Tudalen:Gwaith Goronwy Owen Cyf II.djvu/104

only to mention it. Perhaps it were to be wished that the rules of poetry in our language were less nice and accurate; we should then undoubtedly have more writers, but perhaps fewer good ones. I would never wish to see our poetry reduced to the English standard; for I can see nothing in that to entitle it to the name of poetry, save the number of syllables which yet is never scrupulously observed, and a choice of uncommon, or, if you please, poetic words, and a wretched rhyme sometimes at the end, and in blank verse, which is the best kind of poetry in English, and no rhyme at all. Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a book I read with pleasure, nay, with admiration and rapture. Call it a great, sublime, nervous, or, if you please, a divine work, you will find me ready to subscribe to anything that can be said in praise of it, provided you do not call it poetry. Or if you do so, that you would likewise allow our "Bardd Cwsg" to take his seat amongst the poets. As English poetry is too loose, so ours is certainly too much confined and limited, not by the Cynghaneddau—for without them it would not be poetry—but by the length of verses, and poems too. Our longest lines do not exceed ten syllables, and have too scanty a space to contain anything great within the compass of six or seven stanzas, the usual length of the Gwawdodyn Byr; and our longest poems are not above sixty or seventy lines the standard measure of Dafydd ap Gwilym's Cywyddau, which is far from being a length adequate to a heroic poem. These, however, are difficulties that will never, I apprehend, be remedied. These models our wise forefathers