First Christmas Update

I unfortunately got sidetracked by a commercial project the past 30 days and lost time writing.  Given the choice I'd rather have been writing but probably could've used the break... so I'm going with it.  A week ago or so I spent rearranging my titles list into a possible content structure and finished Flagpole Days, Autumn Harvest, Solitude, my Swahili poem, added a Carmina, tried to rewrite Hiawatha failing to find the rhythm or tone I wanted, and rewrote Painted Rooms again.

Looking forward, I have at least a dozen or so roughed-out poems I'd like to finish including four or five that are interconnected to a common theme, along with two legendary tales (one's quite lengthy).  I had hoped to get all of them done before Christmas and to book-bind them for my folks and family but can see now it'll be somewhere between March and July by the time I finish these.

It also seems that my creativity period has dried up as I search for better ways to express myself.  I'm going to take some time off to read a novel or two, and finish some other projects I have to do; maybe pick at things as I go along just to keep my hand in the task of writing and not get too far away from it lest I come to a stop altogether.  It's been a long 12 months.

My goal was a hundred pieces and I'm at 58 with 10-12 to go, making it 68-70.  I also have six completed short stories and another six I need to rewrite.  And then I have one very lengthy sports story I wrote a year ago which needs to be re-written in a different voice, as well as a theology book I've started.  But each time I do I get some personal disaster which pulls me away from it (which seems highly coincidental to me, as it's been a several year pattern ongoing).

My theology book consists of two major sections of 10-12 chapters each.  The first section is a teaching section and the second section reviews each previous chapter integrating them with one another.  I'm tracing major thematic elements between the testaments and tying them together to help simplify reading the Christian bible from its vast theological complexity.  It's mainly for my son and daughter as a biblical theological premier (not systematics theology but biblical theology).  Once it's written I have a theological professor in mind whom I wish to contact who teaches and thinks in the style as my beloved friend, and now deceased professor, Carl B. Hoch.  With his input I hope to remove inaccuracies and update it generally from someone much closer to the material than I currently am.

Overall, I like writing short stories, but I prefer the poetry format better because of all the many varieties that it allows for personal expression, creating new words and ideas, tone, coloring, shading, everything!  Sooo, I think I made a good start even though I'm short by 30 pieces, but its still enough to judge where I'm at and see if its any good (my general impression is that they each need a rewrite to sharpen up their tone and focus and readability) and whether they might stand up to reader interest or not.  I haven't tried a Shakespearan sonnet and would like to try that someday just to see if I can.  But with Flagpole Days I did try a running sentence broken into 12 verse sections and am quite pleased with its lilt and composition.  The thought occurred as I was listening to Mozart's Requiem which gave me the idea of seeing how many rounds/voices could be put into a musical piece and still get one overarching theme... I think he got up to 14 competing rounds/voices making for one massive sound which is exquisite to the ear held in rapture.

At this point I should probably find some outside opinions and a publisher to see what's next, though generally I find this a distasteful task and would rather not.  My knowledge of critics tells me to beware overvaluing their opinions... John Keats is a good example of perserverance by following heart/pen while allowing the task itself to resolve any future readership.  Too, I've only ever have written for me and my kids, but from the several people who have read them I think I should share them as they are generally liked, though I care not about this but whether they might add thought and contemplation as I speak my soul.  I do worry about how personal they are, but I'm sure every poet does. They are myself unsheathed as I can allow that task, and a reader will either like them or not. I cannot be anything less than myself and can only speak of what I hear and wish to write against the streams of humanity that sings its own songs alongside mine own.

RE Slater

December 10, 2009

Finding My Voice

Since last October of 2008 I have written as much as I have had time to - mostly poetry but a few short stories as well.  Through this process I have written what has been most important to me from years past but have known that these pieces would be a "developmental record" of my progress as a new writer formally seeking his own words and styles and thoughts.  I have consciously known that it will take some time for me to develop my writing style and have recently come upon a phrase most apt in describing my progress - that of "finding my own voice" as a poet and as a writer.  Too much of my style feels like it is narrative (though it isn't) and I should like to step back from that as much as I can, and perhaps read some poets to catch their style and help me in mine own more quickly.  But on this point I still refuse to read other poets so as to keep my words and thoughts fresh and essentially mine own and not theirs.  But lacking formal writing classes these past poets and writers may be of help to me and so, I shall intend to briefly explore some styles which appeal to me and my style, without straying too long in anyone matter for I still wish for my material to be fresh and original.

It is now mid-October of 2009 and I continue to push out at least one to three documents a week along with my other duties and commitments as husband, father, dutiful son, son-in-law, consultant, community services and so on.  Thus, I have many half-written pieces which I wish to go back and complete as newer pieces continue to cross my mind and heart - all of which takes time away from my effort in finishing my original drafts.  And since I do not wish to lose these creative moments, I try to capture them while attempting to finish my rough drafts as well.  This is proving to be a hard process which can easily overwhelm me amid the vicissitudes of life.

I also have a theology paper I wish to write up as a book and have started this task as well (again).  But each time that I have made a major attack to get it properly going I seem to experience some little personally upheaval in my life.  The thought has crossed my mine that it is not unlike being prevented by the devil because of the severity of these roadblocks.  But, I do not think my words are so important that they haven't been said before and require any devil for prevention.  However, it has been a very odd and coincidental experience.

The book itself is to be written in 2-parts - the subject matter itself and then the integration of those subjects with one another.  This project will encompass the dozen-or-so major themes of the bible (sic, pertaining to "biblical theology" not "systematic theology"... this is a BIG difference) as they cross between the testaments and are integrated with one another.  This subject was a major part of my training in college and later seminary, and I should've pursued a PhD in biblical studies on this but did not.  I had neither the money nor the will to study any further, being somewhat exhausted after years of study and needing to work.  But my boy has shown an interest in biblical knowledge and perhaps my primer could be useful both to him, his friends and any young would-be Christian theologs wishing guidance in thematic matters.  At least that is my hope.

And so, I have been tragically stopped again and am writing of more practical experiences and observations from my personal life into my poems and trying to mix my training with my writings.  Perhaps these "lesser" poetic pieces will be of more aide in the long run to the general reading public than a large stuffy book filled with important "theological" subject matter.  At least that is my hope and one of my purposes in writing... to get God into the details of life, including my own, failings and all, in as many ways as I can be creative and "non-Christian" about it.

RE Slater
October 28, 2009

Sylvia Plath - The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

by Sylvia Plath




 

Sylvia Plath - Years

 

 

 

 

They enter as animals from the outer

Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

What I love is
The piston in motion . . .
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
There merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis . . .
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful God-bit in him.

Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves,
They are very still.
The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.

by Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath - The Colossus

 

 

 

"I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind.

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing."

by Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Anniversary! Journeys of a Would-Be Poet

Dolan's pub (Limerick, Ireland) - Irish Traditional Music Session

July 7, 2015

The Monahan Twig; John In The Mist

Apr 25, 2021

Aspirations of a Would-Be Poet

by R.E. Slater

October 6, 2009

Thanks to a local group of Celtic musicians I stumbled upon last evening I have been able to re-imagine and complete a new set of verses today to add to a growing portfolio; this time writing of a Brigadoon-like experience through the greater length of today. Now for some rest after a long day of writing. My mind and hands are tired. I will take the rest of the week to firm up the edges of this new poem and refine it to make it more clear and more readable.

Last week I finished a personal narrative I had started working on in April as an all-too-common experience in my childhood. It starts out as a simple story but gathers additional layers of meaning as I add more thoughts and details to what at first seems a plain homily. I intend to add it to a selection of other personal narratives which will flesh each other out and perhaps provide historical relevance for the times I am writing about.

Otherwise, I spent one day simply re-organizing my stories in relation to one another and setting them into slip-case books which I can manage should I need to re-arrange them again. I retitled each book and can better find each written verse in compendium to one another. While doing this I found several poems which needed a word here or there, an adverb, a verb, a pronoun in re-reading them in a fresh light gained by distance away from these pieces. Without these additions they felt awkward to me and/or incomplete to the theme(s) I had intended. Even though I keep telling myself to refrain from overmuch editing at this point - that they are what they are and should now be left alone.

I should also add that I started on a short story and added a poem to it which is now completed even though the story isn't. I've also added some pictures to this story to help give it a more readable symmetry in describing what I was seeing. I think many readers will be better able to visualize what I'm writing about through the usage of these photos. Because of this, I may wish to add personal photo stock selectively to several previously written stories to help enliven their pages as well. Further, there is a collection of poems I'm writing as one complete set which will be related to this newest story either directly or indirectly. To date it consists of 4-6 pages contained in 4 sections and may grow by a couple more pages into another narrative homily that I wish to relate since my childhood stood so vastly different from many my age.

Apart from personal narratives I have tried to write descriptively in various styles and, have another 30 or so poems roughed out in various stages of completion. Either as legends or tales, allegories or interpretive parables, sonnets or songs, etc. When these are completed I should like to try my hand at more irregular lyrical poetry and break away from the symmetry I've produced in the first year of my experience. Which, by the way, had begun in the month of October of last year... so this then is my first anniversary of writing. I've come a long way but have so much more to write about and hope to have the chance to complete what I've started and intend to finish.

Anyway, unlike my first set of 100 poems, I think I'll need to read some poets in order to be able to copy their styles since their styles are so foreign from my mindset. I may be a year away from actually beginning this task since I am not finished with my current set of tasks.

But afterwards when I am done I should then like to try something remarkably different and foreign to my mind and ear. I think Dylan Thomas may be a good example to me however I do not like his rambling verse which seems to lose its meaning over the distance of time. So, should I chose to go this route, I'll try not to ramble and try as best I can to keep it relevant despite the movement of culture, era and language away from my era. This will be hard to do I think but good poets can keep their relevancy for the most part. Since I do not expect readers to be historical anthropologists and culturally literate I will try to write about our common condition and not so specifically as to lose its translation. At least that is my hope.

I can tell that I have been rambling because I am so tired but I thought to put these several lists together to remind myself of my journey and possible future goals.  Forgive me and apologies and good night.

RE Slater

October 6, 2009

End Note (June 25, 2021). I have no idea what I was talking about when mentioning Dylan Thomas years ago! I love his poetry. Love it! - re slater 

My Writing Progress Thus Far

I would like to say at the onset that I reserve the right to ramble in these blogs and not have to think about how I'm going to say something. More simply, my blogs are not how I write but a form of personal communication about what I am doing. Thanks for allowing me this unstructured pleasure.

As earlier mentioned last month, I have been working through both recent and older poems I've written and am glad I have. Many were in serious need of editing after reviewing them. Maybe because I'm becoming less rusty at writing or because I can better critique my past writings. Whatever it is, I find that this has become a necessary task once a poem has been produced and has laid in the closet for awhile simmering and aging.

For example, the Celtic poem I had written changed again when I added 4 end-verses to it. It took a cool allegory and gave it wings so that it tied all previous verses back to itself and to each other. Thus giving to the poem more flexibility and freedom.

As another example, the poem "Looking Glass" was six months old and in great need of repair and updating. After which it seemed to be able to fairly "sing" on its own. If I had not looked at it then its flaws would not have been seen.

Thus, by allowing several months or more to go by I can better re-visualize what I was trying to say originally and can more immediately see the errors within that piece. That, and the fact that my writing skills are slowly improving so that I have more ideas that I can add with a larger vocabulary and greater personal familiarity with stylistic differences.

Overall my word-pictures seem to be getting better and I am becoming more comfortable mixing my metaphors and themes in new integrated ways that provide quicker apprehension and sensual binding of the reader to the main themes.

I'm also discovering that language is very fluid because of its symbolic nature and cultural context and that to say something simply may be impossible yet the most practical and important task to work on. Succinctness and conveyance have been my greatest struggles and best rewards.

And then there is the element of meter; I had one poem I had written several months ago set in the standard 4-line meter form. But however much I tried to make it work (upon re-edit) I found it simply wasn't working. And so I changed it around to 9-line meter which is irregular and offbeat in rhythm. That changed made the entire poem so much better I couldn't believe it! Who would've thought?! By allowing it to speak to me on its own terms instead of on my own terms, and by learning to listening to it rather than forcing it into something it was not for, made all the difference. Thus, I'm learning that each poem is unique and requires me to better listen to what it is trying to say.

RE Slater
September 16, 2009

Still writing

Today I wrote a poem of 8 lines in 10 stanzas and kept it as sparse as I could. Played around with the elements, tones and colors on this one.

A couple days ago I finished a Gaelic poem started 4 weeks ago. This was my first attempt at an allegory. I wanted it to feel like a Charlotte Bronte read on the moors. Coincidentally, it ended up thematically paralleling 2 interpretive parables written a couple months ago which are still being finalized. So I think I will group them together in their own section.

On my short list to do, I would like to work through and finalize 10 recent poems and 1 short story I've roughed out. Each unit is more-or-less completed but I like to go back and edit them after letting some time go by. They read differently to me when I do this as opposed to when I am actually writing them. For me, it helps to give an "outsider's perspective" to gauge whether they're interesting, readable, clumsy, awkward, and so on.

Several of these poems are lengthy and will be more demanding in their review. I have one that is especially long - about 12 pages; but it's a good narrative broken into 4 sections and will be fun to ramble through while thinking over the content I'm presenting.

Lastly, the past two months I've reworked several of my "finished" poems. Each of these were at least 6 months old and in need of updating. Why? It seems that the more I write, the more words and styles I have in my head which then helps me to better edit my past completed works. And since I'm so new to writing, it seems that for now I'll have to allow this habit. But over time I hope to limit myself from this type of "introspective" labor and simple let the poem pass or fail on its own merit once they are submitted to the "done" side of the ledger.

RE Slater

August 27, 2009

Dylan Thomas - In the White Giant's Thigh

In the White Giant's Thigh

by Dylan Thomas

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,

Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,

And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh

Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,

Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow

Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night's eternal, curving act

They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived

And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved

In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun

In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay

Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one

Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade

Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,

Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,

Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush

Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,

Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush

Rough as cows' tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk

Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk

And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house

And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,

The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse

Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb

Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,

All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,

Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,

Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king

Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead

And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,

And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round--

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives

Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground

They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)--

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro

Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust

As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low

And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.

They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,

Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead

And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved

Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed

Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved

Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed

Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these

Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill

Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

Dylan Thomas
http://www.dylanthomas.com/

* * * * * * *

Analysis of Poem

DASHING-DANNY-DILLINGER

eNotes

Dylan Thomas’ sensual poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh” is reminiscent of the work of poet D.H. Lawrence in that Thomas interestingly conflates the human body and nature in order to highlight the interconnected relationship between humans and the natural world. More specifically, Thomas does this through his potent imagery depicting barren women longing to conceive children and equating this imagery with their natural surroundings. Thomas defamiliarizes images of potency and fertility, and juxtaposes them with women “barren as boulders”:

“Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,

Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,

And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh

Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.”

Indeed, one image that is especially powerful is the image of the giant itself. According to Ralph Maude in [title], the giant is an important figure in the poem, and points to a historical basis that Thomas may have pulled from:

“The notes to collected poems… present a photograph of the ‘Mighty Giant of Cerne Abbas’, wielding a club (which could have supplied Thomas with ‘the cugelling [sic], hacked hill’) and an equally prominent male member” (158).

This phallic giant, thus, is an especially important figure in highlighting the desires of these barren women. Moreover, the giant is a life-giving force as well as a violent figure, with his phallic cudgel hacking the natural landscape.

The final line is provocative in that it pulls the poem together as a cohesive whole. Here, Thomas subverts the expectations of nature, and prominently displays the agency of humanity:

“Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill

Love forever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.”

The women are revolting against their nature; that is to say, they reject the fact that they are barren and still burn for a desire to conceive. Thomas’ brilliant use of the image of Guy Fawkes lends the end a revolutionary tone; the women rise against their nature.

Thomas’ poem examines the sensuality of the human form and its bond with nature, while also exalting the potency and violence, both literally and figuratively, of both.

---

I pulled my textual evidence from:

• Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
• Ralph Maud, Where Have the Old Words Got Me?: Explications of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems

* * * * * * *

© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Biography of Dylan Thomas

poetry foundation

1914–1953

Born in Swansea, Wales, Dylan Thomas is famous for his acutely lyrical and emotional poetry, as well as his turbulent personal life. The originality of his work makes categorization difficult. In his life he avoided becoming involved with literary groups or movements, and unlike other prominent writers of the 1930s—such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for example—he had little use for socialistic ideas in his art. Thomas can be seen as an extension into the 20th century of the general movement called Romanticism, particularly in its emphasis on imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form. Considered to be one of the greatest Welsh poets of all time, Thomas is largely known for his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery in his poems.

Thomas began writing poetry as a child, and was publishing by his teens. His notebooks from 1930 and 1934, when he was 16 to 20 years old, reveal the young poet’s struggle with a number of personal crises. In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg described them as “related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful problems of finding one’s identity.” Revised versions of some of the notebooks’ poems became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems. Published in December 1934, it received little notice at first, but by the following spring some influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably.

Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with words—with their sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings. This richness of meaning, an often illogical and revolutionary syntax, and catalogues of cosmic and sexual imagery render Thomas’s early poetry original and difficult. In a letter to Richard Church, Thomas commented on what he considered some of his own excesses: “Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence.” Similarly, in a letter to Glyn Jones, he wrote: “My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.”

The Eighteen Poems reveal some of Thomas’s key themes, which he was to return to later in his career: the unity of time, the similarity between creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living things. This last theme was identified by Elder Olson in The Poetry of Dylan Thomas as part of the tradition of the microcosm-macrocosm: “He analogizes the anatomy of man to the structure of the universe … and sees the human microcosm as an image of the macrocosm, and conversely.”

During the almost two years between the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934 and Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Thomas moved back and forth between London and Wales a great deal. In London he met influential people in the literary world, including Vernon Watkins, an older man whose sedate lifestyle contrasted markedly with Thomas’s. Watkins became a frequent source of money for the continually destitute Thomas. During this period Thomas’s drinking became a serious problem, and his friends would sometimes take him off to out-of-the-way places in Cornwall and Ireland to remove him from temptation with the hope that he would do more writing.

Thomas’s second volume of poetry, Twenty-five Poems, was published in September 1936. Most of the poems were revised from the notebooks; Constantine FitzGibbon reported in The Life of Dylan Thomas that “only six entirely new poems, that is to say poems written in the year and a half between the publication of [Eighteen Poems] and the despatch of the second volume to the printers, are to be found in that volume.” In his Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris noted that “the reviews were generally favourable, but with one exception they were not as enthusiastic as they were for [Eighteen Poems].” This exception, however, almost assured the volume’s commercial success; it was a laudatory review by Dame Edith Sitwell in the Sunday Times. As cited by Ferris, the review proclaimed: “The work of this very young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally. … I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement.”

The volume includes a significant sonnet sequence of 10 poems, “Altarwise by owl-light,” written in Ireland the year before publication. In these sonnets Thomas moved from the pre-Christian primitivism of most of the Eighteen Poems to a Christian mythology based upon love. While much of the attention given to Twenty-five Poems has been focused on the religious sonnets, the volume as a whole contains indications of a shift in emphasis in Thomas’s writing. Richard Morton noted in An Outline of the Works of Dylan Thomas that the poems of this volume are “concerned with the relationship between the poet and his environment,” particularly the natural environment. “In Twenty-five Poems, we can see the beginnings of the pastoral mode which reaches its fulfillment in the great lyrics of Thomas’s last poems.” And, as Korg said, “at least three of the poems in the second volume are about the poet’s reactions to other people, themes of an entirely different class from those of [Eighteen Poems]; and these three anticipate [Thomas’s] turning outward in his later poems toward such subjects as his aunt’s funeral, the landscape, and his relations with his wife and children.”

Some of the best poems in the book are rather straightforward pieces—”This bread break,” “The hand that signed the paper,” “And death shall have no dominion”—but others, such as “I, in my intricate image,” are as involved and abstruse as the poems of the earlier volume. Derek Stanford noted that still “there are traces of doubt, questioning, and despair in many of these pieces.” Thomas, however, chose to place the optimistic “And death shall have no dominion” at the end of the volume. This poem has always been one of Thomas’s most popular works, perhaps because, as Clark Emery noted, it was “published in a time when notes of affirmation—philosophical, political, or otherwise—did not resound among intelligent liberal humanists, [and thus] it answered an emotional need. … It affirmed without sentimentalizing; it expressed a faith without theologizing.”

The “Altarwise by owl-light” poems as well as “And death shall have no dominion” raise questions concerning the extent to which Dylan Thomas can be called a religious writer. In an essay for A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, W.S. Merwin was one of the first to deal with this issue; he found Thomas to be a religious writer because he was a “celebrator in the ritual sense: a maker and performer of a rite … . That which he celebrates is creation, and more particularly the human condition.” However, the positions on this issue can be—and have been—as various as the definitions of what constitutes a religious outlook. At one end of the scale, critics do not dispute that Thomas used religious imagery in his poetry; at the other end, critics generally agree that, at least during certain periods of his creative life, Thomas’s vision was not that of any orthodox religious system. The range of interpretations was summarized by R.B. Kershner Jr., in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics: “He has been called a pagan, a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love, Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself.”

On July 11, 1937, Thomas married dancer Caitlin Macnamara; they were penniless and lacked the blessings of their parents. After spending some time with each of their reluctant families, they moved to a borrowed house in Laugharne, Wales. This fishing village became their permanent address, though they lived in many temporary dwellings in England and Wales through the war years and after, until Thomas’s death in 1953. The borrowing of houses and money became recurring events in their married life together. Korg associated these external circumstances in the poet’s life with his artistic development: “Thomas’s time of settling in Laugharne coincides roughly with the period when his poetry began to turn outward; his love for Caitlin, the birth of his first child, Llewellyn, responses to the Welsh countryside and its people, and ultimately events of the war began to enter his poetry as visible subjects.”

Thomas’s third book, The Map of Love, appeared in August 1939, a month before war officially broke out in Europe. It comprised a strange union of 16 poems and seven stories, the stories having been previously published in periodicals. The volume was a commercial failure, perhaps because of the war. Ferris reported that “the book was respectfully and sometimes warmly reviewed, with a few dissenters”; yet these works of Thomas’s middle period were his least successful.

In sharp contrast to the stories in The Map of Love are those published the following year, 1940, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas claimed in a letter to Vernon Watkins that he “kept the flippant title for—as the publishers advise—money-making reasons.” These Thomas stories are different from the earlier ones in their particularity of character and place, their straightforward plot lines, and their relevance to Thomas’s childhood in Wales. Thomas wrote to Watkins in August 1939: “I’ve been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semi-autobiographical, to be finished by Christmas.” Reviews of the book were mixed, and it didn’t sell well at the time, though it later became enormously popular.

Thomas avoided service in World War II because of medical problems; he had also considered filing for conscientious objector status. He was able to secure employment during the war years writing documentary scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While he considered it hack work, it provided the first regular income since his newspaper days and also allowed him to spend a good deal of time in London pubs. This pragmatic writing was the beginning of a career that Thomas pursued until his death; it did not, however, replace what he considered his more important work, the writing of poems. In addition to the documentaries, he wrote radio scripts and eventually screenplays for feature films. Though his income from these activities was moderate, it did not allow him relief from debt or borrowing.

In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never completed, though its first section was subsequently published. It is essentially the time-honored story of a country boy in the big city. Annis Pratt commented that Thomas intended the story to be “a series of ‘adventures’ in which the hero’s ‘skins’ would be stripped off one by one like a snake’s until he was left in a kind of quintessential nakedness to face the world.”

Thomas’s work next saw publication in a 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such works as “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “The Hunchback in the Park,” and “Fern Hill.” Deaths and Entrances was an instant success. Ferris noted that 3000 sold in the first month after its publication and that the publisher, Dent, ordered a reprint of the same number.

H. Jones, in his Dylan Thomas, declared the volume to be the core of Thomas’s achievement. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, while still provoking arguments about interpretation, are less compressed and less obscure than the earlier works. Some, like “Fern Hill,” illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of time. As Jacob Korg said of these poems, “the figures and landscapes have a new solidity, a new self-sufficiency, and the dialectic vision no longer penetrates them as though they were no more than windows opening on a timeless universe.”

While these later poems in Deaths and Entrances are less compressed than the earlier ones, they reveal no less verbal facility or less concern for what is generally called poetic style. Thomas was always a highly individual stylist. Sound was as important as sense in his poems—some would even say more important. He made ample use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, and approximate rhyme. In The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, William T. Moynihan describes his rhythm as “accentual syllabic”: “its stress pattern generally sounds as though it is iambic, but this very justifiable assumption cannot always be borne out by traditional scansion. Thomas may, in fact, have depended upon an iambic expectancy, as he varied his rhythms beyond any customary iambic formulation and then—by completely unprecedented innovations—created his own rhythm, which is very close to iambic.”

By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Kershner asserted that Thomas “became the wild man from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure with racial access to roots of experience which more civilized Londoners lacked.” His drinking, his democratic tendencies, and the frank sexual imagery of his poetry made him the focal point of an ill-defined artistic rebellion.

In 1949 Thomas and his family moved to the Boat House of Laugharne, Wales, a house provided for them by one of Thomas’s benefactors, Margaret Taylor. For the last four years of his life he moved between this dwelling and the United States, where he went on four separate tours to read his poetry and receive the adulation of the American public. The often-sordid accounts of these tours are provided in John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America. Thomas’s last separate volume of poetry before the Collected Poems, 1934-1952 was Country Sleep, published by New Directions in the United States in 1952. As originally published, this book contained six of the poet’s most accomplished works: “Over Sir John’s Hill,” “Poem on his Birthday,” “Do not go gentle into that good night,” “Lament,” “In the white giant’s thigh,” and “In country sleep.” Concerning this volume, Rushworth M. Kidder commented in Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit that “the fact of physical death seems to present itself to the poet as something more than distant event. … These poems come to terms with death through a form of worship: not propitiatory worship of Death as deity, but worship of a higher Deity by whose power all things, including death, are controlled.”

Several of Thomas’s film scripts have been published, including The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesa. Neither of these was produced, but they gave Thomas the opportunity to develop his dramatic skills. These skills culminated in his radio play, Under Milk Wood, written over a long period of time and frantically revised in America during the last months of his life. The play grew out of the story “Quite Early One Morning,” which was broadcast by the BBC in 1945. Under Milk Wood is set in a small Welsh town called Llareggub and covers one day in the lives of its provincial characters. Raymond Williams, in an essay for Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, said that Under Milk Wood is “the retained extravagance of an adolescent’s imaginings. Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is not the least of its dramatic virtues.” Thomas read the play as a solo performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953; the first group reading was on May 14. The following November, Dylan Thomas died in New York of ailments complicated by alcohol and drug abuse.

Dylan Thomas - And Death Shall Have No Dominion

George Bellows, The Gulls, Monhegan Island, 1911

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and
the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they
shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer
through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.


- Dylan Thomas
April 1933

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

For more information on this poem - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_death_shall_have_no_dominion

Amazon Link

BIOGRAPHY

https://americanliterature.com/author/dylan-thomas

Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953) was a Welsh poet best known for Do not go gentle into that good night and radio broadcasts reciting A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (a mischievous nod to fellow Irishman, James Joyce).

Thomas began publishing as a teenager after quitting school at sixteen and briefly working as a journalist. In 1934, he first received literary acclaim for his poem, Light breaks where no sun shines, published in his collection, 18 Poems. His poetic style was greatly influence by the works of William Blake.
[Dylan sketch to the right is by Jessica Dismorr, 1935.]

Making a living as a writer proved difficult, so Thomas augmented his work as a popular radio broadcaster for the BBC, covering the literary scene. He went to America four times in the 1950s, recording a vinyl record to further popularize his iconic work, A Child's Christmas in Wales. Thomas fell into a coma during his last trip to New York City, where he died. His body was returned to his native Wales.

Thomas is considered one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. We are pleased to feature his limited works available in the public domain.

And death shall have no dominion

by MWChocolate on Mar 5, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niY3j_xOzGc

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Welsh Poet, Dylan Thomas

Review - Dylan Marlais Thomas

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

http://davidkftam.tripod.com/HighSchool/English/DylanThomas.txt

Written by David Tam

davidkftam@netscape.net Copyright 1999


Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, Glamorganshire, Wales.He married Caitlin Macnamara and had two sons and a daughter.He was a poet, prose writer, reporter, reviewer, scriptwriter, radio commentator, and actor.He gave public poetry readings on the BBC radio and in lecture tours in the United States.Because of a drinking problem, he died of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, in New York City.

Dylan Thomas is one of the renowned authors of the twentieth century.He believed writing was a process of self-discovery.This was reflected in his writings where he explored his own existence and communicated his discoveries with others.His writing remained distinctly personal, using metaphorical language, sensuous imagery, and psychological detail.Though it remained personal, he focused on universal concerns such as birth, death, love, and religion.His works included: "Eighteen Poems" - 1934, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" - 1940, "Fern Hill" - 1946, and "Adventures in the Skin Trade" - 1955, after his death.His Welsh background attributed to his attention to sound and rhythm.Up until 1939, he was concerned with introspective, obsessive, sexual, and religious feelings.He argued rhetorically with himself about sex, death, sin, redemption, natural processes, and creation and decay.

Poetic and literary devices that were used included near-rhyme (consonance), pun, paradox, repetition, alliteration, inversion, metaphors, and contrast. The poet used "foot" and "not" at the end of lines 5 and 8 as a near-rhyme. It is one of the more prominent devices because it is used throughout the poem. A pun was used on the word "windily" in line 12 to mean both the movement of the sea and the shroud in which the dead are buried at sea. A paradox could be found in line 16 where the poet wrote "unicorn evils them through;". The unicorn is a symbol of Christ and has no association with evils.The most obvious repetition was that of the line, "And death shall have no dominion" because it was present at the beginning and ending of each stanza.The repetition of the word "though" was present in the first stanza. This was the most prominent device that the poet used.It effectively re-enforced the ideas of the poem and provided a secure poetic structure.Alliteration could be found in a few places, such as line 8, "Though lovers be lost love shall not."Inversion was present in line 4, "...bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone." A metaphor was used in line 15 to compare faith with a wooden stick, "Faith in their hands shall snap in two." Contrast was evident in lines 6 to 8, "Though they go mad, they shall be sane,"and could also be classified as a paradox.

Images of the sea, torture, and biblical events were formed from the reading of this poem.Sea imagery was created in the first stanza by the the idea that the dead sank into the sea and rose again.In the second stanza, "windings of the sea" was mentioned.The third stanza the sound of gulls and the seashore maintained this imagery.Images of suffering were found in the second stanza in lines 13 and 14."Twisting on racks when sinews give way, strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break." These lines brought out the image of the body and muscles in pain and of the midevil Catherine Wheel. Biblical imagery was created by the description of the rise of dead bodies from the sea (Revelation 20:13), and the use of the paradox of "unicorn evils".

The idea of this poem was that although people die, they will eventually be redeemed at the end of time.It supported the prophesies of the bible, the Book of Revelations.We should not let the fear of death control our lives. We have nothing to fear because at the end, God will redeem those who were good.Each stanza of the poem developed support for expansion of the theme. The first stanza focused on mankind, the second focused more on God and suffering, and the third focused on nature.The poet was making a bold statement about life and the prophesies.

The repetition of "And death shall have no dominion" re-enforced the theme of this poem.The message was delivered very strongly and even used as the title.By repeating this line at the beginning and end of each stanza, a nicely structured poem developed.The use of near-rhyme made the poem enjoyable to read.

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Dylan Thomas Companion

by Golden Essays

http://goldenessays.com/free_essays/3/poetry/dylan-thomas-companion.shtml

[When] Auden and Christopher Isherwood set sail for the United States, the so-called 'All the fun' age ended. Auden's generation of poets' expectations came to nothing after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and they, disillusioned, left the European continent for good.

In the late 1930s the school of Surrealism reached England, and Dylan Thomas was one of the few British authors of the time who were followers of this new trend in the arts. He shared the Surrealist interest in the great abstracts of Love and Death, and composed most of his work according to the rules of Surrealism.

His first two volumes, Eighteen Poems and Twenty-five Poems were published in the middle of the decade and of this short surrealistic era as well. Dylan Thomas was declared the Shelley of the 20th century as his poems were the perfect examples of 'new-romanticism' with their 'violent natural imagery, sexual and Christian symbolism and emotional subject matter expressed in a singing rhythmical verse' (Under Siege - Robert Hewison, 1977.).

The aim of 'new-romanticism' was setting poets free from W.H. Auden's demand for 'the strict and adult pen'. In 1933 Dylan Thomas sent two of his poems to London, one of which was an earlier version of his famous poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. It was dated April 1933 in Thomas's notebook and was published for the first time in the 18 May 1933 issue of the New English Weekly.

After its first publication, the poem was altered several times and got its final form in Twenty-five Poems, even though Thomas was not particularly proud of this work of his, and was not sure about publishing it for a second time. Immediately in its title, the poem has a reference to the New Testament, which was one of Dylan Thomas's main sources of metaphor. The title (and the refrain of the poem as well):

'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' has been taken from the King James Version of the Scriptures, which, with its flowing language and prose rhythm, has had profound influence on the literature of the past 300 years. 'Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves dead to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' Romans 6:9-11

There is another line in the poem,

'Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;' which resembles a line from the Scripture: 'And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.' Revelation 20:13

The assertive optimism of the poem can also be brought into connection with the traditions of evangelical hymns, which is best reflected in the lines;

'Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not, And death shall have no dominion.'

It seems, that it is this assertive optimism Dylan Thomas is trying to impose on the reader, and, perhaps on himself as well in this poem, maybe in order to keep his sanity. Being one of the least obscure of Dylan Thomas's poetry, it was evident, that of his earlier woks, beside Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, And Death Shall Have No Dominion would catch public imagination quite easily. The thing in this poem that drew the attention of the everyman was the constancy of hope coming from the notion that everything is cyclical: though the individuals perish, 'they shall rise again', and, though particular loves are lost, love itself continues.

The tone of this poem is quite sermon-like, and its atmosphere is rather Christian; yet, the central theme in it is not religion, nor the religious beliefs concerning death but the relationship between man and nature. Thomas claims in the second stanza that deliverance from death is not through religious faith as

'Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through;' but he declares man's unity with nature at death: 'Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon.'

The frame of the poem is the title, the first line, the refrain from the Bible, repetitive and insistent at the beginning and the end of each stanza. Between these lines the poem is full of vivid imagery, of which probably the most significant can be found in the above-mentioned line ('With the man in the wind and the west moon;'). Here Dylan Thomas uses one of his most characteristic devices: the transferred epithet, to create a new image form 'the man in the moon and the west wind'.

Beside his sophisticated use of poetic devices, Thomas's poems are full of lively images, such as

'When their bones are picked clear and clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot;', or 'Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;'

which sometimes seem to be a completely meaningless confusion of images. This is one characteristic of Surrealist poetry. In the case of And Death Shall Have No Dominion this 'confusion' is counterbalanced with the repetition, therefore the meaning, the feeling of the poem is homogeneous, even despite the rather nothing-to-do-with-each-other images.

The significance of this poem lies in its being simple and subtle at the same time.

Bibliography

1. A Dylan Thomas Companion - John Ackerman, 1991 2. All references to the Bible from the Bible Gateway (www.gospelcom.net) 3. Dylan Thomas - Paul Ferris, 1977 4. The Ironic Harvest - Geoffrey Thurley, 1974 5. The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, 1611 6. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7. The Oxford Illustrated History English Literature - ed. Pat Rogers, 1987 8. The Penguin History of Literature, The Twentieth Century - ed. Martin Dodsworth, 1994 9. Under Siege (Literary Life in London 1939-1945) - Robert Hewison, 1977