The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas Read online

  THE

  COLLECTED

  POEMS OF

  DYLAN

  THOMAS

  ORIGINAL EDITION

  Introduction By Paul Muldoon

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  CONTENTS

  Dylan and Delayment

  by Paul Muldoon

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  I see the boys of summer

  When once the twilight locks no longer

  A process in the weather of the heart

  Before I knocked

  The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

  My hero bares his nerves

  Where once the waters of your face

  If I were tickled by the rub of love

  Our eunuch dreams

  Especially when the October wind

  When, like a running grave

  From love’s first fever to her plague

  In the beginning

  Light breaks where no sun shines

  I fellowed sleep

  I dreamed my genesis

  My world is pyramid

  All all and all the dry worlds lever

  I, in my intricate image

  This bread I break

  Incarnate devil

  Today, this insect

  The seed-at-zero

  Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

  Here in this spring

  Do you not father me

  Out of the sighs

  Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month

  Was there a time

  Now

  Why east wind chills

  A grief ago

  Ears in the turrets hear

  How soon the servant sun

  Foster the light

  The hand that signed the paper

  Should lanterns shine

  I have longed to move away

  Find meat on bones

  Grief thief of time

  And death shall have no dominion

  Then was my neophyte

  Altarwise by owl-light

  Because the pleasure-bird whistles

  I make this in a warring absence

  When all my five and country senses see

  We lying by seasand

  It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell

  O make me a mask

  The spire cranes

  After the funeral

  Once it was the colour of saying

  Not from this anger

  How shall my animal

  The tombstone told when she died

  On no work of words

  A saint about to fall

  ‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’

  Twenty-four years

  The conversation of prayers

  A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

  Poem in October

  This side of the truth

  To Others than You

  Love in the Asylum

  Unluckily for a death

  The hunchback in the park

  Into her lying down head

  Do not go gentle into that good night

  Deaths and Entrances

  A Winter’s Tale

  On a Wedding Anniversary

  There was a saviour

  On the Marriage of a Virgin

  In my craft or sullen art

  Ceremony After a Fire Raid

  Once below a time

  When I woke

  Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred

  Lie still, sleep becalmed

  Vision and Prayer

  Ballad of the Long-legged Bait

  Holy Spring

  Fern Hill

  In Country Sleep

  Over Sir John’s hill

  Poem on His Birthday

  Lament

  In the White Giant’s Thigh

  TWO UNFINISHED POEMS:

  Elegy

  Vernon Watkins’s note

  In Country Heaven

  Daniel Jones’s note

  A Chronology

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  to

  Caitlin

  DYLAN AND DELAYMENT

  Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.

  Oddly, one of the main obstacles to readers immediately reaching the speed of sound, maybe even of light, is Dylan Thomas’s own tabloidian history. Like some of his poems, Dylan Thomas had a habit of putting some things off, be it getting a job or paying the rent. It was, however, his not postponing an eighteenth straight whiskey in the White Horse Tavern that would lead to his death on November 9, 1953 at the age of 39. Paradoxically, it confirmed his already legendary status as the artist as old dog, the poet as shaman-bard. One’s reminded of Michael Drayton’s notion, expressed in his Poly-Olbion, of the furor poeticus which he associates with the Welsh bards in their “sacred rage,” singing to a harp accompaniment “with furie rapt.”

  That sense of the history of the Welsh bard was instilled from the start in Dylan Mariais Thomas, born on October 27, 1914 in Swansea. The “Marlais” was the name used by his great uncle, William Thomas, in his own bardic forays and means something like “great blue-green.” It’s a name shared by two Welsh rivers, and along with the meaning of Dylan itself (“son of the sea”) might be thought of as predisposing the poet to an extraordinary combination of fluency and force. We read the last line of “Fern Hill” (“Though I sang in my chains like the sea”) with quite a new attentiveness.

  “Fern Hill” was written in 1945, when Dylan was at the height of his powers, and might be said to be typical of his “mature” style:

  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 honored 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.

  The “chains” in which this poet sings have, in some sense, been loaded upon him by himself. Like Marianne Moore, Thomas is engaged in a system of syllables, this first stanza establishing a pattern of lines of 14, 14, 9, 6, 10, 15, 14, 7 and 9 syllables to which the poem adheres, sort of, in the highly modified way a sea might be expected to be contained by its chains. Such full end-rhymes as the poem displays (“stars” and “jars” in stanza 3, “white” and “light” in stanza 4, “long” and “songs” in stanza 5, “hand” and “land” in stanza 6) seem almost inadvertent, yet there are internal rhymes and echoes into which a lot of thought has been put. This delight in language play from line to line is a feature of Welsh prosody. We see it there in the internal rhyme on “boughs” and “about” in lines 1 and 2, or in “hail” and “heydays” in lines 4 and 5, as a kind of technical delayment, or withholding, which is at the heart of Dylan Thomas’s formal method.

  Another example
of this may be found in the term “heydays” in stanza I, which anticipates the days spent making “hay,” both the subjects of stanzas 3 and 5. Such punning, which is itself another form of delayment in the sense of “hindrance,” where one meaning of a word intervenes before another, may be found in a word like “lilting,” which rather neatly combines the sense of a house in which one might hear someone “sing cheerfully or merrily” (OED) as well as a house that is “tilting.” A more conventional form of punning is available in the word “down,” which extends to both the senses of “descending direction” and “any substance of a feathery or fluffy nature” such as that one might find on barley, the word with which it is violently enjambed. Those “whiskers” that are a feature of barley bring to mind the beardless condition of someone who is “young and easy.”

  The combination of the words “down” and “young and easy” conjures up a setting which might be described as a diorama for “Fern Hill.” It’s the setting of W. B. Yeats’s beautiful lyric “Down By the Salley Gardens,” in which there is a great deal of shared vocabulary with the first stanza of “Fern Hill,” including not only “down,” “young,” and “easy” but also “trees,” “leaves,” “river,” and “grass.” A Yeatsian influence extends to the “apple boughs” in line I, apple boughs being a feature of any number of Yeats poems including “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” in which Aengus proposes to pluck “the silver apples of the moon, / the golden apples of the sun.” The word “wanderer” appears in stanza 4 of “Fern Hill,” while the first word of line 5 in both stanzas 1 and 2 is “golden”. The fact that Thomas establishes such a pattern in stanzas 1 and 2, just as he uses the phrase “happy as the heart was long” at the end of line 2 of stanza 5, replicating the phrase “happy as the grass was green” at the end of line 2 of stanza 1, suggests that he might have harbored Yeatsian ambitions in the business of stanza-making. Again, it’s an ambition he defers.

  The spirit of Yeats is not the only one that threatens to loom between us and our capacity to read Dylan Thomas in his craft or sullen art:

  In my craft or sullen art

  Exercised in the still night

  When only the moon rages

  And the lovers lie abed

  With all their griefs in their arms,

  I labor by singing light

  Not for ambition or bread

  Or the strut and trade of charms

  On the ivory stages

  But for the common wages

  Of their most secret heart.

  Written in 1945, “In my craft or sullen art” owes much to W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby,” written in 1937, with which it shares some key vocabulary—“lie,” “arms,” “night,” “heart”—as well as the 7-syllable line count and something of the rhythm of part III of Auden’s 1939 “InMemory of W. B. Yeats”:

  In the deserts of the heart

  Let the healing fountain start,

  In the prison of his days

  Teach the free man how to praise.

  This rhythm is, of course, derived from Yeats’s own “Under Ben Bulben”:

  Irish poets learn your trade

  Sing whatever is well made.

  The “trade” has itself been lifted wholesale from “Under Ben Bulben” to the “trade of charms,” while the “strut” in the same line may be traced to “there struts Hamlet” of “Lapis Lazuli,” a poem in which the rhyme “rages / stages” appears as in “In my craft or sullen art.” “Strut” is a word that has a walk-on part, as it were, in another of Thomas’s greatest poems, “After the funeral,” with its stunning closing:

  These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental

  Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,

  Storm me forever over her grave until

  The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love

  And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

  Although something of the power of that image is diminished if one remembers the “fern-seed footprints” so delicately made by Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa,” which had appeared in her Selected Poems of 1935, it nonetheless represents Thomas at his own swaggering best.

  This tendency towards brashness, along with those towards bluster and browbeating, may account for the slightly reticent quality of Marianne Moore’s comments on him for the issue of The Yale Review that coincided with the first anniversary of Thomas’s death. In November 1954, Moore described Thomas in a kind of boilerplate praise-speak:

  He was true to his gift and he had a mighty power, indigenously accurate like nature’s. And his mechanism at times is as precise as the content.

  There seems to be a suggestion on the part of Moore (underscored by her own uncharacteristically lumpish prose) that there’s another type of delayment all too often to be found in Dylan Thomas which has to do with his style more often than not hampering his subject-matter, only occasionally allowing a poem to sing out of its chains.

  Even when a single stretch of a poem by Dylan Thomas is muddied by its influences, including the omnipresent Joyce, extending to usages such as “dingle” and “windfall” and the funster garbling of “happy as the grass was green” and “once below a time,” there is nonetheless something sweet and clear and refreshing flowing through that same stretch. We find it in the gorgeous “And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns,” which comes off the page as being oddly balanced rather than bodacious, as Dylan Thomas and no one else.

  Dylan Thomas once remarked of posterity that its function should be “to look after itself.” As part of our looking after ourselves we should acknowledge the possibility that what has sometimes come between Thomas’s poems and our capacity to read them is as much our own sense of being “lordly” over his being “loudly,” a fashionable looking down one’s nose at his tendency towards high spirits, including those legendary eighteen straight whiskies. When we tear away the tabloidian tissue there is revealed a poet who has overcome so much—his influences, his being under the influence—that our impulse to reach for him when our own sense of the world is obstructed or obscured turns out to have been well founded.

  PAUL MULDOON

  NOTE

  The prologue in verse, written for this collected edition of my poems, is intended as an address to my readers, the strangers.

  This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve. Some of them I have revised a little, but if I went on revising everything that I now do not like in this book I should be so busy that I would have no time to try to write new poems.

  I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.

  DYLAN THOMAS

  LAUGHARNE, WALES, NOVEMBER 1952

  PROLOGUE

  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 sails,

  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, (tho
ugh song

  Is a burning and crested act,

  The fire of birds in

  The world’s turning wood,

  For my sawn, splay sounds),

  Out of these sea thumbed 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 spinning 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 red, 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 rooing 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 arid fiddle, this tune

  On a tongued puffball)

  But animals thick as thieves

  On God’s rough tumbling grounds

  (Hail to His beasthood!).

  Beasts who sleep good and thin,

  Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked

  Hollow farms in a throng

  Of waters cluck and cling,

  And barnroofs cockcrow war!