A man blunders across a moor in the dark, chasing a girl who isn't even there, and the poem's great joke is how much suffering he thinks he deserves credit for. "Night Song of Dafydd ap Gwilym" is a modern English version, by Rolfe Humphries, of a poem attributed to the medieval Welsh poet named in the title. I won't guess at the original's details, so what follows concerns the poem as Humphries gives it to us: a short comic odyssey in which a lovesick walker endures every horror the night can offer, then abandons the whole project the moment the sky clears.
The structure is a journey with a sudden turn. The first three stanzas pile up obstacles. He is "Lost from the high road," then slogging "Over stubble and furrow / With stumble and sorrow," then pushing "Through nine thorny thickets" and past "ruined old forts." The language itself stumbles, since "stubble," "furrow," "stumble" and "sorrow" jostle together like feet catching on uneven ground. Then the dangers turn supernatural: "spirits of evil" who circle him twice, once as the "hateful companions" of the bogs and once as something "worse than the fogs." His defences, "crossing and praying, / My charming and rhyme," are "Of little avail." Even his own poetry is useless against the dark, a quietly funny admission from a man who presumably thinks of himself as a poet.
His similes show how fear distorts the mind. He is "A fighter betrayed / In the thick of the battle, / A man in a gaol," comparisons that swell his wet, cold walk into military and legal tragedy. Whether the poem is mocking him or sympathising, the inflation is part of its charm. A lover's misery always feels grander to the lover than to anyone else.
Then comes the turning point, marked by the plainest line in the poem: "But at last I looked up / And there were the stars!" From here the imagery changes completely. The stars are "like cherries... / In the orchards of night, / All yellow and red," a surprising, almost domestic image that replaces fear with ripeness and abundance. Next they become "sparks of the bonfires / Of seven dear saints" and "pickets of embers," a military picture again, but now of a friendly army guarding the heavens, whose fires "wind cannot take." The earlier battle imagery was about being under attack; this is about being watched over. The poem's two registers, terror below and order above, are held together by the simple act of lifting the eyes.
The ending is the best part. The man stops, speaks aloud ("'Look you,' I said"), and announces that "This is over and done." Having endured so much, he decides the girl "will have to be told," adding a hasty "God forgive me the telling," as if breaking off a courtship were a minor sin. His final vow is delightfully practical: he won't "blunt my good axe / On the face of the stone." The axe is oddly specific, hinting at some earlier labour, perhaps clearing a way or striking at obstacles, though the poem never explains it, so we can only say that the image closes the poem on stubborn, physical effort now judged not worth it.
The rhythm supports this movement. Lines are short, mostly three or four stresses, and the rhymes come and go loosely, with "sorrow" echoing "furrow," and "bright" answering "night," rather than following a strict scheme. That looseness suits a walker's uneven pace, and it lets the final stanza's longer, more talkative lines feel like a man finally catching his breath and speaking his mind.
What makes the poem worth reading is its gentle honesty about desire. Love sends him out into danger, but beauty, in the shape of a starry sky, sends him home. The cure for lovesickness here is neither argument nor willpower but perspective: one look at something vast and calm, and his private drama shrinks to size. The humour never turns cruel, and the poem lets him keep his dignity even as he gives up his quest.