POETS Day! Thumbing Through Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952
Attribution: Dylan Thomas’s Writing Shed by John M
Happy POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work as early as you can and steal a few hours of a weekend that’s never long enough to begin with. Next week’s taken care of because of Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving long weekend to come, by the way. This Friday can be a half holiday of your own making should you accept the mission.
Daylight Savings has put the crunch on a lot of POETS Day activities. Indoor stuff makes more sense. You can still skip out of work and go to the park, but it gets dark around 2:15 so watch out for muggers and if you plan to be outside, save some daylight for a little verse. You’ll thank yourself.
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My biggest problem with Dylan Thomas is that I keep calling him Dylan Harris.
Darren Harris was a guy I went to high school with. That’s where the confusion comes from. I didn’t know him very well; nice guy, we spoke at parties. His name sticks in my head because I heard a story about him a few years ago. He was involved in the student productions at Princeton when Roberta Flack held a concert there. She was so impressed with his management of the operation that she told him to get in touch after graduation. Eventually he became her manager.
I won’t vouch for any of that. He was a few years younger than I was, but I do remember hearing he got into Princeton. I don’t know if he was involved in productions, if he ever worked for Roberta Flack, or if she ever played an Ivy, much less Princeton. But I like the story and hope it’s true. I also hope he had a “Now that’s impossible,” Kramer to Bette Midler moment.
He was a nice guy; funny, too. The problem isn’t that Dylan Thomas brings up bad memories of Darren Harris. Not at all. I just keep saying the wrong name and feel like I should have worried grandchildren exchanging glances they don’t think I can see and wondering if it’s time for the talk.
Dylan Thomas does not appear to have been a nice guy. I’m sure he was fun and companionable. I suppose fun is in the eye of the beholder, but this, from Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander, looks like a good time in the way that only the best “in retrospect” cries for help can:
“[Campbell and Harris] used to meet for drinking-bouts at the Catherine Wheel, the pub nearest Campbell’s house in Campden Grove – bouts so heroic that over thirty years later several of the aged ‘regulars’ of the Catherine Wheel could remember the two poets eating a bunch of daffodils whole, flowers, leaves, and stems, for a bet on St. David’s Day.”
Sometimes I’ll surf through the archives at The New Criterion’s website. For subscribers, they have every article they’ve published going back to 1982. It’s a pretty good deal. I don’t know what made me think of Thomas the other day, but I decided to see if they had anything on him, typed in “Dylan Harris,” backspaced, made it right, and pulled up a couple of columns about the poet.
The first was “Shorter notice,” by Daniel Kunitz from the September 1996 issue. It’s a brutal review of John Ackerman’s book, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work. If you’ve got a cruel streak and can get past the paywall, it’s worth your time. If not, highlights include “gormless,” “insipid commentary,” “Ackerman labors like a mule over the poems,” “conspicuously fails,” and concludes with “Ackerman’s book manages to do little more than explode the myth of his own competence.” Good stuff.
According to Kunitz, Ackerman sets two goals, neither of which he achieves. First, he wants to kill the pervasive image of Thomas as “the colorful drunk and rhapsodizing lyrist,” (I’m quoting Kunitz here, not Ackerman) and second, that Thomas didn’t exhaust himself poetically in the early years only to spend his last few “as a sort of travelling clown, besotted by drink and poetically impotent”(still Kunitz.) Both are tall orders. I’d start by keeping my guy out of Roy Campbell biographies.
The second article was “Dylan Thomas: the poet in his letters,” by Bruce Bawer from the April 1986 issue. Bawer’s is also a review, this one of The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, edited by Paul Ferris. I’ve read neither Ackerman’s nor Ferris’s book but from reading about both, if Ackerman was trying to rehabilitate Thomas’s image, Ferris throws up the poet’s own words in refutation.
Bawer wrote:
“The Dylan Thomas of these letters is vulgar, guileful, manic, terminally immature, eternally obsessed with sex, death, words, and himself, and contemptuous of English professors, women, other poets, and other Welshmen; to indulge in a bit of Dylanesque alliteration, he’s hyperbolic, high-strung, hierophantic, borderline hysterical.”
He was untrustworthy too. Bawer recounts the story of a woman who lent Thomas an apartment in London. He stole her fur and typewriter among other items and apparently pawned them. He sent her a backdated letter towards plausible innocence. I would admire the attempted alibi were it by anyone younger than a sixth grader.
After reading those two articles, I pulled Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952 from the shelf. Frustration with the connection between birth and death is a theme that shows itself frequently in his work. Birth leads to mortality and sex is the instrument of condemnation. Bawer holds out “Written for a Personal Epitaph” as an example. A few lines:
Mother I blame
Whose loving crime
Moulded my form
Within her womb,
Who gave me life and then the grave,
Mother I blame.
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” is arguably the poem that brought Thomas to prominence. It’s from 18 Poems, published in 1934 when he was only twenty years old, back when he may or may not have been exhausting his poetic energy. As with so much of his work there’s a mania to it. Right there in the second line you feel it with “Drives my green age,” and five lines later “Drives my red blood.” As soon as I start reading, I get the sense that I’m being pulled through the poem at a pace that makes it feel reckless. It’s never too fast, but almost.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)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.
It’s extraordinarily crafted. Sex to death isn’t the only theme he writes about, but it’s subject often enough to be seen as an obsession. In his savaging of Ackerman’s book, Kunitz does credit that the man “does happen upon something useful,” although what he happened upon was a passage from Mathew Arnold on Welsh literature. This is Kunitz quoting Ackerman quoting Arnold though it’s only text written by Arnold. I feel the compunction to credit it because I wouldn’t have come upon it were it not for Kunitz. That makes sense to me, but then I’ve backspaced over “Harris” at least three times in the last half hour, so if it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s not your faculties that are in doubt.
From Arnold via a chorus:
“The true art, the architectonicé which shapes great works . . . comes only after a steady, deep-searching survey, a firm conception of the facts of human life, which the Celt has not patience for. So he runs off into technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill; but in the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of the world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you.”
If that slander on the Welsh upsets you, please address complaints to Ackerman, Kunitz, and Arnold because my only complicity is in giggling at it.
It fits Thomas, though. He didn’t live a long life, but his poetry, from his debut at twenty to his death at thirty-nine, is rife with the same frustration. What he is too dumb to say in “The force that through…” is the same thing he urges his father (I know, but it is his father) to viscerally rage against in “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night.”
I don’t see any development of the idea. The Arnold quote predates Thomas by fifty or more years, but it might as well have been written about him. He has astonishing skill. He really is a great poet, but stagnant in one very big way.
Here’s that same birth to death “infinite sentiment” written years after “The force that through…” and seemingly run through Ecclesiastes 3:2.
This bread I break
This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oats and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
The charge that he exhausted his talent as a youth is a defensible one because his output decreased with age. Bawer counters that while he wrote fewer in those last ten years (in fact, none in at least three years), he wrote some of his best.
Here’s one from 1943, when he was writing only a handful a year, unsurprisingly about an inevitable journey towards death. Killing him softly with his song?
Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.
