I have been listening to a song by Brigyn ‘Paid â mynd i’r nos heb ofyn pam’, which is based on the Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. The Welsh words are available on the Brigyn site, quite difficult but I think I have figured how they relate (rather loosely) to the original English except for one line in the last verse: ‘Tithau 'nhad yng ngwagle’r Pelican’, which corresponds to ‘And you, my father, there on the sad height’ in the original English. I can make no sense of ‘gwagle Pelican’, or at least, I know that ‘gwagle’ means ‘void’ or ‘vacuum’ but what’s a Pelican got to do with anything? Could this be a mishearing, and if so of what, or could anyone explain the Pelican?
A web seacrh reveals it’s a (rather strange!) name for a house:
Across the road is a tall Georgian terraced house, ‘The Pelican’, where Dylan’s parents had come to live in 1949.
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Ah, that makes sense now, thank you. I would never have thought of that.
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