AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT: THE POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS
Rage Against the Dying of
the Light:
The Poetry of Dylan Thomas
The
poetry of Dylan Thomas [1914-1953] seems to contain various interesting
themes worth bringing into sharper focus. The early works reveal a diverse
range of topics, connected initially by an underpinning intoxication with
words and the musicality of language, woven into a love of phrases,
especially rhyme and alliteration, and the tumbling clank and clatter of
the spoken word; his poems are dominated by speech rhythms.
5 Cwmdonkin Drive Swansea;
Dylan’s birthplace
His later works reveal a
sustained focus upon childhood and nature, both depicted as sacred and
magical, and each suffused with a sublime sentiment of supernatural and
beneficent spiritual forces that make life worthwhile and which the poet
invokes repeatedly to dispel all darkness in our lives. Or maybe he keeps
questioning if the darkness is ever brightened?
Cwmdonkin Drive in the 1930s
By scummed, starfish
sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas…
[Author’s Prologue]
South Wales, Swansea, the Gower and
LaugharneThe interplay of dark
and light, of loss, death and decay with these luminous, nature-loving
forces is the central and abiding feature of his poetry, especially in the
corpus of his mature work. Also visible are various symbols, such as the
priestly heron, black rooks, the roaming fox barking clear and cold, the
hawk on fire, etc, which are contrasted with the sweet berries, seeds,
feathers, sunshine, song birds, fish, hedgerows and birds nests of an
idyllic and magical rural world. Nature is presented as red in tooth and
claw.
“The fire of birds
in
The world’s turning wood”With Welsh and reverent
rook,
Coo rooing the woods’ praise,
[Author’s Prologue]
The Gower PeninsulaHis poems are littered
with his symbols of death and decay, which are invoked repeatedly and
contrasted against—or interwoven with—images of simple childhood and
the rich beauty of nature’s bounty.
“Time held me green
and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
[Fern Hill]
“When like a
running grave, time tracks you down…”
“As the green
blooms ride upward to the drive of time…”
“Time sings through
the intricately dead snowdrop. Listen.”
The
fact that he repeatedly explored these dark themes in the later poems, and
never abandoned them, shows he was very much absorbed with the overriding
sentiment that life is tragic. Yet he balances this with a goodness found
in a sentimental yearning for the bliss, intensity and innocence of
childhood, sublimated into an enduring sanctification of the creatures,
wild fields, lanes and woods of his ‘dear Wales in my arms.’
This contrast is
rendered especially vivid and seems to reach a confessional crisis and
urgent outpouring of ‘spiritual grief’ in several telling lines of
Poem in October:
And down the other air
and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten morning when he walked with his mother
Through the parables of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told
fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds…
And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.
There is an undoubted
and tremendous sadness running through this poem, which one presumes
Thomas felt very acutely. It is terribly heartfelt and the poet shows the
tragic loss he feels for an adulthood that has somehow betrayed that child
he speaks of: the wonder of summer…walking with his mother…the
parables of sunlight…the twice told fields of infancy…his tears burned
my cheek…the boy whispered the truth of his joy…the mystery sang alive…and
the true joy of the long dead child…the summer noon…leaved with
October blood.
The Boat House Laugharne
This
sequence reveals what a terrible betrayal of those childhood joys he feels
his adulthood to be: all the magic has fled. Apparently, only sex and
alcohol could take him anywhere close to that precious joy he once had
daily as a child in ‘the wonder of summer.’
The child who made a
solemn blood pact with nature—‘whispered the truth of his joy to
the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide’—as an adult
seems to feel an acutely deep sense of betrayal, failure and despair. He
rages against the dying of the light. What has gone so wrong? He “toils
towards the anguish of his wounds,” and “sings towards
anguish,” for “on skull and scar where his loves lie
wrecked.”
That he did not, as a
middle-class city boy, personally experience the type of childhood he
describes, might suggest that he was yearning for an idealised type that
maybe he had dreamed of or which he invented merely for artistic purposes
to convey his sentimental and romantic views of Wales and the countryside.
Trips to the Gower peninsula as a child and his Aunt Annie’s farm seem to
have fed this pastoral craving. It is also arguably an artistic response
to his move to Laugharne [first in 1938] and the Boat House [1948] where
much of his later work was composed and where most of it was inspired. Was
that where his yearnings for childish rural joys were merely rekindled?
“In my seashaken
house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,”
Certainly, this is the
impression one gets from his Author’s Prologue, Fern Hill, Over Sir John’s
Hill, In the White Giant’s Thigh, In Country Sleep, In Country Heaven,
Poem in October, Ballad of the Long-legged Bait and A Winter’s Tale. In
other words, all his mature work.
In these last poems, his
art became undeniably elevated to the highest and noblest sentiments of
love of nature, rich pastoralism, romanticism and a spiritual
sanctification of the child’s pristine view of nature, the season’s roll
and the wider world.
Brown’s Hotel, Laugharne
“The country is
holy: O bide in that country kind,
Know the green good,” [In
Country Sleep]
More evident in the
early poems, is Thomas’s abiding interest in death, time and the
tragically fragile and transitory nature of human life, such as in the
Force that Through the Green Fuse and Hold Hard these Minutes in the
Cuckoo’s Month, amongst many others.
The force that through
the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
[The Force that through
the Green Fuse]
“And nothing I
cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs.”
[Fern Hill]
Dylan & Caitlin drinking
Though still present in
the later poems, this raw theme becomes softened, tamed and sublimated
into such carnivores as the dog, fox, owl, hawk and heron, etc, who people
and patrol the darkness of nature’s night world, inspiring fear in
children and women, but again Thomas mostly employs them as symbols of the
darker forces in nature that threaten human life, and which he contrasts
very effectively with the soft fruits, the beautiful views, gurgling
brooks, the light, and the intense colours of the Welsh skies, hills and
valleys.
In this sense, Thomas
does not abandon these themes, but transfers them in a muted and softened
form, into the rich Welsh landscapes, which he depicts as foaming with all
the myriad birds and creatures that take his fancy.
But animals thick as
thieves
On God’s rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogsback woods!
Yet still he persists in
exploring the sadness of life, its transient nature and the ever-present
reality of death, change and loss.
“The oak is felled
in the acorn
And the hawk in the egg
kills the wren
.” [Ballad of
the Long legged Bait]
Some of Dylan’s papers in the shed
at Laugharne
His poetry brings the
British landscape vividly to life but is also enhanced and deepened by his
humane concerns. He therefore goes beyond the simple pastoralism of poets
like John Clare and Robert Frost, because he projects onto nature some
innately human fears and concerns and intertwines the flow of nature’s
year with these pressing problems of human life—such as change, decay,
reproduction and death.
He manages to suffuse
nature and human life with the same interpenetrating themes and concerns,
just as if they are intimately blended with each other. In this important
respect his poetry succeeds and considerably transcends the work of Clare,
Tennyson and Frost. Nature is not only sentimentalised and sacralised by
Thomas, it is also embraced as an intimate friend and a dear companion and
ally of human beings without whom we could not possibly live. This
reflects the perennial concerns of human life.
Dylan in his writing shed at
Laugharne
In
this respect, his poetry genuinely reaches lofty and timeless heights, by
addressing the central pagan facts of our lives: the roll of the seasons,
the beauty of nature, the painful presence of death, change and loss, and
the dimly discerned presence of some pagan deity or spiritual force that
secretly pervades our lives and nature and protects us, shielding us from
the darkness of fear, extinction and change. All then becomes redeemed and
sacralised in Thomas’s poetry. It is clearly a religious theme and
ultimately an optimistic note that he strikes.
Though he ends on these
highly optimistic notes, one has to contrast these sentiments with the
tragic facts of the poet’s life. Dying in an alcoholic coma in New York
after a long and unsuccessful struggle with drink does not suggest that
Thomas himself had in any sense succeeded in his artistic quest, but that
in fact he had failed to overpower the terrible sense of failure, grief
and betrayal he expressed so vividly in his greatest poem: Poem in
October. The tragic life and the sincerely felt contents of that poem seem
to reveal the truth of the man and his life, even though he strived in
adulthood to reconcile the lost joy of his childhood dreams. One only
hopes and prays that his spirit is protected in the way he wrote of so
eloquently:
…you are shielded by
fern
And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep…
Under the prayer
wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
Lie in grace…
The leaping saga of
prayer!…the rooks
Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books
Of birds! [In Country Sleep]
Dylan’s simple grave in Laugharne
cemetery
The enduring popularity
of his work might be due to his honesty and broken nature which could
appeal to the broken, the abandoned and the less than perfect in the human
race and in us all. Maybe his work resonates not only with romantic and
sentimental notions but also with those who struggle and fail to transcend
the basic and unhappy facts of their lives. His life and poetry touched,
it seems, a certain chord in the hearts of many.