Dylan Marlais Thomas was born today on October 27th, 1914, at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea.The 100 year anniversary celebrations may have passed, but that does not mean that we forget this blazing talent, by the age of eight or nine he was writing his own poetry,
even before he entered the Grammar School in 1925. A quiet and introspective
student, he was a frequent contributor to the school's magazine.Leaving school at sixteen he worked on the staff of the
South Wales Daily Post (later the
South Wales Evening Post),
sometimes writing scathing reviews and critiques of local plays, concerts and
writers which needed be edited to keep from offending the subjects under scrutiny.
During this very productive writing period of Dylan's life, he also became known
locally for the offbeat jokes, stories and obscene limericks he told in the pubs
at night. He would read poems he was working on aloud to friends and relatives,
not wanting them to read the work he'd done, but instead to hear it. Along with
writing, Thomas was also involved with local theater, both writing and acting.
A good half of his 90 collected poems were written or half-written in
his bedroom at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea before he was 20.
In a January 1933 essay in the South Wales Evening Post entitled
"
Genius and Madness Akin in the World of Art" Thomas discussed the idea that
one gifted with genius often walked a line where it was "
difficult to
differentiate, with any sureness, between insanity and eccentricity."
He asserted that "
the borderline of insanity is more difficult to trace
than the majority of people, comparatively safe within the barriers of
their own common-sensibility, can realise."
Dylan's first national publication was in a small literary review in the
spring of 1933. Later that year his poems were published in the more
prestigious Adelphi and the London newspaper
The Sunday Referee.After moving to London in 1934 in pursuit of better opportunities,
Dylan's writing career began to flourish. His poems, essays, articles
and reviews were being published in London and Swansea magazines and newspapers. With dedication and devotion to the craft of writing his hard work paid of when his first book,18 poems was released on the 18th of December 1934 when he was only 20. A second book Twenty-five poems appeared in Autumn of 1936.He would go on to become one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.
It was in this year that Dylan would meet one Caitlin Macnamara, and it is said that within hours of their first meeting Dylan, drunkenly insisted that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and that
he was going to marry her, to which she offered no objections.
The slightly older Caitlin,who was a physically strong, trained dancer with a fiery and
unpredictable temper found the impoverished poet vulnerable and sweet, if a bit needy.
They spent the next five days and nights together, going from pub to pub and hardly eating
at all. Later that summer when he and Caitlin met again in Wales, Dylan had a run-in with
Augustus John, a painter and friend of her parents with whom Caitlin had been having an affair.
Caitlin and Dylan eventually started living together near the end of 1936. and was to marry her in 1937. A turbulent marriage, that weathered many a storm.
In 1941 , Thomas and Caitlin moved to Plas Gelli at Talsarn in what was then known as Cardiganshire, now known as Ceredigion, keeping a studio flat in London whilst spending some of the time working on wartime propaganda films. The couple left their son Llewellyn with Caitlin's mother, where he stayed until 1949. Their second child a daughter named Aeronwy (Aeron) Bryn Thomas was born in March 1942. During his time in London Thomas would take part in more than a hundred radio programmes.Dylan and Caitlin moved to New Quay in September,eager to escape both the war and London, moving to a little bungalow by the name of ' Majoda' before moving to South Leigh in Oxfordshire. His final home would be the Boathouse where they lived from 1949 to 1953.
Thomas is often labelled a non-political poet, but he wrote about the
great issues of his day, such as unemployment, war and the danger of
atomic weapons. and was also a life-long socialist and an internationalist, in his 1934 collection
New Verse he states “
I take my stand with any revolutionary body that
asserts it to be the right of all men to share, equally and
impartially, every production of man ... from the sources of
production at man’s disposal”
All the evidence points to Thomas’s holding revolutionary
convictions both before he moved from Wales to London in 1934 and
throughout his life. Before the Second World War, Dylan was certainly a man who liked to be
known as challenging fascists on his patch, in Swansea. Writing in the Swansea Guardian,
he was critical of a local councillor, Mainwaring Hughes, who aligned
himself with the British Union of Fascists. When the BUF mounted a 3,000
strong demonstration in Swansea in 1934, Dylan felt the need to be
involved to oppose such extremism. A letter he wrote to Pamela Hansford
Johnson in July 1934 explained how he had recently written ‘a seditious
article attacking the shirted gentleman’ – i.e. Oswald Mosely. Here, he
even claimed to have been involved at a fracas when opposing fascists,
resulting in him being thrown down some stairs. It seems the latter was
something of an embellishment, but nonetheless such letters highlight
his anti-fascist identity.
In 1944, Thomas also wanted the
Communist Party cultural journal Our Time to publish Ceremony
after a Fire Raid, ‘pressing’ the poem “upon [Arnold]
Rattenbury because, he said, he wanted to advertise that he remained
a socialist” (Hobday, p. 233). Thomas contributed not only to
Our Time but to its successor Communist Party periodicals
Arena and Circus. On his 1952 visit to America, he also
agreed to do a poetry reading for the Socialist Party of the USA
without expecting his usual fee. And, as we have seen, Thomas called
himself a communist and relished opportunities for political
discussion in the final days in New York city. And, as his prose
writings and film scripts reveal, he understood poverty and class
consciousness and could describe them as experienced in Wales and the world. Dylan developed more anti-fascist writing during the Second World War,
as he worked as a writer of propaganda films. In this body of work too –
which was of greater significance and impact, but once more was not his
most literary writing – he could use humour to skewer a fascist leader.
His funniest of these films was undoubtedly These Are the Men, which
featured footage of Hitler and other leading Nazis delivering histrionic
speeches, although re-dubbed with an English language voiceover. The film-scripts reveal a socialist understanding of the cost to
humanity of a failed economic system. Wales – Green Mountain, Black
Mountain was too political for the British Council to show overseas.
One memorable passage answers the early critics who said that Thomas
ignored the social reality of Depression-era Wales:
Remember the procession of the old-young men
From dole queue to corner and back again,
From the pinched, packed streets to the peak of slag
In the bite of the winters with shovel and bag,
With a drooping fag and a turned up collar,
Stamping for the cold at the ill lit corner
Dragging through the squalor with their hearts like lead
Staring at the hunger and the shut pit-head
Nothing in their pockets, nothing home to eat,
Lagging from the slag heap to the pinched, packed street.
Remember the procession of the old-young men.
It shall never happen again.
He would often like to boast about his drinking and said: “An alcoholic is someone
you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do.” Thomas’ health rapidly
began to deteriorate as a result of his drinking; he was warned by his
doctor to give up alcohol but he carried on regardless.In January 1950 Dylan engaged on a reading tour in America which was a great success. However on a further tour in 1953, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern the result of a binge in which, as he allegedly boasted, he drank "18 straight whiskies; I think it's a record".this has become the stuff of legends, but since then it has been said that he probably actually died from a blood sugar inbalance having not eaten properly for several days prior to his death, and the Doctor who treated him with both cortisone and half a grain of morphine sulphate, an abnormally high dose, and dangerous given his breathing complications,probably did not help him any further. He subsequently died in a coma , a few days later on November 9th, at St Vincents Hospital in New York City at the age of 39. A tragic premature end nevertheless to this great Welsh poet and writer. And despite the myths that have emerged about his prodigous appetite for drinking it was certainly not alcoholism that finished him off, as his liver showed no signs of cirrhosis. The post mortem actually said that the primary cause of Thomas's death was pneumonia, with pressure on the brain and a fatty liver given as a contributing factor.Yes he had a love of alcohol, but first and foremost he was a poet
the likes of which is seldom seen, and to define a man by his vices is to
ignore his virtues.We should not let his reputation as a heavy drinker overshadow his great literacy legacy. One of the most entrancing features Thomas possessed was his voice, a
seductive instrument which he used to enrich his performances that still endures to this day, he remain a poet unlike any other. Dylan Thomas took the very local and very specific and made it
universal. Across all of the forms that Dylan Thomas mastered, the
literary landscape was made all the richer by his creative exploration
of subjects that he returned to throughout his career: memory, childhood
and place. He wrote about the ways in which we belong to each other
and to the place that we call ‘home’.
He is buried in Laugharne, and has a memorial plaque in Poets corner in Westminster Abbey I have long been a great admirer of his life and work and his unfailing commitment to his craft, that continues to inspire, so today I celebrate his birth, and his mercurial talent, and yes I will raise a glass or two. Cheers Dylan Thomas..A certain Mr Robert Allen Zimmerman would arrive in New
York eight years after Dylan Thomas's death, telling everyone that his name was Bob Dylan
(later admitting it was his way of honoring the late poet).This influence extended beyond Dylan’s stage name though, going so far as to
shape his lyrical style and even the types of songs he chose to write. That is another story I guess, but illustrates how Dylan Thomas had on many that rode on his waves later, and the poets who have followed in his footsteps who still owe a debt to his mighty mercurial talent. Every year the Dylan Thomas society of Great Britain lays a wreath at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death.
Poem in October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbours wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
the morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
in rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here we found climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea the wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed agaiI a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
in the sun
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there in the summer moon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my hear's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
1945
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.
Poem on his birthday
In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.
Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.
In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,
The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.
In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark
And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is alwas true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.
There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in youg Heaven's fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,
But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him
Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:
Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Thangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,
That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,
I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thuderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Poems (1971)
Collected Poems (1952)
In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (1952)
Deaths and Entrances (1946)
New Poems (1943)
The Map of Love (1939)
The World I Breath (1939)
Twenty-Five Poems (1936)
18 Poems (The Fortune press, 1934)
Prose
Early Prose Writings (1971)
Collected Prose (1969)
The Beach of Falesá (1964)
Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957)
Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other Stories (1955)
A Prospect of the Sea (1955)
A Child’s Christmas in Wales (1954)
Quite Early One Morning (1954)
The Doctor and the Devils (1953)
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)
Notebooks (1934)
Drama
Under Milk Wood (1954)
