The intention of this essay is to engage directly with the poetry of Dylan Thomas without the mediation of any prior scholarship. The objective is specifically to unpack the aura of certain lines and phrasings of Thomas’s resonant in postmodern English language poetry.
Perhaps the greatest achievement demonstrated by Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is its having entered new words in the English dictionary, words like jabberwocky, galumph, and runcible. Ezra Pound once noted that what the great artist succeeded in doing was to create the style by which he would be judged. While he may not have entered new words in the lexicon, few poets in the twentieth century have succeeded as clearly as Dylan Thomas in creating a style against which his work and work after would be measured. The difficulty for the reader is in understanding his unusual way with words. Take these famous lines for example:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green
So well remembered that their fame may obscure the imagery delivered in the words, these lines locate a persona in a childhood past, in the early memories of a persona. But how particular and how general is the setting envisaged? How – and with whose eyes – can we as readers see into the poem? At first glance there seems to be only one trope, a simile in the second line: ‘happy as the grass was green’. How can an individual human’s happiness be equated with the greenness of the grass? I think these can be equated quite easily and naturally. Green grass in the countryside is the result of good rain, is associated with plenty, with fat cows and good crops. Notice the persona is not as happy as the green grass, he is as happy as the grass was green. The simile is actually bringing us a metonymy. Or rather it brings us into a metonymic chain. Nor is there anything especially poetic about this particular metonymy action. Any farmer’s heart would be gladdened by the sight of green grass, because of what it means. The greenness of the grass might provide an accurate index for the happiness of farmers.
But how can the persona be ‘easy’ under the apple boughs? ‘Easy’ is an unusual epithet for a persona to apply to himself. Life is easy, things might be easy, but people usually are not referred to in this manner. The epithet has been transferred to something associated with it. In this case the persona is described as easy because his life is easy. This particular place, generalized by the use of the plural (‘boughs’, itself ambiguous because we don’t know whether one tree or an orchard is intended) suggests a playful and unburdened lifestyle in the countryside. It suggests the kind of place in which the Romantic poet (for instance Wordsworth) imagined that poetic thinking was possible.
‘The lilting house’ is a clearer case of metonymy. Houses do not lilt, but the people in or around them might. So this is also a personification: the house is being given human attributes, and it is being given the attributes of particular people, the people who live in the house. The quality or characteristic of certain people is transferred to the house they live in. But how particular are these unnamed people? We only know them rather indirectly, through a property of theirs already transferred to their house when we meet it. In other words we have to work backwards to imagine the inhabitants of the house as lilting. We have to try to imagine the scene with which the persona’s vision, a memory of course, began, before the poem. Paradoxically, we work to recover the innocence of the persona, by taking apart the metonymic structure that carries it.
‘Happy as the grass was green’, ‘easy under the apple boughs’, ‘about the lilting house’: different techniques are employed in each phrase but a related principle applies in each. The meaning is transferred between or among objects through a pattern of association. This pattern has a generalizing effect because it unifies a landscape or image field by sharing the attributes of the objects in it. The technical unity of these first two lines sets up the pattern for the reading of the whole poem. As with an early E.E. Cummings’ poem like ‘All in green went my love riding’, the reader has to make her own images from the patches of colour and the glimpses of movement and the patterns of association that make up the poem. We need to read the poem metonymically because the imagery of the poem works associatively.
How complicated is the work of reading lines like these? To identify with Dylan Thomas’ childhood experiences, for the reader well versed in the literature tradition which makes his work possible, these lines can be understood without much effort. The associations are made unconsciously, just as there is very little intellectual labour for the farmer who smiles to see a green field.
The result of the thinking-feeling process of reading is probably that one ends up with images in mind something like those from a child’s picture book. Evocative as it, Dylan Thomas’ poetry does not demand the reader ‘see’ anything of great complexity. Rather it is the process of evocation that is complicated. Understanding and explaining how the poem does what it does is difficult but of how much of that complexity need the reader or the writer be aware? Thinking too hard and explaining too much can kill a poem, just as it can kill a story or a joke. A lot of the fun in reading is in not knowing how the text does what it does to you.
What was poetry to Dylan Thomas? In an interview he once said:
What does it matter what poetry is, after all? If you want a definition of poetry say ‘Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing’, and let it go at that. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic that might be.
Dylan Thomas’ early death as alcoholic (while on a reading tour of America) was indeed tragic, but much of his poetry was filled with the exuberant love of life characteristic of perhaps his most famous poem, ‘Fern Hill’, the first two lines of which we considered in detail above. Despite the use of the past tense throughout that poem, despite knowing that we are reading an adult’s recollections, in fact we are on a child’s journey in this poem. And the imagery of childhood is delivered so rapidly that one easily omits to recognize the elaborate rhythmic, and especially alliterative, architecture of the poem. The Welsh lilt is there from the pseudo-bibilical story-telling opening to the closing paradox of the last line. If we attend to the poem it is the pictures we see. They do not work to engage us as a conventional story might; rather, like dream imagery, they continually surprise us with shifts out of expectation. The child’s erratic breadth of vision is conveyed throughout as if this were something Dylan Thomas had managed to maintain, despite adulthood, throughout his life.
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 Onto the fields of praise.
Here the child’s experience of the origin of things is generalized as universal. The child sees the world as it was when God created it.
In terms of metonymy, it is useful to compare the green and gold imagery in this poem with that in E. E. Cummings’ ‘All in green went my love riding’. Here is how that poem opens:
All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.
Both poems play with the conventional symbolism which each of these colours suggests. In both poems the reader has to re-associate colours, the fields of bright colour, which fill the picture book of childhood memory. In ‘Fern Hill’ the feeling of childhood is established by an associative logic. Image leads to image to tell the story, to recover that innocence. The days are lamb white. The stables are whinnying. Tunes come from the chimneys. How much more evocative that phrase is than it would be to explain that people sat by the hearths in their houses playing tunes. The evocation of a personal imagery through association opens this past for the reader; allows us to climb into the picture and explore for ourselves.
Dylan Thomas’ poetry puts the reader in mind of influences on poetry s/he might be more apt to forget. The cadences of a nursery rhyme are often close to the surface of his writing, as ‘The Hand that signed the Paper’:
The Hand that signed the Paper
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
Those five kings did a king to death.
The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.
The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow. Compare this poem with the traditional nursery rhyme, ‘For want of a nail’:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost, For want of a shoe the horse was lost, For want of a horse the rider was lost, For want of a rider the battle was lost, For want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The logic here – about large consequences following from small omissions – and its moral corollary – pay attention to detail – place us in the genre of popular wisdom.
The logical structure in each case is similar but the Dylan Thomas poem builds on an assumed knowledge of nursery rhymes like the one above (and also for instance ‘This is the house that Jack built’). However this poem is much more tropically complex. The juxtaposition of abstract and concrete imagery (e.g. ‘A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven’) makes it difficult to know how to read the poem. One would like to take the ‘the hand’ in the poem as steady metaphor, perhaps for authority or power or control. But the metonymic value of the hand in that kind of function (the hand is associated with certain acts it enables) is such as to shift from instance to instance, according to what it is the hand holds or manipulates. The hand and/or fingers in the poem can, according to their function, start or end conversations or wars, count the dead. They do embody power but the manner in which their functions shift lies out of prediction. Who knows which decisions will cause wars or famines or bring these to an end?
What effect does this kind of uncertainty have on the simple morality of the nursery rhyme from which it originated? Does Thomas’ poem takes us on a train of thought that agrees with or extends or contradicts the older conventional wisdom of nursery rhymes? A moral to the story might be that the disconnection of power from its balanced emotional setting results in pitiless and inhuman situations, situations that ironically result from the control emotional creatures like us. Is it the case that the danger comes from the disconnection of the links in a metonymic chain; that is to say for instance with the hand being out of touch with the pain that it inflicts?
‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ employs a not dissimilar logical pattern. Like ‘Fern Hill’ the long sentence structure of the poem is very demanding of the reader’s attention. Think again ‘For want of a nail’ or ‘The house that Jack built’. The child hearing those rhymes may have no trouble understanding what to see from the rhyme, line by line. But remembering at the end what was happening at the beginning is a lot more difficult. So, with this poem, it is easy to lose track of what is doing what to what in the poem.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
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 poolStirs 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 fountainhead; 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 a lover’s tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Dylan Thomas’s is a Romantic participation in the animated landscape. Humans are not so much set above the natural above as sealed off from it by virtue of their language. The means of knowing and explaining how one is where one is seal one off from participation in one’s environment. This is the frustration of the esemplastic process or participation in nature that Coleridge prized.
In the third stanza of the poem the failure of communication is extended to humans, in this case to the human with whom society (that collectivity enabled by language) is dispensing, by means of his execution. In the fourth stanza two big abstractions – time and love – are personified, but somehow unconvincingly. It is as if we humans cannot help personifying, but it does not do us any good.
At stake here – and the last couplet makes this abundantly clear – is the failure of community to emerge from identity. Yes, we all get eaten by worms in the end, but one will not succeed in communicating that affinity to someone the worms are already at. So what good does knowledge do us? How can communication have effect when it cannot touch those with whom communication is lacking and needed?
The thinking in ‘The Hand that signed the Paper’ and ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ is certainly far more complex than that of a nursery rhyme. In both cases there are reversals of expectation that are worked through unusual tropes and unusual imagery. The result is to confuse thought and feeling so as to make a world uncertain. We understand each step on the way but we do remember how we got where we are? For the adult reader of poetry, the pleasure in getting lost in this manner is not unlike the pleasure of the child lost in the tangle of sense and nonsense in the nursery rhyme.
In a way modern poetry for adults is the flipside of the nursery rhyme. The nursery rhyme teaches what is normal and how to behave by showing the limits of normality and the limits of behaviour. The post/modern poem often enough demands that all of that be rethought, that the normal and the correct be challenged, re-evaluated; that, as Socrates famously suggested, life be examined in order that it be worth living. In Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ ambivalence about the destination or existence of the soul is countered by a determination to live, even when that determination is futile.
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.What are the reasons to rage against the dying of the light, to not go gently into that good night, to burn and rave at close of day? Note that each of these is a euphemism for resistance to death and its inevitability, its imminence. There are several reasons for resistance given in the poem. Having got it wrong in life or having been mistaken in some big way: that kind of a realisation is such a reason. To suddenly understand your own moral worth – that even your weak actions might have danced in a green bay – gives a value to your life and a reason to live. To learn that you were wrong about your life – you thought you had sung the sun but now you see you’d grieved it – that is a reason not to submit to the inevitable. To understand that vision persists powerfully even for the sightless: this is a reason to value light, meaning life. Even the wise who understand the inevitability of death – when they realise how little effect their words have had – will resist. All are right to feel cheated by death because death deprives them of the humanness which is demonstrated by their failings, and because none of them have finished their business with life. Whether tears are for cursing or blessing is less important than the evidence they offer of a passionate commitment to life. Note in this poem that death is ‘that good night’. So the passionate commitment to life for which the poem argues is founded on an ambivalence. The question is not whether death is inevitable or just or deserved or good. One should rage against death because one has reasons to live even when life is no longer a viable option. Humans are creatures with reasons to live.
Poetry has to do with the life and death struggle; it has to do with grief and heart and singing light, as in ‘In my craft or sullen art’:
Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art. Poetry here aims – the art of the poet aims – at a secret place: the other world of lovers’ hearts. It is a world private, yet shared, yet unknown. To write for the heedless one might regard as cynicism or realism or both. But if one must write in poverty for those who are likely neither to heed nor praise then at least one ought to have the privilege of a target for one’s writing. Who better than those already full focused (the lovers) and already fully distracted (their arms around the griefs of the ages)? Who could have less time for poetry? And if they are, each for the other, the griefs of the ages, then they are lost and found in the language between themselves. What act, what posture of mind or heart, could be more poetic?
Poetry and song are the great humanising thread in which the voices of others have resonance. Lest we find ourselves becoming too serious about this business, we may allow Dylan Thomas to remind us that there is something at least a little comical in the thanklessness and the unheeding nature of the task. Through all of Dylan Thomas’ work, and no matter how serious his subject matter, one feels, that this is a poet who ‘makes our toes twinkle’.