ABSTRACT
Gwerful Mechain (c.1460–1502) is the only female Welsh poet from the later Middle Ages for whom a substantial body of work survives. Born into a high-status family, she is a contemporary of poets Dafydd Llwyd and Llywelyn ap Gutyn, with whom she exchanges poems. Katie Gramich notes that her poetry is notably conventional in form, and the devotional and the erotic coexist easily in her surviving work (Mechain 2018: 8). This poem is a dyfalu, a poem where a number of different images describe a single object, a form indebted to the riddle (cf. the early English sexual riddles of extract 69). A small number of other surviving Welsh poems, all by men, also contain very explicit sexual content, notably Dafydd ap Gwilym's poem to his penis. That Mechain's sexually explicit poems are in dialogue with the rest of this tradition is clear from her exchange of verses with Dafydd Llwyd (Johnston 1998).
