“When the words do come, I pick them so thoroughly of their live associations that only the death in the word remains.” — poet Dylan Thomas

“[My] 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, 1952

Dylan Thomas was born on this day.

I got a chance to write about him when I reviewed Last Call, a truly gruesome “experimental” film about his last day. No thank you. But at least I got to write about him, because he – and his trajectory – the heights, the depths – are really interesting. He was SO influential on his generation that he ruined many up and coming poets who just tried to write like him – and it took some people years to shuffle off his influence. His influence was not entirely a good thing. He was a brilliant PERFORMER of his verse … and many people thought they saw through this at the sham underneath. That Thomas created a mood through his voice that then people assigned as “Genius”. Thomas felt uneasy about this himself. Anyway, you can hear a lot of this in the collection of quotes at the bottom of this post. Thomas’ star has fallen – a bit, anyway – but for the generation coming up around him and after him, he was the cat’s pajamas and EVERYONE had to grapple with him.

Famous during his lifetime (for his drunken shenanigans as well as his poetry), I know many people who count Dylan Thomas as their favorite poet of all time. He has written some poems that are woven into the culture, gigantic 20th-century “hit” poems. How often is “rage against the dying of the light” referenced? It’s a perfect quote, from a perfect poem: it’s rigorous and intellectual, it’s a villanelle, for God’s sake!!

Thomas was one of those poets who seemed to have a philosophy of life, not just a good observatory eye. You can feel him grappling with big issues, issues bigger than his own small experience. I don’t want to paint with too wide a brush. He is a personal poet. I love personal poetry. But Thomas’ facility with language, as well as his obsession with certain themes, as well as the sense you get of the man behind it all really thinking about poetry … all this sets him apart.

There were many poets at the time who basically launched their careers in opposition to Dylan Thomas, in opposition to his religious mysticism and high-flung language. He was the Big Man on Campus, and a Big Target. And if you were a WELSH poet? Forget about it. It was like an Irish poet trying to “do their own thing” in the Era of Yeats. Good luck. Dylan Thomas was prolific and diverse. He wrote scripts and radio plays, he was famous, he did long tours of the United States, his readings often became notorious because of his drunkenness, and yet he was also a brilliant showman.

The term Seamus Heaney uses for him – “a freak user of words” – is a direct quote from Dylan Thomas, speaking of himself, and in that, I can feel some sadness from Thomas, a sadness that he perhaps is not as good as he might be. He had no desires other than to be a writer. He grew up in Swansea, Wales. His father was a schoolteacher, and encouraged Thomas to go on to university, but Thomas was in a rush, and started trying to make his living as a writer right away. He burned brightly while he was here. His work was very controversial (some poets wondered if there was anything to him BEYOND his “freak” facility with words).

Thomas drank himself to death. The legend goes: he was at the White Horse Tavern, here in New York. Thomas was in rehearsal for his beautiful play Under Milk Wood, and he was in bad shape. He was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and he returned there from the White Horse Tavern, stating, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record”. Apparently, those were his last words. There is a plaque on the wall at the White Horse Tavern for Dylan Thomas.

I love Under Milk Wood, too, a haunting play packed with gorgeous rich language. He was one of the poets we had to learn in high school, and so – like most of the stuff I had to learn back then – the poems seem part of my emotional/intellectual landscape – like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. It seems to always have been there.

Turns out, Dylan Thomas had already been introduced to me, although I didn’t quite put it together at the time. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the author Robert Cormier (I Am the Cheese was assigned reading in 8th grade: that was some intense shit) – and one of his books – a book so harrowing I shouldn’t have been allowed to read it (even though it was for kids!) – uses a quote from a Dylan Thomas poem as its title: After the First Death (my review and excerpt here). This book was also assigned reading in 8th grade, and it is challenging terrifying stuff. Also prescient, in re: terrorism. Is there a more bleak statement than “After the first death there is no other”?

So that’s the poem I will post today.

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

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Quotes

Dylan Thomas, in a letter to a friend:

I make one image – though ‘make’ is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellect and critical forces I possess – let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time … Out of the inevitable conflict of images – … the womb of war – I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

It was against Dylan Marlais Thomas and his contemporaries that the Movement reacted.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, April 26th, 1962:

But as in the case of Dylan Thomas, I really feel [the Brazilians] don’t understand him at all–certainly, I’ve had no luck getting people to read the better stories.

Seamus Heaney, “Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas,”essay about “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”:

This is a son comforting a father; yet it is also, conceivably, the child poet in Thomas himself comforting the old ham he had become; the neophyte in him addressing the legend; the green fuse addressing the burnt-out case. The reflexiveness of the form is the right correlative for the reflexiveness of the feeling. As the poem proceeds, exhortation becomes self-lamentation; the son’s instruction to the disappointed father to curse and bless him collapses the distance between the sad height of age and physical decay in the parent and the equally sad eminence of poetic reputation and failing powers of the child. ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ is a lament for the maker in Thomas himself as well as an adieu to his proud and distant schoolteacher father. The shade of the young man who once repressed a fear that he was not a poet, just a freak user of words, pleads for help and reassurance from the older, sadder literary lion he has become, the one who apparently has the world at his feet.

Dylan Thomas:

I think of Mr. Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholia. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.”

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, August 14, 1947:

I agreed with your review of Dylan Thomas completely–his poems are almost always spoiled for me by two or three lines that sound like padding or remain completely unintelligible. I think that last stanza of “Fern Hill” is wonderful–although I don’t know what he means by “the shadow of his hand”–I haven’t got the poem or the review to go by.

Michael Schmidt:

Not since Swinburne has such orchestration engulfed sense. Most of the early poems have an interpretable line or couplet that gives access, and once inside things sort of slot into place.

Philip Larkin:

Dylan Thomas came to Oxford to speak to a club I belonged to, and we had a drink the following morning. HE wasn’t frightening. In fact, and I know it sounds absurd to say so, but I should say I had more in common with Dylan Thomas than with any other “famous writer” in this sort of context.

Camille Paglia, “Love Poetry”:

Love poetry of the twentieth century is the most varied and sexually explicit since classical antiquity…For Dylan Thomas, youth’s sexual energies drive upward from moldering, evergreen earth.

Dylan Thomas:

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Michael Schmidt:

Each phrase and fragment makes sense, but when the reader stands back from the poem its many meanings collapse like a house of cards … Like Hart Crane, Thomas writes always just beyond his own considerable but essentialy instinctive understanding.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, November 19, 1953:

I guess you’ve heard about Dylan Thomas’s death. He died four days after a brain stroke which seems to have immediately finished his mind. The details are rather gorgeously grim. He was two days incommunicado with some girl on Brinnin’s staff in some New York hotel. Then his wife came, first calbing “eternal hate,” and tried quite literally to kill and sleep with everyone in sight. Or so the rumors go in Chicago and Iowa City. It’s a story that Thomas himself would have told better than anyone else; I suppose his life was short and shining as he wanted it–life, alas, is no joke.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, December 5th, 1953:

Yes–I first saw about Dylan Thomas in Time, that awful magazine that you have to read here because it has the news first, at least. Then I got some letters. I suppose he had a cerebral hemorrhage or something, poor man. I liked him so much. Well, “like” isn’t quite the word, but I felt such a sympathy for him in Washington, and immediately, after one lunch with him, you knew perfectly well he was only good for two or three years more. Why, I wonder … when people can live to be malicious old men like Forst, or maniacal old men like Pound, or–

W. Read, The Days of Dylan Thomas:

Dylan was now having blackouts at frequent intervals. On more than one occasion he had been warned by his doctor that he must go on a regime of complete abstinence from alcohol if he was to survive … Dylan seemed exhausted, self-preoccupied, and morbidly depressed. He went out alone, and an hour and a half later returned to announce, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record.” Shortly afterwards he died.

Ted Hughes:

I read whatever contemporary verse I happened to come across, but apart from Dylan Thomas and Auden, I rejected it.

Dylan Thomas:

“[At Swim-Two-Birds is] just the book to give to your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.”

Robert Nye:

He is shut in the twisted tower of his own observations, a tower where only words are real and can bleed.

Michael Schmidt:

Thomas weaves spells. He engages language, rather than expresience. When the spell releases us, nothing is clarified. There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular late poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret, it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality. There are exceptions. “Poem in October”, with its brilliant details, works like “Refusal to Mourn” and “Do Not Go Gentle” against the tragic grain. In “A Winter’s Tale” Thomas’s rhythmic achievement is at its most subtle. The later work is rhetoric of a high order.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, June 7th, 1956:

I thought E’s review of the Dylan Thomas book by Brinnin was superb, really It came the same day that MacNeice’s review did, and that was so poor, and mean! Heavens, the English can be mean. He accuses Brinnin of being handicapped by his faulty American sense of humour so that he couldn’t appreciate DT “as a clown,” which strikes me as speaking rather well for the U.S. sense of humour… I thought the book suffers chiefly from a lack of common sense, or a helpless romanticism, about alcoholism–confusing it with philosophy or something–but actually I think he did have to write it, good or bad.

Michael Schmidt:

Dylan [Thomas] put modern Welsh poetry on the map, making stereotypes in Under Milk Wood that the Welsh have to live down, and reaching an enormous audience with his seductive rhetoric.