Ar ben y bryn,
There sits a paint-brush-thin monument,
A crooked rocky record built by many unwilling hands.
This cockeyed testimony announces a difficult man,
A man befriended by nature
Whose oakish form turned in opposition to his kin,
Took root on stony ground,
Prospered on infertile soil
And sheltered under nature's canopy.

Y bryn oedd ei gartref
And he lived and thrived there
To the annoyance of the conformists:
The chapel-goers, the gossipers, the rate-payers
Those who could not abide his ragged clothing,
Sweat-stewed, blood-patched remnants of cloth,
Hanging rags of garments and barely-there shoes.
Loneliness he embraced and so peace was his.

Ar y bryn fu farw.
A few feigned to mourn to satisfy their curiousity,
Wanting to view the corpse of the man on the hill,
A man who was and wasn't one of them.
And so a dissonance struck the town:
He was one of them but also one of wild nature.
He was miserably poor but enviably free.
And out of such confusion was his half-hearted monument raised.