POETS Day: The Unholy Reality That Is/Was Dylan Thomas

The interior of Dylan Thomas’s Writing Shed, Laugharne, Wales. Photo by DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

We don’t see Dylan Thomas’s like that often. It’s impossible to say what the economic, political, and cultural fortunes of Wales would be in his absence but I suspect that without Ryan Giggs and Dylan Thomas, Wales would be that place the Tudors built castles to tick off Monty Python and be otherwise an afterthought.

We won’t rarely – that’s wrong. We just won’t see his like again. He piles wise men, good men, wild men, grave men, and his father in the same work. Maybe he was highlighting them or maybe he was casting them as of a piece, dying not to go gentle into that good night and they were not him or they were him and he was struggling to be different. I’m confused as to how he thought he entered that night.

First off, it’s P.O.E.T.S. Day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get yourself out of work and don’t let that niggling thought that deception is wrong lodge itself in the back of your mind. That’s just pride sneaking up on you. Get past that. Get out of that office. I’ll get back to Thomas after the logistics.

This week’s escape attempt is all about semen. Don’t think this leaves out the ladies because they have an interest in this performance as well. Sometimes they wade rather than swim. This is to everyone’s advantage in this most narrow of circumstance.

It’s impossible to keep up with if you are on the outside looking in, but people who really want to have a baby are mired in Byzantine regimens when the typical process doesn’t produce the product. There are thermometers, chilled underwear, ph tests, and so many more things that probably come under the title of holistic while ensuring a ready and responsive charged phone is always at the ready. Having a baby when you are not fifteen and covered in three layers of prophylactics is not easy. Pretend to be doing that stuff in all manner of non-baby making intercourse with your co-workers. You can leave the building at will.

When the phone rings with that particular immediacy you are dismissed without prejudice plus a wink and a nod from your well-wishing co-workers. It’s the joyful chemotherapy.

Now you are out and free to enjoy a bar, park, or movie theatre if you live where there are no theaters. Whatever way, you are free. Work is a thing of the past. Now you can confront Dylan Thomas.

The day he died he went out drinking and retired to his hotel room for a nap. After a two-or-so-hour sojourn he went back out, returning late in the evening, telling the hotelier that he had twenty-six shots of whiskey. He died shortly thereafter.

I say this as someone who taught dram shot liability classes. The barman disagreed but…Don’t say what Harris’ bartender purportedly said: “I only served him eighteen shots.” That doesn’t save you any grief.

His most famous poem is “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

I can’t decide if it’s childish or brilliant verse. I don’t think Dylan Thomas would have written it the same way later in life. I am sure that, had he survived the eighteen to twenty-six shots, Dylan Thomas would have cast the emphasis differently but that’s in my reading and he is crippled by an indistinct tangential to a crumbling empire accent and the fact that most of us are going to read the poem on our own terms.

It’s aba, aba, aba, and again, and again, and then a flourish of abaa. It’s a kid’s poem in form. He sticks to iambic petameter as far as I can tell with a few nine syllable lines, but that’s poetry for sense over structure. I may be wrong about that because I stink at mapping out rhythm.

The premise is that a brave man, or more so an actualized man, resists death. He doesn’t fear. He plows headlong with intent. He’s the seize the day guy. But Thomas was thirty-nine, and I see it differently.

I’m forty-eight. This guy is careering towards death. He’s not resisting a gentle descent, he’s plowing headlong into that good night, at speed.

I’m also showing my age here, but he uses commas and semi colons where sane people use periods. That’s annoying but not disqualifying. The occasional lack of periods might in fact be disqualifying, but he’s sold a lot of books so who am I to say.

Dylan Thomas lived fast and died young. I’ve no idea what the state of his corpse was, but he left behind something beautiful. Divine it as you will and as your age allows, but consider his course and plot your own.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
– Dylan Thomas

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 the 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.