By Bergotte
Dylan Thomas believed that language was not the instrument through which experience was described but the medium in which it was created — that the poem did not report on the world but summoned it, called it into existence through the sheer incantatory force of sound and rhythm and the collision of unexpected words. This is a position with ancient roots — in the Welsh bardic tradition, in the King James Bible, in the metaphysical poets he read as a boy in Swansea — and it produces, in his best work, a poetry of such physical and sonic intensity that the meaning arrives through the body before it arrives through the mind, the way music does, the way prayer does when prayer is working. His subject, beneath all the verbal exuberance, is always the same: the mortal body, the passing of time, the refusal to go quietly into the dark, and the grief — raw, unmanaged, enormous — of a man who loved the world so completely that the thought of leaving it was insupportable. He burned at both ends and the light was extraordinary.
The Boy from Swansea
Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in 1914 in Swansea, South Wales, the son of a grammar school English master who had wanted to be a poet himself and who gave his son Shakespeare and the English tradition with a fervour that was both gift and burden. The name Dylan — from the Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh tales, the name of a legendary sea figure — was his father’s romantic choice, and the romanticism was inherited along with the name. Dylan Thomas grew up between two languages — Welsh all around him, English the language of his education and his ambition — and the tension between them, between the musical density of Welsh and the literary richness of English, produced a poet whose relationship to the English language was that of an outsider who had fallen in love with it: more alert to its possibilities, more willing to push it to its limits, than a writer for whom it was simply the air he breathed.
He left school at sixteen, worked briefly as a junior reporter on the South Wales Evening Post, and published his first collection, 18 Poems, in 1934 at the age of twenty. He was nineteen when he wrote most of it. The poems were immediately recognised as something unprecedented — dense, obscure, physically overwhelming, unlike anything being written in England at the time — and they made him, overnight, one of the most discussed young poets in the language. He moved to London, entered the literary world, drank heavily, charmed everyone, and produced the work that would make his reputation across three decades of extraordinary productivity alternating with periods of paralysis, debt, and the domestic chaos that his wife Caitlin, whom he married in 1937, endured with a fortitude that gradually became fury.
He was also, from the early 1940s, a broadcaster for the BBC, and it is impossible to overstate the importance of the voice. Thomas read poetry on air — his own and others’ — with a depth and a resonance and a musical intelligence that made the experience of hearing him something categorically different from reading the poems on the page. The voice was the poetry’s other half: the physical instrument that completed what the written word had begun, the proof that these were not poems to be read silently at a desk but spoken aloud in a room, the breath and the body participating in the meaning. He was the first great poet of the radio age and he understood, instinctively, that the medium required a poetry that could hold an audience through sound before it reached them through sense.
He made four lecture tours of America between 1950 and 1953, each one more chaotic and more celebrated than the last. He performed his poems to packed houses, drank prodigiously, conducted affairs, and became, in a way that no British poet had previously managed, a transatlantic celebrity — the last of the Romantic poets living the Romantic life in public, the performance and the work inseparable. He died in New York in November 1953, aged thirty-nine, having drunk eighteen straight whiskies at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village the night before — or so the legend has it, and the legend has proved more durable than the medical record, which suggests a combination of alcohol, morphine administered by a well-meaning doctor, and an undiagnosed pneumonia. He was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, fell into a coma, and died four days later. Caitlin arrived and had to be restrained from attacking the nurses. He was buried in Laugharne, the small Welsh town on the Taf estuary where he had lived for the last years of his life, in the churchyard of St Martin’s, under a simple white cross.
He was thirty-nine. He had written enough to last forever.
The Force That Through the Green Fuse
The early poems — the poems of 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems, written in Swansea in the notebooks he kept from adolescence — are among the most densely physical in the language, organised around a vision of existence as a single continuous biological process in which birth and death and sex and decomposition are not separate events but aspects of one unbroken cycle. The green fuse of the title poem is both the force that drives the flower and the force that drives the poet — the same energy, the same blind biological compulsion, the same process that will eventually turn the green world into the winter world and the living body into the dead one.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. The identification is absolute and the tone is neither celebration nor lament but something more primitive: recognition, the shock of understanding that you are not separate from the process that will kill you, that the vitality you feel right now is the same force that is spending itself in the spending. It is a vision of existence that has more in common with the pre-Socratic philosophers — with Heraclitus, for whom everything is flux and the river is never the same river — than with the Christian tradition in which Thomas was raised and against which he perpetually struggled.
The early poems are difficult in a specific way: they resist paraphrase because the meaning is generated by the collision of images rather than by the development of an argument. You cannot say what Altarwise by owl-light means in the way you can say what a sonnet by Shakespeare means, because the meaning is not separable from the language that produces it. Thomas himself was evasive when asked to explain his poems, sometimes claiming that they were purely sound structures with no paraphrasable content, sometimes insisting that every image had a precise personal symbolism. Both claims were probably partially true and both were deflections: the poems mean something, but what they mean is not available to prose without irreversible loss.
What can be said is that the early poems are organised around a body — a specifically male, specifically mortal body — and its relationship to time. Sex and death are not opposites in these poems but rhymes, two expressions of the same underlying process. The worm and the lover do the same work. The grave and the womb are the same chamber. This is not morbidity. It is the most thorough and the most honest engagement with biological existence that English poetry had attempted since Donne, and it is conducted with an energy and a physical directness that the metaphysical tradition had filtered through theological framework but that Thomas insists on experiencing raw, without the mediation of doctrine.
Fern Hill
Fern Hill, published in Deaths and Entrances in 1946, is the poem by which Thomas is most widely known after Do Not Go Gentle, and it is the poem in which the tension between the celebration of experience and the knowledge of its loss achieves its most complete and most heartbreaking expression. It is an elegy for childhood — for the farm in Carmarthenshire where Thomas spent his summer holidays as a boy, for the absolute and unconditional happiness of a child in a green world who does not yet know that the world is passing — and it is written with a formal control and a sonic richness that make it one of the supreme achievements of twentieth century poetry in any language.
The poem moves through three stanzas of remembered joy and arrives at the close with the knowledge that the child who was happy did not know he was mortal — Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea — and the knowledge falls like a sentence, like the announcement of something that was always true and that the happiness of the preceding lines has been simultaneously celebrating and concealing. He was held green and dying from the beginning. The chains were always there. And he sang in them, as the sea sings in its chains of shore and gravity, because singing is what you do when you are alive and the chains have not yet tightened.
The image of singing in chains is the human condition in concentrated form as Thomas understood it: we are mortal, we know it or will know it, and the proper response — the only response consistent with being fully alive — is to sing anyway, with the full force of everything you have, in the knowledge that the singing is both the proof of your aliveness and the measure of what will be lost when it stops.
Fern Hill works because the joy is real. Thomas does not sentimentalise the childhood or soften the fall. The green world of the farm is rendered with such physical precision and such genuine delight — the lilting house, the hay fields high as the house, the foxes in the morning dew, the rivers of the windfall light — that the loss, when it arrives, is proportionate to what is lost. You can only mourn what you have loved, and the poem insists that you love it first, fully, before it takes it from you.
Do Not Go Gentle
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, written in 1947 and published in 1951, is the most famous villanelle in the English language and one of the most anthologised poems of the twentieth century, and it runs the risk that all enormously famous poems run: of being known so widely that it is no longer read. It is worth reading again, slowly, as if for the first time, because what it says is not what its reputation as a poem of defiant courage always suggests.
It was written for Thomas’s dying father, David John Thomas, the grammar school teacher who had given him Shakespeare and his own frustrated ambitions, and who was losing his sight and his life in the Swansea house where Dylan had grown up. The poem is a son’s plea to his father to fight death, to rage against it, to refuse the passivity of a good death well managed. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The refrain is magnificent and it is also, if you read carefully, desperate — the repetition of rage not triumphant but imploring, the son asking the father to do something the father may not have the capacity or the will to do, the plea revealing as much about the son’s needs as about the father’s situation.
The four types of men in the intervening stanzas — wise men, good men, wild men, grave men — all find reasons to rage, all have something unfinished, something unsaid, something that the dying of the light will extinguish before it is fully expressed. The accumulation is not simply rhetorical. Each type represents a different relationship to the unlived life, a different form of the human condition’s most persistent grief: the sense that there was more, that the time was insufficient, that the light is going before the work is done.
Thomas’s father did not rage. He died quietly, as most people die, in 1952, the year after the poem was published. The poem did not save him and was not meant to. It was meant to say, in the most formally concentrated way available, what the son felt watching the father go — the love, the terror, the refusal, the knowledge that the refusal was futile and the refusal anyway. Grief wearing the mask of defiance, which is one of the oldest and most human things there is.
Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood, the radio play completed just before his final American tour and first broadcast by the BBC in January 1954, two months after his death, is the work in which Thomas moves furthest from the intense personal lyric of the poems and toward something more communal, more comic, more explicitly Welsh. It is a day in the life of the fictional Welsh seaside village of Llareggub — the name readable backwards, as generations of readers have noticed, as a scatological instruction to the world — observed from before dawn to night by two narrators and a cast of characters whose inner lives are rendered with the same physical density and the same loving attention that the poems bring to the natural world.
The play is many things: a pastoral, a comedy, a meditation on memory and desire and the small daily accumulations of a life. It is also, and this is what makes it more than a charming exercise in regional voice, a serious argument about what ordinary human lives contain. Captain Cat, dreaming of his dead drowned sailors. Polly Garter, who loved too many men and regrets nothing. Reverend Eli Jenkins, who writes terrible poetry and means every word of it sincerely. Mr Pugh, who fantasises about poisoning his wife and brings her breakfast in bed. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, haunted by her two dead husbands whose standards of domestic hygiene she can never quite meet.
These are not grotesques in the Gogolian sense — not human vacancies exaggerated for satirical effect — but people with interior lives of richness and specificity, people whose desires and griefs and small daily rituals are held by Thomas with the same tenderness he brought to the child in the hay fields and the father in the dark. The vision of the human condition in Under Milk Wood is the most generous Thomas ever expressed: that every life, however small and however ridiculous, contains something worth attending to, something irreplaceable, something that the world will be diminished by losing.
We are not wholly bad or good / Who live our lives under Milk Wood, the Reverend Jenkins writes in his terrible poem, and Thomas agrees with him completely. The not wholly bad or good is enough. It is, in fact, everything.
The Craft
Thomas was a technical poet in the most serious sense — a craftsman who counted syllables and stresses with obsessive care, who revised endlessly, who understood formal constraint not as a limitation but as the resistance against which the poem’s energy was generated. The notebooks from his adolescence show a writer already in complete command of the traditional forms — the sonnet, the villanelle, the ode — and already pushing against them, looking for the place where the form would give him most freedom rather than least.
His preferred method was to accumulate images in the notebooks — fragments, phrases, isolated metaphors — and then compose by selecting and arranging, finding the structure that would bring the fragments to life. It was a process more like collage than like conventional composition, and it produced poems that feel simultaneously inevitable in their sonic logic and surprising in their imagery, as if the words had found each other by some other law than the poet’s conscious intention.
He spoke about this in the most direct terms available to a poet who distrusted direct statement: I want the poem to be a formal garden, with a wall built round it. The wall was the form — the syllabic count, the rhyme scheme, the stanzaic structure — and the garden inside it was the wild, unruly growth of image and feeling that the wall made possible by containing it. Without the wall, the garden would be a field. Without the garden, the wall would be a prison.
This understanding of form as enabling rather than restrictive is one of the things that separates Thomas from the free-verse tradition that Whitman inaugurated and that dominated much of twentieth century poetry. He was not against free verse, but he understood that his own particular gifts — the sonic density, the incantatory repetition, the building of rhythmic pressure toward emotional release — required the resistance of formal structure to work at their highest pitch. The chains were the condition of the singing.
What Thomas Gives
What Dylan Thomas gives the human condition argument is something that the more philosophically systematic writers in this series — the novelists with their structures and their moral architectures — cannot quite give: the immediate, physical, unmediated experience of being alive in a body that is dying, rendered in language that enacts what it describes, that is itself a form of the energy it is mourning.
His poetry does not argue that life is valuable. It demonstrates it, in the specific gravity of specific words arranged in specific orders that produce in the reader something that bypasses argument entirely and arrives directly at the body — the speeded heart, the held breath, the sensation of something important happening that you cannot quite name. This is what the greatest lyric poetry has always done, and Thomas does it with a consistency and a force that puts him in the company of the best.
The argument he makes — if argument is even the right word for what a lyric poem does — is the simplest and the most ancient: we are alive now, and the now is extraordinary, and it is passing, and the passing is not a reason to diminish the now but to be more fully in it, more awake to it, more willing to let it cost you what it costs. He raged against the dying of the light not because the rage could stop it but because the rage was the measure of how much the light mattered.
He was thirty-nine when the light went out. The green fuse was spent. The chains fell. And the singing, somehow, goes on — in the recordings, in the broadcasts, in the poems that are still being read by people who find in them, on some ordinary afternoon, exactly the shock of recognition that the best poetry provides: the sense that someone has said, in the only way it could be said, the thing you have always known and never quite managed to say yourself.
Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Sources and Further Reading
Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934–1952. Dent, 1952.
Thomas, Dylan. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Edited by Daniel Jones. New Directions, 2003.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood. Dent, 1954.
Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories. New Directions, 1955.
Thomas, Dylan. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Dent, 1940.
Thomas, Dylan. Quite Early One Morning: Broadcasts. New Directions, 1954.
Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas: A Biography. Hodder and Stoughton, 1977.
Lycett, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: A New Life. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003.
Ackerman, John. Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas’s Life, Writing and His Wales. John Jones, 1979.
Holbrook, David. Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night. Athlone Press, 1972.
Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962.
Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan Thomas: No Man More Magical. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
Caitlin Thomas. Leftover Life to Kill. Putnam, 1957.
Emery, Clark. The World of Dylan Thomas. University of Miami Press, 1962.
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