Goronwy Owen

Goronwy Owen (1 January 1723 – 3 July 1769), who wrote under the bardic name Goronwy Ddu o Fon (Goronwy the Black of Anglesey), was an Anglican clergyman and one of the 18th century's most notable and influential figures in Welsh-language literature. He mastered the traditional bardic metres of the cerdd dafod ("tongue craft") and played an important role in the literary and antiquarian flourishing described as the Welsh 18th-century renaissance.

Forced by poor prospects in Britain to emigrate to British Virginia in the late 1750s, Owen joined the faculty of the College of William & Mary. He served as master of the college's grammar school until 1760, when he was apparently terminated for participating in a drunken brawl in Williamsburg. His influence upon subsequent Welsh poetry and culture has been extensive.

Early life and family background

Owen was born on New Year's Day, 1723, to an impoverished family in the parish of Llanfair Mathafarn Eithaf in Anglesey. Both his grandfather, Goronwy Owen the tinker, and his father, Owen Gronw, had poetic sensibilities and were interested in genealogy. His mother, Siân Parri, had apparently once been a maid at Pentre-eiriannell, home of the prominent Morris family—a connection that would prove to be a decisive factor in Owen's life. Owen apparently came to the attention of family matriarch, Margaret Morris, as a child and developed a close attachment. Owen would later memorialize the late Mrs. Morris in a celebrated elegy.

Owen's childhood at his ancestral home, Y Dafarn Goch, was difficult. The family was desperately poor, and while his mother was apparently a refined woman who instilled in him an appreciation of the Welsh language, his father was reportedly an unpredictable drunkard, as Owen himself would one day be.

Education At around 10 years old, Owen was sent to attend Griffith Jones' circulating school in Llanallgo. He soon moved to the free school at Pwllheli and then finally in 1737 to Friars School, Bangor. It was at Friars, under the direction of headmaster Edward Bennet and his assistant Humphrey Jones, that Owen learned Latin and Greek and became a classical scholar. He also apparently began to work directly with Margaret Morris' son Lewis, a polymath and poet known by his bardic name Llewelyn Ddu o Fôn, who taught the rules of Welsh poetry. During this period, Owen's long-suffering mother died. During much of this period as an ostensible student at Oxford, he actually worked as an usher at the free school at Pwellheli (1742-1744) and the school in Denbigh (1745). He appears to have formally exited the university without a degree.

Career in Britain

In January 1746, Owen was ordained and appointed curate of St Mary's Church, Llanfair Mathafarn Eithaf, his home parish. Once more in his beloved Anglesey, he associated with local poets and antiquaries. To his great misfortune, however, he had been granted his position while the Bishop of Bangor was abroad. When the bishop returned to Anglesey, he informed Owen that the curacy had been promised to someone else. He remained in these roles for approximately three years and married Elin Hughes, the daughter of a local ironmonger and alderman, in 1747.

Owen and his wife then moved to Donnington, where he became master of the local grammar school and curate of nearby Uppington close to Shrewsbury, positions he held from 1748 to 1753. The Morris brothers—Lewis, Richard, and William—had apparently been aware of the precocious Owen since his childhood and became his principal patrons.

Emigration to the Colony of Virginia

College of William & Mary For a decade, Owen, his growing family in tow, had bounced from one poorly-paid curacy to another. In 1757, however, the Bishop of London, at the apparent urging of the Earl of Powis, offered the struggling clergyman-cum-poet the life-changing opportunity to become the master of the grammar school of the only royal college in British America, the College of William & Mary. The position came with a 200 pound annual salary—far more than the indigent Owen had ever made. The Owen family departed for the Colony of Virginia, though the crossing, led by a deceitful captain, proved to be a disaster. According to Owen's brother and his patron Richard Morris, Owen composed a now-lost cywydd on the experience of being on the ship when it had to seek shelter in an English port during a severe storm. Before the ship docked on the other side of the Atlantic, several passengers, including Owen's wife and youngest child, died.

In Williamsburg, the colony's capital, the newly-widowed Owen assumed his post at the college under president Thomas Dawson and alongside fellow professors William Small, Jacob Rowe, and Emmanuel Jones. To the Morris brothers' astonishment, Owen, an impoverished Welshman, married President Dawson's sister, the widow Anne Clayton, though she died the same year without issue. His two surviving sons, Robert and Goronwy, enrolled at the college grammar school led by their father. Though little is known of Owen's career at William & Mary, one of his former students would reminisce about him in a letter nearly 40 years later: "In November 1758, the time I was sent to the Grammar School in the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, the Rev. Gronovius Owen was master of that school. He was a blunt, hasty-tempered Welshman, and esteemed a good Latin and Greek scholar. He married a Mrs. Clayton, who at that time was the Dame of the College. She shortly died without issue. He had two sons, Robert and Gronovius, who came from England with him. I remember him well, as he was frequently at my father's, and very fond of talking Welsh with my mother.

Rum, which has destroyed more than the sword, was his destruction. He was extremely intemperate; and in one of his merry frolics he and a Mr. Rowe, who was Professor of Moral Philosophy, headed the Collegians in a fray with the young men of the town; for which and other flagrant improprieties they were dismissed from their offices by the visitors.

This, I think, happened in the year 1760. Mr. Rowe returned to England, and Mr. Owen was soon after inducted in a parish in Brunswick Country, Virginia..." Decades later, Richard Morris, who had been in Britain during this entire period, recalled Owen's dismissal with bitterness, blaming President Dawson, himself a notorious drunk, for driving the poet out of the position that was supposed to be his salvation.

Poetry and literary legacy

In Welsh, Owen signed his name as "Gronwy," "Gronwy Ddu" ("Gronwy the Black"), and "Grownwy Ddu o Fon" ("Gronwy the Black of Anglesey").

Though many of Owens' poems were published in the 1760s, it is doubtful that he, then languishing in the backwoods of colonial Virginia, ever saw his work in print. Still, those that who read his verse and corresponded with him recognised him as an exceptional literary talent and brilliant classicist. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London from 1787 to 1809, described Owen as "the most finished writer of Latin since the days of the Roman Emperors." His reputation grew quickly after his death, and by the 1790s, the London-based Gwyneddington Society, which had spurred a revival of the Eisteddfod literary tradition, was inviting poets to submit works for a competition that identified Owen's work as the model of exemplary Welsh verse. The correspondence between Owen and the Morris brothers would also later be celebrated as a foundational text in Welsh literary criticism.

Since the early 19th century, Owen has been esteemed as a giant of Welsh literature and made the subject of various tributes. In 1831, a memorial tablet for him was erected by self-described "lovers of the Muses" in the Bangor Cathedral. In 1923, the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion installed a plaque in memory of Owen in St. Mary's Church, Northholt, and in 1957, a second one was put in the Earl Gregg Swem Library of the College of William & Mary. Both plaques conclude with the same line written by Owen himself:"Dyn didol dinod ydwyf | ac i dir mon estron wyf"

"I am an isolated man of no note | and to the land of Anglesey I am a stranger" His statue adorns the side of the Main Arts building at Bangor University. At the College of William & Mary, the Goronwy Owen Prize in Poetry is awarded annually to an undergraduate for the best collection of poems.