Dylan Thomas - Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

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
1951

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_not_go_gentle_into_that_good_night

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)

Come Gentle Night - Abel Korzeniowski

Dylan Thomas - All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

Coldplay - O (Fly On) - Extended

February 1, 2016

All That I Owe The Fellows Of The Grave

by Dylan Thomas

All that I owe the fellows of the grave

And all the dead bequeathed from pale estates
Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,
Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots.
O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,
My fathers' loves that pull upon my nerves,
My sisters tears that sing upon my head
My brothers' blood that salts my open wounds

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop,
My fallen filled, that had the hint of death,
Heir to the telling senses that alone
Acquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,
I round this heritage as rounds the sun
His winy sky, and , as the candles moon,
Cast light upon my weather. I am heir
To women who have twisted their last smile,
To children who were suckled on a plague,
To young adorers dying on a kiss.
All such disease I doctor in my blood,
And all such love's a shrub sown in the breath.

Then look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortune
And browse upon the postures of the dead;
All night and day I eye the ragged globe
Through periscopes rightsighted from the grave;
All night and day I wander in these same
Wax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.
Then look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,
And look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.


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

Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer 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", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".

Early Life

Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.

His father, David John ('DJ') Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. 'DJ' was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.

Dylan is pronounced 'd?lan in Welsh, and in the early part of his career some announcers introduced him using this pronunciation. However, Thomas himself favoured the anglicised pronunciation /'d?l?n/. A review of a biography by Andrew Lycett (2004) notes: "Florence, the boy’s mother, had her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the family used, is “Dullan,” and she worried that other children would tease him by calling him “dull one.” Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the way he himself pronounced it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him in honour of his great-uncle, Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.

His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work, notably many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. He described his experience there in Quite Early One Morning:

Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.

In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School, in the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these first years. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few more years.

Thomas spent his time visiting the cinema in the Uplands, walking along Swansea Bay, visiting a theatre where he used to perform, and frequenting Swansea's pubs. He especially patronised those in the Mumbles area such the Antelope Hotel and the Mermaid Hotel. A short walk from the local newspaper where he worked was the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, central Swansea. At the café he met with various artist contemporaries, such as his good friend the poet Vernon Watkins. These writers, musicians and artists became known as 'The Kardomah Gang'. In 1932, Thomas embarked on what would be one of his various visits to London.

In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that suffered badly; the rows of shops, including the 'Kardomah Café', were destroyed. Thomas later wrote about this in his radio play Return Journey Home, in which he describes the café as being "razed to the snow". Return Journey Home was first broadcast on 15 June 1947, having been written soon after the bombing raids. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". The Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland Street, not far from the original location.

This text is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Dylan Thomas - All All and All

Coldplay - Gravity (Video HD)

May 13, 2017

All All and All

by Dylan Thomas

I All all and all the dry worlds lever, Stage of the ice, the solid ocean, All from the oil, the pound of lava. City of spring, the governed flower, Turns in the earth that turns the ashen Towns around on a wheel of fire. How now my flesh, my naked fellow, Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow, Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow. All all and all, the corpse's lover, Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow, All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever. II Fear not the waking world, my mortal, Fear not the flat, synthetic blood, Nor the heart in the ribbing metal. Fear not the tread, the seeded milling, The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade, Nor the flint in the lover's mauling. Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven, Know now the flesh's lock and vice, And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver. Know, O my bone, the jointed lever, Fear not the screws that turn the voice, And the face to the driven lover. III All all and all the dry worlds couple, Ghost with her ghost, contagious man With the womb of his shapeless people. All that shapes from the caul and suckle, Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine, Square in these worlds the mortal circle. Flower, flower the people's fusion, O light in zenith, the coupled bud, And the flame in the flesh's vision. Out of the sea, the drive of oil, Socket and grave, the brassy blood, Flower, flower, all all and all. Dylan Thomas http://www.dylanthomas.com/

Dylan Thomas' poetry hut

Dylan Thomas

poets.org

1914–1953

read poems by this poet

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar Allan Poe. 

Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.

In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books. 

Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.

Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937. 

About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality."

In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems.

Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).

In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters," and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).

In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.

Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. 

Dylan Thomas at work

Dylan Thomas - A Winter's Tale

A Winter's Tale

by Dylan Thomas

It is a winter's tale

That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,
He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers
And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
His naked need struck him howling and bowed
Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung
Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,
And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
In the always desiring centre of the white
Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,
By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised
Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year
When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-
Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,
The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes
On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.


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

Queen - A Winter's Tale (Official Video)

Oct 16, 2013

Dylan Thomas with his mother, wife and three children

Dylan Thomas: “After 39 years, this is all I’ve done.”

Dylan Thomas - A Grief Ago

Freddie Mercury's OPERA Voice!

Apr 11, 2018

A Grief Ago

by Dylan Thomas

A grief ago,

She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Hell wind and sea,
A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
Rose maid and male,
Or, master venus, through the paddler's bowl
Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,
A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
Shot through the leaf,
Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
Road east to plague,
The horn and ball of water on the frog
Housed in the side.

And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going.

Who then is she,
She holding me? The people's sea drives on her,
Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before dark.

The night is near,
A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
I tell her this: before the suncock cast
Her bone to fire,
Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.


Dylan Thomas
from Twenty-Five Poems, pub. 1936
http://www.dylanthomas.com/

Dylan Thomas - Elegy

Dylan Thomas

Departures (Soundtrack) - 18 Okuribito (Memory)

January 13, 2010

Elergy

by Dylan Thomas

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.

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

Departures (Soundtrack) - 19 Okuribito (Ending)

January 13, 2010

Dylan Thomas - Author's Prologue

Author's Prologue, Part I

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue, Part II

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue, Part III:

Poem on Dylan Thomas' Birthday

March 26, 2020

Author's Prologue

by Dylan Thomas

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
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,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,

The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spining man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooning the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite

(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On atounged puffball)
But animals thick as theives
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms ina throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.

Dylan Thomas

http://www.dylanthomas.com/

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/

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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.

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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

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© 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.