On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry
Dylan Thomas was a major figure in Heaney’s childhood. His poetry readings, captured on radio broadcasts, released on vinyl, Thomas reading his own poetry, reading other people’s poetry, etc., were in everyone’s collections. (I love that Ethan Hawke’s character references having one of those records in Before Sunrise, Dylan Thomas reading Auden.) In this lecture, Heaney speaks movingly about what Thomas meant to him as a young man, striving towards something, he didn’t know what, looking for voices that could launch him into some other dimension, a dimension of more connectedness, more clarity and authenticity. Heaney, as a grown man, can now perceive Thomas’ flaws in a way he couldn’t back then, swept away by Thomas’ sheer bravura love of words, his drowning in the sounds of things, etc. Heaney talks about the flaws a lot in this lecture, and it’s interesting stuff, especially if you’re on the outside of that particular obsession. For example, I love Dylan Thomas, and he’s one of those quotable poets that I can recite by heart without even remembering memorizing him, and I read Christmas in Wales and Under Milkwood before I knew I was supposed to be impressed or whatever, I read them as a kid, and LOVED them. Digging deeper into them than that, into critical appraisal, was just not part of my experience of him. We learned “Do Not Go Gentle” in class, it’s part of the canon (and rightly so), but beyond that I did not go. So it’s fascinating to hear Heaney’s extremely personal and yet really well-thought-out take on Thomas: how Thomas seemed to him when he was young and impressionable, and how Thomas seems to him now. Heaney makes an interesting observation about negative criticism of Thomas:
Indeed, I have the impression that negative criticism of Dylan Thomas’s work is more righteous and more imbued with this kind of punitive impulse than is usual. Even a nickname like ‘The Ugly Suckling’ has an unusual animus behind it. It often seems less a matter of the poet’s being criticized than of his being got back at, and my guess is that in these occasions the reader’s older self is punishing the younger one who hearkened to Thomas’s oceanic music and credited its promise to bring the world and the self into cosmic harmony.
An interesting perspective on criticism, basically blaming Thomas for not living up to what the CRITIC wanted from him as a young reader.
But, luckily, Heaney does not throw out the baby with the bathwater (Heaney seems categorically opposed to throwing babies out with any kind of water. His whole thing was attempts at not integration, so much, but intersection, an allowing of the possibility that a couple of things can be equally true at the same time.)
Dylan Thomas was famous in his own lifetime, not just for his verse but for his lifestyle and drunken shenanigans. He was a big drunken brat, and his behavior was legendary, and if you go to the White Horse Tavern in New York you can see a plaque commemorating him. The tavern was a big writer’s hangout (it still is), and Thomas spent an evening drinking there, went back to the Chelsea Hotel, and died a couple of days later. If you believe the myth, when he returned to the Chelsea, he declared, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!” That was the kind of braggadocio he specialized in, and it did him in. Nobody could survive at that speed. Well, Keith Richards did. But very few others can handle it. Thomas encouraged his own bad-boy myth, he was in a state of permanent adolescent rebellion, one of the reason that adolescent boys thrilled to his poems.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
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.
Heaney’s lecture is extremely in-depth and takes a look at much of Thomas’ work, the early stuff, the later stuff, and discusses his own reaction to these poems (first as a young man in the 50s, hearing them on the radio or on vinyl, and now, in the 1990s, with more experience).
I’ll excerpt part of the section that has to do with Thomas’ most famous work, the unforgettable villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
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.
Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry
‘Do Not Go Gentle’ is obviously a threshold poem about death, concerned with the reverse of the process which occupied Thomas in ‘Before I Knocked.’ In that earlier poem, the body was about to begin what Thomas calls elsewhere its ‘sensual strut,’ here the return journey out of mortality into ghost hood is about to be made, so in fact the recurrent rhymes of the villanelle could as well have been ‘breath’ and ‘death’ or ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ – but what we have instead are ‘night’ and ‘light.’ And the night is a ‘good night.’ But, for once, a characteristic verbal tic has become an imaginative strength and not just an irritating cleverness. ‘Good night’ is a pun which risks breaking decorum of the utterance but which turns out in the end to embody its very complexity and force. The mixture of salutation and farewell in the phrase is a perfect equivalent for the balance between natural grief and the recognition of necessity which pervades the poem as a whole.
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 in 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 expressed 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.
Not that Thomas intended this meaning, of course. One of the poem’s strengths is its outwardly directed address, its escape from emotional claustrophobia through an engagement with the specifically technical challenges of the villanelle. Yet that form is so much a matter of crossing and substitutions, of back-tracks and double-takes, turns and returns, that it is a vivid figure for the union of opposites, for the father in the son, the son in the father, for life in death and death in life. The villanelle, in fact both participates in the flux of natural existence and scans and abstracts existence in order to register its pattern. It is a living cross-section, a simultaneously open and closed form, one in which the cycles of youth and age, of rise and fall, growth and decay find their analogues in the fixed cycle of rhymes and repetitions.
