Thoughts on the Person and Poetry of Dylan Thomas
Thoughts on the Person and Poetry of Dylan Thomas
With an Introduction to the Poet and Some Further Thoughts, with Readings from Selected Poems
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, a seagoing city in the south of Wales and an important port for the British Merchant Navy. I have visited the city many times. Swansea is that kind of ultramarine-blue-cloud-covered seafaring city that inspires poets and songwriters. In this sense, Swansea is a maritime twin to Liverpool, best presented in a watercolor wash of dismal grays and somber blues. Thomas’s mother was Florence Thomas (née Williams), a godly woman and stalwart member of Paraclete Congregational Church in Mumbles (a hilly shop and residential community up from Mumbles Bay in Swansea, where my family and I enjoyed many afternoons when I was going to school at the University of Wales). While Florence’s strict Calvinist faith was never in doubt, and her devotion to teaching the Bible to Dylan and his older sister, Nancy (1906-1953), and others, was well-practiced, there was no apparent discongruity of her Puritan faith with her wit and considerable gifts as a storyteller. Dylan Thomas’ father was an atheist (or a tortured agnostic who was constantly diminished by sharing a home with a “saint”).
He was an educator of significant gifts, a teacher of Welsh and English Literature, who named his boy after the Welsh legend “Dylan” of the Celtic “Matters of Britain” medieval classic Mabinogion (pronunciation). As the legend goes, Dylan, “Son of the waves,” was baptized by the Christian missionaries in the early years after Christ but became one with the Celtic Sea. Thus, Dylan is a Christian without relinquishing the older Celtic nature religions. Dylan Thomas, a twentieth-century poet, lived up to his eponym, for he was a son of the waves with baptism, a living ode to his mother and father. Thomas’ father was an honors graduate of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and had high hopes for an academic career for Dylan. It was not to be. What transpired in his brief life and celebrated works surpassed any of his father’s dreams for him. Yet, Dylan Thomas seemed to assume the undisciplined life of the literary genius that he might have thought the public expected. If that were the reason, the game went too far. During a highly successful tour of America, in which Thomas gave readings of his works, the Welsh poet collapsed from his self-abusing life of drink and died at St. Vincents in New York City on November 9, 1953. His body was returned to his native country.
Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” written for his father, became so influential that it has achieved that rare (and not always desired) place of being quoted without knowing who wrote it. In the past week, I heard the title used by a well-known reporter in political commentary (about President Biden) and by a physician giving medical advice. I was reminded of the opinion of Paul Muldoon, the Irish poet:
“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.”1
It is a characteristically ironic Dylan-Thomas-conclusion to his first published work, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.”
Familial Influence
When nineteen-year-old Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) took up his notebook and scribbled out the quite beautiful pastoral poem, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” he drew upon both the evangelical Christian faith of his mother and the literary lines of thought of his father, an academic and an atheist. The poem is based on Paul’s words in Romans 6:9: “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (KJV). Thomas modeled the poem after John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Did this young man who would die by the last poison dregs of whiskey in a New York tavern also draw on a nascent faith in the risen Jesus Christ? The poem is theologically orthodox, even if shrouded in more unconventional tones than the writing (and preaching) of John Donne. Or has he borrowed the teaching of his mother to express a mystical earthly religion of his father? I want to think about the former, but I let you decide.
“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.”
If you read the poem, you will notice the early marks of Dylan Thomas’ technical style, which includes a dazzling placement of iambic (da-dum: “sea-’shores”), anapestal (da-da-dum: “un-der-’stand”) meter to create a lilting musical (like the Welsh accent). He uses the refrain, “And death shall have no dominion,” as an incantation to begin and conclude each of the three stanzas. The well-placed repetition strengthens with each stanza and creates a poetic denouement like clashing cymbals. The lines' metaphysical, almost magical quality serves the central theme of death and decay, giving way to ultimate resurrection. Dylan Thomas would continue to employ Christian themes throughout his abbreviated career. Yet, his life revealed little fruit of true faith. He seemed to be acting out the conflicting worldviews he witnessed at home. Despite the tug-of-war over faith or faithlessness, Mrs. and Mrs. Thomas would bequeath to their son a legacy of a love of words, the sounds of words, and a playful approach to storytelling to explain the world around him. All of this was set in the “fish-frozen” estuaries and “hymn-singing hills” of the ancient district of Glamorganshire. There are no technical prompts to feed artificial intelligence writing machines that could create the human experiences of a boy, a man, a son, a brother, a success, a failure, a believer, a doubter, and a mischievous trickster in a brandy-soaked winding sheet of incomparable sadness. So, what prompts were employed to create the poet Dylan Thomas? We have considered his family. Let us think about the Dylan Thomas family tree in English poetry.
Poetic Lineage
Thomas once remarked that his favorite poem was John Milton’s ode, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629).2 This fact notwithstanding, Dylan Thomas is more aligned with the metaphysical poets than the classical Milton. Tracing any artist’s influences is a study of history and human nature. In this brief essay, I hope to introduce some readers to Dylan Thomas and his connection to the broader Romantic movement in English poetry. Furthermore, I want to share why I find his poetry fascinating (our son grew up listening to recordings of Dylan Thomas). Finally, I will read the Introduction to Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas to demonstrate the lilting, lyrical style produced by his remarkable command of the English language in the service of his subject (in this case, childhood memories). But let us begin by considering Dylan Thomas, the man, and his literary relationship to other poets within that imaginative, spontaneous, and impressionistic genre known as Romanticism.
The Romantic poet selected subjects from Creation, infusing them with enchanted anthropological powers to convey his message.
Metaphysical and Romantic
Dylan Thomas was a Romantic poet, though if the standards of painting judged poetry, one might call him an Impressionist rather than a Romantic. Many notable scholars rank him as the greatest of the Welsh poets, with some placing him in the metaphysical lineage of John Donne. There is at least a vague connection to the celebrated Pastor of Saint Paul’s through Donne’s use of “conceits”—innovative poetic uses of natural phenomena to draw comparisons or make commentary on otherwise disparate subjects. Thomas drew on nature as a metaphor; the juxtaposition of images drawn by words or phrases demonstrates the poet’s abilities and delights the hearers with its suggestive animation of the ordinary. However, in my estimation, Dylan Thomas of Swansea and Mumbles Hill ranks among English-speaking poets such as England’s Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) and, perhaps, Ireland’s William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Dylan Thomas was greatly inspired by The Reverend Hopkins (a Welsh name, though Hopkins was born and reared in Sussex and ministered first in the Anglican Church and later in the Latin Church in Ireland). However, Gerard Manley Hopkins gathered vivid imagery from nature to praise God. Thomas gathered the sights and sounds of the Welsh valleys to express childhood memories or to depict the oft-overlooked nobility of simple folk, simple faith, and the crash of the pastoral life with twentieth-century modernity (and, yet, we remember that Dylan Thomas asserted that he wrote for the love of Man and the praise of God). Yet, the similarities are unmistakable. One thinks of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ playful hymn to God in “Pied Beauty (1877):
“Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”
As Hopkins enlisted Thomas, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) bore Hopkins. We remember Rossetti for many gifts, but her “In the Bleak Midwinter” remains one of my favorites (consider the essential interpretation of Rossetti’s masterpiece by the late Dan Fogelberg, 1951-2007).3 Like Hopkins (with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden), she used the wonders of creation to convey Biblical doctrine. Thus, we have the making of one line in the literary family tree: Christina Rossetti to Gerard Manley Hopkins (Hopkins met Rossetti before her death) and, then—with a profoundly new version of Romanticism—Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas used nature to approach spirituality and even consider the doctrines of Christianity but without a definitive faith. Nonconformist ministers (viz., non-Anglican Protestants, e.g., Baptists, Congregationalists, Calvinistic Methodists) ministers were less of a heroic figure to Dylan Thomas and more of a stage prop in his tales of the Welsh valleys (consider his classic A Child’s Christmas in Wales read by the Poet, and note his comical characters gathered for the Christmas dinner). Nevertheless, a devout Christian may take in Thomas for the sheer gifts of God at work as much as the work itself. All things at length must work to serve the God who is there.
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
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 honoured 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.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.4
In the end, we are reminded by the poet himself why he wrote. This is from an introduction to a collection of his poetry:
“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: 'T'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.”5
I first read the line of Paul Muldoon quoted in Maria Popova, “The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece,” The Marginalian (blog), January 25, 2017, https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/24/dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/. The line is from Dylan Thomas and Paul Muldoon, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition, Original ed. edition (New York: New Directions, 2010).
John Goodby, “His Influences and Reading | Dylan Thomas - Wales Arts Review,” May 6, 2017, https://www.walesartsreview.org/dtd17-the-reading-of-dylan-thomas/, https://www.walesartsreview.org/dtd17-the-reading-of-dylan-thomas/.
“In the Bleak Midwinter” is not a poem or hymn that seeks to recount historical fact but an evocative word sketching that explores the actual event's atmospheric impressions. So, though our Lord would have been born in the early spring, Rossetti employs the image of an English country winter to convey the loneliness, isolation, and wonder of Almighty God coming to His creation in this most ignoble way. “Earth stood hard as iron” is another example of Romanticism at work. The rich theological truth of the Incarnation is, thus, proclaimed through the poetic use of nature imagery.
From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.
Dylan Thomas, Introduction, in Dylan Thomas and Paul Muldoon, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition, Kindle Edition (New York: New Directions, 2010).
References
C. Day, Lewis, and Lentricchia Jr. Frank. “The Lyric Impulse, by C. Day Lewis by Frank Lentricchia Jr. | Five Metaphysical Poets, by Joan Bennett by Frank Lentricchia Jr. | Dylan Thomas and Poetic Dissociation, by David Holbrook by Frank Lentricchia Jr. | Some Coordinates of Modern Literature by Frank Lentricchia Jr. | Tree and Leaf, by J. R. R. Tolkien by Frank Lentricchia Jr.” Poetry Magazine, July 17, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/64164/i-the-lyric-impulse-i-by-c-day-lewis-i.
Editors. “Dylan Thomas Biography - Life, Family, Childhood, Death, School, Mother, Young, Book.” Accessed July 17, 2024. https://www.notablebiographies.com/St-Tr/Thomas-Dylan.html.
Ellis, Hannah. Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
Foundation, Poetry. “Dylan Thomas by Constance Urdang.” Poetry Magazine November, no. 87 (1955). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60093/dylan-thomas.
Goodby, John. “His Influences and Reading | Dylan Thomas - Wales Arts Review,” May 6, 2017. https://www.walesartsreview.org/dtd17-the-reading-of-dylan-thomas/, https://www.walesartsreview.org/dtd17-the-reading-of-dylan-thomas/.
Popova, Maria. “The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece.” The Marginalian (blog), January 25, 2017. https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/24/dylan-thomas-do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night/.
Richard Burton Reads “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas, 2010. https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=fern%20hill%20read%20by%20Dylan%20Thomas&view=riverview&mid=B4DC2FAE3B092EAE7AC8B4DC2FAE3B092EAE7AC8&ajaxhist=0.
Sato, Satoru. “Memories of Dylan Thomas at the B.B.C.” Poetry Magazine 87, no. 2 (July 22, 2024). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60092/memories-of-dylan-thomas-at-the-b-b-c.
Sir Anthony Hopkins Reads Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, 2019. https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=fern+hill+read+by+Anthony+Hopkins&&view=riverview&mmscn=mtsc&mid=C128452DA0931915C61CC128452DA0931915C61C&&aps=0&FORM=VMSOVR.
Thomas, Dylan. Dylan Thomas Reading His Complete Recorded Poetry. New York and London: Caedmon Records, 1963. https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=dylan+thomas+reads+fern+hill&qpvt=dylan+thomas+reads+fern+hill&view=riverview&mmscn=mtsc&mid=FA9EDD196FE7C435D46FFA9EDD196FE7C435D46F&&aps=0&FORM=VMSOVR.
Thomas, Dylan, and Paul Muldoon. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition. Kindle Edition. New York: New Directions, 2010.
Tindall, William York. “The Poetry of Dylan Thomas.” The American Scholar 17, no. 4 (1948): 431–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41206634.
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