Excellent thread, Henry! Your Dylanelle's a peach.

Robert Mezey wrote:
I think very highly of a few of Thomas' poems, including "In My Craft or Sullen Art" (the most musical and dithyrambic of any poem in syllabics) and "Refusal to Mourn the Death &c" and two or three others...

I'd be interested in a list of the others. I feel like such a waffler when it comes to DT - sometimes I find him incredibly hard to take, and yes, temptingly spoofable, but when he's at his best - wow, he just takes the breath right out of me.

"Fern Hill", a great poem right up there with Wordsworth's immortality ode.

And to comfort all of us twiddlers and tweakers, there are over 200 hand-written drafts of "Fern Hill".

He got it pretty well nailed by the end.

------------------
Mark Allinson

Lie still, sleep becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

Dylan Thomas

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

------------------
Mark Allinson

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

The Hand That Signed the Paper

Dylan Thomas


The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Dylan Thomas




Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

BANNED POST

Janet, sure you could love Larkin loved you not Thomas
too--many people love Larkin who can't bear to read Thomas. Was it HQ who asked what other Thomas poems I liked? I
like very much "The Hand that Signed the Paper" (which
someone kindly posted) and "The Force that Through the
Green Fuse" and one about a hunchback in a park. Can't
think of any others, though there may be one or two that
don't come to mind. I find most of his stuff "romantic"
in the worst sense of that word, "rhetorical" in the
worst sense of that word, and generally unreadable. Not
the poems of a grown man. As someone tersely said, hot
air. He himself had some sense of that, I believe. It interests me that at his readings he tended to recite
poems by mssters of the plain style, Hardy especially
(his favorite poet, though it would be hard to imagine
anyone more different except maybe Larkin, or anyone who
less influenced his verse). If you want to read a really
good poet named Thomas, read Edward Thomas.

Edward Thomas, indeed! A maker of many lovely poems. His voice is a quiet one, but at his best his sentences are most beautifully modulated in a manner unique to him, though I have often wondered if another, later English poet, E. J. Scovell, had picked up the same tune. (I shall leave it to others to discuss the relationship between Thomas and Frost if they wish. A new thread?)

Among my favourites are these: “The Owl”, “Fifty Faggots”, “ Adlestrop”, “The Gallows”, “Birds’ Nests”, “A Cat”, “But These Things Also”, “Aspens”, “A Private”, ”No One So Much As You”. His masterpiece, the poem of his which I should have most liked to have written, is “Old Man”. I recall posting it here about two years ago.

Thanks for mentioning him, Robert.

Kind regards

Clive


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited June 14, 2004).]