Dylan Thomas’s writing was an obsession of mine in the sixth form and I was attracted to his poetry by the way in which he painted a kaleidoscope of colours… but in words. Like many a dreamy kid, I tried to write in his style.
In those days, it was difficult to understand all what he was saying in his poetry. It was both obscure and it was wonderful. One of my teachers held that Dylan’s work was “All truth and beauty”…while another retorted, “Ner…It’s all about booze and sex.”
Later I read his poem, Fern Hill, to a class of students at the Sorbonne. And at the end of the reading, the tutor remarked, “that was great; we understood absolutely nothing but it was magnificent”. “C’etait magnifique…on n’a rien compris, mais quand meme..magnifique”. Since which time, after constant reading on the one hand and listening to Dylan’s own recordings, the meanings have become clearer.
For me, Dylan Thomas, is part writer and part composer ; communicating ideas and thoughts both directly, via language and indirectly by what I might call word-music….and so he speaks to that part of the mind that computes and calculates and to the other part that deals in imagination.
And yet there remains a difficulty. I love his work but find his own recordings quite hard to listen to. He sounds very English and I sometimes wonder to whom he is speaking. It occurs to me, in my whimsy, that he’s actually speaking to his own muse or possibly to himself. And yet Dylan knew about radio and knew that radio is pillow-talk – no better expressed than in the Introduction to Under Milk Wood… which I’d like to read now:
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in theslow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazesand colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishesand flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
Before I go any further I need to be clear and honest…I’m no literary scholar as any scholar would be swift to notice; just an enthusiast. But I was fumbling through one of those Penguin tomes, you know, that scholars might appreciate, and I found a reference entitled, “untranslatable” which was, apparently, a word first coined by Coleridge and only by him. Coleridge used “untranslatable” in the following sentence: “In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum, which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning”.
And for me, “untranslatable” applies well to all Dylan’s works…the lad who left school at the age of 16 with an insufficient education. It would be appalling … and appallingly difficult to to alter the words of a Dylan Thomas poem without inflicting that injury. A blameless style? Well I leave that for you to judge.
His poems are, generally, a challenge to read and to read aloud…so let me start with one that avoids obscurity …that I find quite easy to understand … the meaning is clear… the message is straightforward.
Right the way through Dylan’s work run constant references to Creation and to the Creator.
And that last poem and perhaps the majority of Dylan Thomas’s poems draw from a pallet of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Hardly does his pen or brush, if you like, touch the paper before some bird, a flower, a bone, the sea, the sun, a rock or the wind are flung, hurled-hard into the pot. I know I’m mixing my metaphors. He launches all the tones against each other: hard tones, soft tones, rough tones and smooth tones. Here he presents a logical idea or a comment: on life or death… and there, he delves into the whirlpool of his sub-conscious to snatch out whatever he can find.
In his poem “And death shall have no dominion” he goes straight to the Bible and makes a single edit to St Pauls (Romans 6:9) assertion: “and death shall have no more dominion”…he simply excises the word, “more.”
Dylan’s own recording of this poem is a defiant shout at his listeners; he’s almost like some Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea into giant cliffs of water with the wind blowing his grey hair across a craggy countenance.
Right the way through Dylan’s work run constant references to Creation and to the Creator.
And that last poem and perhaps the majority of Dylan Thomas’s poems draw from a pallet of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Hardly does his pen or brush, if you like, touch the paper before some bird, a flower, a bone, the sea, the sun, a rock or the wind are flung, hurled-hard into the pot. I know I’m mixing my metaphors. He launches all the tones against each other: hard tones, soft tones, rough tones and smooth tones. Here he presents a logical idea or a comment: on life or death… and there, he delves into the whirlpool of his sub-conscious to snatch out whatever he can find.
In his poem “And death shall have no dominion” he goes straight to the Bible and makes a single edit to St Pauls (Romans 6:9) assertion: “and death shall have no more dominion”…he simply excises the word, “more.”
Dylan’s own recording of this poem is a defiant shout at his listeners; he’s almost like some Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea into giant cliffs of water with the wind blowing his grey hair across a craggy countenance.
There are commentators who would judge that “And death shall have no dominion” represents an emphatic affirmation that death isn’t really the end. Penned in September 1936 it’s one of his most notable comments on the eternal nature of the human spirit. But to my mind, it contrasts strongly, with that angry cry, many years later, addressed to his father called, “Do not go gentle into that good night”; a father that was in his 80s, in afflicted health and with failing eyesight. For if death really shall have no dominion then its acceptance, to which Dylan Thomas paradoxically refers in the second verse, seems acknowledged as a consummation devoutly to be wished. You know, I think that Dylan was expressing his own rage at the dying of his father’s light…anger, they tell me, is a natural response to bereavement…
Some thoughts for students:
1. Note down striking phrases or poetic lines as you listen to the poetry.
2. Listen to a line and repeat it with the same rhythm and emphasis.
3. Take turns reading Dylan Thomas’ poetry with different emotions or accents.
4. Act out lines from Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night or the beginning of Under Milkwood with gestures and tone changes.
5. Write a short piece mimicking his imagery-heavy style.
6. Poetic Chain Story: Each student adds a poetic line to a group poem, inspired by his themes.