[Allen Tice]

It picks up again after "I am heir..."

[Janice D. Soderling]

That link doesn't work for me. But neither did the link to subscribe to E-verse, so maybe the fault is on my end.

[Lance Levens]

But no one stepped up to the plate to address Bill's questions(mockish though they were). I'm just going to address the noun-adj. combinations.

What's the issue in general with DT's noun adjective doubles? e.g. "fortuned-bone" and "ravaged-roots"? My answer is:" proportion." There are simply too many. In the first stanza alone he has seven. If we examine them more closely we see that they seem to come in two varieties:
a. the ordinary-"my open wounds"
b. the stretchers-"fortuned-bone."

But with the stretchers there is a second problem: they push the semantic boundaries, and there's the rub with DT. What happens when you push semantic boundaries? Either you create hitherto unanticipated words and meanings (Joyce: the agenbite of inwit(?)) or you wrench old words to open up to include more than the conventional meanings, so "fortuned bone":

Is it a
a.wealthy bone?
b.legendary bone?
c.lucky bone?
d.cursed bone?

Of course, we're all supposed to chime in and say: it's all three. But a crowd of such "stretchers" makes for conflict and contradiction (which Thomas thrived on) and total meaning becomes more and more elusive. As you attempt to construct a meaningful pattern to this poem "open wounds" is easy. A stretcher like "Fortuned bone" isn't. Polysemy, ambiguity, lots of meanings for the same word unit. Mr. W. Empson, I fear, led us all down an Alice hole when he "implied" ("Seven Types of Ambiguity") that the more ambiguity, the better the poem. So feed your polysemous machine gun as many rounds as you can.

When too many of these "stretchers" take root in your poem the chances of arriving at anything like understanding begins to slip away and we are left with what we are too often left with in DT's poems: magniloquence sans context. Individual sentences thunder and roar, even several lines in sequence flash like neon, but whole poems negate coherence. A more parsimonious placement of those "stretcher doubles" might have helped.

Having said that, how about this gem: "Look...upon this bonehead fortune." Alas, poor Dylan.

[Janice D. Soderling]

But wasn't bonehead a typo that should have been bonebound?

[Wintaka]

Maryann:

What would we say about it on a modern po-board?

This is exquisite. Time hasn't been kind to "O" (S1-L4) but the rest of the language seems modern, if formal. S1-L7 has problems: apostrophe in "sisters"? Is it really "sing upon my head"?

The scansion is perfect, of course, although I'd expect reservations about the late inversion in S2-L12. The repetition of "wax" in S3-L6 would probably raise eyebrows.

I can't see many other problems here. Thanks for posting this.

-o-

[Lance Levens]

Janice,

I don't know. I'm just echoing what's on the site Maryann posted. How would you find out if the poem's not in his collected?

Lance

[Janice D. Soderling]

Lance, Maryann had added a note onto her post. That's what I was going by.

[Steve Mangan]

Originally Posted by Lance Levens

What happens when you push semantic boundaries? Either you create hitherto unanticipated words and meanings (Joyce: the agenbite of inwit(?)) or you wrench old words to open up to include more than the conventional meanings, so "fortuned bone":

Is it a
a.wealthy bone?
b.legendary bone?
c.lucky bone?
d.cursed bone?

e: Fore-tuned - ready in anticipation - prepared, erect.
f: Subject to the whims of fortune; or of Fortuna (as opposed to providence or wisdom) and thus more animal-like than God-like.
g: 'Fortune', like 'bone', is part of Dylan's vocabulary of somatic symbols. A man's fortune, the wealth one inherits, is the inheritance of the flesh through his seed, fortune=wealth=seed/semen=the inheritance of flesh, the fortune bound up in his bone - he blows his load, his fortune, and is 'spent'. He uses 'bone' quite frequently in his poems, as a symbol of death and life, the skeletal corpse and the boner whose 'marrow' seeds life.

I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.
This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower,

Other words we find here from his vocabulary of symbols are 'O' and 'wax':

'O' ~ O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,

His work is certainly well peppered with 'O's - must be one of his favourite words, and subjects (along with his 'bones'). In those of his poems which deal with birth, sex and death, or uses some version of the womb/tomb trope, which is one of his common themes, then his use of O often also serves the double duty of referring to the c(o)un/t/ree of the corpse (nation/family/clan, the tree of life, generation to generation) : the nothingness that lies between a maids legs from which we come and in which we end: the 'o' -

HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
[Lying down at OPHELIA's feet]
OPHELIA No, my lord.
HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA Ay, my lord.
HAMLET Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
OPHELIA What is, my lord?
HAMLET Nothing.


- is the nothingness from which this corpse we inhabit is generated and to which it returns: life is a deathly cycle running from generation to generation perpetuated through sex/love, from man through son of man - from Adam through son of (mac) Adam -

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer's fashion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Not city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.

And so we owe our inheritance of flesh to 'O' the womb and the marrow of the bone, and what we owe to our fellows in 'O', those bones in the grave, is to pass our inheritance, the marrow of the bone, the fortune of the bone, on in a never ending chain of birth and death.

0 my true love, hold me.
In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,
And the living earth your suns.

wax ~ Wax clothes that wax upon the aging ribs;

Wax, like bone marrow and fortune, is another of his euphenisms for semen - he often uses it in connection with the phallic candle or tower; to wax, waxing = to come, coming; wax clothes, sheets = semen stained = Adam and Eve's garments of skin they wear after the fall, which brings death/time into the world; red wax = the staff/candle/tower of life = the 'bone' swollen red with blood and eager to bestow/blow its wax/marrow/fortune/semen; he also uses the old waxing/coming figured as a 'little death' or 'murder':

The blood got up as red as wax
As kisses froze the waxing thought
The spirit racked its muscles and
The loins cried murder...

----

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood;
That drives the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.

---

And love plucked out the stinging siren's eye
Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue
Till tallow I blew from the wax's tower

---

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

...

Re: ambiguity/obscurity
Yes, one could rarely accuse him of clarity - he also used inversion and the biblical technique of metathetic parallelism to the point of obscurity - and when you decipher it and realize, for example, while he may be talking figuratively of the act of writing poetry, on a more literal level he is talking about having a wank in a toilet (My Hero Bares his Nerves), well perhaps a little obscurity may serve for the purpose of being publishable. One is drawn to his work through its sound, its eloquence - you must also be a lover of puzzles if you want to go beyond that into deciphering what the hell he is going on about. A little knowledge of Freud, Frazer, the Bible and his poetic techniques will see you through most of it. Much of his stuff, its themes and the techniques he uses also has echoes in the work of the occultists of the time - so perhaps his obscurification techniques proved no challenge to his 'discoverer', Aleister Crowley's old paramour Vicki Neuberg.

The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the trodden womb,
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely stumbling
Over the manwaging line.

The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely leaping
Over the warbearing line.

Even in his own time he was something out of step with his contemporary poetry scene, but neither that nor his obscurity or promotion of sound over sense, highly personal metaphors or vocabulary of somatic symbols seems to have dented his popularity.

[Maryann Corbett]

A lot has happened here since I've been back, and it will need replies in several directions.

Just so it's clear, when I posted this thread I hadn't been following the poetry boards for a while and had no specific poems or crits in mind, though I had been following the "Contemporary Taste" discussion on Discerning Eye. Sorry if there was any confusion about that.

Colin, I'm glad you liked it!

Steve, that's a very learned and thorough explication. I don't think anyone is surprised to see sexuality in DT, but sometimes it benefits from, er, exposure.

Lance, your point about adjectives is the very one that I'm most concerned about. It's true that this poem is very, very dense with the inventive adjectives. But I also wonder if we aren't at times overly doctrinaire about what has been called here "Golias's razor," the ratio of adjectives to words in the poem. I happen to think that adjectives are not all alike, so I'm glad to see somebody else saying that at least a little.

Last night I happened upon "The Fellow Human" in Les Murray's Learning Human (thanks to Rose K. for getting me started reading this). It's a collection of the poems LM considers his best, according to the dust jacket, so we can't write it off as immature work. The poem is built up of descriptions of women driving up to a school and gathered talking. Here's one stanza:

Another, serene, makes a sad-comic mouth beneath glasses
for her fine-necked rugby-mad boy, also in glasses,
and registers reed notes in the leatherhead birds' knotty music
as they unpick a red-gold judge's wing of bloom
in the silky-oak tree above the school's two classes.

Did you count all those hyphenated adjectives? This is what I'm driving at: there are effects that only adjectives will accomplish, and sometimes we simply need a lot of them.

Getting back to D. Thomas, if "All That I Owe..." is a very early poem, then it comes from a time when the sound of the Victorians was still in a lot of ears. Apart from the sheer number of the adjectives, what interests me is their inventiveness. Maybe the poetry I've been reading lately has been too much on the plain and prosy side, but it seemed to me that this poem was a useful reminder that we need to reach outside the conversational norms of language sometimes, and that if we don't do that enough, we might not end up with poetry.

About technical/textual matters: Google books provides us with two "collected" versions: the 1950s version that Thomas was in charge of, which doesn't contain "All That I Owe...," and the 2003 collected, which does, and which says "bonebound" and not "bonehead." (There are a great many versions online that do say "bonehead," though, and I have no idea how that reading originated. Anybody up for online textual criticism?)

[Steve Mangan]

Originally Posted by Steve Mangan

e
Other words we find here from his vocabulary of symbols are 'O' and 'wax':

In reference to the title the word 'fellows' is another word from Dylan's stock vocabulary to which he attached particularly meaning and by which he commonly referenced doubles/halves - for example the fellows maybe the two halves of our own production - our parents for example, or our own inner self/ghost/soul/spirit/shadow. For example:

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
Bearding the unborn devil,

And
Half fo the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
Tomorrow's diver in her horny milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And unplanted ghost.

Such fellow halves we may perhaps see referenced in opposites in the body of the poem such as fortune's bone and the flask of blood; and the periscope upright from the grave. Basically an extended list of birth/death, womb/tomb metaphors. His combination of nouns with unusual adjectives may be viewed in a similar fashion as part of his techniques for combining and either uniting or negating contrasting images - they too partake in an extended metaphor of the 'fellowed.'