Quote:
Originally Posted by Rhina P. Espaillat
Yes, I think Roger has it right: "Almost no poetry is thoroughly happy." That reminds me of the joke about the man who complained bitterly about the food at his boarding house, because "it's so bad, and there's so little of it." That contradiction is at the heart of a dissatisfaction with life that is unreasoning and pretty much universal: we agree that it's full of trouble, and wish there were more of it.
The longing for childhood--or youth, or lost loves, or you name it--is the "so little of it" part of the complaint, the eternal desire for what's still missing or already gone, like Paradise or mornings on "Fern Hill," not because of its perfection (which we don't really know anything about) but because of its goneness, which allows us to gild it in retrospect.
Thomas's trick to writing a good poem about this is not to believe all of what he's saying, even while the gilding is going on, so that the apparent nostalgia falls apart eventually and becomes the truth almost against its own wishes: "I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."
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Rhina, this is very wise. I don't know if you're aware of this, but the joke that you begin this post quoting is how Woody Allen starts out "Annie Hall"--he then goes on to say "Well, folks, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of pain, suffering, and misery.... And it's all over much too quickly." A related quote from his character, in the movie, is when he is telling Annie his philosophy that you can divide people into two groups, "the horrible and the miserable." "The horrible" are people suffering from terrible handicaps and diseases--he doesn't know how they make it at all. That leaves the rest of us, the miserable. Therefore, whenever you are feeling miserable, you should be grateful that you're one of the miserable.
Anyway, I think your argument is dead on, and I love your modification of the last line:
"I sang (because I didn't know any better!) in my chains (which I've always worn) like the sea (which isn't free either)."[/quote]
It's actually a little Woody Allen-ish/Monty-Python-ish.... I can imagine someone playing Dylan Thomas, intoning the line while someone else yells the parenthetical part, and the Thomas character keeps glaring at the curtains...
