps the poem from sounding like a polished advertisement for love. It sounds more like someone talking, a little amazed at his own contentment, with each short line placed down carefully like a stepping stone.
Sound matters here too. The repeated w's in "was with her" and "wonderful weather" give the opening a breathy, warm quality, as though the memory itself were being exhaled. Later, "No one said No! / From height or from hollow" is one of the poem's more intriguing moments. The exclamation is the only real raising of the voice in the whole piece, and the phrase "from height or from hollow" casts a wide net: no one, on the peaks or in the valleys, objected. It suggests a landscape in complete agreement with the lovers, a world with no dissenting voice. The poem never says what anyone might have objected to, and that gap lets the line glow with a sense of general blessing.
The rhetorical questions in the middle of the poem deepen this effect. "In what other country / Would I rather be?" is a question that answers itself, and so is "Whose way of moving / Should I more sing?" These are not real questions but confident assertions dressed as them. The speaker already knows the answer, and so do we. The second one is especially lovely, because it shifts attention from the woman's face or words to her "way of moving," her grace in motion, as though what he treasures most is the living, walking person rather than any fixed portrait of her.
The final couplet turns memory into vow: "I will dwell on her praise / For now and for always." The verb "dwell" is well chosen. It means both to linger in thought and to live somewhere, so the speaker will make a home in his praise, just as he has already made the hillside a kind of homeland. After all that past tense, the shift to the future gives the poem its closing lift.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It would have been easy to inflate such a subject with grand imagery. Instead, Humphries trusts short lines, plain words, and a few well-placed questions to carry the feeling, and the result is a love song that sounds all the more sincere for refusing to shout.