"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Fern Hill (1945) is a poem by Dylan Thomas, first published in the October, 1945, Horizon magazine, with its first book publication as the last poem in Deaths and Entrances. The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie's farm:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoral metaphors and allusion to scenes from the Garden of Eden. By the end, the poet's older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
The poem uses internalhalf rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the impact of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but "his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence, or cynghanedd, a prescribed feature of Welsh versification".[2]
The house Fernhill is just outside Llangain in Carmarthenshire. Thomas had extended stays here in the 1920s with his aunt Annie and her husband, Jim Jones. His holidays here have been recalled in interviews with his schoolboy friends, and both the house and the Thomas family network in the area are detailed in the same book.[3]
Perhaps the most startling thing about Dylan Thomas' verse is his brilliantly orginal use of metaphors. In this he shares much with the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, who too delighted in finding resemblances between dissimilar objects, and in using those resemblances to illuminate and enrich their poetry. But whereas Donne and his ilk constructed elaborate and detailed analogies (for instance, comparing two lovers to the fixed arms of a compass), Thomas' particular mastery lies in the use of the 'compressed metaphor' - in wonderfully evocative phrases like 'windfall light', 'holy streams','fire green as grass', 'fields of praise' and 'lamb white days' (all of which are from today's poem), he juxtaposes disparate words into combinations which seem utterly _right_. Indeed, these phrases, with their wealth of connotation and descriptive detail, seem so natural that you don't even notice them on a first reading... it's only later that they strike you, and make you think.
As a brief aside, do note the language of the poem; specifically, note the repetition of the words 'green', 'golden' and 'white'. It's no accident that these are the colours of Spring; although Thomas uses the adjectives in unfamiliar contexts ('fire green as grass'), the overall atmospeheric effect is brilliant.
Technical details [1] apart, what I love about 'Fern Hill' is the sheer joy that rings through every word. Thomas glories in life, in the wonder and beauty and mystery of each living day; in his own words (in the introduction to the Collected Poems (1952)) he wrote 'for the love of Man and in praise of God'. This, despite his knowledge of the inevitability of death. It's the same philosophy which informs much of his work [2], but it's kept from sounding trite by the quality of his verse - phrases such as 'holy streams' and 'fields of praise' resonate with an almost religious awe in the face of the glory and majesty of life. Utterly beautiful.
Thomas.
[1] I would mention the rhyme scheme (yes, there is one; see if you can spot it) and the metre (syllabics) in greater detail, but I thought I'd leave that for another day (and another poem). Be patiently. [2] Including the justly-celebrated villanelle 'Do not go gentle into that good night', Minstrels Poem #38 - exactly a hundred poems ago :-).
George Macbeth has this to say about Thomas (and his comments are particularly apt in light of today's poem):
"Whether or not he 'died of drink', whether or not he was unusually debauched, whether he was a great saint or a great sinner, are not questions of much importance for the assessment of his verse. With the exception of the radio play 'Under Milk Wood', almost all of Thomas' creative energy went into his poetry. He wrote very slowly, often at the rate of only one line a day after hours of hard, sober work...
... Apart from his painstaking craftsmanship, so at odds with the popular legend of his life, Dylan Thomas' poetry is perhaps specially interesting for its optimism. No other poet writing in English since Yeats has responded to life with such a consistently affirmative and positive note. This may in part account for his continuing appeal to readers who don't normally pay much attention to poetry."
[Trivia]
The name Dylan comes from the Mabinogion, a collection of 11 mediaeval Welsh tales. The word means "sea". In the tale Math, the son of Mathonwy, challenges Aranrhod, his niece who claims to be a virgin, to step over his magic wand.
"Aranrhod stepped over the wand, and with that step she dropped a sturdy boy with thick yellow hair; the boy gave a loud cry, and with that cry she made her way for the door....."Well said Math, 'I will arrange for the baptism of this one......and I will call him Dylan." The boy was baptised, whereupon he immediately made for the sea, and when he came to the sea he took on its nature and swam as well as the best fish. He was called Dylan (:sea) son of Ton (:wave), for no wave ever broke beneath him"
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer[1][2] who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art"[3] and the rhapsodic lyricism of "Fern Hill' ".
Author and broadcaster Nigel Williams examines the work and the legend of one of the most famous poets of the 20th century, Dylan Thomas.
Born in 1914, Dylan Thomas was an unruly and undisciplined child who was interested only in English at school and was determined from childhood to become a poet. Little did he know that he would eventually become world-renowned.
Cited by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Van Morrison and other cultural icons as a profound influence, Thomas occupies the space more readily associated with the likes of James Dean and Jack Kerouac, both of whom he preceded.
But it was his death that truly made him a legend. Did Dylan Thomas really die after drinking 18 straight whiskies at The White Horse in New York? Was he a genius or a sponging, womanising drunk?
The film unravels the myth by tracing the poet's biography backwards, from his much written about, much lied about death to the heart of the Dylan Thomas story and his beginnings in a quiet street in suburban Swansea. (2003)
Dylan Thomas - Film Biography
The Edge of Love [Trailer]
Arena - Dylan Thomas From Grave to Cradle (BBC 2003) - Part 1
Arena - Dylan Thomas From Grave to Cradle (BBC 2003) - Part 2
Arena - Dylan Thomas From Grave to Cradle (BBC 2003) - Part 3
[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
Dylan Marlais Thomas is perhaps Wales' best-known writer. A season marking the centenary of Thomas’ birth is to be unveiled today by BBC Cymru Wales.
Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive. As a boy, Dylan knew the western suburbs of Swansea, particularly nearby Cwmdonkin Park. Dylan attended Swansea Grammar School, where his father had been teaching for two decades. His first poem was published in the school magazine.
A submission to a BBC poetry competition resulted in it being read on air. In 1934 he moved to London where his first poetry collection, 18 Poems, was praised by a number of established poets. In the 1940s, Dylan became a regular presence on the BBC writing scripts, reading poetry and short stories, as well as acting.
Dylan married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937. Their first child, Llewelyn, was born the following year. They had two more children – a daughter, Aeronwy and a son, Colm. The family settled in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, in 1949. Dylan and Caitlin had a volatile marriage which was exacerbated by heavy drinking on both sides.
The main themes of Dylan Thomas' poetry were nostalgia, life, death, and lost innocence. He wrote often about his past as a boy or as a young man. Wales and the landscapes and people became an integral part of his writing. Pictured here is his writing shed in Laugharne.
Dylan Thomas first travelled to America in 1950 to earn money through a tour. He had harboured desires to travel there since the 1930s, but World War Two prevented him. His poems were being published there, and he had a considerable stateside following. He also became known for his excessive drinking as well as his poetry.
This undated image of a letter to BBC producer Douglas Cleverdon was written in 1953 - eight months before Dylan’s death. It details progress on one of his most famous works, Under Milk Wood.
On a final trip to New York in 1953, Dylan began drinking heavily and was unable to stop vomiting during a rehearsal of Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas died at noon on Monday 9 November 1953. The post mortem gave the primary cause of death as pneumonia, with pressure on the brain and a fatty liver given as contributing factors. He is buried at St Martin's Church in Laugharne.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright 1939, 1946 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1957)
