[Janet Kenny]

Robert and Clive
I have read some Edward Thomas and agree he is fine but what--other than his surname--is the point of mentioning him? As a coarse and rather Chaucerian woman I am tempted to mention John Thomas
Janet

[robert mezey]

Janet, it was just a mild joke. If people feel a passionate need to admire a poet named Thomas, well, Edward strikes me as the very one. But you can go ahead and like all the Thomases.
Try R. S. Thomas too--I'd rather reread him than most of DT.
A good list, Clive, though I'd add several others---most especially "Roads"--if that's the right title. "Now all roads lead to France"--I can't read that without tears.
I doubt that Yvor Winters ever wrote about Dylan T. but I can just imagine what he might have written. He was a wonderful dismantler of the most feverish romantics and would have had a field day with poor Dylan.

[Janet Kenny]

Robert,
One can choose (within one's limitations) one's own style of writing. But I do believe that when we become the audience it is more rewarding to walk in the shoes of others. Of course we have likes and dislikes.

Perhaps my John Thomas joke was too English to travel? If I'd called him Dick?

I know the malice and the wit of the Welsh. I spent a fair bit of time in Wales and I never heard two Welshmen agree.

Here is another Welsh Thomas having a good crack at the land of my birth:
Farewell to New Zealand
Wynford Vaughan Thomas

Super-suburbia of the Southern Seas,
Nature's - and Reason's - true Antipodes,
Hail, dauntless pioneers, intrepid souls,
Who cleared the Bush - to make a lawn for bowls,
And smashed the noble Maori to ensure
The second-rate were socially secure!
Saved by the Wowsers from the Devil's Tricks,
Your shops, your pubs, your minds all close at six.
Your battle-cry's a deep, contented snore,
You voted Labour, then you worked no more.
The Wharfies' Heaven, the gourmet's Purgat'ry:
Ice-cream on mutton, swilled around in tea!

A Maori fisherman, the legends say,
Dredged up New Zealand in a single day.
I've seen the catch, and here's my parting crack -
It's undersized; for God's sake throw it back!

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 14, 2004).]

[Mark Allinson]

Is this not the work of a poetic genius?


[Silence] FIRST VOICE [Very softly]

To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters''-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the web foot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. "Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah;
night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors' Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

[Under Milk Wood]

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Mark Allinson

[robert mezey]

No, it is not; nor of a prose genius either. It's very ornate imaginative writing and it certainly has some fine moments, but like so much of DT, it is too fancy, too fanciful, over-
written and overripe. Compare one of these drunken sentences with, say, this one from the Bible: "Jesus wept." Or this one: "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked." Or these: "Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is past...and Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal."

[Henry Quince]

Ah, yes, Mark. The origin of the nannygoats, too! “invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea” makes a mess of Golias’ Razor, yet it works wonderfully here for me. Although DT’s own Welsh accent was muted and anglicised, that this was written for a Welsh voice is evident in its cadences. “Llareggub” was a great piece of naming — I believe the local wowsers wanted it amended to Llaraggeb!

Robert, I admire R. S. Thomas, too. They were contemporaries (R. S. born one year earlier, 1913). I think R. S. began later and anyway only really came to prominence after Dylan’s death. Since you mention him, here’s my tribute, if we can call it that, to the two of them.


Thomas to Thomas

Black winds dispersing to faraway mindflap
Out over the tree full hills to the harbourside
And the birdlimed wall and the wheeling terns
Slow as March
But the apologues
Of autumn were burning and cast into cloudfall
And the winterwood days of my damsoned delight
Sailed away over me...

My namesake friend, forgive my stopping you.
You were so near in your dithyrambs
To the world’s eye, no one remembers
How I predated you, or envied either
Your drunken rhetoric, you at your desk
Intoning of ferns and green chapels.
My poems were made in your huge shadow
Falling heavy across the page.

— Henry Quince


[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited June 14, 2004).]

[Mark Allinson]

Robert,

I love the spare, lapidary language of the King James' Bible, too. No need to convince me there. But I also love the language of Under Milk Wood. I am puzzled by your assertion that the former is "good" writing and the latter "bad". It is, to me, as if a dry and astringent wine should be praised as the paragon of all drinks, and a double-malted chocolate milk-shake, with all its attendant nourishment, be dismissed as cloying and OTT. Like the two styles of writing, I enjoy both styles of drink.

The dry, spare, clean text of the King James is what I would characterise as "spiritual" in nature; and the D.T. I would call "soulful". Soul and spirit are two terms we have hopelessly muddled today. But they in fact pertain to two different phenomenological realms of experience. Spirit (which the Greeks called Pneuma) is not a synonym for Soul (which they called Psyche). Here is how the psychologist James Hillman differentiates them:

Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the ‘patient’ part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury - to use an image from St. Augustine - a confusion and richness, both ... The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions ... Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p 68/9.

But since we are composite beings, mixed spirit and soul inseparably, I believe we need both spirit-literature and soul-literature for a well-balanced diet.

But it is true that the history of Western culture is the history of domination of Spirit (mind, will, the masculine principle) over Soul (emotion, imagination, the feminine principle). Under Milk Wood is a rich, lush and nourishing soul-work, and I need it in my diet as much as I need to wash it down with some astringent Biblical wine.


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Mark Allinson

[Kate Benedict]

That's interesting, Mark -- I too am a devotee of Hillman's -- but why would you not categorize Dylan Thomas as a poet of spirit? His language spurts to the heights. Fire-like, spermy images abound (The force that through the green flower ... or sow my salt seed ... I fled the earth and naked climbed the weather ... etc., etc.)

Hillman's definition of soul would pertain more to the quieter voices in poetry, the slower tempos. Depth rather than height.

[Janet Kenny]

Kate,
I believe Thomas has both qualities. There is an Australian composer, Ross Edwards, who wrote the ultimate display piece for violin and orchestra and the most sombre, inward symphony that combines restraint and foreboding. Thomas died young but I think his reach was wide.

I understand why some people are repelled by Dylan Thomas but I consider myself lucky to be able to accept his excesses in order to find his strengths. I rarely use adjectives. I understand the discomfort.
Janet

[Mark Allinson]

Kate,

I am so excited to find another Hillmaniac on the site! I have been teaching Hillman's post-Jungian psychology now for years. And so much of my work (both poetry and prose) is heavily indebted to his influence.

Yes, Janet has answered for me. I took those two examples of the polarity of soul/spirit, but even the Bible has its soul elements - the Song of Solomon, for instance. And certainly D.T. has his spirit component. They are, after all, poles of a unity, so you really can't have the one without its other, but some texts seem to move to one end or the other, some alternating, some staying more or less fixed at one end of the polarity. But as Hillman points out, in the New Testament, psyche is used 57 times to pneuma's 274 times, making it more on the spirit end of the spectrum.

I would love to have a longer chat sometime about all this stuff.




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Mark Allinson