The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas Read online

O kingdom of neighbours, finned

  Felled and quilted, 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, and then,

  Under the stars of Wales,

  Cry, Multitudes 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.

  THE COLLECTED POEMS OF

  DYLAN THOMAS

  ORIGINAL EDITION

  I SEE THE BOYS OF SUMMER

  I

  I see the boys of summer in their ruin

  Lay the gold tithings barren,

  Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

  There in their heat the winter floods

  Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

  And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

  These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,

  Sour the boiling honey;

  The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;

  There in the sun the frigid threads

  Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;

  The signal moon is zero in their voids.

  I see the summer children in their mothers

  Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,

  Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;

  There in the deep with quartered shades

  Of sun and moon they paint their dams

  As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

  I see that from these boys shall men of nothing

  Stature by seedy shifting,

  Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;

  There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse

  Of love and light bursts in their throats.

  O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

  II

  But seasons must be challenged or they totter

  Into a chiming quarter

  Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;

  There, in his night, the black-tongued bells

  The sleepy man of winter pulls,

  Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

  We are the dark deniers, let us summon

  Death from a summer woman,

  A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,

  From the fair dead who flush the sea

  The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,

  And from the planted womb the man of straw.

  We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,

  Green of the seaweeds’ iron,

  Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,

  Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth

  To choke the deserts with her tides,

  And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

  In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,

  Heigh ho the blood and berry,

  And nail the merry squires to the trees;

  Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,

  Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.

  O see the poles of promise in the boys.

  III

  I see you boys of summer in your ruin.

  Man in his maggot’s barren.

  And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.

  I am the man your father was.

  We are the sons of flint and pitch.

  O See the poles are kissing as they cross.

  WHEN ONCE THE TWILIGHT LOCKS NO LONGER

  When once the twilight locks no longer

  Locked in the long worm of my finger

  Nor dammed the sea that sped about my fist,

  The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,

  The milky acid on each hinge,

  And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

  When the galactic sea was sucked

  And all the dry seabed unlocked,

  I sent my creature scouting on the globe,

  That globe itself of hair and bone

  That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,

  Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

  My fuses timed to charge his heart,

  He blew like powder to the light

  And held a little sabbath with the sun,

  But when the stars, assuming shape,

  Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,

  He drowned his father’s magics in a dream.

  All issue armoured, of the grave,

  The redhaired cancer still alive,

  The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;

  Some dead undid their bushy jaws,

  And bags of blood let out their flies;

  He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

  Sleep navigates the tides of time;

  The dry Sargasso of the tomb

  Gives up its dead to such a working sea;

  And sleep rolls mute above the beds

  Where fishes’ food is fed the shades

  Who periscope through flowers to the sky.

  The hanged who lever from the limes

  Ghostly propellers for their limbs,

  The cypress lads who wither with the cock,

  These, and the others in sleep’s acres,

  Of dreaming men make moony suckers,

  And snipe the fools of vision in the back.

  When once the twilight screws were turned,

  And mother milk was stiff as sand,

  I sent my own ambassador to light;

  By trick or chance he fell asleep

  And conjured up a carcass shape

  To rob me of my fluids in his heart.

  Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,

  A worker in the morning town,

  And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;

  The fences of the light are down,

  All but the briskest riders thrown,

  And worlds hang on the trees.

  A PROCESS IN THE WEATHER OF THE HEART

  A process in the weather of the heart

  Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

  Storms in the freezing tomb.

  A weather in the quarter of the veins

  Turns night to day; blood in their suns

  Lights up the living worm.

  A process in the eye forwarns

  The bones of blindness; and the womb

  Drives in a death as life leaks out.

  A darkness in the weather of the eye

  Is half its light; the fathomed sea

  Breaks on unangled land.

  The seed that makes a forest of the loin

  Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,

  Slow in a sleeping wind.

  A weather in the flesh and bone

  Is damp and dry; the quick and dead

  Move like two ghosts before the eye.

  A process in the weather of the world

  Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child

  Sits in their double shade.

  A process blows the moon into the sun,

  Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;

  And the heart gives up its dead.

  BEFORE I KNOCKED

  Before I knocked and flesh let enter,

  With liquid hands tapped on the womb,

  I who was shapeless as the water

  That shaped the Jordan near my home

  Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter

  And sister to the fathering worm.

  I who was deaf to spring and summer,

  Who knew not sun nor moon b
y name,

  Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,

  As yet was in a molten form,

  The leaden stars, the rainy hammer

  Swung by my father from his dome.

  I knew the message of the winter,

  The darted hail, the childish snow,

  And the wind was my sister suitor;

  Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;

  My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;

  Ungotten I knew night and day.

  As yet ungotten, I did suffer;

  The rack of dreams my lily bones

  Did twist into a living cipher,

  And flesh was snipped to cross the lines

  Of gallow crosses on the liver

  And brambles in the wringing brains.

  My throat knew thirst before the structure

  Of skin and vein around the well

  Where words and water make a mixture

  Unfailing till the blood runs foul;

  My heart knew love, my belly hunger;

  I smelt the maggot in my stool.

  And time cast forth my mortal creature

  To drift or drown upon the seas

  Acquainted with the salt adventure

  Of tides that never touch the shores.

  I who was rich was made the richer

  By sipping at the vine of days.

  I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither

  A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.

  And I was struck down by death’s feather.

  I was a mortal to the last

  Long breath that carried to my father

  The message of his dying christ.

  You who bow down at cross and altar,

  Remember me and pity Him

  Who took my flesh and bone for armour

  And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

  THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER

  The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

  Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

  Is my destroyer.

  And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

  My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

  The force that drives the water through the rocks

  Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

  Turns mine to wax.

  And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

  How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

  The hand that whirls the water in the pool

  Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

  Hauls my shroud sail.

  And I am dumb to tell the hanging man

  How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

  The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

  Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood

  Shall calm her sores.

  And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind

  How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

  And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb

  How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

  MY HERO BARES HIS NERVES

  My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

  That rules from wrist to shoulder,

  Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

  Leans on my mortal ruler,

  The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

  And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

  Ache on the lovelorn paper

  I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

  That utters all love hunger

  And tells the page the empty ill.

  My hero bares my side and sees his heart

  Tread, like a naked Venus,

  The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

  Stripping my loin of promise,

  He promises a secret heat.

  He holds the wire from this box of nerves

  Praising the mortal error

  Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,

  And the hunger’s emperor;

  He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

  WHERE ONCE THE WATERS OF YOUR FACE

  Where once the waters of your face

  Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,

  The dead turns up its eye;

  Where once the mermen through your ice

  Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers

  Through salt and root and roe.

  Where once your green knots sank their splice

  Into the tided cord, there goes

  The green unraveller,

  His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose

  To cut the channels at their source

  And lay the wet fruits low.

  Invisible, your clocking tides

  Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;

  The weed of love’s left dry;

  There round about your stones the shades

  Of children go who, from their voids,

  Cry to the dolphined sea.

  Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids

  Shall not be latched while magic glides

  Sage on the earth and sky;

  There shall be corals in your beds,

  There shall be serpents in your tides,

  Till all our sea-faiths die.

  IF I WERE TICKLED BY THE RUB OF LOVE

  If I were tickled by the rub of love,

  A rooking girl who stole me for her side,

  Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,

  If the red tickle as the cattle calve

  Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,

  I would not fear the apple nor the flood

  Nor the bad blood of spring.

  Shall it be male or female? say the cells,

  And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.

  If I were tickled by the hatching hair,

  The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,

  The itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,

  I would not fear the gallows nor the axe

  Nor the crossed sticks of war.

  Shall it be male or female? say the fingers

  That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.

  I would not fear the muscling-in of love

  If I were tickled by the urchin hungers

  Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.

  I would not fear the devil in the loin

  Nor the outspoken grave.

  If I were tickled by the lovers’ rub

  That wipes away not crow’s-foot nor the lock

  Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,

  Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib

  Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,

  The sea of scums could drown me as it broke

  Dead on the sweethearts’ toes.

  This world is half the devil’s and my own,

  Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl

  And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

  An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,

  And all the herrings smelling in the sea,

  I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

  Wearing the quick away.

  And that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.

  The knobbly ape that swings along his sex

  From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist

  Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

  Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast

  Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six

  Feet in the rubbing dust.

  And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?

  Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

  My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?

  The words of death are dryer than his stiff,

  My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.

  I would be tickled by the rub that is:

  Man be my metaphor.

  OUR EUNUCH DREAMS

  I


  Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,

  Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,

  Whack their boys’ limbs,

  And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,

  Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night

  Fold in their arms.

  The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,

  When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,

  The bones of men, the broken in their beds,

  By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

  II

  In this our age the gunman and his moll,

  Two one-dimensioned ghosts, love on a reel,

  Strange to our solid eye,

  And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;

  When cameras shut they hurry to their hole

  Down in the yard of day.

  They dance between their arclamps and our skull,

  Impose their shots, throwing the nights away;

  We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill,

  Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

  III

  Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which

  Shall fall awake when cures and their itch

  Raise up this red-eyed earth?

  Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,

  The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,

  Or drive the night-geared forth.

  The photograph is married to the eye,

  Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;

  The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

  That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

  IV

  This is the world: the lying likeness of

  Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move

  Loving and being loth;

  The dream that kicks the buried from their sack

  And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.

  This is the world. Have faith.

  For we shall be a shouter like the cock,

  Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack

  The image from the plates;

  And we shall be fit fellows for a life,

  And who remain shall flower as they love,

  Praise to our faring hearts.

  ESPECIALLY WHEN THE OCTOBER WIND

  Especially when the October wind

  With frosty fingers punishes my hair,

  Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire

  And cast a shadow crab upon the land,

  By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,

  Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,