The Woodland Mass

[3] Sometimes seen as blasphemous, it presents a woodland scene in which a thrush, sent by the poet's lover, and a nightingale officiate at a Mass celebrating both God and sexual love.

Ifor Williams and Thomas Parry were agreed in taking it to be Carmarthenshire, but it has alternatively been argued that it can be translated as the earldom of Chester, or, if a variant reading be accepted, the county of Caerleon.

R. Geraint Gruffydd suggested that it was the name Ceirio, referring to a place in northern Ceredigion, and that the thrush was sent there, but Rachel Bromwich considered it to be the adjectival form of the noun gair, and translated it "with eloquence".

[23] More specifically, comparisons between birdsong and Christian liturgy appear quite commonly in medieval literature, one striking example being La Messe des Oiseaux by the 14th-century French poet Jean de Condé [fr], which presents a nightingale in a woodland setting celebrating a Mass assisted by various other birds, including a thrush, and in which the poet even, like Dafydd, shows the elevation of the Host, here a red rose rather than Dafydd's leaf.

Rachel Bromwich, while noting the similarities between the two, thought that the influence of Jean de Condé's poem on "The Woodland Mass" was probably "contributory and indirect rather than literary and direct".

[26][27] The Scottish composer John Hearne's Offeren y Llwyn or Woodland Worship (1958) is a cantata for chorus and strings, setting Dafydd's poem in the original Welsh and in an alternative English version.