Cywydd

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Cywydd is one of the important, if not the most important, metrical elements in Welsh traditional poetry. There are a variety of forms of cywydd, but the word on its own is generally used to refer to cywydd deuair hirion. This was the favourite meter of the Poets of the Nobility, the poets working from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and it is still used today.

Cywydd consists of a series of seven-syllable lines in rhyming couplets, with all lines written in cynghanedd. One of the lines must finish with a stressed syllable, while the other must finish with an unstressed syllable. The rhyme may vary from couplet to couplet, or may remain the same. There is no rule about how many couplets there must be in a cywydd.

Cywydd deuair hirion and the related cywydd deuair fyrion, cywydd llosgyrnog and awdl-gywydd all occur on the list of the twenty four traditional Welsh poetic meters.

[edit] Reference

• The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, Meic Stephens, 1986, Oxford University Press.