Poetry is broken down, repeated and recreated, while maintaining its undiminished ingredients: words. Poetry takes part in the evolution of human thought, of its culture, of the interpretation of reality; it is neither dead nor dying. Yet among us it languishes, waiting for someone who can reclaim it and give it a new form and a new voice.
In 1934 it found Dylan Marlais Thomas in the form of 18 poems.
One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women. This is how the Welsh poet described himself.
Born in 1914 in Swansea, Thomas left school at the age of sixteen to concentrate on writing. At a very young age he revolutionised the English cultural environment by creating a more emotional and visionary alternative to the intellectual poetry of Wystan Hugh Auden and Thomas Stearns Eliot.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
A poem by me needs a host of images. 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 intellectual 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, con-flict. 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 that central seed, which is itself destructive and construc-tive at the same time…Out of the inevitable conflict of images I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.[1]
Dylan Thomas died in New York at the age of thirty-nine – consumed by poetry and alcohol – after five days in a comatose state. His wife flew in from the UK and arrived at the hospital and asked: ‘Is the bloody man dead yet?’ She turned up a few hours late, out of control and drunk; a straitjacket was forced on her and she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic.
The love story between the Welsh poet and Caitlin (Macnamara) Thomas was one of alcohol, betrayal and passion: ‘raw, red bleeding meat’, as Caitlin described it.
Despite his short life, Dylan Thomas was extremely productive, and his poems have become famous amongst mass culture.
The poet’s themes are reoccurring: nature, religion, the cyclical nature of life and death. And yet it would be a trivial simplification to define Dylan Thomas solely by them. In fact, these themes transcend the banal meaning and in the poet’s words take on new forms that lead to paths never taken before.
Dylan Thomas is a phonetic poet, his poems are rhythmical, he uses repetition, a clever juxtaposition of vowels and consonants largely underlined by calligraphic elements. His readings are legendary, the poems live again through his vibrant voice, they do not merely end in writing. In the United States he undertook several ‘tours’ of reading his own poems and was often drunk – wreaking havoc with his audience. His escorts expected him to collapse on stage, but poetry gave him strength even though: ‘the demon alcohol had for some time [become] a friend a little too oppressive and a little too intimate’.
Religion recurs in many of his poems. Dylan Thomas was a Puritan, believing in predestination and in the salvation of the human being (as promised by God to Abraham) as long as he followed biblical rules. In his poems elements from the Old and New Testaments recur and it is with the Apocalypse that his religious vision comes to fruition, with the figure of Abaddòn, who in the Old Testament represented the abyss (from the Hebrew place of destruction) while in the New Testament he represents an angel, ‘the destroyer’ in Greek, ‘the exterminator’ in Latin.
In the poem Before I Knocked, the poet speaks of both physical and spiritual birth. Time is the physical key: the foetus inexorably matures until birth, which then becomes failure: the human being is annihilated, his existence is a feeble one for which only death awaits him. Passio is the spiritual key, destiny is already prearranged; the foetus faces the stages until it leaves its mother’s womb: the crucifixion. Then only death is left.
Before I knocked and flesh let enter, I who was deaf to spring and summer, I knew the message of the winter, | As yet ungotten, I did suffer; My throat knew thirst before the structure And time cast forth my mortal creature
| I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither You who bow down at cross and altar,
|
In his most famous poem And death shall have no dominion, the poet echoes St Paul’s epistle to the Romans (6.9), ‘Death hath no more dominion’, i.e. death cannot defeat life, because it is not part of the kingdom. Unlike John Donne’s poem Death, be not proud, Dylan Thomas shows no concern in regard to physical appearance. Death cannot defeat mankind because even if his body is no more, he will join his fellow men. Ultimately, despite the loss of nature, death will have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
| And death shall have no dominion.
| And death shall have no dominion.
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However, Especially when the October wind is certainly the poem that best represents the author’s poetic idea: the sonority, the juxtaposition of imagery, Wales and the calligraphic elements.
Especially when the October wind Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
| Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
| Especially when the October wind
|
A discordant symbolic-figurative element overlays the former natural themes: the crab that takes the form of the sun, which, clawed by the clouds, projects a shadow of a crab clawing its prey across the author’s body.
The calligraphic elements are multiple: blood is syllabic, the tower is made of words, the trees are verbal; in addition to these and other natural-calligraphic examples, the poet adds: “it tells me the hour’s word”: time is also verbal – it has its own sound.
Poetry is the representation of certain sounds by means of signs, and yet Dylan Thomas goes conceptually further, combining and breaking down sounds and signs to create combinations filled with meaning: natural, symbolic, artistical and calligraphic meaning.
During one of his trips to America, Dylan Thomas met Igor’ Fëdorovič Stravinskij, the well-known composer, who admired the Welshman’s poetic work. He requested a libretto for an opera from the poet, but Thomas died before starting it. By putting to music Do not go gentle into that good night, a poem written by the poet for his dying father, Stravinsky consequently paid homage to his beloved poet with a funeral song entitled In memoriam Dylan Thomas, a poem that was revived in a new form, completing the author’s poetic circle.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
| Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
| Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight And you, my father, there on the sad height,
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[1] Quote taken from Willard Liston Rudd, Images of creation and destruction in the early poetry of Dylan Thomas, 1971.
[2] D. Thomas, Poesie, Einaudi, 2021, p.12
[3] Ivi, p.64
[4] Ivi, p.20
[5] Ivi, p.230