The Wind (poem)

Rachel Bromwich called it "one of the greatest of all his poems",[5] while the academic critic Andrew Breeze has hailed it as "a masterpiece" and "a work of genius", noting especially its "rhetorical splendour".

[6] The poet opens by addressing the wind, calling it a strange being, going where it wills, and subject to none of the physical or legal restraints of ordinary human life.

[20] The poet Gwyneth Lewis sees the poem as "a hymn to the havoc that art can work in the world",[19] while for the scholar Helen Fulton the wind is a metaphor for "freedom and autonomy from the laws of governing society".

[24] Likewise Richard Morgan Loomis sees the wind as Dafydd's "glorious alter-ego", the poem being "the paradoxical fantasy of a frustration that would speak through an uncontrollable freedom".

This strongly suggests to some scholars that Dafydd knew the older poem,[26][27] though in recent years doubt has been cast on this line of argument.

[30] The 15th-century poet Maredudd ap Rhys wrote a cywydd on the wind which shows several similarities with the poem of his predecessor Dafydd; certainly more than can be accounted for by coincidence.