Dylan Thomas
 

A recent experience took me back to this old favourite:

To Others than You

Friend by enemy I call you out

You with a bad coin in your socket,
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret,
Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
In the memory worked by mirrors,
With unforgettably smiling act,
Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
And my whole heart under your hammer,
Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
A desireless familiar
I never thought to utter or think
While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults
As much as for their good,
My friends were enemies on stilts
With their heads in a cunning cloud.

Thank you, Phillip, I missed this one. I am against the current dismissal of Thomas as a kind of performance poet, a clever child we can overlook except for five or ten poems. He went places with poetry, in my humble opinion, that no other poet before or since has been, and should be studied and venerated.

Tom

Amen to that.

The key to Dylan Thomas (apart from the fact he was a drunk, a free-loader, a Celt, a self-inventor, a roisterer and a rogerer) is for me that he mastered the art of crafting a thing so meticulously it didn't look crafted, but more like a spontaneous outpouring.

His "Letters to Vernon Watkins" and Brinnin's "Dylan Thomas in America" are very revealing about the man.

But for me his greatest quality is his sense of wonder and spirituality as evidenced by e.g:

A Winter's Tale

It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,
He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers
And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
His naked need struck him howling and bowed
Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung
Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,
And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
In the always desiring centre of the white
Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,
By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised
Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year
When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-
Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,
The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes
On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

Master of the long sentence in service of the sustained idea. Also the paradigm case of what it means for a poem to have or be "an arc".

You can find a lot of his stuff online at:

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/by/Dylan+Thomas

Philip

Philip - we've had a number of other Dylan Thomas threads in the past that might be of interest (we've had so many good discussions here on similar topics that it's always helpful to check the old ones - the Search function works well in that regard - before launching a new one.):

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...t=Dylan+Thomas

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...t=Dylan+Thomas

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...t=Dylan+Thomas

Michael

Thanks for that. I checked out the threads, and very interesting they are too, if you happen to be a devotee in the first place, as I am.

I wonder what the statute of limitations is on reviving old threads? They date from 2001, 2004, 2005, which these days is a lifetime ago and many members from then have long gone?

Interestingly, I tried out your advice and did a search on T S Eliot. I got 411 hits, mostly of tangential relevance!!

Rebirth or exhumation? Which is to be preferred?

Philip

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 labour 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.

Dylan Thomas

Yes indeed, Mary. Poetry, and sentiments, made to be said. And who, having hacked away by lamplight, hasn't wondered to what end except the hacking itself? As you said yourself, elsewhere in these pages, notwithstanding the value of forums like these poetry is essentially a solitary occupation.

It isn't always easy to understand Dylan's juxtapositions but when you hit lines like "With their nightingales and psalms" they never seem to cease to surprise.

The other aspect of his poetry I love is his propensity to make lists of things - sometimes his poems are littered with "ands", other times he just lists them straight out without any apparent attempt at making a literal statement, rather just to create an impression or picture of something which can't really be said literally.

This is one of his nicer syllabics and proves that syllabic can read very naturally. True, there are mostly (not always) three stresses to a line, against the 7 syllables (forgetting the last line of each "stanza"), but he moves them around so nicely.

I can't read this, or much of his stuff, without hearing his voice reading, and I guess that's his trick - to truly write for as well as in his own voice. The voice of a declamatory actor, no doubt, and hence not much in vogue, but undeniably his, and uncopyable**.

Thanks for posting that one.

Philip

** Does everyone know Sam Gwynn's brilliant take on "Do not go Gentle..."? The exception that proves the rule, and very funny.

I can't make much sense of a lot of Winter's Tale but the detail of snow and farmyard takes me straight back to childhood on the Welsh border and the farm next door. Odd lines in other poems can be pure magic, such as 'The knockof sailing-boats on the net-webbed wall' in Poem In October.

I remember with joy reading Dylan's "Fern Hill" from the pulpit of an old and echoing church in Hereford and seeing a handful of people who were heading for the door, stop in their tracks and slump down in a pew to listen. The occasion was a whole-day, non-stop poetry festival, a sort of drop-in kitchen for the word-starved, organised by the Vicar.

Mary - that wonderful expression "sullen art" is a mischievous mirror-image of the better-known phrase "gay science", a translation of the Provençal expression "gai saber" which was the name given to the study of the love lyric at the Academy of Toulouse in the fourteenth century.

Philip - have you ever read Les Murray's "Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil". Trust me; it refers.

Certainly have!