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 that 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.

Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas
My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,

Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout'
After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,
I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands

Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me forever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

Dylan Thomas
On almost the incendiary eve
Of several near deaths,
When one at the great least of your best loved
And always known must leave
Lions and fires of his flying breath,
Of your immortal friends
Who'd raise the organs of the counted dust
To shoot and sing your praise,
One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
That cannot sink or cease
Endlessly to his wound
In many married London's estranging grief.
On almost the incendiary eve
When at your lips and keys,
Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,
One who is most unknown,
Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,
Will dive up to his tears.
He'll bathe his raining blood in the male sea
Who strode for your own dead
And wind his globe out of your water thread
And load the throats of shells
with every cry since light
Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.
On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances,
When near and strange wounded on London's waves
Have sought your single grave,
One enemy, of many, who knows well
Your heart is luminous
In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,
Will pull the thunderbolts
To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys
And sear just riders back,
Until that one loved least
Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

Dylan Thomas
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas
Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.
If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.
Out of confusion, as the way is,

And the wonder, that man knows,

Out of the chaos would come bliss.
That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.

Dylan Thomas
Poslije pogreba
(u spomen Anni Jones)
Poslije pogreba, jecave hvale, jauci,
Vjetar to stresa ui ko jedra, priguen topot,
Kuckanje zavrtnja u blatnoj stopi groba,
Vjee zasjenjene i zubi u crnini,
Oi slinave, rukavi slanih kapi,
Jutrom udarac lopatom to tjera san
I stresa djeaka oajnog gdje sijee svoje grlo
U mraku kovega i suho lie sipa,
to lomi jednu kost do sjaja s ruhom suca,
A nakon slave kalja, vremena gustih suza,
U izbi s lisicom punjenom, u izbi s paprati uvelom,
Ja stojim, sam, u ime ove uspomene
U jecav sat s mrtvom zgrbljenom Annom
Kojoj je srce zapretano jednom ko esma pljutalo
Spenim svijetom Walesa i svako sunce utapalo,
(Pa nek je za nju to udovina slika i slijepo
U hvali pretjerana; smrt joj je bila tiha kap;
Ne bi mi dala da poplavi me slava
I plima njenog srca; duboko nijema bi legla
I njenom skrenom tijelu ne bi trebalo vraa).
Ali ja, Annin bard, na uspravljenom ognjitu,
Sva mora zovem na slubu, da krepost joj utljivu
amore ko zvona na bovi ponad raspjevanih glava,
Da sijaju papratne zidove lisiijih uma,
Da ljubav joj ljuljaju i poju u smeem hramu,
Blagoslove duh sa etiri ukrtene ptice.
Meso je imala blago ko mlijeko, no kip to stremi u nebo
Divljih grudiju, blaene lubanje diva,
Iz nje sad kleem u izbi s mokrim oknom

Dok kua estoko narie i godina dok se svija.

Poznam joj dlanove oljutene, ponizne jetke ruke,
I znam da lee u vjeri zgrene, njen istanjeni
apat u vlanoj rijei, pamet sada ve praznu
I aku njenog lica priljubljenu uz bol,
Tu isklesanu Annu, sedamdeset ljeta kamena.
Ruke od mramora natopljene oblacima, ta velika
Prepirka odsjenim glasom, gest i psalam,
Nek huje zauvijek sa mnom nad njenom rakom
Sve dok se plue lisici ne gane dok ne zagrca Ljubav
A gizdava paprat ne poloi sjeme na crni prag.

Ruka to potpisa papir

Ruka to potpisa papir srui grad
Vladarski prsti namet na zrak udarie
Dvostruko ve je mrtvih, zemlja prepolovljenja;
Tih pet kraljeva i kralja usmrtie.
Tu monu ruku sputeno vodi rame
Zglobove prstiju ve zgrio je kre;
Pero je guje dovrilo umorstvo
Koje dovri rije.
Potpisa ruka ukaz i ognjicu rodi,
Dooe skakavci, nasta vrijeme glada;
Velika to je ruka to ovla, potpisom
ovjekom moe da vlada.
Mrtvace broje tih pet kraljeva no nee
Ublait elo ni smekat skorenu ranu;
Ta ruka milost daje ko ruka to nebom vlada;
Nemaju ruke suza da im kanu.

Sjaj se lomi gde sunce ne sije

Sjaj se lomi gdje sunce ne sije;
Gdje more se ne mie, a vode u srcu
U plimama se biju;

I slomljene sablasti s krijesnicom u glavi,

Od sjaja stvari,
Kroz meso bruse se gdje meso kost ne krije.
U bokovima svijea
Mlado e sjeme zgrijat,sjeme vremena sagat;
Gdje sjeme se ne mie
Plod se ovjekov razrasta u zvijezde,
Ko smokva blistav;
Kad voska nema, lu e stijenj pokazat.
Iza oiju prolomit e se zora;
Od lubanje i prstiju, vjetrena e krv
Lizat poput mora;
Bez zabrana, bez kolja, izljevi nebesa
U stapkama e brizgatI ljubiti u smijehu ulje suza.
U dupljama zaoblit e no.
Ko mjesec paklinast, granicu globusa;
Dan ozari kost;
Gdje studen nije, zderat e oluja
Ruho od zime;
Mrena tad proljetna na kapcima visi.
Sjaj e na tajnoj batini se slomit,
Na vrhu misli gdje misli miriu u kii;
Kad razum umre
Tajna e tla kroz oi nii,
Krv se u sunce dii,
A iznad pustih zemljita zastati e zora.

esto sputan siromatvom i nedostatkom inspiracije, ivot Dilana Tomasa kao pisca bio je
turbulentan.
Dok je jo bio mlad deak, Dilanova majka Florens itala mu je kada god je to mogla, ili mu je davala
stripove da ih sam ita. Kasnije je tvrdila da su to stvari iz kojih je Dilan sam nauio da ita. DJ, njegov
otac, imao je drugaiji pristup, birajui ekspira da ga ita naglas sinu, to je Dilana upoznalo sa bojama i
zvukovima jezika.
Oba roditelje su ohrabrivala mladog Dilana da pie, i on je razvio nezajaljivu elju da se dokae kao
pisac. Januara 1927. prodao je pesmu, His Requiem, novinama Western Mail u Kardifu. Iako je od
tada ona bila prihvatana kao da je delo nekog drugog pisca, to je ipak svedoanstvo njegove ambicije i
elje za uspehom.

U koli, jedini predmet u kojem je bio odlian bio je engleski. Ali kao nemirno dete, bio je nedisciplinovan i
uglavnom potcenjivan. 1931. godine napustio je kolu, i zaposlio se kao novinar u Veernjim Novostima
Juni Vels. Nije bio u potpunosti uspean, i naposletku je otputen iako je nastavio nakon toga da radi
kao novinar slobodan strelac sporadino jo nekoliko godina.
1933. godina bila je godina kada je njegova poezija doivela ire eksponiranje. Objavljivan je u
asopisima, a prijavljivanje na BBC-jevo poetsko takmienje rezultiralo je njegovim itanjem uivo.
Naredne godine se preselio u London, gde je svojim naporom postao ire poznat kao pijani udak, iako je
njegovu prvu zbirku pesama, 18 Pesama, hvalio dobar broj etabliranih pesnika meu kojima i Edit Sitvel.
Pa ipak ga je uporno pratila reputacija pijanice, pre nego pisca.
Osnovne teme poezije Dilana Tomasa bile su nostalgija, smrt i izgubljena nevinost. esto je pisao o
svojoj prolosti, o deatvu ili adolescenciji. I Vels, i velki predeli i ljudi, postali su neodvojiv deo
njegovog pisanja.
Izolacija koju je esto oseao dok je iveo u Velsu, naroito u Laugharne-u i New Quay-u, nadahnula je
njegovo pisanje i podstakla ga na introspekciju. Nije sluajnost da je mnoga od svojih najboljih dela
napisao daleko od Londona i Amerike...

Dylan Thomas
19141953

The work of Dylan Thomas has occasioned much critical commentary, although critics
share no consensus on how bright his star shines in the galaxy of modern poetry. In fact,
it is a curious phenomenon that so many critics seem obsessed with deciding once and

for all whether Thomas's poems belong side by side with those of T. S. Eliot and W. H.
Auden, or whether they arein the words of a reputable critic quoted by Henry Treece
in Dylan Thomas: "Dog Among the Fairies""intellectual fakes of the highest class."
The latter is definitely a minority opinion; yet even Treece, an acquaintance of
Thomas's, had to admit that the poet's work is "extremely ill-balanced."
The estimation of the work has often been colored by an estimation of the man. Until
Constantine FitzGibbon's The Life of Dylan Thomas in 1965, Thomas's biography was
dominated by numerous unflattering published reminiscences, among them the
graphically detailed account of John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in
America,concerning, in part, the poet's drinking and philandering during his last years
in America. Though FitzGibbon sympathetically glossed over Thomas's drinking habits,
the facts reported by Brinnin and others and corroborated in Paul Ferris's Dylan
Thomas support the idea that Thomas frequently drank to excess, and that such
drinking adversely affected his social behavior. Personal details such as these tended to
render objective evaluations of the poetry difficult. Indeed, the legend of Dylan Thomas
grew: the hard-drinking bard, the erratic chanter of his own songs, the romantic artist at
odds with the modern world.
Thomas began writing poetry as a child, publishing his work in school magazines. By
1930 he had taken to writing poems in penny notebooks; a number of his poems were
published in the "Poet's Corner" of the Sunday Referee and in the influential New
Verse. Ralph Maud, in Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry, declared that the writer's
first published poem was the subsequently popular "And death shall have no dominion,"
which appeared on May 8, 1933, in the New English Weekly.
The notebooks in which Thomas composed between 1930 and 1934, when he was
sixteen to twenty years old, reveal the young poet's struggle with a number of personal
crises, the origins of which are rather obscure. In his 1965 Dylan Thomas, Jacob Korg
described them as "related to love affairs, to industrial civilization, and to the youthful
problems of finding one's identity." Revised versions of some of the notebooks' poems
became in 1934 his first published volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems.
Eighteen Poems was published in December, 1934, a short time after Thomas moved to
London. The volume received little notice at first, but by the following spring some
influential newspapers and journals had reviewed it favorably. Ferris quoted from an

anonymous review in the Morning Post that called the poems "individual but not
private" and went on to strike a note that later became a frequent criticism: "a
psychologist would observe Mr. Thomas's constant use of images and epithets which are
secretory or glandular." Ferris also quoted a critic for Time and Tide, who wrote: "This
is not merely a book of unusual promise; it is more probably the sort of bomb that bursts
not more than once in three years." The book was also reviewed favorably by Spectator,
New Verse, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Like James Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas was obsessed with wordswith their
sound and rhythm and especially with their possibilities for multiple meanings. This
richness of meaning, an often illogical and revolutionary syntax, and catalogues of
cosmic and sexual imagery render Thomas's early poetry original and difficult. In a
letter to Richard Church, included by FitzGibbon in Selected Letters, Thomas
commented on what he considered some of his own excesses: "Immature violence,
rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted
imagery that leads often to incoherence." Similarly, in a letter to Glyn Jones, he wrote:
"My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived
symbolism derived (I'm afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic
significance of the human anatomy."
This discussion of the difficulty of Eighteen Poems does not discount the fact that most
of the poems have yielded their meanings to persistent readersand books like William
York Tindall's A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas and Clark Emery's The World of
Dylan Thomas aid the reader's comprehension. Such poems as "I see the boys of
summer," "A process in the weather of the heart," and the popular "The force that
through the green fuse drives the flower" merit repeated readings, both for the artistic
pleasure they give through their highly structured forms and for their embodiment of
some of the key themes that run throughout the volume and, indeed, throughout much
of Thomas's work. Among these themes are the unity of time, the similarity between
creative and destructive forces in the universe, and the correspondence of all living
things. This last theme was identified by Elder Olson inThe Poetry of Dylan Thomas as
part of the tradition of the microcosm-macrocosm: "He analogizes the anatomy of man
to the structure of the universe . . . and sees the human microcosm as an image of the
macrocosm, and conversely."
During the almost two years between the publication of Eighteen Poems in 1934

andTwenty-five Poems in 1936, Thomas moved back and forth between London and
Wales a great deal. In London he began to meet influential people in the literary world:
Herbert Read, Geoffrey Grigson, Norman Cameron, and Vernon Watkins, among others.
He became particularly close to Watkins, an older man whose sedate lifestyle contrasted
markedly with Thomas's. Watkins and Thomas would criticize each other's poetry, and
Watkins became a frequent source of money for the continually destitute Thomas. At
this time Thomas was carrying on a mostly long-distance relationship with the poet and
novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, later the wife of novelist C. P. Snow. While the affair
lastedit was finally torn asunder by Thomas's drinkingThomas shared with her in
letters his personal insecurities and his misgivings about his work. Paul Ferris cited this
letter written from Laugharne, Wales, circa May 21, 1934: "I am tortured today by every
doubt and misgiving that an hereditarily twisted imagination, an hereditary thirst and a
commercial quenching, a craving for a body not my own, a chequered education and too
much egocentric poetry, and a wild, wet day in a tided town, are capable of conjuring up
out of their helly deeps." During this period Thomas's drinking became a serious
problem, and his friends would sometimes take him off to out-of-the-way places in
Cornwall and Ireland to remove him from temptation with the hope that he would do
more writing.
Thomas's second volume of poetry, Twenty-five Poems, was published in September,
1936. Most of the poems were revised from the notebooks; FitzGibbon reported in The
Life of Dylan Thomas that "only six entirely new poems, that is to say poems written in
the year and a half between the publication of [ Eighteen Poems] and the despatch of the
second volume to the printers, are to be found in that volume." Ferris noted that "the
reviews were generally favourable, but with one exception they were not as enthusiastic
as they were for [ Eighteen Poems]." This exception, however, almost assured the
volume's commercial success; it was a laudatory review by Dame Edith Sitwell in
the Sunday Times. As cited by Ferris, the review proclaimed: "The work of this very
young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and
structurally. . . . I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows
so great a promise, and even so great an achievement."
Though most of the works in Twenty-five Poems were mined from older material, the
volume includes a significant sonnet sequence of ten poems, "Altarwise by owl-light,"
written in Ireland the year before publication. In these sonnets Thomas moved from the
pre-Christian primitivism of most of the Eighteen Poems to a Christian mythology based

upon love. G. S. Fraser commented in Vision and Rhetoric that "the sonnets, a failure as
a whole, splendid in parts . . . are important because they announce the current of
orthodox Christian feelingfeeling rather than thoughtwhich was henceforth
increasingly to dominate Thomas's work in poetry." Olson saw these sonnets as a break
with the past, in method as well as philosophic-religious outlook: "It is notable that after
the 'Altarwise by owl-light' sonnets, he discards nearly all of this particular body of
symbols, transforms the remainder and gradually develops new symbols and new
diction to correspond with his changing view of life." Olson, who worked out an
elaborate schema of interpretation involving Hercules in the zodiac, also called these
sonnets "surely among the greatest poems of the century." Tindall remarked in A
Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas that the theme of these sonnets is really Thomas
himself. Tindall commented, "Although cheerfully allowing the presence of Jesus,
Hercules, the stars, the zodiac, and a generally neglected voyage, I think them analogies,
not to be confused with the theme." Korg, commenting on the obscurity of the sequence,
said that "all that is reasonably clear is that it concerns the crucifixion and the
resurrection as foci of spiritual conflict."
While much of the attention given to Twenty-five Poems has been focused on the
religious sonnets, the volume as a whole contains indications of a shift in emphasis in
Thomas's writing. Richard Morton noted in An Outline of the Works of Dylan
Thomasthat the poems of this volume are "concerned with the relationship between the
poet and his environment," particularly the natural environment. "In Twenty-five
Poems,we can see the beginnings of the pastoral mode which reaches its fulfillment in
the great lyrics of Thomas's last poems." And, as Korg said, "at least three of the poems
in the second volume are about the poet's reactions to other people, themes of an
entirely different class from those of [ Eighteen Poems]; and these three anticipate
[Thomas's] turning outward in his later poems toward such subjects as his aunt's
funeral, the landscape, and his relations with his wife and children."
Some of the best poems in the book are rather straightforward pieces"This bread
break," "The hand that signed the paper," "And death shall have no dominion"but
others, such as "I, in my intricate image," are as involved and abstruse as the poems of
the earlier volume. Derek Stanford noted that still "there are traces of doubt,
questioning, and despair in many of these pieces." Thomas, however, chose to place the
optimistic "And death shall have no dominion" at the end of the volume. This poem has
always been one of Thomas's most popular works, perhaps because, as Clark Emery

noted, it was "published in a time when notes of affirmationphilosophical, political, or

otherwisedid not resound among intelligent liberal humanists, [and thus] it answered
an emotional need. . . . It affirmed without sentimentalizing; it expressed a faith without
theologizing."
The "Altarwise by owl-light" poems as well as "And death shall have no dominion"
inevitably raise questions concerning the extent to which Dylan Thomas can be called a
religious writer. In an essay for A Casebook on Dylan Thomas W. S. Merwin was one of
the first to deal with this issue; he found Thomas to be a religious writer because he was
a "celebrator in the ritual sense: a maker and performer of a rite. . . . That which he
celebrates is creation, and more particularly the human condition." However, the
positions on this issue can beand have beenas various as the definitions of what
constitutes a religious outlook. At one end of the scale, critics do not dispute that
Thomas used religious imagery in his poetry; at the other end, critics generally agree
that, at least during certain periods of his creative life, Thomas's vision was not that of
any orthodox religious system. The range of interpretations was summarized by R. B.
Kershner, Jr., in Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics: "He has been called a pagan,
a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love,
Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself."
On July 11, 1937, Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara; they were penniless and lacked
the blessings of their parents. After spending some time with each of their reluctant
families, they moved to a borrowed house in Laugharne, Wales. This fishing village
became their permanent address, though they lived in many temporary dwellings in
England and Wales through the war years and after, until Thomas's death in 1953. The
borrowing of houses and money became recurring events in their married life together.
Korg associated these external circumstances in the poet's life with his artistic
development: "Thomas's time of settling in Laugharne coincides roughly with the period
when his poetry began to turn outward; his love for Caitlin, the birth of his first child,
Llewellyn, responses to the Welsh countryside and its people, and ultimately events of
the war began to enter his poetry as visible subjects."
Thomas's third book, The Map of Love, appeared in August, 1939, the year war broke
out in Europe. It comprised a strange union of sixteen poems and seven stories, the
stories having been previously published in periodicals. The volume was a commercial
failure, perhaps because of the war. Ferris reported that "the book was respectfully and

sometimes warmly reviewed, with a few dissenters"; yet these works of Thomas's middle
period are his least successful. The short stories are inferior to those that appeared the
next year in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. They are mannered, misty,
cumbersomedealing often with dreams and vague imaginings. Some of these stories
have been called surrealistic, opening up a vein of controversy, since Thomas often
disavowed his use of surrealism. Annis Pratt, in Dylan Thomas's Early Prose,suggested
that although surrealistic features exist in the stories, Thomas exercised careful control
over his material. She quoted Thomas on this point: "I do not mind from where the
images of a poem are dragged up; drag them up, if you like, from the nethermost sea of
the hidden self; but, before they reach paper, they must go through all the rational
processes of the intellect."
While the poems of The Map of Love, with one or two exceptions, are not among the
best Thomas wrote, they are interesting for the light they shed on his development of a
more outward-looking and less cosmic aesthetic. At least one of the poems, "I make this
in a warring absence," treats an early marital conflict with Caitlin. "If my head hurt a
hair's foot" appears to be a celebration of the birth of the poet's son. Two very
interesting poems have to do with the uncertainties of the poet. Clark Emery has
associated "On no word of words" with Coleridge's "Dejection" and Milton's Sonnet XVI
in its lament over lost powers and the passage of time. "After the funeral," considered
the best poem of the volume, is an elegy for his rural aunt, Ann Jones. John
Fullerconcluded in an essay from Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays that "the poem
rehearses for Thomas the idea that out of the practice of grief can come real grief and
love."
In sharp contrast to the stories in The Map of Love are those published the following
year, 1940, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas claimed in a letter to
Vernon Watkins that he "kept the flippant title foras the publishers advisemoneymaking reasons." He also said that the title was not a parody of James Joyce's A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Mana dubious propositionthough he did acknowledge the
general influence of Joyce's Dubliners. These Thomas stories are different from the
earlier ones in their particularity of character and place, their straightforward plot lines,
and their relevance to Thomas's childhood in Wales. Thomas wrote to Watkins in
August, 1939: "I've been busy over stories, pot-boiling stories for a book, semiautobiographical, to be finished by Christmas."

Reviews of the book were mixed, and it didn't sell well at the time, though it later
became enormously popular. According to Ferris, a reviewer for the Times Literary
Supplement found that "the atmosphere of schoolboy smut and practical jokes and
poetry is evoked with lingering accuracy but with nothing more." Subsequent critics
have detected more in the stories, though most agree that Thomas is primarily a poet
and only secondarily a writer of fiction. Korg commented that "taken as a group, [the
stories] seem to trace the child's emergence from his domain of imagination and secret
pleasures into an adult world where he observes suffering, pathos, and dignity." Two of
the more successful stories in the collection are "The Peaches"the first storyand
"One Warm Saturday"the last.
"The Peaches" features a youthful main character named Dylan who goes to his aunt's
farm for a holiday; this is quite clearly the farm of Ann Jones of "After the funeral" and
the farm celebrated in "Fern Hill." Harold F. Mosher, Jr., in his Studies in Short
Fiction essay, summed up the conflict of the story and the means by which it is
dramatized: "Through the juxtaposition of characters, the opposition of images, and the
variation of pace and tempo, Thomas unifies his story and clarifies the conflict between
imaginative life and dull existence." "One Warm Saturday" contains disillusionment
comparable to that found in Joyce's story "Araby." After falling in love with a girl in a
park and drinking with her and her friends in a bar, the hero of the story goes with the
group to the girl's apartment, but loses his way in the hall after going to the bathroom
and never finds the apartment again. Once more, this story depicts the conflict between
the imaginative dreams of love and the real world of pain and confusion. In his Studies
in Short Fiction essay Richard Kelly contrasted this story with Joyce's Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man: "Whereas Joyce's wading girl provides [the main character]
with aesthetic and emotional autonomy, the girl in the antiromantic 'One Warm
Saturday' fills the young man with anguish and frustration and returns him to an ugly,
hostile world."
Constantine FitzGibbon reported that Thomas considered World War II a "personal
affront." For a while he contemplated filing for conscientious objector status, but in the
end he seems to have avoided service because of medical problems. Ferris quoted
Thomas's mother, who claimed "punctured lungs" were the reason he didn't serve.
Ferris suggested that the disability may have been a psychological one. Whatever his
particular unfitness, Thomas was able to secure employment during the war years
writing documentary scripts for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While he

considered it hack work, it provided the first regular income since his newspaper days
and also allowed him to spend a good deal of time in London pubs. This pragmatic
writing was the beginning of a career that Thomas pursued until his death; it did not,
however, replace what he considered his more important work, the writing of poems. In
addition to the documentaries, he wrote radio scripts and eventually screenplays for
feature films. Though his income from these activities was moderate, it did not allow
him and Caitlin relief from debt or their friends relief from the frequent begging letters.
In 1940 Thomas began writing Adventures in the Skin Trade, a novel that he never
completed, though its first section was subsequently published. It is essentially the timehonored story of a country boy in the big city. Annis Pratt commented that Thomas
intended the story to be "a series of 'adventures' in which the hero's 'skins' would be
stripped off one by one like a snake's until he was left in a kind of quintessential
nakedness to face the world."
Thomas's work next saw publication in a 1946 poetry collection, Deaths and
Entrances, containing many of his most famous poems. This volume included such
works as "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," "Poem in
October," "The Hunchback in the Park," and "Fern Hill." Deaths and Entrances was an
instant success. Ferris noted that three thousand copies sold in the first month after its
publication and that the publisher, Dent, ordered a reprint of the same number.
InVision and Rhetoric G. S. Fraser said of the volume that "it increases the impression
of variety and of steady development, which the earlier volumes, read in the order of
their appearance, give." T. H. Jones, in his Dylan Thomas, declared the volume to be the
core of Thomas's achievement. The poems of Deaths and Entrances, while still
provoking arguments about interpretation, are less compressed and less obscure than
the earlier works. Some, like "Fern Hill," illustrate an almost Wordsworthian harmony
with nature and other human beings but not without the sense of the inexorability of
time. As Jacob Korg said of these poems, "the figures and landscapes have a new
solidity, a new self-sufficiency, and the dialectic vision no longer penetrates them as
though they were no more than windows opening on a timeless universe."
"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," one of Thomas's more
accessible poems, illustrates well the almost sacramental view of nature that
characterizes this later poetry. At the same time it is topical in its reference to the
firebombing of London during the war. The child, like the poet, enters the "synagogue of

corn," the holiness of nature, at her death. Yet the poem is richly ambiguous in its final
line, "After the first death, there is no other." As Tindall observed, this statement can be
taken either as a pledge of eternal life or as a realization that death is death, that one is
dead foreveror both. "Fern Hill" presents a similar sacramental imagery"And the
sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams"and a pervasive sense of unity
between the speaker and nature. But over the whole poem broods "Time," which at the
end is triumphant: "Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the
sea." In an essay for English Journal Jack L. Jenkins summarized: "The predominate
tone of the poem is still green, touched by the bittersweet knowledge of the last lines but
green nonetheless. There is nothing harsh or bitter or dark about the poem, only an
inevitable acceptance of the irony."
Mention has already been made of Thomas's obsession with words, and while these later
poems in Deaths and Entrances are less compressed than the earlier ones, they reveal
no less verbal facility or less concern for what is generally called poetic style. Thomas
was always a highly individual stylist. Sound was as important as sense in his poems
some would even say more important. He made ample use of alliteration, assonance,
internal rhyme, and approximate rhyme. In The Craft and Art of Dylan
Thomas, William T. Moynihan describes his rhythm as "accentual syllabic": "its stress
pattern generally sounds as though it is iambic, but this very justifiable assumption
cannot always be borne out by traditional scansion. Thomas may, in fact, have depended
upon an iambic expectancy, as he varied his rhythms beyond any customary iambic
formulation and thenby completely unprecedented innovationscreated his own
rhythm, which is very close to iambic."
By the time of the publication of Deaths and Entrances Thomas had become a living
legend. Through his very popular readings and recordings of his own work, this writer of
sometimes obscure poetry gained mass appeal. For many, he came to represent the
figure of the bard, the singer of songs to his people. Kershner asserted that Thomas
"became the wild man from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure
with racial access to roots of experience which more civilized Londoners lacked." His
drinking, his democratic tendencies, and the frank sexual imagery of his poetry made
him the focal point of an ill-defined artistic rebellion.
In 1949 Thomas and his family moved to the Boat House of Laugharne, Wales, a house
provided for them by one of Thomas's benefactors, Mrs. Margaret Taylor. For the last

four years of his life he moved between this dwelling and the United States, where he
went on four separate tours to read his poetry and receive the adulation of the American
public. The often sordid accounts of these tours are provided in John Malcolm
Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America. Thomas's last separate volume of poetry before
the Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (1952) was Country Sleep, published by New Directions
in the United States in 1952. As originally published, this book contained six of the
poet's most accomplished works: "Over Sir John's Hill," "Poem on his Birthday," "Do
not go gentle into that good night," "Lament," "In the white giant's thigh," and "In
country sleep." Concerning this volume, Rushworth M. Kidder commented in Dylan
Thomas: The Country of the Spirit that "the fact of physical death seems to present
itself to the poet as something more than distant event. . . . These poems come to terms
with death through a form of worship: not propitiatory worship of Death as deity, but
worship of a higher Deity by whose power all things, including death, are controlled."
Tindall called these poems "Thomas at his mellowest." In "Do not go gentle into that
good night," a poem written during his father's illness and in anticipation of his death,
the son exhorts the father to affirm life in his dying. Similarly, though the women of "In
the white giant's thigh" have died childless, the poet, as Korg pointed out, "memorializes
their vitality by means of the paradox that their fertility survives through the memory of
their many loves."
It has already been mentioned that Thomas began writing scripts during the war.
Several of his film scripts have been published, including The Doctor and the
Devilsand The Beach at Falesa. Neither of these was produced, but they gave Thomas
the opportunity to develop his dramatic skills. These skills culminated in his radio
play,Under Milk Wood, written over a long period of time and frantically revised in
America during the last months of his life. The play grew out of the story "Quite Early
One Morning," which was broadcast by the BBC in 1945. Under Milk Wood is set in a
small Welsh town called Llareggub and covers one day in the lives of its provincial
characters. These characters are disembodied voices who reveal their nighttime dreams
and their daily monotonous lives. Richard Morton commented that "the trivialities of
small-town life are more than evocative, however; they are presented to us in
ceremonial order, as though they have a kind of esoteric significance." The characters in
the play are satisfied with their lives, and Thomas himself seems to accept and affirm
their rural simplicity. Raymond Williams, in an essay for Dylan Thomas: A Collection of
Critical Essays, said that Under Milk Wood is "not a mature work, but the retained
extravagance of an adolescent's imaginings. Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine

involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is not the least of its dramatic
virtues." Thomas read the play as a solo performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
May 3, 1953; the first group reading was on May 14. In the following November, Dylan
Thomas died in New York of ailments complicated by alcohol and drug abuse.
Publication of the rest of Thomas's BBC work occurred in 1992 with the release of On
the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts. This volume includes all of Thomas's
radio work with the exception of Under the Milk Wood. Peter Thorpe, writing for
theBloomsbury Review noted the immense power of Thomas's voice during these
broadcasts, which "[tended] to overwhelm us with its incantational rhythms, its
intoxicating iterations." Thorpe commented that the advantage of having these works in
print "is that it allows his 'senior' followers . . . to assess a significant part of his work
with the eye rather than the ear."
The originality that is the hallmark of Thomas's work makes categorization very
difficult. As Kershner commented, "The fact remains that Thomas throughout his career
stayed generally aloof from literary cliques, groups, and movements." Unlike other
prominent writers of the 1930sW. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for example
Thomas had little use for socialistic ideas in his art. He seems to have admired much of
T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry but became disenchanted with what Kershner called Eliot's
"unsensual and religious poetry." It is safe to say that Thomas was influenced by such
modern movements as symbolism and surrealism, but he borrowed without adhering to
any creed. He was particularly concerned with disassociating himself from the surrealist
movement because he felt his conscious craftsmanship was contrary to the methods of
that group. In the late 1930s and the 1940s a movement called the Apocalypse, which
heralded myth and decried the machine and politics, claimed Thomas for its own; but
though he did say he mostly believed in its principles, he refused to sign the group's
manifesto. Clearly, Thomas can be seen as an extension into the twentieth century of the
general movement called romanticism, particularly in its emphasis on imagination,
emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form; but attempts to identify him with a
particular "neo-romantic" school have failed. As Kershner said, "The historical
perspective, while valuable, is self-limiting; poetry either crosses temporal boundaries
or else it has no essential purpose." That Dylan Thomas wrote poems that cross
temporal boundaries guarantees their essential purpose.
The boathouse in Laugharne, Wales, that served as the inspiration for Llaregguh

inUnder Milk Wood is threatened by nearby construction. City officials are working to
prevent damage to the building from the trucks working on expanding Ferry House,
which serves as a tourist center for those visiting Thomas's homestead.
CAREER
Poet and prose writer. Reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, a reviewer for the Herald of Wales, and an actor;
British Ministry of Information, scriptwriter during the mid-1930s; British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC),
documentary scriptwriter and radio commentator on poetry during the 1940s; gave public poetry readings, including
extensive lecture tours in the United States, 1950-53.