(Macmillan Literary Companions) John Ackerman (Auth.) - A Dylan Thomas Comp

A DYLAN THOMAS COMPANION
MACMILLAN LITERARY COMPANIONS
John Ackerman
A DYLAN THOMAS COMPANION
J. R. Hammond
AN H. G. WELLS COMPANION
AN EDGAR ALLAN POE COMPANION
A GEORGE ORWELL COMPANION
A ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON COMPANION
John Spencer Hill

A COLERIDGE COMPANION
Norman Page
A DICKENS COMPANION
A KIPLING COMPANION
A CONRAD COMPANION
F. B. Pinion
A HARDY COMPANION
A BRONTE COMPANION
A JANE AUSTEN COMPANION
AD. H. LAWRENCE COMPANION
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A GEORGE ELIOT COMPANION
A TENNYSON COMPANION
AT. S. ELIOT COMPANION
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England.
A Dylan Thomas
Companion
Life, Poetry and Prose
JOHN ACKERMAN
palgrave
© John Ackerman 1991
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of

this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
First edition 1991

Reprinted (with corrections) 1994
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-333-60703-9 ISBN 978-1-349-13373-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-13373-4
A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.
Transferred to digital printing 2001

To Barbara
and in memory of my mother
Contents
List of Plates ix
Acknowledgements xii
Preface xiii
PART ONE DYLAN THOMAS'S LIFE 1
PART TWO THE POETRY ss

The Early Notebooks and other Manuscript Verse 57
18 Poems 75
Twenty-five Poems 91
The Map of Love 99
Deaths and Entrances 106
Collected Poems 130
Unfinished Poems 155
PART THREE THE PROSE 163
Introduction 165
The Early Stories 166
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog 180
Adventures in the Skin Trade and
The Death of the King's Canary 200
vii
viii Contents
PART FOUR FILM SCRIPTS, BROADCASTS, LAST
STORIES, LETTERS AND UNDER MILK WOOD 205
Introduction 207
Film SCripts and other Prose Items 208
Broadcasts
Quite Early One Morning 216
Last Stories
A Prospect of the Sea 230
The Collected Letters 238
Under Milk Wood 241
Appendix 266
Notes 272
Maps and Manuscript Work Sheets

1 Dylan Thomas's Swansea 289
2 Dylan Thomas country: southwest Wales 289
3 Dylan Thomas's Laugharne 290
4 Manuscript worksheets of 'The Hunchback
in the Park' 291
5 Dylan Thomas's sketch of Llareggub 292
6 Manuscript worksheet of 'Poem on his Birthday', F. 1 293
Select Bibliography 297
Index 301
List of Plates
1a Swansea views, c. 1920: 'This sea town was my world'.
(© Welsh Arts Council)
1b 5, Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea. (© Colin Shewring)
2a D. J. Thomas, Dylan's father, c. 1900, on graduation
with first-class Honours in English, University College
of Wales, Aberystwyth. (David Higham Associates)
2b Dylan's mother, c. 1934. (David Higham Associates)
3 Dylan as a very young boy, with his mother, his sister
Nancy and a family friend. (David Higham Associates)
4a Dylan at eleven: Grammar School mile winner (Cam-
brian Daily Leader). (© South Wales Evening Post)
4b and c Dylan and Pamela Hansford Johnson, who visited
Swansea in September 1934. (The estate of Pamela
Hansford Johnson)
Sa Dylan with his mother in Gower, September 1934. (The
estate of Pamela Hansford Johnson)
5b Dylan and Pamela on the beach, September 1934. (The
estate of Pamela Hansford Johnson)
5c Family group, 1934, with Pamela Hansford Johnson,
Aunt Pollie, Mrs D. J. Thomas, Uncle Dai (Minister of
Paraclete Church, Mumbles), Auntie Dosie Rees and
Uncle Bob. (The estate of Pamela Hansford Johnson)
6a Dylan's first London address: 5, Redcliffe Street,
Chelsea. (© John Ackerman)
6b Dylan sunbathing while living at 21, Coleherne Road,
1935.
6c Dylan aged 19, taken while staying with Pamela
Hansford Johnson in Battersea, Spring 1934. (The estate
of Pamela Hansford Johnson)
7a 'Sea View', Laugharne. (© John Ackerman)
7b Dylan and Caitlin in Blashford, Hampshire, shortly
after their marriage. (David Higham Associates)
ix
x List of Plates
7c Dylan and Vernon Watkins in Laugharne, 1939. (©
Mrs Gwen Watkins)
7d Dylan and Caitlin play croquet at Heatherslade, Ver-
non Watkins's Gower home, 1938. (David Higham
Associates)
8 Dylan having a piggy-back across the estuary at
Laugharne, 1940. (© Rupert Shepherd)
9a Wentworth Studios, Manressa Road, Chelsea. (© The
Royal Borough of Kensinston and Chelsea)
9b 'Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin look grave in
Manressa Road', Chelsea, 1944. (© Mrs Noya Brandt)
9c Dylan in 'The Salisbury' public house, St Martin's
Lane, London, 1941. (© Mrs Noya Brandt; courtesy of the
Edwin Houk Gallery Inc., Chicago)
lOa 'King's Head and Eight Bells', Cheyne Row, Chelsea.
(© John Ackerman)
lOb Dylan Thomas reading Quite Early One Morning on the
BBC Welsh Home Service, 1948. (© BBC Enterprises)
10c Radio Times picture, 1949, of a broadcast from Swansea:
Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas and Daniel Jones.
(Courtesy of The Evening Post, Swansea)
11 Dylan and his mother at Fern Hill Farm, 1952. (© Rollie
McKenna)
12a and b Mount Pleasant Chapel and the grave of Anne Jones,
Dylan's aunt, at Uanybri, near Fern Hill. (© Colin
Shewring)
13a Dylan's 'water and tree room' on the cliff and The Boat
House just above the beach. (© Colin Shewring)
13b View of Laugharne estuary and Sir John'S Hill from
The Boat House balcony. (© Colin Shewring)
14a Brown's Hotel, Laugharne. (© John Ackerman)
14b Dylan playing cards at Brown's, with Ivy and Ebbie
Williams. (© Rollie McKenna)
14c The Boat House and garden, and across the bay,
Uanybri. Blaen Cwm and Fern Hill lie the other side of
the hill. (© Colin Shewring)
15a Dylan, Caitlin and John Brinnin on the verandah of
The Boat House. (© Rollie McKenna)
15b Family photograph, September 1953: Dylan, Llewelyn,
Aeronwy, Mrs D. J. Thomas, Calm and Caitlin. (©
Rollie McKenna)
List of Plates xi
16a Dylan in his writing shed, 1953. (© Rollie McKenna)

16b Dylan directing Under Milk Wood: 'Love the words'
instructed Dylan; New York, 1953.
16c Dylan Thomas's grave, St Martin's churchyard,
Laugharne. (© John Ackerman)
The author and publishers wish to state that they have attempted to trace
all the copyright holders, but in any case where they may have failed, they
will be happy to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have
kindly given permission for the use of copyright material:
J. M. Dent and the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas,

for the extracts from: Dylan Thomas, Collected Stories; Dylan
Thomas, The Doctor and the Devils; Dylan Thomas, Notebooks of
Dylan Thomas; Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog;
Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning; Dylan Thomas, Selected
Letters and The Collected Letters; Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood;
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934-1952 (1952) and Collected
Poems: 1934-1953 (1988). The following poetry extracts from Dylan
Thomas, The Poems, ed. Daniel Jones, are also quoted by permission:
'Missing', 'Your Breath Was Shed', and extracts from 'Notes' to the
poems.
The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, for the extracts
from 'Twelve Hours in the Streets'; the extracts from the holograph
manuscript of 'A Story' and 'Oh Pain Consumed Him, Pain Made
Skin and Bone and Spirit' from Notes on Basildon Bond NotePad,
copyrights by the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, ©
1990.
Permission was also given by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd, for the
extracts from Caitlin: A Life with Dylan Thomas by Caitlin Thomas
with George Tremlett.
The author is also grateful for the use of material at the National
Library of Wales, Swansea Public Library, and of course for
quotations from books and articles as listed. lowe a particular debt
to Professor Barbara Hardy and Aeronwy Thomas, both of whom
read the proofs and made helpful comments.
xii
Preface
I remember hearing of Dylan Thomas's death on the early morning
news on Tuesday, 10 November 1953. I was then studying English
at King's College, London, and had a copy of the recently
published Collected Poems, few, if any, I fully understood. I
immersed myself in his verse and was fortunate in being able to
research on him, writing a thesis on his life and work, the first, it
seems, in a British university, and more importantly the first that
investigated his Welsh background. I was fortunate, too, in
receiving the help and friendship of Vernon Watkins, also in
meeting Mrs Caitlin Thomas at the Boat House in the summer of
1956, and Dylan's mother there the following year. Vernon
Watkins was then editing Dylan Thomas's letters to him, and I
now recall with gratitude and delight those talks with Vernon,
touching on the work of both poets. One afternoon, too, joined by
Rollie McKenna, we visited and photographed Dylan's Swansea
scenes. I treasure also memories of those first visits to Laugharne,
and to Fern Hill, the Dylan Thomas industry then still in its
infancy, that provided reliable glimpses into the poet's life and
work there, in contrast to the legends fostered in the years
immediately following his death, the legend and the life running
together in the popular mind. This was, of course, before the
publication of Caitlin Thomas's books, always deeply rewarding in
their accounts of the poet. Swansea, some seventeen miles from
Maesteg where I lived, was already familiar territory, as the nearest
large shopping centre, scene of cricket matches and, with Gower,
the place for day-trips to the beaches. Consequently my involve-
ment with Dylan Thomas and his world, both personal and
academic, has its roots in this time; though the present book
subsumes and indeed supersedes my previous studies of the poet.
The kaleidoscope of criticism constantly changes the pattern and
picture. The stili-growing popularity of Dylan Thomas both as poet
and prose writer, the sustained academic interest in his work, and
the astonishing spell the legend casts even today are matters that
this book raises.
xiii
xiv Preface
Apart from Stanford's Dylan Thomas (1954), still a helpful
exposition of his work, there was little useful critical gUidance in
the mid-fifties as to the meaning of the poems, one American critic
recommending classical astrology as the key, while Treece's book
was unkindly, though not entirely unfairly, dismissed by Dylan's
reported 'You cannot see the wood for the Treece'. Yet I was
convinced that Dylan Thomas's poetry could be consistently
interpreted and explicated, that the then-current view that his
poetry was a kind of rhetoric that didn't yield to analysis, probably
produced when drunk, was as much a falsification as the tales
concerning the poet's life that then dominated, and still occasio-
nally prejudice, discussion of the work. But here I must admit an
interest. No doubt my view derived from an undergraduate's
devotion to Dr Leavis's method of textual analysis, despite the fact
that after an hour's lecture on modern poetry largely spent
dismissing Auden's verse, the great man responded to the
proselyte'S anxious question as to how he rated Dylan Thomas
with the curt'Auden at least had talent!' Likewise, replying to a
letter in 1954, he expressed surprise 'at the suggestion that Auden
and Dylan Thomas could be grouped with Eliot & Yeats & major
poets'. Despite these magisterial rebukes I was young enough to
persist in my belief concerning Dylan Thomas! Nevertheless,
academic and critical games of valuation and devaluation have
increasingly seemed pointless beside the critic's proper task of
understanding and illumination. In this respect, elucidation of the
poetry still strikes me as the essential need of Dylan Thomas
criticism. Accounts of the life are incidental to this, and are most
worthwhile when they assist it.
As late as 1952, in reply to a query regarding the importance of
Wales for him as a writer, Dylan Thomas humorously quipped, 'if I
had been born and brought up in an igloo and lived on whales, not
in it ... it would have been extremely unlikely had I become a
writer'. The late Professor William Armstrong crucially advised me
in 1955 to research Dylan Thomas's work in relation to his Welsh
background. Knowledge of the Welsh background is now regarded
as essential in understanding Dylan Thomas's work, and Anglo-
Welsh literature provides one of the literary contexts of Dylan
Thomas's world. Meetings with Gwyn Jones and Keidrych Rhys,
editors of the Welsh Review and Wales, and Glyn Jones, all three
writers who knew Dylan, assisted my pioneering study of the
Welsh background in Dylall Thomas: His Life alld Work (Oxford
Preface xv
University Press, 1964). An invitation to prepare and write the
Catalogue for the Welsh Arts Council Exhibition 'Welsh Dylan',
held to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the poet's
death, meant focusing on a visual introduction to the poet's life
and work, and led to the later book Welsh Dylan.
It was recent doctoral research on the role of nature in Dylan
Thomas's poetry that helped me to understand how his concept of
nature determined both style and theme. Consequently the
present book seeks to show, through analysiS of the early
manuscript verse, the emergence of Thomas's distinctive poetic
voice in 18 Poems, a crystallisation of themes and style evolved over
four years. As with Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot, an original
sensibility found expression on first publication. The following
account of 18 Poems, Twenty-five Poems and The Map of Love outlines
the main themes in the early poetry and the movement towards
greater clarity, again with the help of his letters and miscellaneous
critical comment. Examination of Deaths and Entrances highlights
Dylan Thomas as the first great civilian war poet, analyses his
important childhood poems, and traces the lyrical pantheism of
his later verse. Finally, discussion of the new poems in Collected
Poems, together with the unfinished versions of 'In Country
Heaven' and 'Elegy' now included in Dylan Thomas: Collected
Poems 1934-53, explores the widening role of nature, with
reference both to the natural life of land, sea and air that crowds
the canvas of the final verse and the intensity of his pantheistic
vision. The book demonstrates, too, how the last poems, like the
contemporaneous Under Milk Wood, marked a threshold of new
development and certainly not a diminution of inspiration.
The latter part of the book traces Thomas's growth as a prose
writer, commenting on each of his works, and showing how
throughout his life this was linked with his development as poet.
His early experiences as an amateur actor, his wartime employ-
ment writing film scripts, his work for radio as broadcaster and
writer, and his increasing fame as a reader, both of his own and
others' work, cast their perspectives on his changing prose style.
Attention is given to his various critical writings, as well as his
letters. There is some quotation from work not previously
available, such as his typescript summary of the projected 'Book of
the Streets', manuscript versions of 'A Story', and some wartime
comments on Chelsea that seem to me to be Dylan Thomas's. As
well as discussing its themes, characters, style and structure, the
xvi Preface
account of Under Milk Wood traces literary and biographical
sources, some not before explored. The range of his prose, and its
later new directions in film scenarios and radio broadcasts as well
as in drama and the short story, suggest that a notable and popular
twentieth-century prose writer, as well as a great poet, was lost as a
result of his untimely death.
The account of Dylan Thomas's life with which the book opens
offers a picture of the worlds in which he moved: initially Swansea
and west Wales, then London and return journeys to Wales,
including New Quay, and finally Laugharne and America. There
are glimpses of Italy, Prague, Teheran and New York, seen through
his eyes. Generally I have preferred his own descriptions of places
and people: they are always vivid, and often amusing. I am
especially indebted to Mrs Caitlin Thomas's books, and the
biographies by Constantine Fitzgibbon, Daniel Jones, Gwen Wat-
kins and Paul Ferris. Indispensable, too, is Ferris's magisterial
edition of The Collected Letters, Ralph Maud's editions of The
Notebooks and Walford Davies's Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings.
They provide the poet's words. I was finally especially fortunate to
receive Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53, and to benefit from
its definitive editing by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud.
Likewise, I have sought to let the poet speak, and where I have
erred I hope it is still on his side of the truth.
Part One
Dylan Thomas's Life
Dylan Thomas's Life
'This sea-town was my world d Dylan Thomas said of Swansea,

and certainly the most arresting feature of Swansea is the wide and
splendid curve of the shore, towards which the hills of Swansea
descend. It was this spectacular view that greeted the poet from his
home in Cwmdonkin Drive, high above Swansea Bay, a town and
seascape that vividly encapsulate a microcosm of Welsh life, today
as in the twenties and thirties. If you approach from the east,
industry and the docks dominate the scene, the road backed on
one side by gaunt hillsides dotted with the ruins of earlier
industrial life, and on the other by harsh grassland and glimpses of
sand and sea beyond the oil tanks and dockside buildings. Then
quite suddenly the communal centre of Swansea begins. But our
journey takes us along the coast road, facing Swansea town and
where the trains once ran to the Mumbles, on our left the new
Marina and high flats, then the grassy hillock leading to the long,
sandy beach, once busily crowded with holidaymakers in
summer. While to the right, we soon pass the town centre, Victoria
Gardens, St Helens and the cricket ground, the lively fun-fair,
Singleton Park and the University College. We have now reached
the residential area of the western side of Swansea, where the road
leads on to Newton and Mumbles and also forks to the Gower
coast, and its bays and villages, such as Bishopston where
Thomas's parents lived on leaving Cwmdonkin Drive in 1937.
Apart from the modern architecture of the new buildings of the
town and university, perhaps little has essentially changed in this
striking setting of the life of town and sea, the beauty of varied
prospects of the sea alongside industrial and scarred landscapes.
This was the world that inspired Thomas's poetic imagination
and also the sharply observed, compassionate comedy of his
Swansea stories. It was always to remain with him, even in later
years when it was a much smaller town-by-the-sea, Laugharne, in
3
4 Dylan Thomas's Life
the far west of Wales, that was to dominate his sea-haunted
pastoral verse, and his darkly comic prose writing. Thomas's close
friend and fellow Swansea poet, Vernon Watkins, images the
young poet in his Cwmdonkin home above the bay, evoking the
luminous vision of his wave-wound, death-dealing verses:
Climbing Cwmdonkin's dock-based hill,

I found his lamp-lit room,
The great light in the forehead,
Watching the waters' loom,
Compiling there his doomsday book
Or dictionary of doom.
('A True Picture Restored')2
Undoubtedly it was elements in his Welsh background that helped

forge Dylan Thomas's resounding resurgent pantheism, with its
unfadingly lyrical intimations of mortality and immortality, those
waves of affirmation that sang in their chains like the sea.
'One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover
of the human race, especially of women':3 this was Dylan
Thomas's characteristically humorous and pithy account of himself
to an audience in Rome in 1947, showing how aware he was of the
extent to which his temperament and his imagination were the
products of his Welsh environment. It was, too, with an aptly
prophetic note that Edward Thomas remarked of Swansea that 'if
Wales could produce a poet he should be born in the hills and
come here at the age of sixteen. He would have no need of Heaven
or Hell,.4 Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in Swansea on 27
October 1914. His manuscript notebooks, written here between the
ages of fifteen and sixteen, provide the source of over half his
poems.
Dylan is an ancient Welsh name found in the Mabinogion, a
collection of Welsh mediaeval tales, and no doubt it was Dylan
Thomas's father, D.J. Thomas, a particularly well-read and literary
man, the senior English master at Swansea Grammar School, who
chose it from this source; for though now a not uncommon name -
even outside Wales - it is the poet's fame that has universalised it.
lts appearance in the Mabinogiol1 is a brief but arresting one,
especially in its reference to the child's magical unity with the sea
and its natural life - an apt presentiment of the modern poet's
imaginative empathy with nature:
Dylan Thomas's Life 5
She was fetched to him; the maiden came in. 'Maiden', said he,
'art thou a maiden?' 'I know not but that I am.' Then he took the
magic wand and bent it. 'Step over this', said he, 'and if thou art
a maiden, I shall know'. Then she stepped over the magic wand,
and with that step she dropped a fine boy-child with rich yellow
hair. The boy uttered a loud cry .... 'Why,' said Math son of
Mathonwy, 'I will have this one baptized' - of the rich yellow-
haired boy. 'The name I will give him is Dylan:
The boy was baptized, and the moment he was baptized he
made for the sea. And there and then, as soon as he came to the
sea he received the sea's nature, and swam as well as the best
fish in the sea. And for that reason he was called Dylan Eil Ton
(Dylan Eil Ton: Sea son of Wave).5
Dylan Thomas himself commented on the source and pronuncia-

tion of his name, writing to Pamela Hansford Johnson that 'my
unusual name - for some mad reason, it comes from the
Mabil1ogiol1 - rhymes with Chillun' .6 Dylan's middle name, Marlais,
has a similarly interesting Welsh derivation, for it celebrates the
notable Welsh poet, preacher and radical, William Thomas, the
brother of Dylan's paternal grandfather. He took the 'bardic' name
of Gwilym Maries, Marlais being the name of a small river in north
Carmarthenshire, whence he came. Gwilym Maries became a
Unitarian minister in Cardiganshire, writing both poetry and prose
in Welsh. He was a liberal in theology and a radical in politics; and
he and his congregation were evicted from the chapel by the local
landowner. He is included in the Oxford Book of Welsh Verse. Clearly
Dylan Thomas's names celebrate the literary, Nonconformist and
radical sympathies that informed his Welsh background.
Dylan's father, D.J. Thomas, came from rural Carmarthenshire,
as did Dylan's mother. D.J.'s father worked for the Great Western
Railway and was known as 'Thomas the Guard' / but his son won a
scholarship to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth,
where he gained a first-class honours degree in English. At
Swansea Grammar School D.J. Thomas was much revered for his
enthusiastic and impassioned reading of literature, a gift his son
evidently inherited. D.J. had written poetry himself as a young
man, and founded the grammar school magazine that Dylan was
later to edit and to which he extensively contributed. It seems that
D.J. Thomas became somewhat embittered by his lack of success,
both as a poet and also, apparently, by his failure to gain the Chair
of English at Swansea when it was founded. Caitlin Thomas, Dylan
Thomas's wife, spoke of his father as:
that most unhappy of all men I have ever met; who did all the
spade work of casting off the humble beginnings, bettering
himself, assiduously cultivating the arts; and finished up a
miserable finicky failure; while passing on to Dylan, on a heaped
plate, the fruits of all his years of unrewarding labour. 8
Undoubtedly from the time Dylan could talk his father began to
inculcate in him a love of the English Language; and Dylan
Thomas himself was aware of this debt to his father's patient
efforts, as Brinnin has recorded: 'I had learned from Dylan that
much of his own early education had been more the result of his
father's tutelage than of informed schooling.'9 Dylan spent much
of his time in his father's study, revelling in its rich and up-to-date
collection of English literature, and he has left us an account of
their shared books:
Our books we divided into two sections, Dad's and mine. Dad
has a room full of all the accepted stuff, from Chaucer to Henry
James, all the encyclopaedias and books of reference, all
Saintsbury, and innumerable books on the theory of literature.
His library contains nearly everything that a respectable high-
brow library should contain. My books, on the other hand, are
nearly all poetry, and mostly modern at that. I have the collected
poems of Manley Hopkins, Stephen Crane, Yeats, de la Mare,
Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot,
volumes of poetry by Aldous Huxley, Sacheverell and Edith
Sitwell, Edna St Vincent Millay, D.H. Lawrence, Humbert Wolf,
Sassoon, and Harold Monro; most of the ghastly Best Poems of
the Year; two of the Georgian Anthologies, one of the Imagist
anthologies, 'Whips & Scorpions' (modern satiric verse), the
London Mercury Anthology, the Nineties Anthology (what
Dowsonery!) most of Lawrence, most of Joyce, with the
exception of Ulysses, all Gilbert Murray's Greek translations,
some Shaw, a little Virginia Woolf, and some of E.M. Forster.
This is inadequate really, but added to Dad's it makes a really
comprehensive selection of literature. to
Unlike Dylan, both his mother and father spoke Welsh. Dylan's
mother, Florence Thomas, a deacon's daughter, came from St
Thomas, the industrial and working-class district of Swansea,
though her family, too, had its roots in Carmarthenshire farming
country; and her sister Ann married Jim Jones, who farmed Fern
Hill at Llangain just off the road from Carmarthen to Llanstephan.
This farm is celebrated, of course, in Dylan Thomas's most famous
poem, and it is also the setting of the story 'The Peaches'. Ann is
herself commemorated in 'After the funeral', the finest of Thomas's
early poems, and undoubtedly one of his greatest. This farm was
the scene of Dylan's childhood holidays that were so poetically
rich a recollected experience for the adult poet.
In contrast to his sharp-tongued schoolmaster father, Florence
Thomas seems to have been a warm, affectionate, Simpler and
more kindly person, who spoiled and cossetted Dylan extrava-
gantly. Together with his mother and sister, Nancy, Dylan
attended the Paraclete Congregational Church in Newton, Mum-
bles, where his maternal uncle, David Rees, was minister, a
popular preacher of marked religious fervour. Here Dylan received
the 'Sunday School Certificate I was ashamed to want to pull
down' .11 Evidently Thomas's family and cultural background was
pedagogic, and religious in the Nonconformist style, strongly
stressing the individual conscience and the primacy of each man's
knowledge of his Bible. It was also seriously literary. Though the
years following the First World War were a time of economic slump,
depression and social conflict in Wales, Dylan grew up in the
security of suburban Swansea, the family materially secure thanks
to his father's occupation. Importantly, too, the family still enjoyed
dose roots in the rural life of Carmarthenshire; and they were roots
that always deeply nourished Thomas's poetic imagination.
Visiting Swansea in 1911, Edward Thomas described it as that
'horrible and sublime town ... it is very large ... it is all furnaces,
collieries, filth, stench, poverty and extravagant show, the country
and the sea at the very edge of it all', 12 the reference to the collieries
apart, a deSCription not so far from Dylan Thomas's later 'I was born
in a large Welsh industrial town at the beginning of the Great War: an
ugly lovely town (or so it was, and is, to me), crawling, sprawling,
slummed, unplanned, jerryvilla'd, and smug-suburbed by the side
of a long and splendid-curving shore. d3 Both rightly emphasise
the dose proximity of industry, countryside and the sea - a familiar
feature of South Wales. Swansea provided, too, a panorama of
Welsh life: seaside resort and market and shopping centre for both
the neighbouring mining valleys and the nearby farming country;
the centre also of rugby, football and cricket matches. Dylan
Thomas was to revel in the colourful life of the dockside pubs, as
well as those of the commercial town centre and holiday resort. He
evokes its liveliness in his childhood recollections:
Never was there such a town (I thought) for the smell of fish and
chips on Saturday nights, for the Sunday afternoon cinema
matinees where we shouted and hissed our threepences away;
for the crowds in the streets, with leeks in their pockets, on
international nights, for the singing that gushed from the
smoking doorways of the pubs. 14
Dylan Thomas's Swansea home was No.5 Cwmdonkin Drive, a

street 'up the Uplands tlS that enjoyed a fine view of Swansea and
its bay. From here the poet could see, to his left, the industrial and
dockside areas, while to his right was Mumbles and its pier, and
beyond that the Gower countryside and seascapes. Thomas was
aware that his own upbringing belonged to suburban Swansea,
truly noting his precociousness, rebelliousness and his morbidity
in adolescence.
I first saw the light of day in a Glamorgan villa, and amidst the
terrors of the Welsh accent and the smoke of the tinplace stacks,
grew up to be a sweet baby, a precocious child, a rebellious boy,
and a morbid youth. My father was a schoolmaster: a broader-
minded man I have never known. 16
Facing Thomas's home was Cwmdonkin Park 'and the park

itself was a world within the world of the sea town'; it was the
place that the young Dylan loved as a child, playing at soldiers
during the First World War when he 'carried a wooden rifle in
Cwmdonkin Park and shot down the invisible, unknown enemy
like a flock of wild birds',17 and as he grew
that small interior world widened as I learned its names and its
boundaries, as I discovered new refuges and ambushes 'in its
miniature woods and jungles, hidden homes and lairs for the
multitudes of the young, for cowboys and Indians. 18
Evidently the park had its own enduring resonances in the growth
of the poet's mind and imagination. Though small, it was a place of
endless mystery, delight and excitement:
Though it was only a little park, it held within its borders of old
tall trees, notched with our names and shabby from our
climbing, as many secret places, caverns and forests, prairies and
deserts, as a country somewhere at the end of the sea. 19
It was here, too, that Dylan Thomas was later to endure 'with
pleasure, the first agonies of unrequited love, the first slow boiling
in the belly of a bad poem, the strutting and raven-locked self-
dramatization of what ... seemed incurable adolescence'. 20
Dylan Thomas was spoilt and fussed over by his mother, and he
grew up a lively, happy-go-lucky boy, grubby and curly-haired,
venturesome and full of life and high spirits. Yet physically he was
not perhaps as robust as his 'young dog' image of himself
pretended; for in his teens he suffered from a form of paralysis and
had tubercular symptoms that later made him unfit for National
Service. The many months he spent in bed due to recurrent illness
clearly gave him time for reading and he was, from childhood, a
voracious reader. He began writing verses when he was eight
years old. He entered Swansea Grammar School at the age of
eleven, and by his early teens he had chosen his vocation: he was
to be a poet. Apart from English, where he gained 98 per cent in the
Central Welsh Board Examination, he neglected his studies, passed
no other examinations, and regularly appeared near the bottom of
his class each term. He did, however, put much energy into his
contributions to and editing of the school magazine. His contribu-
tions included poetry, parody - both in prose and verse - and
criticism. Parody and humour are a feature of Thomas's prose and
poetry in the school magazine and point significantly to this
distinctive aspect of his later prose writing and the alertly and
exuberantly comic disposition of his personality - so vividly
reflected in his letters - whether directed at himself or others.
Among his parodies of modern poetry at this time here is one of
W.B. Yeats:
A farmer's boy come up to me,

(With a hey diddle diddle
The moon is my fiddle
And I play on the waves of the sea).21
10 Dyilln Thomas's Life
That he was by no means the wild, untutored youth his own
accounts of his boyhood and adolescence are apt to suggest, is wen
illustrated by an article on modern poetry written in 1929 when he
was fifteen. It shows an unusually knowledgeable grasp of the
subject, is considerably in advance of most academic views of its
time, and has notable felicity of expression, as this brief extract
illustrates:
The most important element that characterizes our poetical

modernity is freedom - essential and unlimited - freedom of
form, of structure, of imagery and of idea. It had its roots in the
obscurity of Gerard Manley Hopkins's lyrics, where ... the
language was violated and estranged by the efforts of compress-
ing the already unfamiliar energy. . . . The freedom of idea can
be found abundantly in any anthology. Assuming that no
subject is an unpoetical subject, the neo-Romanticists (headed
by T.S. Eliot, and, in the majority of his moments, by James
Joyce) give us their succession of sordid details, their damp
despondent atmosphere, and their attraction for the gutter, 'the
sawdust restaurants with oyster shells .... '22
References to Thomas in the school magazine suggest a literary,

precocious and essentially serious-minded boy; and under the
heading 'Things We Cannot Credit' is written 'That D.M.T. should
mispronounce a word.'23 In his first term at school his poem 'The
Song of the Mischievous Dog' appeared in the magazine, his first
published poem.
Dylan Thomas won the mile race in the school sports in 1926, but
it was in the school dramatic society that he flourished. We read in
the school magazine that 'O.M. Thomas gave a good performance
as Oliver Cromwell, in spite of the fact that physically he was not
up to the part . . . he looked as young and fresh and clean as if he
had just come off the cover of a chocolate box' .24 Similarly we learn
of his performance in Galsworthy's Strife that 'O.M. Thomas had a
most difficult task. There are times when he seemed to lack the
coarseness and toughness of fibre necessary for the interpretation
of Roberts (the strike leader); his vowels were occasionally too
genteel!,25
Thomas left school in July 1931 and worked for a year and a half
as a reporter on the South Wales Daily Post. He proved an
indifferent reporter, and spent much of his time strolling about
Swansea, gossiping and chatting with friends in pubs and cafes.

His experience of Swansea life was greatly extended, and it was at
this time that he started drinking. We see something of the growth
of the poet's mind and compassionate imagination in his story 'Old
Garbo': his experience as a journalist was turning his 'inward eye'
outwards to other people, and he was noting and enjoying the
lively Swansea scenes. He describes them with realism and
succinctly, yet he was also aware of himself as the artist who would
shape the richly human life of his tales:
I made my way through the crowds: the valley men, up for the
football; the country shoppers; the window gazers; the silent,
shabby men at the corners of the packed streets, standing in
isolation in the rain; the press of mothers and prams; old women
in black, brooched dresses carrying frails; smart girls with shiny
mackintoshes and splashed stockings; little, dandy lascars
bewildered by the weather ... and all the time I thought of the
paragraphs I would never write. I'll put you all in a story by and
by.26
The 'silent, shabby men ... standing in isolation in the rain'
remind one that it was 1931, the bitterest year of the Depression in
Wales, and the years of severe poverty and unemployment.
Augustus John, the painter, a close friend in the thirties, wrote that
Thomas, 'like so many of his generation, discovered in himself a
fellow-feeling for the under-dog';27 and though never a political
poet Dylan Thomas remained firmly and steadfastly on the left,
unlike many contemporary English poets of the thirties. Brinnin
has observed that 'he was actually far more censorious of the status
quo than any of the other British poets,;28 and though he certainly
joined the political debate of the period his socialism owed more to
his experience of the Depression in Wales, and to the Welsh
traditions of radicalism and dissent, than to Marxism or the
fashionable and often passing allegiance of writers of the thirties.
Having deeper roots, Thomas's left-wing attitude remained to the
end of his life; and he was reported in the Strand magazine to have
said in March 1947, during the winter freeze-up and consequent
fuel crisis that confronted the post-war Labour government: 'One
should tolerate the Labour government because running down
Labour eventually brings you alongside the Conservatives, which
is the last place you want to be.' Nor was Dylan Thomas attracted
politically to Welsh Nationalism.
Geoffrey Moore wrote that Dylan Thomas 'took no interest in
the language - almost in fact deliberately turned away from it for to
him it stood for Welsh Nationalism, and, as he once expressed it,
F--- Welsh Nationalism'. 29 Even if this has an element of truth it
certainly overstates the case, given Thomas's references to the
language, more humorous than hostile. A more serious and truer
response that reveals Dylan Thomas's attitude to aspects of Wales
and Welsh Nationalism - including the language, Nonconformity
and the Welsh establishment as he saw it - is perhaps that
contained in a late letter (1949) regarding possible preferment:
'Perhaps something will come one day from the University of
Wales, though I am not popular with the authorities, being non-
Welsh speaking, non-rationalist, non-degreed, non-chapel going,
& not to be trusted .'30
While a journalist Thomas wrote lengthy and informed articles
of literary interest dealing with the lives and work of local poets
and with the visits of such writers as Landor, Borrow and Edward
Thomas to Swansea. Like his Adelphi reviews in his early twenties
they show sound critical judgement and scholarly erudition.
Undoubtedly they reflect an aspect of his many-sided literary
personality that was neglected in the falsifying light of the later
legend. They display also that vein of unremitting attention to
detail and untiringly scrupulous search for the right word that was
the essential feature of his poetry and prose; for no poet in English
supplied a more painstaking craftsmanship, rooted at all times in
the individual word and phrase, to his initial inspiration.
At this time Swansea was a very lively centre of intellectual and
artistic activity, and Thomas's artist friends included Dr Daniel
Jones, the musician and composer, Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy,
both painters, and his fellow Swansea poet Vernon Watkins.
Revealingly, too, Caitlin Thomas speaks of his 'great friendship
from the Swansea days with Bert Trick, a much older man', and
she recalls 'Dylan used to talk about him a lot' She writes:
Bert Trick was a Communist who had thought his philosophy

right through, who was keen on poetry but put his politics first.
Of all the friends that Dylan acquired in his Swansea days, Bert
Trick was the one with mettle; he was tough and it was through
him that Dylan developed his hatred of Fascism. There was a
period during the Spanish Civil War when Dylan seriously
thought of going off to fight ... he saw the issues in Spain and
strongly supported the Republican side. A lot of his friends went
out there. 3 !
Evidently Trick spurred Thomas's left-wing sympathies.

His youthful, endless discussions, in pub or cafe, on 'music and
poetry and painting and politics, Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky
and Greta Garbo, death and religion' Thomas remembers in his
'Return Journey' to the town. Since working as a reporter he had
also discovered the social and convivial pleasures of the pub: it was
his natural background, the intimate theatre where he was already
becoming the companionable talker and waggish entertainer. It
was also, of course, the place to meet new friends, to listen to their
tales and beery fantasies - and Thomas was all his life a good
listener.
Dylan Thomas belonged at this time to Swansea Little Theatre,

which was situated in Mumbles. In his abilities as an actor, and
notably his magnificent voice and power as a reader, he is probably
unique .among major English poets. While such poets as Word-
sworth or Eliot sought to critically establish the intellectual or
moral climate appropriate to their work, it was Dylan Thomas's
gifts as a reader, both of his poetry and his prose, that created in
his lifetime the conditions most essential to his poetry's success:
delight in the sound and dramatic power of verse. For him reading
aloud was a highly disciplined art. Among the roles he played were
Simon Bliss in Coward's Hay Fever, Witwoud in Congreve's The
Way of the World and Count Bellair in Farquhar'S The Beaux'
Stratagem. Mumbles was, and is, the fashionable holiday resort at
the far end of Swansea bay, and it is evident Dylan Thomas deeply
enjoyed going there in the evenings for rehearsals, not only for the
pleasure of acting but also to visit two of his favourite Mumbles
pubs, the Mermaid and the Antelope, and 'if there is no rehearsal',
he jests, 'I continue to commune with those two legendary
creatures' .32 On one occasion he complains of a hangover after a
night's drinking with Daniel Jones, characteristically punning on
the word Oystermouth, a Mumbles village: 'Oh, woe, woe, woe
unto Mumbles and the oystered beer.'33 In another letter the young
provincial bohemian poet boasts (wittily attributing drunkenness
to alternative inspirations) he gets drunk several nights a week,
despite the calls of his job as reporter and the demands of
rehearsals:
I am playing in Noel Coward's 'Hay Fever' at the Little Theatre

this season. Much of my time is taken up with rehearsals. Much
is taken up with concerts, deaths, meetings and dinners. It's
odd, but between all these I manage to become drunk at least
four nights of the week. Muse or Mermaid?34
Clearly the taste for beer and pub conviviality was established. A
favourite lunchtime haunt was the Uplands Hotel, nearer his
home, and in one of his letters to Pamela Hansford Johnson in
January 1934 he refers to it when describing his day - by this time
he had given up his job as reporter. After breakfast of 'an apple, an
orange, and a banana', and a look at the newspaper in bed, he
would come downstairs for a couple of hours' reading, seated
before the fire, his choice 'anything that is near, poetry or prose,
translations out of the Greek or the Film Pictorial, a new novel ... a
new book of criticism, or an old favourite like Grimm or George
Herbert'.34 Then he walked to the nearby Uplands Hotel for a
couple of pints of beer, returning home for the afternoon's writing
- 'to write anything, just to let the words and ideas, the half-
remembered half-forgotten images, tumble on the sheets of
paper'.36 Clearly Thomas's reading followed the voracious, casual,
totally absorbed manner of the dedicated autodidact; and as was to
be the case throughout his life, a set and regular number of hours
were devoted to writing each day.
Dylan Thomas's letters provide the most vivid and detailed
account of his life and thoughts at this time, especially those
written to Pamela Hansford Johnson, the novelist who was to
marry c.P. Snow. Despite Thomas's flirtations, Pamela Hansford
Johnson was his first serious girlfriend, and though the relation-
ship was soon broken off due to the poet's bohemianism, general
raffishness and what Ms Johnson called 'Comrade Bottle', clearly
their friendship was initially a romantic one and Dylan enjoyed his
visits to her in London. He opened not only his heart but his mind
and ideas to her - the latter almost uniquely. In his letters to her he
talks of his ideas on society, on religion, on sexuality, in a direct
way he seldpm favoured later as he became increasingly the
entertainer and humourist in his letters to friends. Not only do
these letters, like those of Keats, provide illuminating glimpses of
the growth of the young poet's mind and sensibility, they also set
out formative attitudes and concepts. We are given a picture of his
challenging, questioning, albeit somewhat anarchic, mind; and his
ideas on sex, politics and religion reflect aspects of the poet's
thinking that have been largely ignored in favour of the more
superficially sensational side of the poet's personality and later
legend. Thus his views on adolescent sexuality were certainly
contrary to the prevailing social ethos of the thirties, and would
have been particularly shocking to the Nonconformist outlook that
still dominated Welsh life:
From the first months of puberty girls and boys should be

allowed to know their bodies .... More than that, their sexual
expression should be encouraged. It would be very nearly
impossible for a young girl to live, permanently, with a young
boy, especially if both were in school; they would not live
together peaceably; they would have no money, and it would be
difficult for them to earn. But the family of the girl should for a
certain time - the time of the mutual devotion of the boy and girl
- keep the boy in their house. And vice-versa. The lives of the
boy and girl would continue individually - there would be
school and school associations for both of them - but their
domestic closeness and their sleeping together would blend the
two individual lives in one and would keep both brains and
bodies perpetually clean. 37
On Armistice Day 1933, when he was just nineteen, Dylan Thomas

wrote with what may seem surprising vigour and political
commitment on the subject of war and its aftermath. His
comments on the need for revolution and what Auden might have
termed 'new styles of architecture, a change of heart' are
impressive for their vitality and clarity of purpose and expression.
This is written on Armistice Day, 1933, when the war is no more

than a memory of privations and the cutting down of the young.
There were women who had 'lost' their sons, though where they
had lost them and why they could not find them, we, who were
children born out of blood into blood, could never tell. The state
was a murderer .... What was Christ in us was stuck with a
bayonet to the sky, and what was Judas we fed and sheltered.
. . . Genius is being strangled every day by the legion of old
Buffers ... clinging, for God and capital, to an outgrown and
decaying system. Light is being turned to darkness by the
capitalists and industrialists. There is only one thing you and I,
who are of this generation, must look forward to, must work for
and pray for, and, because we are poets and voicers, not only of
our personal selves but of our social selves, we must pray for ....
It is the Revolution. There is no need for it to be a revolution of
blood. We do not ask that ... we ask ... that all that is in us of
godliness and strength, of happiness and genius, shall be
allowed to exult in the sun. We are said to be faithless, because
our God is not a capitalist God, to be unpatriotic because we do
not believe in the Tory Government. 38
The year 1933 was, of course, a time of grinding poverty for the
unemployed, and for many a time of social unrest, particularly in
South Wales, with its strong socialist traditions. Thomas's voice is
that of an idealist, and rebel; and it has been insufficiently realised
that the mind and imagination that produced the early introspec-
tive, astonishingly original but generally solipsistic verse was as
informed and as socially aware as the more political poets of the
period. Thomas also dismisses the churches as vigorously as the
government, asserting that 'they standardize our Gods ... label
our morals ... laud the death of a vanished Christ, and fear the
crying of the new Christ in the wilderness'.
From his earliest childhood Dylan Thomas lived close to sea and
countryside and was deeply receptive to their influence, whether
experienced along Swansea bay, the nearby land and seascapes of
Gower, or the frequently visited Carmarthenshire countryside and
coastal villages of Laugharne and Llanstephan. The young poet
writes to Pamela Hansford Johnson of how he would often 'spend
the afternoon in walking alone over the very desolate Gower cliffs,
communing with the cold and quietness' .39 Dylan Thomas was
deeply fond of the Gower coast and on another occasion writes
that
I often go down in the mornings to the furthest point of Gower -

the village of Rhossilli - and stay there till evening. The bay is the
wildest, bleakest & barrenest I know - four or five miles of
yellow coldness going away into the distance of the sea. And the
Worm, a seaworm of rock pointing into the channel, is the very
promontory of depression. Nothing lives on it but gulls and rats,
the millionth generation of the winged and tailed families that
screamed in the air and ran though the grass when the first sea
thudded on the Rhossilli beach.4O
Thomas moves from his evocation of the past life of this natural
setting to a vivid description of his physical sense of its present life:
There is one table of rock on the Worm's back that is covered

with long yellow grass .... Going over that grass is one of the
strangest experiences; it gives under one's feet; it makes little
sucking noises, & smells - and this to me is the most grisly smell
in the world -like the fur of rabbits after rain .... When the tide
comes in, the reef of needle rocks that leads to the base of the
Worm, is covered under the water.
There were, too, childhood visits to the Carmarthenshire

countryside of 'Fern Hill'. 'My mother came from the agricultural
depths of Carmarthenshire', wrote Thomas in 1933,41 for her family
had its roots in farming country near Llangain, and Fern Hill farm
was some three miles inland from Llanstephan. Across the estuary
from L1anstephan was Laugharne, where Dylan was to live just
before the war, and where he returned in 1949 to live at the Boat
House.
Such stories as 'The Peaches' and 'A Visit to Grandpa's' from
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog reveal Dylan's delight in his
holiday visits to west Wales. They vividly evoke the setting, while
recording Thomas's tendency even as a child to dramatise himself
and his situation, already seeing himself in his imaginary tale, as in
this description of the welcome he received from his aunt, Ann
Jones, on arriving at Fern Hill:
Then a door at the end of the passage opened; I saw the plates
on the shelves, the lighted lamp on the long, oil-clothed table,
'Prepare to Meet Thy God' knitted over the fire-place, the
smiling china dogs, the brown-stained settle, the grandmother
clock, and I ran into the kitchen and into Annie's arms.
There was welcome, then. The clock struck twelve as she
kissed me, and I stood among the shining and striking like a
prince taking off his disguise. One minute I was small and cold,
skulking dead-scared down a black passage in my stiff, best suit
... clutching my grammar school cap, unfamiliar to myself, a
snub-nosed story-teller lost in his own adventures ... the next I
was a royal nephew, embraced and welcomed, standing in the
snug centre of my stories and listening to the clock announcing
me. 42
Vividly, too, he describes his youthful feeling for nature, sponta-

neous and animal-like in its instinctive immediacy, and highly
imaginative in his power to enlarge upon a particular situation:
On my haunches, eager and alone, casting an ebony shadow,

with the Gorsehill jungle swarming, the violent impossible birds
and fishes leaping, hidden under four-stemmed flowers the
height of horses, in the early evening in a dingle near
Carmarthen .... I felt all my young body like an excited animal
surrounding me. 43
It was in Swansea that began the two most important friendships

in Thomas's life, those of Daniel Jones and Vernon Watkins; for it
was these two friends who made the greatest impact on Thomas's
writing and best understood the nature of his poetic originality and
growth. Daniel Jones was a schoolfriend whose house, called
'Warmley', was about ten minutes' walk from Thomas's home. But
what vividly emerges from Dr Jones's account of their friendship in
his book My Friend Dylnll Tholllns is how Warmley became almost a
second home for Dylan during the years of boyhood and
adolescence. Though primarily a musician and composer, Daniel
Jones had a delight in language that matched Dylan's. At this time
they not only wrote joint poems and comic pieces but joyfully
competed in serious games of verbal dexterity and poetic inven-
tiveness, even creating the verbal fantasy world of their own
broadcasting company transmitting programmes from one room to
the other at Warmley. Clearly Thomas's highly precocious linguis-
tic imagination had found both stimulus and competition. Describ-
ing their first meeting in his story 'The Fight' Thomas relates how
he read his poetry to his new friend who listened 'like a boy aged a
hundred' - a characteristically humorous yet generous tribute to
his devoted listener. It would seem that Daniel Jones, whose mind
was of a more academic and scholarly turn than Dylan's, prompted
in him that delight in the use of anagram and palingram that
Thomas was to use particularly in his prose writing (in his early
story 'The Holy Six' these clerical gentlemen have names that are
anagrams, some of the mediaeval Seven Deadly Sins, Stul, Edger,
Vyne, Rafe; in this story, too, is the early appearance of the
paIingram 'Llareggub' as a place name). Daniel Jones also relates
that in their composition of poems together, he wrote the odd lines
and Dylan the even ones, as in the following verses:
They had come from the Place

High on the coral hills
Where the light from the white sea fills
The soil with ascending grace
And the sound of their Power
Makes motion as steep as the sky,
And the fruits of the great ground lie
Like leaves from a vertical flower. 44
May we not anticipate Dylanesque rhythms and images here

('motion as steep as the sky', 'leaves from a vertical flower')? While
the strangely compelling line '1 lay under the currant trees and told
the beady berries about Jesus' certainly has that weird and original
blend of solipsistic sensuousness and faux-naif religiosity that
characterises the early stories. I would think that the seeds of
Dylan Thomas's early poetic style and also of both his sensuously
primitive and inventively comic prose styles may have been rooted
in the verbal experiments and imaginative fantasies of the
language games of two unusually gifted adolescent schoolboys.
As well as pubs, the Kardomah Cafe was a favourite meeting
place for Dylan Thomas and these friends, who included Dan
Jones, Bert Trick, Mervyn Levy, Alfred Janes, Vernon Watkins and
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, the journalist and broadcaster.
But with the publication of 18 Poems Dylan Thomas's aim was to
live in London; no doubt in order to foster his poetic fame and
reputation as well as to enjoy the bohemian life it offered. He
needed a wider stage than that of the provincial bohemian he was
later to depict in 'Return Journey' as:
above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean,

he's five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly
mousebrown hair ... a bombastic adolescent provincial Bohe-
mian ... a gabbing, ambitious, mock-tough, pretentious young
man. 45
Already Dylan Thomas had rebelled against the restrictive and
puritanical aspects of Welsh Nonconformity; and as 'a young dog'
about Swansea he had relished the forbidden pleasures of smoking
and drinking as well, no doubt, as those of sex. One of his literary
heroes was Caradoc Evans, whose satiric short stories, My People,
had shocked and enraged its Welsh readers with its attack on the
alleged greed, hypocrisy and corruption of Welsh Nonconformity.
Dylan visited Caradoc in Aberystwyth, and wrote delightedly:
We made a tour of the pubs in the evening, drinking to the

eternal damnation of the Almighty and the soon-to-be-hoped-for
destruction of the Tin Bethels. The University students love
Caradoc and pelt him with stones whenever he goes out. 46
Certainly Dylan Thomas mocked the narrow-mindedness he

found in Wales at this time, as in this speech to a group of Scottish
writers long after he left Swansea:
I am a Welshman who does not live in his own country, mainly

because he still wants to eat and drink, be rigged and roofed, and
no Welsh writer can hunt his bread and butter in Wales unless
he pulls his forelock to the 'Western Mail', Bethesda on Sunday,
and enters public-houses by the back door, and reads Caradoc
Evans only when alone, and by candlelight. 47
In sharper and more personal vein he evokes the meeting he

attended as a reporter when the artist Evan Walters's offer of his
portrait of Caradoc Evans was discussed at a meeting of the
Swansea Art Gallery:
The Chairman of the Art Gallery Committee was Sir Dai Davies,
the proprietor of the newspaper for which I doodled.
'About this picture of Caradoc Evans now', he said. 'Caradoc
Evans is a liar. He says that Welshmen are narrow-minded
hypocrites. I throw that lie in his teeth. We are not hypocrites.
We are not narrow-minded. We'll show him. I refuse to have his
portrait hung in our gallery:48
Dylan writes here with a bitter and ironic humour worthy of

Caradoc, though generally recollection of his adolescent rebellious-
ness, and his resentment at his feeling of alienation as a Welshman
both in England and Wales, is expressed in a less caustic, more
exuberantly humorous style, as he continued in this talk:
Regarded in England as a Welshman (and a waterer of England's

milk), and in Wales as an Englishman, I am too unnational to be
here at all. I should be living in a small private leperhouse in
Hereford or Shropshire, one foot in Wales and my vowels in
England. Wearing red flannel drawers, a tall witch's hat, and a
coracle tiepin, and speaking English so Englishly that I sound
like a literate Airedale ... piped and shagged and tweed ed, but
also with a harp, the look of all Sussex in my poached eyes and a
whippet under my waistcoat.
References to the traditional Welsh women's costume, the coracle

boat, the harp and the whippet, match the mocking cliches of
Englishness. Certainly the poet's sense of division, albeit a fruitful
one in many respects, is evident. And when he left Swansea for
London, perhaps as much a result of the adolescent's need to break
from his family setting as his need for a wider and freer cultural life
style, it was with the witty but largely self-deceiving comment 'The
land of my fathers. My fathers can keep it.'49 For until he returned
permanently to Wales in 1949 the intervening fifteen years were a
story of return journeys to Wales, first of all to Cwmdonkin Drive,
then to Bishopston in Gower when his father retired there, to
Laugharne shortly after his marriage, and for a year to New Quay.
It was in Wales that he found his inspiration and where he was
able to do his serious work as poet and prose writer. His progress
'from dragon's tooth to druid in his own land tSO characterised his
development as a major twentieth-century writer, rather than the
posthumous and largely spurious legend that caught the popular
imagination. In contrast, introducing a BBC reading of his poems,
Thomas calmly recalled how 'in small rooms in Wales, arrogantly
and devotedly I began them'. 51
II
Dylan Thomas shared what he called 'one big boring beautiful

room' with Fred Janes at 5 Redcliffe Street, between Old Brompton
Road and Fulham Road, when he first moved to London. Mervyn
Levy lived in the same house, but soon they all moved to a house
in nearby Coleherne Road, and Thomas has described their
bohemian life in this somewhat raffish and seedy part of Chelsea as
'exiled bohemian boily boys ... three very young monsters green
and brimming from Swansea' .52 They were 'slightly drunk, slightly
dirty, slightly wicked, slightly crazed' he wrote in an early lettcr to
Bert Trick,53 and complained of 'the most boring bohemian parties'
in this 'quarter of the pseudo-artists'. Yet dearly he was having a
good time drinking in the pubs of Chelsea and Soho, revelling in
the bohemian life of the metropolis and seeking what new
experiences were on offer, not unlike Samuel Bennet in Adventures
ill the Skill Trade, Thomas's unfinished novel on the picaresque
adventures of a young Welshman on his arrival in London. He
wrote to Swansea friends of meeting such people as Henry Moore,
Edwin Muir and Wyndham Lewis. His fame as a poet was
established in the months following the publication of 18 Poems on
11 December 1934; and he was contributing poems, stories and
reviews to such magazines as the Adelphi, Eliot's Criterion, the New
English Weekly, and New Verse, and also newspapers such as the
Moming Post and Sunday Referee. Dylan was already acquiring his
reputation as the thirsty enfant terrible and also as entertaining
company, particularly in the relaxed, beery camaraderie of a
crowded bar. Drinking cronies included Geoffrey Grigson, William
Empson and Norman Cameron, and favourite haunts included the
French pub in Soho and the nearby Fitzroy Tavern, both the Six
Bells and Eight Bells in Chelsea, and later the Gargoyle Club and
the Salisbury. Without a regular job and living on very little money,
yet always ready for the social round of pub and club and party,
Dylan Thomas was already becoming a popular literary-bohemian
figure on the London scene, a good talker, an attentive listener,
and always ready to entertain his pub audience with his verbal
fantasies, jokes and stories. Attending the Surrealist Exhibition in
June 1936, Thomas proffered cups of boiled string, inquiring
'strong or weak?'. When he needed to rest from what he was later
to call 'the capital punishment' he returned home to Swansea, to be
fussed over by his mother, to enjoy the company of Swansea
friends like Dan Jones, and of course to be in the comfortable and
cossetted seclusion he always needed to write, rather than play the
role of poet. He went home at Christmas in 1934, and indeed after a
year in London Thomas was back in Cwmdonkin Drive, becoming
again the poet who enjoyed trips to London, sleeping wherever he
could find a spare bed.
At home in Cwmdonkin Drive a few months after the publica-
tion of 18 Poems in December 1934, Thomas first met his other close
Swansea friend, the poet Vernon Watkins. Watkins worked as a
bank clerk in the St Helen's branch of Lloyds, travelling there daily
from his Gower home of Pennard. If Dan Jones brought out the
more comic and verbally inventive, as well as the actor, in
Thomas's personality, Vernon Watkins's friendship marked the
beginning of that mutual and total absorption in the discussion of
poetry and especially poetic craftsmanship that their correspond-
ence, later edited by Watkins, fascinatingly records. This was
another of those Swansea friendships that remained a deep and
loyal one; though they were especially close in the years before and
during the war. Vernon Watkins relates how they became close
friends from the first meeting, and provides a vivid picture of
Dylan at twenty:
He was slight, shorter than I had expected, shy, rather flushed

and eager in manner, deep-voiced, restless, humorous, with
large wondering, yet acutely intelligent eyes, gold curls, snub
nose and the face of a cherub. I quickly realised when we went
for a walk on the [Gower] cliffs that this cherub took nothing for
granted. In thought and words he was anarchic, challenging,
with the certainty of that instinct which knows its own freshly
discovered truth. 54
That certainty of instinct had recently registered its own freshly

discovered truths in 18 Poems in all their still amazing originality
and power. Their early excited discussions of poetry, often
centring on the rightness of one particular word, testing it from all
angles, delighting in it, treasuring its vast and precise possibilities,
had begun. Such endeavour evokes the distinctiveness of the
poetic world they shared, so different from the more intellectual,
political and discursive modes of English poetry in the thirties.
Each recognised an affinity in their view of poetry, in their
emphasis on the overriding importance of sound and rhythm,
which were truly registered only when poetry was read aloud -
and they were both magnificent readers in the romantic and bardic
style. Vernon Watkins's comments that 'the sound-pattern of lyric
poetry is more closely related to music than to prose' highlights
this shared poetic aim as writers and readers of poetry:
I believe that lyric poetry is closer to music than to prose, and
that it should be read as exactly as a musical score. I also believe
that it is always a gift, the reward of tenacity and minutest
attention, and that unless it comes out of exaltation or moves
towards it, it is not worth writing. 55
Certainly the relationship of lyric poetry to music, its reading as a

musical score, the minute attention to craftsmanship it demands
and the mood of exaltation it seeks to register are key guides to the
originality of Thomas's verse. Likewise the religious temper of
their verse and their preoccupation with the natural world were
vital affinities. It was after reading some of his poems to Vernon in
Cwmdonkin Drive that Dylan showed him his home-made
rhyming dictionary. It was made of folded sheets of brown paper
sewn together; and he had compiled it himself, continually adding
to it. He called it his 'Doomsday Book'. Up to the end of his life,
Thomas was to compile rhyming lists, as the manuscript versions
of 'Poem on his Birthday' show, as well as lists of synonyms.
It was in London, in a Fitzrovia pub called the Wheatsheaf, that
Dylan Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara in April 1936, introduced to
her by the famous painter and bohemian figure Augustus John.
Going around with Dylan meant, of course, that much time was
spent in pubs, and Caitlin recalls how 'to Dylan the pubs were
sacred: they were like churches - places for declaiming and holding
an audience', evidently the equivalent of the lecture room for the
academic poet, and here he learned his role as talker and entertainer,
and she observed of their early pubbing that 'he didn't appear to
monopolise the conversation deliberately, but once Dylan started he
soon had an audience helpless with laughter. People loved listening
to him'.56 Just over a year later Dylan and Caitlin were married in
Penzance Register Office on 11 July 1937, spending their honeymoon
in the Lobster Pot, Mousehole, then a guest-house run by Thomas's
friends Wyn Henderson and Max Chapman. As Dylan had very little
money his parents were of course distressed by what they thought
his irresponsibility, but in a letter to Vernon Watkins Thomas
splendidly and simply announced:
My own news is very big and simple. I was married three days
ago; to Caitlin Macnamara; in Penzance registry office; with no
money, no prospect of money, no attendant friends or relatives,
and in complete happiness.
This delightful letter begins with Thomas's characteristic vein of
comic fantasy, when he apologises for altering slightly Watkins's
poem 'Griefs of the Sea' on its publication in the first number of
Keidrych Rhys's magazine Wales, to which Thomas contributed his
prose piece 'Prologue to an Adventure' but refused to be listed as
co-editor. 'If', writes Dylan, 'you see a dog-like shape with a torn
tail and spaniel eye, its tail between its legs, come cringing and
snuffling up Heatherslade [Watkins's home] gravel, it will be me;
look carefully at its smarmy rump that asks to be kicked, its
trembling, pen holding claw that scribbles "kick me" in the dust.,57
It was by no means Thomas's first or last comic turn offered for his
bungling of some matter - he was later to write a letter of excuses
for failure to turn up at Watkins's wedding that is a burlesque
chapter of accidents! Lamenting finally his 'Thowdlerized version'
of the poem, he ends by saying he's moving shortly to'a studio ...
in Newlyn, a studio above a fish-market & where gulls fly in to
breakfast' - again casually displaying that gift for the evocative and
vividly comic phrase.
After their marriage Dylan and Caitlin sometimes stayed with
his parents in Bishopston, often visiting Watkins's home in nearby
Pennard. There they walked the Gower cliffs, Caitlin particularly
enjoying swimming and sunbathing. In the evenings they all
played Lexicon - a word game very like Scrabble - and Dylan and
Vernon read each other their poems. These pre-war years were
when Dylan and Vernon saw most of each other, the letters
supplementing discussions of new poems when Dylan was living
elsewhere. For some months Dylan and Caitlin stayed with
Caitlin's mother in Blashford, Ringwood, near the Hampshire and
Dorset border. It was probably at this time that Dylan Thomas first
saw the Cerne Abbas giant, which was later to inspire the final
poem in his Collected Poems. These seem to have been very happy
days for the young lovers, and they enjoyed daily outings to the
nearby New Forest, Thomas writing to Vernon that 'Caitlin & I ride
into the New Forest every day, into Bluebell Wood or onto Cuckoo
Hill . . . we are quiet and small and cigarette-stained and very
young' .58 Their first home together was in Laugharne, when in the
late spring of 1938 they lived for a few months in a four-roomed
cottage called Eros in Gosport Street. Dylan described it as 'a small,
damp fisherman's furnished cottage'. He mentions 'the garden
leading down to mud and sea' where 'you bathe or go dirty', 59
while water had to be fetched from a public tap at the bottom of the
hill. But in late July they moved to Sea View, a much larger, more
comfortable house, strikingly set apart from its neighbours. The
Thomases had rented the cottage from the Williamses who owned
Brown's Hotel, and Dylan was able to boast of the attractions of
'three good pubs ... no prohibitive drinking hours ... and colossal
liars to listen to'. Though Dylan and Caitlin were always very hard
up, these couple of years in Laugharne that preceded the war were
happy ones for them. A frequent visitor was Vernon Watkins, who
indeed thought these days at Sea View were Dylan's happiest, a
view Caitlin has confirmed.
Caitlin shrewdly realised that Dylan
needed some one ... to provide that sheltered, secure, deadly

dull and warmly protective small-town Welsh home background
in which his best work was always done', and 'as soon as I could
get him into my little dull country places he would settle down
and start working. . . . The truth is that once he was in an
environment where he could work, Dylan was extremely
disciplined, writing to a strict routine no matter where he was,
and that continued right to the end. 60
This is the vital truth regarding Dylan Thomas as a writer, though

of course he always liked the trips to London and its pubs. But he
enjoyed, too, their weekly shopping jaunt to Carmarthen on
market day, the pubs open all day, when 'he was always at the
centre of a crowd', knowing all the farmers and tradesmen in the
bar.
Once settled in Laugharne after his marriage Dylan was able to
write each day, and he was working on the poems and stories that
were included in The Map of Love, published in August 1939. It was
here, too, that he wrote the stories that were to make up the
collection Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, his eye and
imagination suddenly turned outward from the strange, fantasy
world of the early stories to the scenes of his childhood and
adolescence in Swansea and the Llanstephan countryside, tales
rich with the detail of what Watkins called the 'heroic comedy of
people's lives'. Calling on Dylan and Caitlin after his visit to Dublin
in 1938 Watkins reported Yeats's comment that 'The young poets
toil too much', provoking Dylan's retort 'He should come here'.61
Maybe he had in mind the seventy-two concealed rhyme endings
on the letter L that, to his disappointment, Vernon had failed to
notice on an earlier occasion when Dylan read him his poem 'I, in
my intricate image,!62 There were often, alas, weekends when
there was no money for cigarettes, very little for food, and they
relied on the fish and cockles obtained from the nearby estuary. A
few days before Christmas in 1938 Dylan wrote to Vernon Watkins
that 'we're just as poor ... but the ravens - soft, white, silly ravens
will feed us', 63 and it was on 30 January 1939 that their first child
Llewelyn was born, while they were staying with Caitlin's mother
in Blashford, where they had spent Christmas.
But the happiness of these years was already threatened as the
reality of war grew near. At one point Thomas considered
becoming a conscientious objector, but he was later graded C3 at
his medical and was not called up for military service. Debts forced
him eventually to leave Sea View in 1940, and Dylan and Caitlin
did not have a permanent home until they returned to Laugharne
to the Boat House nine years later. At first they stayed for periods
with Dylan's parents in Bishopston, with Caitlin's mother in
Hampshire, and also at John Davenport's house in Marshfield,
Gloucestershire. In its lively bohemian atmosphere, Thomas
contributed to the writing of the novel The Death of tlte King's
Cal1ary. They stayed, too, with Richard Hughes in his 'grand
mansion' (Dylan's 1938 description) beside the ruins of Laugharne
Castle. Dylan and Caitlin were staying at Bishopston in February
1941 when Swansea suffered its severest air-raids; and Thomas,
walking in the bombed shopping and commercial centre of
Swansea on the morning after the worst raid, said in tears to a
friend 'Our Swansea is dead'.64 This experience inspired his post-
war broadcast 'Return Journey' to the town. The impact of war
deepened his poetic vision and gave it a tragic as well as public
resonance in such poems as 'Ceremony after a Fire Raid' and 'A
Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London', which
marked his emergence as our first great civilian war poet, for the
1939-45 war saw the extensive and deliberate bombing of civilians
- a response anticipated in Picasso's 'Guernica'. The horror of war
also drove Thomas to re-create remembered happiness in his
luminous evocations of childhood in such poems as 'The Hunch-
back in the Park', 'Fern Hill' and 'Poem in October'. This
deepening preoccupation with the past, whether of childhood or
adolescence, is remarkable in a man only in his late twenties. It is
not simply a matter of nostalgia; it is linked also with a crucial vein
in his verse that made him what Gwen Watkins called 'the Proust
of poetry',65 albeit with affinities also with Hardy's later verse. It
was as though the lost, dead worlds of childhood and adolescence
were seen as touchstones of joy and hope during the wartime
years of destruction and suffering. Although marked by mutability
their innocence and delight were sources of sanity and vision on
what Thomas later described as 'this apparently hell-bent earth'. It
was a quest for happiness that was to be richly pursued in poetry
and prose. Shortly after the raids on Swansea Thomas's parents
moved to the family cottage of Blaen Cwm, near Fern Hill farm.
Evidently the poet's wartime return journeys to Bishopston, Blaen
Cwm, where he wrote 'Poem in October' and began 'Fern Hill',
and Cardiganshire, prompted his deepening concern with celeb-
rating the past, usually against a rural background.
Up to 1940 the sources of Thomas's poetry were usually the four
school exercise books of rough drafts and first inspirations of
poems that were written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen.
It was from these books that he quarried the material for his first
three collections of verse, including his first great poems 'And
Death Shall Have No Dominion' and' After the funeral', the latter
the elegy on his aunt Ann Jones of Fern Hill who had died in 1933.
It was in 1941 that Thomas sold his four exercise books of poems
for £6, £7.10, £6.10, and £5, respectively, with the characteristically
humorous, vivid and utterly self-aware remark 'It's lovely when
you burn your boats. They burn so beautifully'. 66 Caitlin Thomas
has declared it 'was the calm, rational, literary Dylan decided that
he didn't want to refer to them any more ... "I've pretty well
exhausted all the stuff in there; there's nothing more I want to
use", he told me.' She adds perceptively, 'The drinking Dylan may
have drunk those notebooks', that is the money they produced,
'but it was the creative Dylan who decided to sell them.'67
Nevertheless it was a bold sale, for Thomas had now to turn to new
and immediate sources of inspiration, and it marked, as the war
had done, that decisive development in his work that produced his
mature and greatest poetry. This was included in Deaths and
Entrallces (1946), and, of course, the later poems included in his
Collected Poems (1952). Thomas was twenty-six, the age at which
Keats had died, when he sold the Notebooks, the fecund sources of
his early verse; developing beyond his self-description as 'Rim-
baud of Cwmdonkin Drive' Thomas was now to learn, following
the examples of Yeats and Hardy, how the lyric poet grows old.
From 1942 to 1945 Dylan Thomas worked on documentary films
for the distinguished producer Donald Taylor, making films for the
Ministry of Information. He enjoyed his film work and wrote up to
twenty documentary and also feature film scripts, bringing
professionalism and flair to this work which he continued after the
war. Feature scripts such as The Doctor and the Devils (1944), Me and
My Bike (1948), The Beach of Falesa (1948) and Rebecca's Daughters
(1948) have been published. Remembering Thomas's gift for
parody, one would particularly like to see the script and film Is
Your Emie Really Necessary?, its title parodying the famous wartime
injunction 'Is Your Journey Really Necessary?'. But the film was
suppressed by the Ministry of Information! During the war this
work not only provided Thomas with a regular income for once in
his life, but also helped him to develop as a prose writer in such
areas as broadcasting, where a clear narrative flow and quick and
vivid evocation of character and place were necessary.
While working on films Thomas lived in various parts of
London, but he also had the freedom to write his scripts in safer
rural Wales during the bombing, should he so choose. For nearly
two years Caitlin and Dylan lived in a studio flat in Manresa Road,
opposite fhe then Chelsea Public Library, and just off the King's
Road near the famous Six Bells pub. Caitlin spent the summer of
1942 in Talsarn, a Cardiganshire village in the beautiful valley of
the river Aeron, clearly remembered when their second child was
born in 1943 and named Aeronwy. On a visit there Dylan Thomas
wrote to a Chelsea drinking companion, the art critic T.W. Earp,
that 'I have been here for over a week with Caitlin, with milk and
mild and cheese and eggs, and I feel fit as a fiddle only bigger .'68
Nicolette Devas, Caitlin's sister, recalls how she searched out
Dylan in the local Chelsea pubs when Aeronwy was born in Saint
Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington. She found him in the Angle-
sea, a few streets away from their studio flat, and joined in the
rounds of celebratory drinks, reluctant to leave since 'Dylan was in
one of his brilliant talking moods'!69 Nicolette Devas also relates
how Dylan built the many books in the studio into items of
furniture, a stack of Dickens and Trollope making a table, while a
pile of Walter Scott provided a seat against the wall; for the flat was
rented unfurnished. The studios were rather ramshackle, and in
the one next door lived an old woman and her seventeen cats -
Caitlin counted thirty!
The studio had a glass roof, so it was always a relief as well as a
pleasure to leave wartime London with its threat of air-raids. A
vividly encapsulated vignette of the danger of German rockets in
1944 is humorously evoked in Gwen Watkins's story of Dylan and
Vernon Watkins dodging falling V2s in a London taxi, a trembling
Dylan anxious he might be found dead with his copy of Reveille
open at the pin-ups page but Vernon seriously declaring he'd be all
right 'because I always carry Kierkegaard in my pocket'7o - a
remark Dylan was to remember and use in his later broadcast talk
'A Visit to America'. As well as Vernon Watkins occasionally on
leave from RAF wartime service as military policeman at Bletchley
Park, other drinking friends in Chelsea included Constantine
Fitzgibbon, John Davenport, Norman Douglas and Brian Howard,
and favourite haunts were the Cafe Royal back bar and in Chelsea
the Six Bells (until bombed), the Black Lion, the Markham (Dylan
and Caitlin lived briefly in Markham Square), the Anglesea, the
Queen's Elm, and particularly the King's Head and Eight Bells in
Cheyne Walk, from which it seems Dylan and Caitlin were once
ejected after he had insulted a serviceman! After the pubs shut,
Dylan often enjoyed reading poetry to friends invited back to their
Wentworth Studios flat, his own books augmented by many of
Daniel Jones's that he was looking after, Captain Jones also an
occasional visitor on leave from Bletchley Park.
It seems to me that Dylan Thomas provided the commentaries
on some photographs of Chelsea taken by Bill Brandt and
published in a wartime issue of Lillipllt (August 1944, pp. 37-46).
These captions are included in an Appendix, with an introduction
and my reasons for thinking they are Dylan Thomas's work. The
photographs include the now famous picture of Dylan and Caitlin
in their studio flat in Manresa Road, and both the photographs and
the commentaries focus on that part of Chelsea between the King's
Road and the river that takes in Cheyne Walk, Old Church Street
and Flood Street, an area and its pubs very familiar to Dylan. Very
much in Dylan Thomas's style is the comedy, the use of puns, the
listed references varied with comic surprise, the poetic evocation of
atmosphere, the literary references often humorous in effect as
well as the more satiric note at the expense of the pretentious and
the affected. Employing his characteristic device of nostalgic
remembrance, Thomas introduces and links the descriptions with
the refrain 'You remember', presumably with the servicemen
readers of Lilliput in mind.
Poetic recollection of the morning view of the Thames from
Battersea bridge begins the sequence, with the suggestion 'You
remember the river, perhaps at early morning with a cold mist
mazing it, and the four tall famous chimneys of the Power House
commanding out of the mist. You remember the bridges and the
barges, and the loud, off-white gulls'. Description gives way to a
sense of Chelsea's past, for 'perhaps you remember Turner, and
Whistler, who saw in the' grey winter water, through river sunrise
and sunset, an eternal lovely London: But Thomas soon moves to
sharp comment on the local poseurs, including 'inarticulate writers
nostalgic for a past they never knew', and turning to the King's
Road he warms to his subject: 'Perhaps you remember how hard it
was to walk down King's Road without meeting a painter of
Cornish fishing-boats, or a shaggy man sitting on a shooting-stick
and drawing Old Chelsea with supreme regard for passers-by.'
Sometimes the writing anticipates the later satiric piece 'How to be
a Poet', with its pointed use of the conversational quote that mocks
smart, fashionable cleverness, and in character is his punning
description of some of the Cheyne Walk milieu as 'fugitives from
the Cheyne-gang'. Clearly Thomas is enjoying himself, though
more in the satirically humorous vein of 'A Visit to America' than
his genial recollections of provincial Swansea bohemians.
This corner of Chelsea comes across as very much home territory
for Dylan Thomas. He lived here not only during the war years,
but had known it since he lived in Redcliffe Street in 1934, when he
used to call on Richard Rees, editor of the Adelphi for which he
reviewed, in Cheyne Walk. His friend Rayner Heppenstall then
lived in what is now Chelsea Square, around the corner from
Manresa Road; and Pamela Hansford Johnson has recalled she
used to visit the garden of The Six Bells, still a popular King's Road
haunt, with Dylan. In these 1944 captions Thomas is mindful of its
past writers and artists, their fame and their foibles, noting '96
Cheyne Walk, where Whistler lived, painted, destroyed reputa-
tions with a sentence', and, moving westward along the small
river-facing gardens, Thomas wonders:
Is it the gardens of Chelsea that you remember, gardens where

once the decorative pre-Raphaelite poets chanted their drowsy
verse to ladies with golden hair and goitres, or where young men
in knickerbockers discussed the New Age and the air was
masculine with strong tobacco? Over the lawns leapt Rossetti's
wombat, Swinburne squeaked on the wall ... Carlyle was stern
with the flowers.
Both Swinburne and Rossetti, who kept exotic animals, lived at 16
Cheyne Walk, and Carlyle of course in Cheyne Row. Thomas
particularly highlights this corner of Chelsea, mentioning one of
his favourite pubs, the King's Head and Eight Bells that faces the
Thames, and his closing jest at Carlyle's expense, who was famous
for his dour personality, shows the poet's delight in comic and
fantastic incident, perfectly phrased and pointed:
You see Cheyne Row, looking towards the Thames, where the
Eight Bells still stands and where Thomas Carlyle is said to have
bored his dog so deeply that it committed suicide by jumping
through the top floor window.
On a more serious and more personal note, below the picture of

himself and Caitlin in their Chelsea studio flat, Thomas sharply
concludes that Chelsea is 'a place where the only peace is in the
garrets of the lean and hungry poets who, by the light of a candle
in a beer bottle, write for a credulous posterity what the dubious
present will not accept'.
Their glass-roofed studio in Chelsea was particularly dangerous
for the new baby, Aeronwy, during the flying-bomb horrors of
1944, so Dylan and Caitlin spent some months with his parents in
the small Llangain Cottage near Fern Hill, which his mother had
just inherited from her sister Dosie. Then in the late summer of
1944 Dylan and Caitlin moved to the seaside town of New Quay,
Cardiganshire, living for a year in a wood and asbestos bungalow
called 'Majoda' about half a mile from the town but overlooking
the bay and the church of St Ina at Llanina. Thomas wrote to
Vernon Watkins that 'it's in a really wonderful bit of the bay, with a
beach of its own'.71 Legena spoke of a sea-drowned church and
cemetery. It was this setting that contributed in part to the writing
of Under Milk Wood, and Thomas's broadcast talk 'Quite Early One
Morning', written while he lived in New Quay, embodies
characters and setting that anticipate and are echoed in Under Milk
Wood. This period near the end of the war was a particularly rich
one poetically and the eighteen months between May 1944 and
October 1945 saw the completion and publication, among other
poems, of 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid', 'Poem in Octo,ber', 'Vision
and Prayer', 'Holy Spring', 'A Winter's Tale', 'A Refusal to Mourn
the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London', 'This Side of the Truth',
'The Conversation of Prayers' and 'Fern Hill'. Though employed to
write film scripts Thomas was not committed to set office hours,
and it was, as he later said, 'in small rooms in Wales',n whether at
Bishopston, Llangain or New Quay, that he could turn to his verse
during that marvellously productive time. 'New Quay was just
exactly his kind of background,' his wife observed, 'with the ocean
in front of him as it later was in Laugharne, and a pub where he felt
at home in the evenings . . . the further away we were from
London and the bleaker the landscape, the better it was for him .
. . . When he got back to New Quay, and later Laugharne, Dylan
still had his drinking, but it was normal, everyday drinking and
conversation, and his thoughts were channelled into his writing.,73
After his day's stint 'It is time for the Black Lion', as he wrote in his
humorous poem 'New Quay' where 'I sat at the open window,
observing the salty scene', for the pub looks down on the busy
quay and seascape.
After the war Thomas lived near Oxford in accommodation
provided by Margaret Taylor, a loyal patron and wife of the
distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor. For a year the Thomases
lived in a one-room cottage in the garden of their house, then in a
larger cottage at South Leigh, again provided by Margaret Taylor,
together with a caravan in which Thomas could write. In the
Oxford pubs Dylan enjoyed the company of the older, newly
demobbed students, though he was as ever more cagey when. it
came to meeting the dons - particularly those who taught English
literature. There were regular trips to London, occaSionally to
deliver film scripts, more often to broadcast on the recently
established Third Programme, where Thomas was now achieving
fame and acclaim as a poetry reader and actor. For the rest of his
life he continued to broadcast frequently, including talks - many
written by himself, discussions, and dramatic roles as well as
poetry. There was a notable series of readings of Paradise Lost in
1947, and his absorption in Milton's epic poem may well have
shaped his conception of his last, unfinished, and potentially
greatest, certainly longest, poem: 'In Country Heaven', of which
'In Country Sleep', 'Over Sir John's hill' and 'In the white giant's
thigh' were completed parts. Alas, many of these broadcasts have
been lost!
These trips to London meant, of course, drinking sessions in the
BBC pubs, though always after the broadcast, for Thomas was as
punctiliously professional in his performance of this work for radio
as he was later in his delivery of his American poetry readings,
however exhausting the travelling involved in these tours. It was
after the broadcast or after the reading that the drinking and
conviviality took over. By now Thomas was a famous poet,
following the success of Deaths and Entrances in 1946, and a
celebrated raconteur; and once he entered a London pub he was
soon surrounded by a circle of admirers and drinking cronies -
often to the chagrin of visiting friends like Vernon Watkins or
Daniel Jones who had to watch Dylan perform from the periphery
of the circle. Dylan Thomas visited Italy with his family in the
spring of 1947, staying first in Rapallo, then in a villa in the hills
outside Florence where he wrote that 'we live on asparagus,
artichokes, oranges, gorgonzola, olive oil, strawberries, and more
red wine'.74 This was a family holiday of three months uniquely
free of money worries thanks to a travelling scholarship, whose
award Edith Sitwell had strongly supported. In Florence Thomas
found the literary life as tedious as he later found the American (it's
said he once hid in a wardrobe to avoid an Italian writer75), and
clearly most enjoyed the end of his stay, in Elba, which he loved,
especially the company of the iron-workers and miners. He wrote
of Rio Marina that 'only fishermen and miners live here ...
extremely tough .... Notices "Fighting Prohibited" in all bars. Elba
cognac 3d. Of course, no licensing hours.,76 Thomas also visited
Prague for a few days as guest of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union
at an international congress in March 1949, and early in 1951 he
went to Persia to make a film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company-
'my job was to help pour water on troubled oil. m
To his immense delight Dylan Thomas was able to return to
Laugharne in May 1949 to live in the Boat House, bought for him
by Margaret Taylor. In a broadcast talk, 'Living in Wales', delivered
a month after his return, Thomas describes that deeper vein of
nostalgia and longing, called 'hiraeth' in Welsh, that spurred his
desire to return to Wales as the haunting recollections of sea and
countryside gripped him. The delicate, poignant, evocations grow
i·n the mind and imagination:
What was harder to remember was what birds sounded like and
said in Gower; what sort of a sound and shape was Carmarthen
Bay; how did the morning come in through the windows of
Solva; what silence when night fell in the Aeron Valley. 7R
The Boat House was Dylan Thomas's first permanent home for
some years, and in a place that he loved, Laugharne. Its land and
seascapes illuminate his last poems, suffusing them with the
estuary's changing light, and resonant with the pastoral, often
melancholy, music of this watery landscape, waders and heron
among the muddy shallows, while the long, piercing cry of the
curlew reaches to the low, watery hills and crying gulls presage
storm and rain. And if hill and estuary were to shape the bestiary
of his last verse, his 'patchlWork ark',79 Laugharne itself, the
'timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town',80 colours and vivifies
the later prose. Anticipating the move to Laugharne Dylan wrote
excitedly and nostalgically to Margaret Taylor of:
the grey estuary, forever linked to me with poems done and to

be ... the clock of sweet Laugharne, the clock that tells the time
backwards so that, soon, you walk about the town, from Browns
to the gulls on the Strand, in the only Golden Age! . . . the
mapped, measured ... pubbed and churched, shopped, gulled,
and estuaried one state of happiness!81
The fishing village of Laugharne had always been popular with

Welsh artists and writers, including Edward Thomas and Dylan's
friends Augustus John and the novelist Richard Hughes, who lived
in Castle House. The village is built on hill-slopes, which descend
to the seashore, bordering the estuary and the horseshoe bay. On
one side is the cliffside path that leads towards the Boat House. It
passes first Thomas's workshop, that he called 'the shack', which
seems precariously perched on the cliffside - viewed from the
estuary it looks like a bird's nest. It resembles a garage from the
outside, but inside its wide picture windows overlook the bay with
its sea-noises, flying birds, changing winds and weathers. Inside it
was furnished with an anthracite stove, bare wooden table and
chair, a few books on the shelf, including particularly a dictionary
and Rogel's Thesaurus. Also, of course, there were Thomas's sheafs
of rhymes and word lists, as well as piles of manuscripts in
longhand, for Thomas often wrote over a hundred versions of a
poem in these last 'seathumbed leaves'82 of complex composition.
Writing to thank Margaret Taylor for her generosity Dylan Thomas
declared that' All I write in this water and tree room on the cliff,
every word will be a thanks to yoU.'83 From this now fabled 'water
and tree room', in spring and summer wreathed with trailing
greenery and wild flowers, Thomas had before him the vistas
across the bay of Sir John's Hill and on the opposite shore the hill
farms and sloping fields of LJanybri. The life of sea and country-
side, birds and fishes, was spread out before him: a perpetual
natural theatre of moving tides and light, bestiary drama held in
seasonal change.
From the poet's writing shed the cliffside path slopes steeply to
the Boat House, and is flanked on one side by the trees and bushes
growing out of the cliff-face; this side of the path is crowded with
flowers in summer while on the other side, beyond the narrow
ledge, the sea laps against this mountain wall when the tide is in,
and when it· is out the long stretches of sand and mud flats of the
estuary are likewise visible from the path. A garden slopes sharply
down to the Boat House, reversing our cliffside walk to the garden
gate that gives access to the house. Here this cliff rises sheerly
above us, while on the sea's side the low garden wall looks on to
the waves or sands below. The house is built halfway up the cliff,
seemingly growing out of it, a buttress against the sea, and walking
on the verandah, which runs along two sides of the house and
above the sea-wall, seems at night like walking on the deck of a
ship, with tides murmuring below. The ground floor of the house,
which is below the sea-wall, leads to a level and now paved garden
at the back of the house, which can be reached by a seaside path,
sometimes washed over by the tides, that passes below the walls of
the ruined castle. This path leads from the stretches of mud flats
and coarse grass, the 'shallow and sedge,64 that border the town
square facing the bay. In his 'Prologue' to the Collected Poems
Thomas aptly described his home as 'my sea shaken house / On a
breakneck of rocks' .
Laugharne was a small town of a few hundred people when
Dylan Thomas returned there in 1949, its life and atmosphere more
that of a lively village, and Dylan certainly enjoyed his late
morning routine of drinking in the pub, usually Brown's Hotel,
chatting and listening to and delighted by the daily gossip, before
his regular and everyday stint of composition in his writing shed
from two until seven o'clock, his five hours' work on his poetry
and prose seldom missed. In the late evening, usually accompa-
nied by Caitlin, he returned to Brown's, drinking the customary
four or five pints of beer like the rest of his pub friends. It was a life-
style of set habits, both regular and certainly not excessive in its
drinking, and above all else fertile and fruitful for him as a writer -
as his last poems, stories and broadcasts, vivid and always
entertaining letters, and, of course, Under Milk Wood indicate. As
poet and prose writer it was for him a time of renewed energy and
rich development. While the Laugharne countryside and seascapes
inspired his greatest verse, clearly the gossipy and richly eccentric
life of this Welsh village by the sea contributed to the dramatic and
poetic comedy of Under Milk Wood. His letters show how
felicitously Thomas fitted into the village and pub life there.
Brown's Hotel is in the long main street of Laugharne, and
opposite is Pelican House, where Thomas's parents lived whom he
visited every day, helping his father with the crossword and
cheering and no doubt sustaining them with his devotion and
concern for their well-being. This main street begins at the church,
in whose churchyard Dylan Thomas's grave is simply marked by a
plain wooden cross, and runs south to the sea. The Georgian
houses and Town Hall give way, as the road descends sharply on
to the foreshore, to the fishermen's cottages and the town square,
with its Celtic cross and the Cross House Inn, another of Dylan's
favourite pubs. To the left, facing the bay, are the Castle ruins,
painted by Turner and described by Dylan as 'the castle / Brown as
owls', and the cliff and sea paths to the Boat House. To the right
the fields, trees and greenery of Sir John's Hill dominate the scene,
the hill pointing out to sea.
If Dylan Thomas spoke of Swansea as the town at the end of the
railway lines, less literally but just as aptly Vernon Watkins was to
speak of Laugharne as the 'village at the end of the world',85 for in
Thomas's time the village certainly had an air of remoteness and
timelessness, a world of its own, with more than its share of
eccentrics among the inhabitants and where, in the silences and
vistas and solitariness of its coastal paths and lanes, the bestiary
world of the bay takes on a dominant life of its own, a pastoral
tableau such as Thomas's poem 'Prologue' depicts. There were, of
course, long winter months of rain and cold, when life was a
particular drudgery for Caitlin, but Dylan, even when depressed,
was able to record vividly those moods when his own inner life
seemed as bleak as the outer weather, and in the writing no doubt
buoying up his spirits:
These pages, I think, are wilting in the grey nearly permanent

drizzle that sighs down on to this town and through the
birdscratched matchboard roof into my wordsplashed hut. It isn't
rain, it must be remorse. The whole fishy bay is soaked in guilt. 86
Often his comic gifts transformed the mood of a grey, wet, and
wintry day:
I'm cold, it's raining on the sea, the herons are going home, the
cormorants have packed Up.87
For a short while when they first moved to the Boat House water
had to be fetched from a well outside the house;88 and understand-
ably it was a damp house, although coal fires combated this. But
Dylan wrote of the inconveniences, such as the outside lavatory,
with characteristic good humour, albeit sometimes surreaIIy sharp:
There are rats in the lavatory, tittering while you shit, and the
official rat man comes every day to give them titbits before the
kill. Unfortunately, for my peace of mind, the rat man has only
one arm. 89
In his broadcast talk on 'this unique, this waylaying, old, lost

Laugharne' with 'its sane disregard for haste', 'its seven public-
houses, one chapel in action, one church . . . one St Bernard
(without brandy) . . . three rivers, a visiting sea', 90 affectionate
comedy and exact comment are effectively mingled and there is no
doubting Thomas's profound sense of the stability and imaginative
nourishment he derived from this lovingly evoked place. Caitlin
Thomas emphasises how much 'he had enjoyed writing it because
it enabled him to put into words the feelings that he'd had about
Laugharne since he first discovered it almost twenty years
earlier': 91
Off and on, up and down, high and dry, man and boy, I've been
living now for fifteen years, or centuries, in this timeless,
beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town, in this far, forgetful,
important place of herons, cormorants (known here as billy
duckers), castle, churchyard, gulls, ghosts . . . pubs, mud,
cockles, flatfish, curlews, rain, and human, often all too human,
beings . . . and [I] can claim to be able to call several of the
inhabitants, and a few of the herons, by their Christian names.
In her first book Caitlin Thomas perceptively and trenchantly

noted the stability and simplicity of her husband's life in
Laugharne, and how this fostered his creativity, for here he
enjoyed the firm but gentle control of his wife and parents, and
also of friends who cared for him as a man rather than simply a
famous and amusing passer-by at the bar:
And I did all I could to make him work, at his own special work,
and not public money-making work. And it was only with our
kind of purely vegetable background, which entailed months on
end of isolated, stodgy dullness and drudgery for me, that he
was flattened out enough to be able to concentrate ... he needed
opposition, gentle, but firm, constant curbing, and a steady dull,
homely bed of straw to breed his fantasies. 92
What Caitlin calls 'his fantasies' centre in these last years on the
poet's deepening vision of the relationship between man and
nature against the background of the mutability of both. Following
the example of Yeats, Dylan Thomas's final phase shows how the
lyric poet was learning to grow old. It produced that luminous
exploration of the joy and tragedy of the human condition whose
mainspring was a pantheistic apprehension of the universe and
whose expression was in pastoral fable. While in his early verse
Thomas sensuously discovered the world in the map of his own
body, in his last Laugharne-charted poems he passionately
sculpted the pastoral map before him, so that finally despair at the
ubiquity of death wins through to a profound pity and exultation.
This bucolic corner of Wales afforded both glimpses of the paradise
lost in 'Fern Hill' and 'Poem in October' and intimations of a
paradise regained in such poems as 'Prologue' and 'In Country
Heaven'. As he watched the life of the bay from his shed, or while
walking the cliff path, along the estuary, or on Sir John's Hill,
Thomas's empathy with the natural world was daily fostered by
the Laugharne setting. Relatedly the steady, regularly industrious
life that the poet enjoyed there, despite the longueurs of winter,
greatly contributed to his remarkable output of prose and poetry in
these last years. Of course, Caitlin Thomas has pointed this out,
acutely noting that he lived in a world of his own, speaking of his
'gift of knowing', that intuitive knowledge that Thomas expressed
through what he himself aptly described as 'the colour of saying':
So he was much better than me at contenting himself with the

very simple, I might justly say moronic, life. Because, there is no
other possible explanation, he lived in a world of his own: 'out of
this world', as they so succinctly put it in America. Thus: the best
part of the morning in the kitchen of this same high class
establishment [Brown's Hotel], putting bets on horses, listening,
yes, actually listening for once, open mouthed, to local gossip
and scandal, while drinking slow consecutive pints of disgust-
ingly fiat, cold-tea, bitter beer. Muzzily back to late lunch, of one
of the rich fatty brews, always eaten alone, apart from the
children .... Then ... up to his humble shed, resting high above
the estuary, and bang into intensive scribbling, muttering,
whispering, intoning, bellowing and juggling of words; till seven
o'clock prompt. 93
More recently Caitlin has illuminatingly recalled how 'I used to go

out along the cliff with the children, and we would tip-toe past the
shed as we heard his voice, booming, muttering and mumbling as
he wrestled with each word'; for evidently the subtle interplay of
sound and meaning determined the composition of his prose as
well as his poetry. In his continual recitation to himself of line and
verse, sentence and stanza, as he wrote, he is perhaps unique in
English; and Caitlin further relates how 'he spent hours and days
balancing words, lines and phrases, throwing out words that
weren't right, and he always did this noisily and alone in his shed,
chanting and reciting, making each sound fit'. She shrewdly adds:
He was so meticulous, and yet equally careful that no one saw

him doing it; this was his secret life, the source of his strength
and confidence. 94
Obviously deliberately, Dylan Thomas confided his hidden techni-

cal structures only to Vernon Watkins and, on one occasion, to his
publisher.
Dylan Thomas's delight in 'local gossip and scandal' clearly tells
us something of the atmosphere that inspired Under Milk Wood,
with its gossiping housewives and the comic hilarity of its innocent
scandals! 'His closest friends', his wife relates, 'were the men he
met in Brown's. He would sit with them in the bow window,
looking up and down the street, and he more or less recreated
Laugharne in Under Milk Wood . .. Ivy [the landlady] recognised
many of the characters in the play. She had introduced them to
Dylan,.95 Clearly, too, Thomas's way of life followed in Laugharne
a working-class rather than middle-class pattern, though of course
the social structure of Wales differed from that in England.

Certainly Thomas's interests there were not those of the cosmopo-
litan bohemian poet nor even those of the intellectual: literary
parties, the theatre, anything approaching academic discussion
were not his idea of leisure. Few contemporary poets can have
lived such a humdrum existence and found it so congenial. Caitlin
Thomas has pertinently observed that 'he had the same dislike,
amounting to superstitious horror, of philosophy, psychology,
analysis, criticism; all those vaguely termed ponderous tomes; but
most of all, of the gentle art of discussing poetry'. 96 Evidently
Thomas fitted easily and on the whole comfortably into the
Laugharne setting where 'here we just are', he said, 'and there is
nowhere like it anywhere at all', commending in his broadcast talk
Laugharne's 'minding of its own, strange, business ... its
generous acceptance of the follies of others, having so many, ripe
and piping of its own; its insular, featherbed air; its philosophy of it
will all be the same in a hundred years' time'. 97 It is a viewpoint
which Vernon Watkins echoed in his own depiction of Dylan
Thomas in this place:
The peace and beauty of this small sea-town beyond Carmar-

then, a fishing village at the end of the world, represented for
him the last refuge of life and sanity in a nightmare world, the
last irregular protest against the regularity and symmetry of
madness. 98
But as this refuge had been threatened by the onset of war when
Dylan first lived in Laugharne after his marriage, before long
financial problems, brought to a crisis by an accumulated tax
demand, were to disrupt Thomas's life there again. Now came the
desperate need to earn large sums of money quickly.
It was in July 1949, a couple of months after their return to
Laugharne that Colm, their third child, and a boy, was born; and
the first months in the Boat House in the summer of that year were
a happy time for Dylan and Caitlin. And it was in May, the month
of their return, that Thomas received an invitation from Brinnin to
give poetry readings in America. Harassed by debts and threat of
what he called in one letter 'the income tax Dracula', Dylan
immediately accepted. He had been wanting to go to America for
some years. He set off in much the same spirit that he enjoyed his
trips to London for broadcasts, for there was always the drinking
with friends and pub pals afterwards. Understandably the pros-
pect of fame and being lionised in the States had its attractions,
though no one could have anticipated the acclaim the readings
were to bring the poet. But while Dylan was able to mock himself
on his London wanderings as 'lost and blown about in London
town, a barrel-shaped leaf,99 and knew, as Fitzgibbon has noted,
that 'there was always Paddington station and the train to
Wales',100 America was to prove an altogether more alien,
ultimately destructive, world for him. There he was essentially
isolated, misunderstood and as vulnerable and helpless as a child.
Not that he did not delightfully mock it in his broadcast' A Visit to
America', that witty and so sane counterbalance to the lurid
accounts of his experiences in America by others; but this was
written when he was back in Laugharne, recovering from the
exhaustion of his poetry tours that criss-crossed the States with
nightmarish strain even for a fitter man. In a letter to Caitlin from
Kenyon College he describes the rigours of these travels about
America where he was 'just a voice on wheels':
I wrote to you last from be-Biffled Washington. Then I sweated

back to New York. Then I read in Columbia University, New
York. I flew to Cornell University, read, caught a night-sleeper-
train to Ohio, arriving this morning. This evening, in an hour's
tlm~, I do my little act at Kenyon University, then another night
train, this time to Chicago, I never seem to slcep in a bed any
more, only on planes and trains. I'm hardly living; I'm just a
voice on wheels. 101
Alas, too, Thomas was as prodigal in spending the money he

earned as in the way he gave all his energies to his magnificent
readings, for his letter continues:
And the damnedest thing is that quite likely I may arrive home
with hardly any money ... my earnings for us, Colum, Aeron,
Llewelyn, for our house that makes me cry to think of, for the
water, the heron, old, sad empty Brown's.102
These words are heavy with Thomas's homesickness and loneli-

ness, and though he undertook four American visits he was
agonisingly aware they took him from his important work - his
own writing, and were ultimately not simply a distraction wherein,
however entertainingly, he played the poet, but were also
destructive of his vital need to write poetry: 'About another visit to
the States, I don't know. Though I can only playa poet there, and
not make poetry.,103
During these tours Dylan Thomas, as Dickens had done just
over a hundred years before, widely popularised the art he
practised through his unique gifts as a reader. His compelling
power over large audiences was due to his passionate eloquence
and his instinctive ability to communicate through his voice and
personality. He brought poetry from the rarified, cerebral and self-
regarding worlds of the lecture rooin and literary circle and made it
important and meaningful to wide numbers of people, through
readings, broadcasts and records. In the exalted, bardic role he
adopted as reader he was in the romantic Blakean tradition, closer
to the oratorical style of Yeats than such contemporaries as Auden
and Eliot. It was Thomas's achievement to give poetry a popular
and public voice. And this achievement rested on the importance
he always attached to the sound of poetry, beginning with the
careful, measured, rehearsed pronunciation of each single word. It
was certainly a devotion to the sound-potential of each word that
no other major English twentieth century poet has shown. 'And
those words were, to me', wrote Thomas of his own first love of
poetry, 'as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments,
the noises of wind, sea, and rain ... the clopping of hooves on
cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to
someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his
hearing,.104 Hearing Dylan Thomas read was indeed like a
miraculous revelation of the aural power of language; and if for
Auden an ulterior motive of poetry was, by telling the truth, to
disenchant and disintoxicate, for Thomas enchantment and intox-
ication were the means by which poetry achieved its vatic and
prophetic purpose. Dylan Thomas's highly dramatic performances
were regarded by many, including leading academics, the general
public and, of course, students, as the most powerful and
compelling poetry readings they had heard; and they had, of
course, heard the major English and American poets read.
Interestingly, Thomas's programme usually included only a few of
his own poems, being for the most part a reading of other poets,
particularly Hardy, Yeats, Auden, and also Betjeman (long before
he became fashionable in England), Wilfred Owen, Graves,
Edward Thomas, MacNeice, and such fellow Welsh poets writing
in English as Vernon Watkins, Idris Davies, W.H. Davies and Alun
Lewis. There was always a leavening of humorous verse, and later
Thomas included excerpts from Under Milk Wood; for Thomas's gift
as a reader of light verse were as remarkable as those in his more
sonorous bardic vein. 'I try to get across what I feel . . . to be the
original impetus of the poem. I am a practising interpreter' was his
self-description as reader. t05 There were times when Thomas
arrived for the reading tired from travelling, times when he was
physically unwell, depressed, or had been drinking, but what is
remarkable is that once on the platform, albeit occasionally after an
initial hesitancy, an accomplished reading ensued. David Daiches
describes such an occasion at Cornell University, when he was so
alarmed by Thomas's evident fatigue and unease that he gave a
somewhat apologetic introduction to what however proved 'a
marvellous performance,!to£> What acutely distressed Thomas was
having to sit through the academic tedium of faculty dinners or
receptions, particularly before his readings when surely only a little
percipience would have made clear he wanted rest and relaxed
company, if any, before going on-stage. Is it any wonder that the
formality of such occasions, and the insensitivity of the question-
ing about the meaning of his poetry - always a red rag to him - led
to heavy drinking and, if necessary to stem the flow of often obtuse
and silly interrogation, rude and scabrous replies. Dylan Thomas
was always ready to read a few poems in the relaxed atmosphere of
a small, private party - he often did this with friends returning
home with him after the pub, both in London and Wales. Similarly,
Daiches goes on to record that after the Cornell reading the poet
read 'Poem in October' at his home and that 'he was very quiet and
gentle. The only thing that upset him was being asked for
explications of his poems.'107 Caitlin Thomas, never a sentimental
observer, has also commented that 'this very pronounced attitude
of Dylan's against every type of flowery excursion into intellectual-
ism made all the more surprising his extreme patience and
tolerance in America'. 108 We learn, too, that within days of his final
illness Dylan made a notable contribution to a symposium, which
included Arthur Miller, on the art of film, clearly drawing on his
own experience in writing film scenarios, and of course, delighting
the audience with his humorous mocking of the more absurdly
pretentious contributors. t09 While in his introductory comments to
his poetry readings Dylan Thomas frequently expressed his
unwillingness to say what his poems were about, nevertheless he
often, in his metaphorically vivid, entertaining, truthful but
essentially non-academic style, provided very revealing insights
into his preoccupations as poet and prose-writer. Thus, introduc-
ing Hardy he spoke of 'the crabbed, gnarled, knotty poems, in
which he seems to use language as an arthritic wrestler might
grapple with a recalcitrant tree',110 and of himself as a Welshman
who wants 'to write poems of happiness',111 and on another
occasion (echoing Autolycus's 'a snapper-up of unconsidered
trifles') saying 'I am a kind of pig that roots for unconsidered
truffles in the reeky wood of his past' 112 - a gold nugget indeed for
anyone seriously seeking to understand his later verse with its
designed use of the past as a key to interpreting both the ever-
present and the eternal in the human condition. Baited beyond
endurance despite his frequent opening pleas, 'You won't ask me
any questions afterwards, will you' and 'I don't mind answering a
bit, only I can't',113 it's hardly a matter for surprise or shock that
occasionally, such as at a party given by an academic critic, he
should make such remarks as his exasperated reply to 'What is the
Ballad of the Long-legged Bait about?' - 'A gigantic fuck',114 a
concisely apt, though crude, riposte.
In more sober mood, he liked in his introductory words to say
humorously that 'I am no grey and tepid don, smelling of water-
biscuits'. 115 Yet while he certainly felt uneasy, vulnerable and often
bored in the company of assembled academics, there is no doubt
that they generally found his readings a unique revelation of the
power of poetry. 'I hadn't heard anything like before or since, and
I've heard in person almost every major poet of this century except
Yeats. We had a whole procession of poets at Holyoke over the
years, British and American, and there's been no one like him',116
commented Joseph McG. Bottkol of the English Department at
Mount Holyoke, while Professor Hoffman declared during Tho-
mas's third tour that 'he gave the most electrifying literary
program the city [Philadelphia] has ever known'.117 On this
occasion Thomas read his engaging and lively talk 'A Visit to
America', and clearly it was well received, with its mocking but so
sane and genial humour, aimed not only at American hosts but
also visiting lecturers who are 'confused and shocked by shameless
profusion and almost shamed by generosity, unaccustomed to
such importance as they are assumed, by their hosts, to possess,
and up against the barrier of a common language'. 118 Thus he
speaks of the 'men from the BBC who speak as though they had
the Elgin Marbles in their mouths', and with characteristic self-
awareness and self-parody jibes at 'the fat poets with slim volumes
... each going buoyantly west to his remunerative doom in the
great State University factories' .119
Undoubtedly, Thomas keeps his sharpest satiric and social
comment for those who come to denounce Britain's recently
established National Health Service, and its famous ex-miner
founder Aneurin Bevan; for this period was the immediate
aftermath of the political battles that led to the post-war establish-
ment of the Welfare State. Though Thomas may, too, have been
remembering his own provoked, but rude, dismissal of an
American doctor's wife who annoyed him with her criticisms of
Britain's National Health Service .120 Angered by political and social
humbug he is ready to make sharp criticism, albeit under the mask
of comedy, of such fellow British lecturers touring America as 'the
brassy-bossy men-women with corrugated-iron perms, and hippo
hides, who come, self-announced, as "ordinary British house-
wives", to talk to rich minked chunks of American matronhood
about the iniquity of the Health Services, the criminal sloth of the
miners, the visible tail and horns of Mr Aneurin Bevan' .121 We may
aptly recall that his friend and first biographer Constantine
Fitzgibbon noted his unchanged, by then unfashionable, political
allegiance, 122 following the demise of the post-war Labour govern-
ment, its achievements and ethos here indirectly, briefly and
humorously defended.
Though not a political poet Dylan Thomas retained his concern
and feeling for the underdog, the poor, the dispossessed, and
during an earlier trip to Persia he vividly described Teheran's poor
in 1951 and in a letter to Caitlin relates this visit to a hospital:
In the children's wards, I saw rows and rows of tiny little Persian
children suffering from starvation; their eyes were enormous,
seeing everything & nothing, their bellies bloated, their match-
stick arms hung round with blue wrinkled flesh. One of them
was crying: only one. I asked why ... 'His mother went out
every day begging in the streets, & he was too weak from hunger
to go with her & she was too weak to carry him. So she left him
alone in her hovel. ... The child fell down into the fire & lay
there all day burning .... He's getting better, but he's lost one
arm & all his toes! .. .
After that, I had lunch with a man worth 30,000,000 pounds,
from the rents of peasants all over Iran & from a thousand
crooked deals. A charming and cultivated man. 12l
Shortly after his return to Laugharne, the Anglo-Iranian Oil

Company, who had commissioned him to write a film script, was
nationalised. With a mocking pun on 'the Marshall plan' -
America's post-war system of financial aid - Thomas humorously
writes 'I got out just before martial law - a friend of Marshall plan's
- and perhaps disguised, will be sent back to write a script to show,
now, suddenly, how beastly Persia is and how grandly irreplace-
able is that thundering Company.t124 In March 1949 Dylan Thomas
had also visited Prague as a guest of the Czech Government, taking
part in the formation of the Writers' Union there, but while not
much taken with what he called 'this multilingual congressing',125
enjoyed seeing the city, trying its pubs' Pilsner beer. Not a
Communist, in succinct reply to the query as to why he came to
take part, he answered: 'Why not? I'm left',126 and indeed this visit
occasioned some difficulties when he sought his second visa to
America during the McCarthy hysteria. 127 Clearly Dylan Thomas's
left-wing views, instinctive rather than dogmatic, had remained, a
natural loyalty, albeit only peripherally reflected in his writing. As
a thirties writer nevertheless Thomas's view of the poet had been
'deeply influenced by the Spanish Civil War' in the winter of 1936-
7,128 and it is said that the poet John Cornford had left for Spain
with a copy of Thomas's 18 Poems. By the fifties Thomas's steadfast
sympathies contrasted with the passing ideological allegiances to
the left of such thirties poets as Auden. Thus he signed the petition
on behalf of the Rosenbergs in 1953,129 and after they were
executed for spying against the United States despite the many
world-wide appeals for clemency Thomas wrote, 'The murder of
the Rosenbergs should make all men sick and mad. t130 Interest-
ingly, too, he wrote in answer to a Horizon inquiry on 'The Cost of
Letters' in 1946, and in specific answer to the question 'Do you
think the State or any other institution should do more for writers?'
that 'The State should do no more for writers than it should do for
any other person who lives in it. The State should give shelter,
food, warmth etc., whether the person works for the State or
not.tl31 The words of an idealistic, romantic socialist perhaps, and
certainly more in tune with their time than today, but they do
show the legend of the anarchic, apolitical, socially unaware poet is
a false one.
Interestingly, while planning his readings for the second tour,
Thomas requested Brinnin to fit in a reading to the Socialist Party
in New York City - 'they say they're a small body (like me) & can't
pay much at all, but I would like to do it for them'.132 Incidentally,
too, when on one occasion he was asked by an academic his
opinion of his 'Conservatism Revisited' he replied with the
perhaps glib but instinctive retort 'Better it should never have been
visited at all. ,133 More notably, he contrasts the ostentatious wealth
and hidden-away poverty in a letter to Caitlin. While telling her of
the prospect of a post in creative writing at a university, he adds
that 'All the women are smart, as in magazines - I mean, the
women in the main streets; behind, lie the eternal poor, beaten,
robbed, humiliated, spat upon, done to death. d34
Certainly there could not have been a greater contrast to
Thomas's unhurried, timeless, relaxed, not to say humdrum, life in
Laugharne than the paranoic feverishness and landscape of urban
nightmare that his description of New York vividly captures.
Allowing for the poet's instinct to adapt his narration to the mood
of the recipient of the letter, in this instance again Caitlin, who was
left alone and hard-up in Laugharne, and for his gift for self-
dramatisation, Thomas's horror at the city life he was experiencing
is powerfully evoked:
And now it must look to you, my Cat, as though I'm enjoying

myself here. I'm not. It's a nightmare, day and night; there never
was such a place; I would never get used to the speed, the noise,
the utter indifference of the crowds, the frightening politeness of
the intellectuals, and, most of all, these huge phallic towers, up
and up and up, hundreds of floors, into the impossible sky. I feel
so terrified of this place, I hardly dare to leave my hotel room ....
Everybody uses the telephone all the time; it's like breathing; it is
now nine o'clock in the morning, and I've had six callsYs
Chance descriptions of the despairing, lonely, sometimes ill and

often exhausted poet, fleeing to the comfort and oblivion of drink
after his readings, though still pursued by obtuse and insensitive
questioners, pale beside his own trenchant, terrifying vision of
America that closes the letter, and this in 1950:
The rest of America may be all right, and perhaps I can
understand it, but that it is the last monument there is to the
insane desire for power that shoots its buildings up to the stars
and roars its engines louder and faster than they have ever been
roared before and makes everything cost the earth and where
the imminence of death is reflected in every last power-stroke
and grab of the great moron bosses, the big-shots, the muItis,
one never sees.
Spontaneously, too, he immediately contrasts this with the c1ose-

at-hand poor:
This morning we go down to see the other side beyond the

skyscrapers: Black Harlem, starving Jewish East Side. A family of
four in New York is very poor on £14 a week. 136
Caitlin accompanied Dylan on his second visit and she has

described how he gave his energies without thought for himself,
for he despised the calculated, self-protective style of the professio-
nal lecturer and what he mocked as the 'tepid, but finished,
reading [of verseI ... a way of speaking that pretends to
emphasize the importance of flat understatement only because the
ability to give isn't there'. 137 Caitlin observes that 'he gave to those
wide-open-beaked readings the concentrated artillery of his flesh
and blood, and, above all, his breath. I used to come in late and
hear, through the mikes, the breath-straining panting.'t3S It is
important to remember that Thomas gave one hundred and seven
readings, the last one day after his thirty-ninth birthday and only a
few days before his final collapse. Remarkably, bearing in mind the
intolerable strain of Thomas's travels criss-crossing America, he
missed only one engagement, during his second trip, and then due
to his physical exhaustion, informing his tour organiser Brinnin,
though not the university, by telephone four days before.
Thomas had arrived in New York for what was to prove his last
tour on 19 October 1953. Even more remarkable than his record of
fulfilled engagements, is the fact that during the last three years of
his life he wrote so much of his finest work, including Under Milk
Wood, 'In the white giant's thigh', 'Lament', 'Do not go gentle into
that good night', 'Poem on his Birthday', 'Prologue' and the
unfinished 'Elegy' and 'In Country Heaven'. Additionally there
were several broadcast talks such as 'Laugharne', 'A Visit to
America', 'The International Eisteddfod' and the singular stories
'The Followers' and' A Story', the latter read by Dylan Thomas on
television in August 1953. There was, too, the flow of letters,
themselves often highly inventive essays in comedy as well as
enduring vignettes of the poet's life in the last years. Usually
beginning as apologies or recitals of his financial and practical
problems, they almost invariably soar into rich humour and
fantasy, often evoke time and place with the poet's unique blend of
pathos and comedy. Certainly, what is evident is that Thomas's
last years, far from seeing a diminution of poetic power, showed
not only a continuing of creative energies but their significant
development in new directions, both in poetry and prose.
Thomas's lifelong themes of death and mutability are explored
with ever-deepening compassion and universality of appeal.
Through the prismatic glass of the unity-in-duality of man and
nature the poet evolved his optimistic pantheism. All this was
achieved despite the strenuous American tours, which in total took
up almost twelve months of his time, and acute financial and
domestic worries. For while the tours were undertaken to make
desperately needed money they undoubtedly almost led to the
breakdown of his marriage and certainly contributed to his
deteriorating health. Dylan Thomas had suffered a grievous loss
when his father died on 16 December 1952 after a painful illness, a
grief the son hardly had time to mourn in the ten months of life left
to him. Nevertheless he undertook the ill-presaged fourth tour of
America contrary to the deepest instincts of both his wife and
mother, for they were aware how he needed the daily care and
concern of his family and dose friends: he had recently suffered
several blackouts, collapsing once while at the cinema in Carmar-
then, on another occasion in Brown's Hotel. In Laugharne he
drank beer, regularly each day, but within the day's routine and
the limitation of the pocket money afforded him. The morning
stroll to the pub was punctuated by his visit to his parents' home
opposite Brown's, and the evening's five or six pints followed on
lunch, usually a nourishing stew, five hours' solitary writing in the
'shed', and an evening meal. It was a relaxed life-style based on a
set pattern and stable routine. Caitlin often accompanied Dylan to
Brown's in the evening, the time usually spent in village gossip,
while games of darts or cards were also part of the shared
pleasures of the pub. In America, alas, there were the proffered
whiskies, the loneliness and boredom that led to bouts of hard,
desperate drinking, the lack of regular meals and of the under-
standing care and what Caitlin called the 'gentle, but firm, constant
curbingt139 that Thomas needed so much more than the lionising,
however generous or stimulating. It was no wonder that the
pedagogic longueurs, the continual demands on his already
exhausted attention, drove the captive poet to drink, and occasio-
nal rude comment. Relatedly, flight into a love affair there
understandably led to personal and family tensions.
Sadly, Thomas's last summer in Laugharne was a short one, for
he did not return from his third American visit until 3 June. He was
still working on Under Milk Wood, and revisions had involved his
depiction of the undertaker, Evans the Death. In the original
version he was named 'Thomas the Death', with the now usual
self-parody, and his portraiture including the menacing but finally
rejected lines 'To him, the eyes of all the inhabitants are full of fear.
"Not me, not me" eyes scream at him'!14o In July he spent a week in
Llangollen, accompanied by Caitlin and Aeronwy, to gather
material for his broadcast talk on the International Eisteddfod
there. His television broadcast of 'A Story' on 10 August was
received with such newspaper reviews as 'a joy' and 'almost a tour
de force'. He was also working On such poems as the 'Elegy' for his
father, and still writing with that relentless refusal to hurry the
completion of any composition, but particularly poems, however
urgent his need for money. This is, of course, reflected in his
unwillingness to write a 'Prologue' to his Collected Poems that did
not meet the fullest demands of 'his craft or sullen art', whatever
the impatience of his publishers over delay in publication. His
letter of apology contains one of his very few revelations of the
artifice behind the seemingly effortless and inspirational flow of
his verse. He writes that rejecting 'a more-or-less straight-forward
& intimate prose preface ... I began to write a prologue in verse.
. . . Here it is'.
In consequence of 'the two months, & more, I've taken over it',
the poet states that 'I've got very badly into debt, am faced with
summonses, and cannot even now buy myself a beer and
cigarettes' and pleads for advance royalties on the Collected
Poems. 141 What is important is that total dedication as a poet led to
the composition of a major poem and one, as we shall see, that
fulfils Thomas's crucial aim that 'the Prologue does read as
Prologue, & not as just another poem'.
This letter was written on 10 September 1952, and 'Author's
Prologue' heralded the work of one of the great English poets.
Collected Poems was published on 10 November 1952, almost exactly
a year before Thomas's death. Ironically, it was to mark the turning
of the tide in his financial fortunes. Not only did it receive high
critical acclaim in which Dylan Thomas was called 'the greatest
living poet' in English,142 but it immediately became a best seller,
as did Under Milk Wood on its publication a few months after the
poet's death.
Vernon Watkins, the friend who best understood Dylan Thomas
as poet and never wavered in his devotion both to the man and his
work, visited Laugharne twice in the summer of 1953. In July he
was accompanied by his friend Francis Dufau-Labeyrie, who had
known Dylan, too, before the war and translated the Portrait stories
into French. They went for a drink to Brown's Hotel, then back to
the Boat House for lunch, but the visit was temporarily clouded by
a quarrel between Dylan and Caitlin, both seemingly at the end of
their tether. The argument was spectacularly provoked by Dylan's
pronunciation of 'tear' while reading aloud the last lines of 'Over
Sir John's hill' and Caitlin contradicting this, the angry exchange
revealing, however disturbing the circumstances, the suggestive
power of the word 'tear' that arose from its different meanings in
that context. At the end of the visit, however, as so often in the
earlier years, Vernon and Dylan were discussing prosody in the
writing shed, Dylan pleased that Vernon praised the assonantal
rhymes and their corresponding images in 'Over Sir John's hill'
and fondly remarking 'only you would have noticed that' .143 They
continued their absorbed talk on the techniques of poetry, such as
the Yeatsian echoes in the language of 'Do not go gentle into that
good night', and Thomas spoke also of his final revisions of Under
Milk Wood. On Vernon's last visit, only a few days before Dylan left
for America, he enthusiastically outlined the libretto of the opera
Stravinsky was to compose. Again it was an exciting new direction
technically, and brings to mind 'In Country Heaven' in its
proposed celebration of, as Watkins recalled, 'the holiness of Earth
which had been devastated' by one 'who alone remembered [its]
beauty and mystery', describing them to 'children who had been
too young to know these things'. 144 Evidently, Thomas's instinc-
tive knowledge of the map of his own poetic genius remained in
this characteristically adult use of memory to draw the last country
of joy now lost. They then turned in their talk to the craft of poetry,
the obsession as strong as ever, Dylan revealing that the first line of
'In the white giant's thigh' took him three weeks to perfect, and
that there were over a hundred and sixty pages of manuscript for
'Prologue'. He spoke, too, of his father's death, recited the first
lines of the 'Elegy' he was then working on and that Vernon was
later to work on and declared yet again that 'no work in the world
was harder than the making of a poem'. 145 These pictures of the
two poets and friends, who had first met in Thomas's home above
Swansea bay eighteen years before, are more vital to an under-
standing of Dylan Thomas in the last year of his life than the many
others that have been offered because they show the poet still
totally preoccupied with the writing of poetry and confidently
wrestling with new poems, however painful their themes, and
with new ventures, however harassing the day's demands and
worries. Thomas himself has perhaps most clearly described the
plaudits, but also destructive potential of his poetry tours: 'Then I
went to the States with my luggage of dismays and was loudly lost
for months, peddling and bawling to adolescents the romantic
agonies of the dead. 1l46
'Loudly lost' on such another visit, Thomas became critically ill
in New York in late October 1953. In his last tormented days before
his final collapse he often spoke of his desperate longing for his
home and family. He remembered, too, the safe, cosy, Saturday
evenings in Brown's, declaring 'Tonight in my home the men have
their arms round one another, and they are singing. tl47 He was
thinking of pub evenings in Wales such as he had depicted often in
his stories, but now so distant. It was on 5 November while
listening to the broadcast of his talk 'Laugharne' in the school hall
there that Caitlin Thomas received the news that her husband was
'lying unconscious in an American hospital' .148 In the days before
it seems that Thomas, bar a diet of raw eggs, had eaten little, if
anything; and by this time was so ill that his now famous boast that
'I've had eighteen straight whiskies',149 which is double the
English measure, and that allegedly drunk in only an hour and a
half, is open to some doubt. It's uncertain, too, whether it was his
favouri.te New York bar, the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich
Village, that he'd visited following his sudden departure from the
Chelsea Hotel in the early hours of 4 November. However, it was
twenty-four hours later on 5 November that he lapsed into the final
coma. Though he was undoubtedly in poor health, so much so that
he should never have undertaken this lecture tour, it now seems
that medical error was also a contributory factor in the circumst-
ances that led to his tragic and untimely death. 150 After four-and-a-
half days in coma he died on the morning of 9 November 1953.
Dylan Thomas lies buried in Laugharne churchyard, the grave
marked by a simple wooden cross. But perhaps the fabled 'water
and tree room on the cliff' with its 'bird / Roared', 151 sea-woven
vistas best recalls him. Speaking of the pieces of bread found in his
coat pockets Florence Thomas was fond of recalling how he fed the
returning birds here, and how they still returned,152 a haunting, if
legendary image, not unrelated to Dylan's own more sardonic and
familiarly self-mocking 'I know, and the birds know, I'm only a fat
little fool ranting on a cliff.IlS3 He said this to an American
university audience, perhaps remembering the close of 'Over Sir
John's hill' and its watery Laugharne vistas where only an owl's
cry and the ebb and flow of the tides break the silence as dusk falls
on heron, hill, hawk and estuary. Common enough events as
Thomas walked the cliff path, and common still.
Part Two
The Poetry
The Early Notebooks and
other Manuscript Verse
Dylan Thomas's earliest poetry includes the verse written up to the
age of sixteen, some of which was published in the Swansea
Grammar School Magazine, and some written in collaboration with
Daniel Jones. Much is derivative, but from the beginning there is a
vein of humorous and light verse. Undoubtedly of greatest interest
is the material written between 1930 and 1934, including poems in
the four Notebooks, invaluable survivors of what Dylan Thomas
later referred to as 'about 10 exercise-books full of poemsl1 - it
seems no notebook has survived for the period July 1932-February
1933; and also some British Museum typescripts. The four
Notebooks contain poems Thomas wrote between the ages of
fifteen and nineteen and are published in Ralph Maud's Poet in the
Making. It was a period of energetic and fertile poetic activity, and
Thomas drew on these sources throughout the thirties. As late as
July 1938 he wrote to Henry Treece, 'I have a great deal of material
still, in MSS books, to shape into proper poems', 2 and clearly
Thomas came to think of the verse in those ordinary exercise books
as first drafts of poems, for they provided early manuscript
versions of such work as 'After the funeral' (1938) and 'The
Hunchback in the Park' (1941). This collection of manuscript
poems, with their alterations and modifications set out before us,
are rare instances of a poet's work-in-progress, and 'I cannot
imagine any collection of manuscripts which illustrates better the
genesis and development of ideas'3 wrote Bertram Rota in 1941 on
selling them to the Lockwood Library of the State University of
New York at Buffalo, where they still remain. However, what they
particularly show is the emergence of Thomas's startlingly original
poetry as displayed in 18 Poems, his first publication, both with
regard to the genesis of his themes and, perhaps more importantly,
the evolution of his poetic style. This is also revealed in the
additional early verse included in Daniel Jones's edition Dylan
57
58 The Poetry
Thomas: The Poems, for almost all the hundred poems added to
those in the Collected Poems were, of course, written before Thomas
published 18 Poems and represent the verse he chose not to
preserve. A careful reading of Daniel Jones's The Poems, therefore,
illustrates, as might be expected, that the poet was the best judge
of his own work, for he unerringly recognised what was original
and distinctive in his verse, ruthlessly and consistently discarding
poems that did not meet his chosen criteria. It seems that Thomas
wrote at least four times as much poetry in the years 1930-4 as in
his remaining nineteen years, albeit much of it discarded or
modified, some evidently lost. Nevertheless the published body of
early work is unique in the continuous and clear light it throws on
the emergence of a poetic style as strikingly new in its time as
Wordsworth's or Eliot's in theirs. In its abundance and variety the
early poetry certainly suggests a profligate nineteen-year-old, but
in the narrowing and compulsive intensity of vision we may detect
his instinctive Midas touch in poetry as he developed.
Thomas's juvenilia are often written in the manner of the
Georgian verse of that period, and include conventional descrip-
tions of nature, some patriotic poems in free verse, and poems of
occasion. It is largely traditional, of its time. Side by side with this
are the parodies and the humorous verse that was to find its
ultimate and most lasting expression in the songs and parodic
verse of Under Milk Wood. Then there begin to emerge two
distinctive characteristics in the early poetry: first, development of
the image, the original, striking image; secondly, there is the
occasionally compulsive, confident rhythm, an energetic use of
sound. The sun is a favourite image. The emergence of these two
features in an otherwise conventional poem is evident in 'Missing',
written when Thomas was fourteen and published in the Swansea
Grammar School Magazine in July 1928:
Seek him, thou sun, in the dread wilderness,
For that he loved thee, seek thou him, and bless
His upturned face with one divine caress.
Lightly, thou wind, over his dear, dark head,
Where now the wings of dreamless sleep are spread,
Whisper a benediction for the dead.
Softly, thou rain - and for his mother's sake,
Shed thou thy tears on him; he will not wake,
No weeping through that deep repose can break. 4
Wilfred Owen without his bitterness perhaps, and generally
conventional in sentiment and language, for we may recall that the
holocaust in the trenches of the First World War was then still a
fresh and wounding memory. Nevertheless the poem has a strong
rhythmic beat, obtained by repetition, assonance and alliteration,
the use of monosyllabic words and a pattern of syllabic sound
structure, e.g. dread/wilderness, dear/dark, and an insistent USe of
strong rhymes. The 'sun', 'wind' and 'rain' images have an
unusual boldness, while providing a narrative thread through
linked images. Here we have signs of a poetic technique that was
to characterise Thomas's original style. Another school magazine
publication, 'Image', dated 30 December 1930 in the second
Notebook, shows a similar example of Thomas's distinctive use of
the image, while the detachment in the phrase 'You call the sky'
anticipates the solipsistic perspective of 18 Poems:
My golden bird the sun

Has spread his wings and flown away
Out of the swinging cage
You call the sky,
And, like his tired shadow
White with love,
My silver bird the moon
Flies up again
Onto her perch of stars. s
In the first, 1930 Notebook, it is perhaps the twenty-eighth poem

which registers for the first time an original direction in Thomas's
presentation of the natural world, where he is writing from the
viewpoint of elemental and actual life, his imagination thereby
finding empathy and prophetic understanding:
Admit the sun into your high nest

Where the eagle is a strong bird
And where the light comes cautiously
To find and then to strike;
Let the frost harden
And the shining rain
Drop onto your wings,
Bruising the tired feathers.
60 The Poetry
I build a fortress from a heap of flowers;
Wisdom is stored with the clove
And the head of the bright poppy. 6
Many of the early poems are concerned with erotic themes,

whether romantic or directly sexual; sometimes they are presented
with an adolescent's ironic romanticism, as in these lines from a
poem in the first Notebook, written when Thomas was sixteen and
titled 'Cabaret':
I poor romantic, held her heel

Upon the island of my palm,
And saw towards her tiny face
Going her glistering calves that minute.
There was a purpose in her pointed foot;
Her thighs and underclothes were sweet,
And drew my spiral breath ...
The band was playing on the balcony.7
However, Thomas moved away from conventional forms and the

narrative sentimentalities of the leisurely, discursive voice. Sexual
preoccupations became increasingly linked with religious themes
of sin and sensual temptation, as in this poem in Notebook Two,
written when he was seventeen:
Nearly summer, and the devil

Still comes visiting his poor relations,
If not in person sends his unending evil
By messengers, the flight of birds
Spelling across the sky his devil's news,
The season's cries, full of his intimations.
He has the whole field now, the gods departed
Who cannot count the seed he sows,
The law allows,
His wild carouses, and lips
Pursed at the ready ear
To whisper, when he wants, the senses' war
Or lay the senses' rumour.
The welcome devil comes as guest,
Steals what is best - the body's splendour-
Rapes, leaves for lost (the amorist!).
Counts on his fist
All he has reaped in wonder.
The welcome devil comes invited,

Suspicious but that soon passes.
They cry to be taken, and the devil breaks
All that is not already broken;
Leaves it among the cigarette ends and the glasses.1!
The conflict between the body, sensual man, and the spiritual is
evident; and the puritanism that was to inform so much of
Thomas's verse is strongly registered here in the personification of
the devil. Exactly a year later Notebook Three contains the
manuscript of a poem of sexual love that was to be considerably
revised and shortened nearly five years later and included in The
Map of Love (1939), but, as so often, the first line of the early version
was retained and it has the resonant syllabic structure that marked
the emergence of his· original style. The tone, too, has that
curiously impersonal note, and its narrative progress is that of
assertive repetition:
Not from this anger, anticlimax after

Refusal struck her face, a clap of laughter
And smiles sucked out the humour of her offer,
Shall she receive a bellyful of stones,
Not from surprise at what turned out
Wrong choice, later, in the hotkneed night,
Shall sin amuse her limbs, and hands
Leap over the barbed lands. 9
We may recall how in the final version the strong rhythms and the
natural energy of the metaphors rather than the traditional syntax
of verse determines the narrative flow, albeit that the revised poem
is harder to understand, for meaning is implied in metaphor rather
than given in explicit statement - as characterised Thomas's
achieved poetic style:
Not from this anger, anticlimax after

Refusal struck her lion and the lame flower
Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods
In a land strapped by hunger
62 The Poetry
Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds
And bear those tendril hands I touch across
The agonized, two seas. IO
Interestingly, in the last poem in the First Notebook, Thomas

emphasises the importance of his own body and its senses in his
journey of self-discovery and poetic truth, and the poem was the
source of the much revised and developed 1938 poem that used its
opening line:
How shall the animal

Whose way I trace
Into the dark recesses,
Be durable
Under such weight as bows me down ....
My senses see.
Speak then, 0 body, shout aloud,
And break my only mind from chains. 11
It is in the Second Notebook, 1930-2, subtitled 'Mainly Free

Verse Poems' that we discover the first poem that not only opens
in the distinctive Thomas style but provided a substantial source
for the final poem nearly seven years later:
The spire cranes; its statue

Is an aviary,
And from the nest
Of stone not straw
He does not let the nightingales
Blunt their tawny neck on rock,
Or pierce the sky with diving -
So wing in weed
And foot an inch in froth.
The bell's chimes cheat the sun,
And drop in time,
Induced to fall
Like discs upon the water,
Tune for the swimmer's hands
And silver music for his babbling mouth.
But let him keep his faculties.
The spire's hook drops birds and notes,
Each featherless and stony hearted;
The upward birds are choice for you,
And notes that breast the vertical,
Or run the corridor on ladder,
Not tread the cloudy steps like prodigals. 12
The spire, probably viewed from Thomas's hilltop Swansea home,

becomes for him an image of contrast between the chimes of its
bells, a stone nest, and the vulnerable song and flight of the living
birds that no doubt visited it. If, too, we remember Keats's
nightingale and Yeats's golden singing bird in Byzantium it is also
an image of the poet in his tower of verse-writing isolation, his
chiming songs not born for death like the flying birds prodigal in
the song and flight of their living but mortal energy and beauty.
One of Thomas's several poems on writing poetry, it points the
contrast between the physical life, the vitality of the natural senses,
and the artificial, the timeless and invulnerable - the artefact that is
poetry. The final 1937 version significantly differs both in the
syllabic structure, twelve syllables to each line, and the tighter
concentration of image - very different from the earlier free verse.
If the progress of the poem was through a strong and impulsive
rhythm, and a succession of enhanced rather than simply repeated
consonantal rhymes (which may initially have partly derived from
Owen's assonantal rhymes in such poems as 'Strange Meeting'), it
was equally importantly a progression of closely knit images, not
one extended image. Thomas himself described this technique of
composition when he said that '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 other two together, a
fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed
formal limits, conflict. ,13 The crucial point that needs to be added to
this definition of his method, particularly in the early poetry that
characterised 18 Poems, Twenty-five Poems and the Map of Love, is
that Thomas omitted any links between the images that might have
made the 'meaning' of the poem clearer. Vernon Watkins shrewdly
commented regarding Twenty-five Poems that the lines were too
packed with meaning, that there were no 'numbd4 words or lines
giving the poems clear narrative flow. That is, nothing was said
simply or to facilitate understanding. But Dylan Thomas replied
64 The Poetry
that 'If my readers want a breather, they won't get one from me',
adding, 'Let them go away and have a game of table-tennis; then
they can come back to my next line.' Not only did Thomas's
unrelenting technique of a continuous succession of images, held
within the 'imposed formal limits' of the poem's prosodic struc-
ture, determine the original style of 18 Poems, but also resolutely
confirmed his stylistic method when working on the material in
the Notebooks from that point. This method is evident if the
revised and final version of 'The spire cranes' is read alongside the
earlier Notebook manuscript.
The end of the Second Notebook provides the first poem in
manuscript version written almost entirely in the style that was to
characterise Thomas's verse. It is 'Out of the sighs', whose first two
verses are dated 7 June 1932, and last two verses 1 July - the last
entry in this Notebook. It was perhaps the most crucial moment in
Thomas's growth as a poet, although he may not have realised it at
that time, for it was initially followed in the Third Notebook
(February 1933) by less distinctive and striking manuscript verses,
and Thomas did not choose to make the few revisions on it until its
publication in Twenty-five Poems (1936). Amusingly, Thomas closes
the Notebook on 2 July with the comment 'This has taken a hell of
a time' and, characteristically, a palingram of his name 'Nalyd
Samot'!
Thomas was seventeen when he wrote 'Out of the sighs' and it
registers a profound darkness of spirit with a controlled but very
personal tone. Prompted by unhappiness in love, and the grief of
loss, it moves to a comfortless realism at life's despairs, that no
words or acceptance can mitigate. The Notebook poem opens:
Out of the sighs a little comes,

But not of grief, for I have vanquished that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good;
All could not disappoint;
There must, be praised, some certainty,
If not of loving well, then not,
And that is true after perpetual defeat.
This stanza was almost unaltered: the main revision was in the
second stanza, where lines 3-5 were initially:
Can lose the pain or stuff the wound,
Back ache too long through no regret
Of leaving woman waiting, saving, lying,
and in line 6 'warrior' became 'soldier' and 'split' became 'spilt';

while a fourth line 'And, sleeping, made me dream' was deleted
from stanza 3, itself originally part of what became a separate
fourth stanza. The whole poem is a remarkable achievement at that
age, and continues in this final form in Twellty-jive Poellls:
After such fighting as the weakest know,

There's more than dying;
Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
He'll ache too long
Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
For her soldier stained with spilt words
That spill such acrid blood.
Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,

Feeling regret when this is wasted
That made me happy in the sun,
How much was happy while it lasted,
Were vaguenesses enough and the sweet lies plenty,
The hollow words could bear all suffering
And cure me of ills.
Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,

The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,
Groping for matter under the dog's plate,
Man should be cured of distemper.
For all there is to give I offer:
Crumbs, barn, and halter.
It was as early as 17 October 1931, in the Second Notebook, that

Thomas had registered his 'womb-tomb' progress via the worm in
the poem 'Written for a Personal Epitaph':
Feeding the worm

Who do I blame
Because laid down
At last by time
66 The Poetry
Here under the earth the girl and thief.
Who do I blame?
My mother I blame
Whose loving crime
Moulded my form
Within her womb,
Who gave me life and then the grave,
Mother I blame
Here is her labour's end,
Dead limb and mind,
All love and sweat
Gone now to rot.
I am man's reply to every question,
His aim and destination.
'I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and

corruption', declared Thomas in an early letter, and added for good
self-dramatising measure 'I am all for cancers ... I loathe poetry.
I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day'. 15
Certainly the Third Notebook (February 1933) begins with imagery
of maggots, corpses, graves, vultures and death, and we enter a
morbid world of carnage and decay. The poet's obsession with
death is established. We may aptly recall his acknowledgement in a
letter of April 1944 of a quotation from Beddoes' poetic drama
'Death's Jest Book' - 'that's my great Beddoes1l (, and he talks of
'reading his lovely gloom ... ere the spider make a thinne curtaine
for our Epitaphs'. Writing of 'those very early poems' four years
later he rejects Treece's speculation on Hopkins's influence,
asserting, 'I see no Hopkins' and avers 'I have read more Francis
Thompson', and also listing Webster and Beddoes,17 later included
in his American readings. Certainly the world of these poets seems
closer to that of Dylan Thomas's early verse, as in Beddoes's 'The
Phantom-Wooer', the worms singing in the 'mossy skull':
Young soul, put off your flesh, and come

With me into the quiet tomb,
Our bed is lonely, dark, and sweet,
The earth will swing us, as she goes,
Beneath our coverlid of snows,
And the warm leaden sheet.
Dear and dear is their poisoned note,
The little snakes of silver throat,
In mossy skulls that nest and lie,
Ever singing 'die, oh! die'.
In a 1933 letter Thomas spoke also of 'the dark-eyed company of
Poe and Thompson', II! and the link between death and renewal in
nature, an increasing preoccupation in this early verse, may owe
something to his reading of Francis Thompson, whose 'Ode to the
Setting Sun' similarly images the paradoxical union of birth and
death in nature:
It is the falling star that trails the light,

It is the breaking wave that hath the might.
For Francis Thompson, as for Dylan Thomas, death and birth are
'mystical twins of time inseparable', as they were too for Vernon
Watkins, and the Ode continues:
For birth hath in itself the germ of death,

But death had in itself the germ of birth.
It is the falling acorn buds the tree ...
The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise ..
Till time, the hidden root of change, updries,
Are Birth and Death inseparable on earth.
Not only such Notebook verses as 'The force that through' but later
images like 'green and dying' ('Fern Hill'), 'the strutting fern lay
seeds' ('After the funeral') and 'the falling stars' of 'Poem on his
Birthday' may well share this poetic ancestry. Likewise Thomas's
'womb-tomb' syndrome, and even the later pantheism, as in 'In the
white giant's thigh', is related to Thompson's perception of man
and nature's mysterious interpenetration (though in Thomas it is
less Christianised):
The grave is in my blood;
I shake
To winds that take
Its grasses by the top;

The rains thereon that drop
Perturb
With drip acerb
My subtly answering soul.

(To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster')
68 The Poetry
Another poem that fed Thomas's poetic imagination at this time
seems to have been James Thomson's 'City of Dreadful Night',
again a poem of religious and fin-de siecie despair. As late as 1949 its
title heads a letter of pain and pennilessness, and its line 'The
unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall' is surely remembered in
Thomas's line 'Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute' (Twenty-
five Poems). 'My education was the liberty I had to read indiscrimin-
ately and all the time ... in my father's brown study tl9 recalled
Thomas later, and there were nineteenth-century poets he was
likely to find there, and find congenial. Beddoes, like Thomson, a
drunkard, also failed his medical studies and delighted in morbid
anatomy; while Francis Thompson, a failed priest, became an
opium addict and ended his life destitute. All three, in their fin-de
siecie role of poete maudit, their unconventional lives and early tragic
end, no doubt appealed to the adolescent poet's precocious but
somewhat morbid imagination. Caitlin was to observe later that
'Dylan had a romantic view of the poet as a rebel. . . an old-fashioned
one, almost nineteenth-century' and further commented regarding
his preoccupation with Keats that 'Dylan had this rather odd view
that all the best poets died young and that he himself would never
make forty - 'a morbid youth' was Dylan's self-description. 2o
Not only, however, does the Third Notebook reveal Thomas's
obsession with death, redeemed only by nature's ongoing proces-
ses, but it also shows that Thomas is now consistently structuring
his poems to strict rhythms and writing with density of image. And
while we meet such lines as 'For time has set its maggots on my
track' in the fifth poem in this Notebook, dated 8 February 1933
and from which this and other lines were included in 'Was there a
time' (Twenty-ftve Poems), we may aptly recall the sentiments on
death and corruption that Thomas expressed in a letter on
Christmas Day 1933: 'Death is said to be ugly only because we
entertain an ugly conception of the body .... Just as a live body has
its rhythms and its pattern and its promise ... so has a dead body;
and not only an abstract pattern but a physical one. A dead body
promises the earth as a live body promises its mate; and the earth
is our mate :21
During 1933 the basic themes that informed Thomas's early
verse were being determined, and finding expression in a distinc-
tive language. This style and originality of thought and feeling was
crystallising in the spring of 1933, and by the summer of 1933 most
of the manuscript poems contain those resonant and charged lines
that we at once identify as belonging to the singular map of Dylan
Thomas's verse. Several poems, however, are close to the form
their final publication took. These are 'I have longed to move
away', dated 1 March 1933, whose revision in 1936 involved only
the omission of certain lines; 'And death shall have no dominion'
(April), largely the source of the final poem and revised mainly
through heightening and concentration of image; 'We lying by
seasand' (May 16), extended in the final 1937 version; 'Why east
wind chills' (July 1); 'Here in this spring' (July 9); 'Find meat on
bones' (July 15), only occasional words changed in the revised
poem; the remarkable 'Ears in the turrets hear' (July 17) that was
finally published unaltered in Twenty-five Poems, and 'Shall gods be
said to thump the clouds' (August), again published after revision
that mainly consisted of the omission of some lines. Interestingly,
Thomas chose to revise and include these poems in his second
collection, TWeIlty-five Poems, with the exception of 'We lying by
seasand' which he included in his third collection The Map of Love,
as also 'The spire cranes'. Even the notable 'The hand that signed
the paper felled a city', Thomas's only directly political poem,
dedicated, significantly, to his political mentor Bert Trick in the
Fourth Notebook, which it opens on 17 August 1933, Thomas
chose to include in Twenty-five Poems, rather than 18 Poems, with
only minor changes of words in the third stanza ('five kings' for
'fingers', 'stroke' for 'pat') and the omission of a fourth stanza.
Occasionally, too, in the 1933 Notebooks the sensuous detail and
power of Thomas's images, particularly when they are taken from
or about the natural world, resembles the poetic prose of the early
stories he was soon to write. Thus in the lines 'The wind is his
friend,lThe glow-worm lights his darkness, and/The snail tells of
coming rain',22 the poet's empathy with nature is close to the
description of the idiot in 'The Tree', written in December 1933.
But if the spring and summer of 1933 saw the crystallisation of
Thomas's original poetic style it was in the second half of that year
that it confidently dominated his imagination. By autumn 1933,
when he was just nineteen, the poems that were to form the body
of 18 Poems, what have been called the 'process poems', follow in
quick succession, and were generally published with little revision:
'Before I knocked' (September 6), 'My hero bares his nerves'
(September 17), 'In the beginning' (September 18) - rather more
revised than the others, 'The force that through the green fuse
drives the flower' (October 12), 'From love's first fever to her
70 The Poetry
plague' (October 14 and 16), 'When once the twilight locks no
longer' (November 11), and 'Light breaks where no sun shines'
(November 20). However, 'This bread I break' (December 24) was
published in Twenty-five Poems. These poems are occasionally
interspersed with verses outside what is becoming the established
stylistic and thematic canon. By February 1934, however, and
about the time of composition, interestingly, of 'A process in the
weather of the heart', Thomas became so certain of his poetic
identity that once it was established all but three of the poems he
wrote from this time, with the exception of the light verse, he chose
to publish: Between March and November 1934 there followed the
eleven poems that were included in 18 Poems, their composition no
doubt fostered by the forthcoming but delayed publication, their
style and themes signalling the startling originality of that
collection. They were: 'Our eunuch dreams', 'Where once the
waters of your face', 'I see the boys of summer', 'In the beginning',
'If I were tickled by the rub of love', 'When once the twilight locks
no longer', 'Especially when the October wind', 'When, like a
running grave', 'I fellowed Sleep', 'I dreamed my genesis', 'My
world is pyramid', 'All all and all the dry worlds lever', Thomas
himself aptly pointed to the direction his style was taking at this
time to Pamela Hansford Johnson in November 1933 that 'what
you call ugly in my poetry is, in reality, nothing but the strong
stressing of the physical. Nearly all my images, coming, as they do,
from my solid and fluid world of flesh and blood, are set out in
terms of their progenitors' ;23 and spoke to Trevor Hughes in
January 1934 of his recent poems 'with their imagery almost totally
anatomical. But I defend the diction, the perhaps wearisome
succession of blood and bones, the neverending similes of the
streams in the veins and the lights in the eyes, by saying that, for
the time at least, I realise that it is impossible for me to raise myself
to the altitude of the stars, and that I am forced, therefore, to bring
down the stars to my own level and to incorporate them in my own
physical universe,,24 Similarly, and more cogently, he wrote to
Glyn Jones in March 1934: 'My own obscurity is quite an
unfashionable one, based as it is, on a preconceived symbolism
derived ... from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy ,,25
As the last two Notebooks indicate during 1933/4, in a sense Dylan
Thomas's 'marvellous year', Thomas turned away from public,
occasional, conventionally lyrical and descriptive verse to that
intensity of and concentration of image and closely structured
The F.IIrlll Nolt.fIoda; _ o*' Mlmuscript VD2 71
rhythms, embodying a language that centred on the map of his
own body, to express his view of the world in terms of his 'own
physical universe'.
The processes of creation and destruction in man and nature,
particularly with reference to sexuality, birth and death, are now
his main and continuing themes. As Thomas acknowledges, his
poetic influences are primarily Donne and Blake, and as his style
crystallises he emerges as a religious poet, not simply in his
preoccupation with sin and death but in his metaphysical concern
with the fundamental processes in man and nature, ancient
identities he celebrates in a language dense with images but always
physically exciting. In January 1934 Thomas vividly set out his aims
as a poet, and it is a description that illuminates the originality of
the style he forged at this time:
I become a greater introvert day by day, though, day by day

again, I am conscious of more external wonders in the world. It is
my aim as an artist . . . to bring those wonders into myself, to
prove beyond doubt to myself that the flesh that covers me is the
flesh that covers the sun, that the blood in my lungs is the blood
that goes up and down in a tree. It is the simplicity of religion. 26
Evidently the genesis of Thomas's distinctive style in 18 Poems

was not as fortuitous as many critics have thought.
The 1933 Notebooks show Thomas's use of an organic imagery
linking the processes of his own body to those of the cosmos.
However, the distinctive physical atmosphere of this verse
explores a deliberately limited number of themes. Examination of
18 Poems will follow these themes. As we have seen, the seeds of
this style may be traced from earlier poems, where the originality
of expression was fragmentary, and was often extended and
developed in later revision for publication in Twenty-five Poems and
The Map of Love. Usually, though not always, these poems were less
obscure than those in 18 Poems, since once the style was cast in 18
Poems, Thomas had the confidence to employ it more variously and
in the direction of greater immediate clarity.
It is now time to capture the distinctive world and achievement
of 18 Poems. We may aptly encapsulate the poetic journey of self-
discovery Thomas made in that direction by first reading the
moving but conventional lyricism of 'Your breath was shed':
72 The Poetry
Your breath was shed
Invisible to make
About the soiled undead
Night for my sake.
A dark as deep
My love as a round wave
To hide the wolves of sleep
And mask the grave. 27
Though it 'was considerably revised ten years later',28 undoubtedly

the relative simplicity of form and feeling belong to the period of its
earlier version (1934), and Thomas chose not to include it in any of
his collections. Characteristically, however, he chose to include in
18 Poems 'My hero bares his nerves', initially a more obscure poem:
My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rubs from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist
until we realise its theme is masturbation, perhaps not a surprising

preoccupation in a sexually and poetically precocious adolescent
boy, for the themes of sexual love and poetic inspiration form the
subtext that now emerges:
And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the paper the empty ill.
The poem extends from the poet's own body to his dream of love,
expressed in the imagery of nature, but registering the unfruitful
isolation of the act:
My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her blood red plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heart.
In the final stanza the phallus is referred to as 'wire', a more
commonplace term than 'hero'; celebrating the sexual activity with
physical and religious ambiguities (two 'knaves of thieves' clearly
referring both to the testicles and the two thieves crucified
alongside Christ - who came to redeem man from death, the
'mortal error'). The unity of sexual and poetic fulfilment, them-
selves responses to death's ubiquity, is clinched in the conceit of
the last line. Here Freudian ideas of psychic health are ingeniously
linked with a mocking Rabelaisian climax. Yet nothing could be
less erotic than the curiously impersonal, almost imperious tone of
these verses:
He holds the wire from this box of nerves

Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.
This poem was written in September 1933, when Thomas was

nineteen. Its originality lies not only in 'physical' richness of
expression, in the formal containment of unusual and vigorous
linguistic activity, but also in the exploration of themes of sexuality,
personal and religious identity, in terms of the natural processes of
life and death. The use of the body as organic metaphor, of course,
marks and anticipates the distinctive world of Thomas's verse. As
we have seen, the more conventional path of such poems as 'Your
Breath was Shed' he chose not to follow.
Total allegiance to this poetic style is the reason why, I think,
Thomas at the last minute chose to exclude 'Paper and Sticks',
published in Deaths and Entrances, from Collected Poems (1952), while
including 'Once Below a Time' and 'When I Woke', poems more
characteristic in style but certainly less successful. Written in 1939,
the one notable poem Thomas finally rejected from the canon,
'Paper and Sticks', is the first of the adult poet's lamentations for
lost childhood, its enchantments and riches. The poet takes the act
of lighting the fire with paper and sticks, then an everyday chore
but now largely gone, as metaphors for re-discovering the boy he
was:
Paper and sticks and shovel and match

Why won't the news of the old world catch
And the fire in a temper start
74 The Poetry
Once I had a rich boy for myself
I loved his body and his navy blue wealth
And I lived in his purse and his heart . . .
I talk to him as I clean the grate

o my dear it's never too late
To take me away as you whispered and wrote
While 'navy blue wealth' suggests the then fashionable boys' sailor
suits that later inspired 'the groves were blue with sailors' ('The
Hunchback in the Park'), and the structure anticipates his later use
of the villanelle, the formal clarity and restraint, the more
conventional manner and use of language is uncharacteristic,
though very effective:
I had a handsome and well-off boy

I'll share my money and we'll run for joy
With a bouncing and silver spooned kid
Sharp and shrill my silly tongue scratches

Words on the hair as the fire catches
You never did and he never did. 29
I have discussed the poem at this point to focus the homogeneity

of style Thomas chose to follow, for 'Paper and Sticks' develops
less through the concentration and conflict of image than a clearer
narrative statement of thought.
This poem is now included in Collected Poems 1934-53, though
the editors illuminatingly note that 'it is essentially a minor
dramatic monologue, impersonative of a character who might very
well have figured, later, in Under Milk Wood'. They rightly see it as
less related in style to the verse of its period but signalling 'a more
dilute style and a racy realism'. 30 Interestingly 'Lament', also a
dramatic monologue with racy realism, but more in character with
his concentrated, distinctively charged poetic style, he included in
his Collected Poems. With witty self-parody Dylan Thomas in 1952
dismissed his earliest verses as 'endless imitations, though I never
at the time of writing thought them to be imitations but rather
colossally original, things unheard of, like eggs laid by tigers'.
18 Poems
T.S. Eliot's comment that genuine poetry often communicates
before it is understood is certainly true of Dylan Thomas's verse;
and similarly the baffled astonishment that greeted 'The Waste
Land' was not unlike the reception of 18 Poems, different though
their impact and message were. 'Take breath and read it with the
ears, as I always wish to be read' Hopkins advised Bridges 'and my
verse becomes alright: It is advice very similar to Dylan Thomas's
injunction 'All I know is that it is memorable words-in-cadence
which move and excite me emotionally. And, once you've got the
hang of it, it should always be better when read aloud than when
read silently with the eyes. Always.'t Such recommendations are
apt for all Thomas's poetry, but particularly appropriate to 18
Poems, for that close-knit rhythmic structure, their bardic tone of
utterance, often prompted by biblical rhythms, and their elaborate
sound patterns provide surer keys to their meaning than following
the usual syntactical paths of poetry. This is because meaning in a
poem by Thomas is compounded as much in the emotional and
sensory impact as in the intellectual or conceptual import. Indeed,
the ideas that inform Thomas's early, as his later verse, are few and
relatively simple; what is original and striking is their enactment in
image and sound structure. The world the poem creates is
physically exciting, sonorous and hypnotic in effect, intuitional as
well as emotive and sensory in its communication.
18 Poems, published in December 1934 when Thomas was just
twenty, was followed by Twenty-five Poems in September 1936,
while The Map of Love, containing sixteen poems and seven short
stories, appeared in August 1939. These three books, representing
approximately half of the poetry Thomas chose to publish, contain
the poems written during the period of his late adolescence and
early manhood. Not surprisingly they share important and
fundamental characteristics: for these poems are the product of a
young, obsessed mind, usually turned in on itself and depicting, as
Thomas himself later observed, 'the very many lives and deaths ...
75
76 The Poetry
seen, as in my first poems, in the tumultuous world of my own
being' .2 He often seems to be arguing rhetorically with himself on
the subjects of sex and death, sin and redemption, the natural
processes, birth and decay. Difficulty in interpretation occurs
when the density of image embodies a depth and subtlety of
intellectual and sensory perception that the mind, in conceptual
terms, cannot easily follow. Essentially, too, Thomas's poetry is
informed by the recognition of a radical relationship between
human and natural life . This sometimes leads to a mystical sense of
the unity between all forms of life, and a sensitivity towards animal
and vegetal life much more profound than the conventional 'love
of nature'. It also influences the evolution and development of his
poetic style.
Certainly guidelines for understanding the poetry have been
provided by Thomas in his broadcasts, replies to questionnaires,
and book reviews. Generally, these remarks emphasise the
importance of the sound and physical impact of poetry. It is not
simply a matter of the traditional use of sound in poetry as part of
its effect. Thomas was speaking of something more than, and
beyond, this; and it leads to a vital aspect of his originality (too
often mistaken by critics in the early years - and still by some
hostile to the kind of poetry he writes - as wanton obscurity, an
inability to attain intellectual clarity). And though Dylan Thomas's
poetry shows important developments in theme and technique,
this essential feature of his writing whereby the physical quality of
thought and feeling is recorded remains its dominant characteris-
tic. The vital energy and purpose derive from 'the strong stressing
of the physical. Nearly all my images, coming, as they do, from my
solid and fluid world of flesh and blood, are set out in terms of their
progenitors.'3 This emphasises the sensory power of words, and in
this respect uniquely revitalising the language in his time (d.
Keats's 'English ought to be kept Up,4), the verbal links are less
intellectual, logical and syntactical, than rhythmically determined
and built upon a syllabic and alliterative structure. Such a poetry
has its own disciplines; that they are not primarily intellectual or
conceptual does not imply their absence. It might be said with
justification that Thomas brought English poetry in the twentieth
century back to the aural tradition, and in his reviews, written for
the Adelphi between 1934 and 1936, he continually emphasised the
place of sound in poetry:
'18 Poems' 77
The true future of English poetry, poetry that can be pronounced
and read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through
the brain . . . this lack of aural value and this debasing of an art
that is primarily dependent on the musical mingling of vowels
and consonants. s
Relatedly, meaning in Dylan Thomas's verse, to a greater extent

than is usual in poetry, is in terms of affective and sensory
perception. It holds true that Thomas introduced us, in this way, to
new modes of thinking and feeling in his verse. Notably, in an
early letter, Thomas writes that it is through the physical body that
man apprehends the world around him:
All thoughts and actions emanate from the body. Therefore the
description of thought or action - however abstruse it may be -
can be beaten home by bringing it onto a physical level. Every
idea, intuitive or intellectual, can be imaged and translated in
terms of the body, its flesh, skin, blood, sinews, veins, glands,
organs, cells or senses. 6
Clearly this has profound and significant influence on Thomas's

choice and handling of themes. Informing their evolution and
presentation, it determines, for example, the ways in which his
poetry is concerned with conveying the instinctive, the intuitional
and, increasingly in his later work, the mystical, in man and his
relationship with the natural world: as in the rediscovery of
childhood vision in 'Fern Hill'; the affirmation in 'Prologue' and
'Poem on his Birthday' of faith in man's unity with other creatures
despite the ubiquity of death; in the evocation of nature's
benevolence in 'In Country Sleep'; in the view of death as final
union with nature in 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a
Child in London' and in the more personal and poignant
registering of this in 'Elegy'.
Stressing the manner in which man is rooted in the earth, an
essentially physical being - and this, of course, does not imply only
Iimitationt> - Thomas emphasises in the same letter that:
The body, its appearance, death, and disease, is a fact, sure as

the fact of a tree. It has its roots in the same earth as the tree. The
greatest description I know of our own 'earthiness' is to be found
78 The Poetry
in John Donne's Devotions, where he describes man as earth of
the earth, his body earth, his hair a wild shrub growing out of the
land.
Consequently Thomas's concept of poetry, and of man's relation

to it, suggesting as it does the pre-eminence of physical and
sensory perception, implies, and this is perhaps the major theme in
his verse, an organic link between man and the natural world. And
in Thomas nature is always seen as an organic power, not simply
as a source of metaphor as is usually the case in Yeats or Eliot.
Again, and in contrast to Hopkins, for whom nature is emblematic
of God and is God's grandeur in the world, for Thomas nature is
important because of its vital link with man.
Nature, then, is the creative and dynamic force operating in the
physical world, his indissoluble unity with which Thomas registers
in the early poem 'The force that through the green fuse drives the
flower', included in 18 Poems. At this stage he characteristically
emphasises the processes of death and destruction man also shares
with nature:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
This poem was written in October 1933, close to the time of

Thomas's comment that he wished to prove to himself 'that the
blood in my lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree', 7
and this idea is continued in the second stanza:
The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
Howat the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
Throughout the poem emphasis is laid upon the process of

creation as a biological creative-destructive continuum, the process
related to that of his own body. In the concluding lines of these
stanzas the poet laments that he cannot communicate to the
'18 Poems' 79
natural world his perception of unity with it, nor to his own blood
its kinship with the mountain spring, whether it be the blood of his
own body or the rose that must wither.
In the light of Thomas's earlier insistence that it is through the
physical body that man apprehends all forms of experience:
Through my small, bonebound island I have learnt all I know,

experienced all. sensed all. All I write is inseparable from the
island ... 8
it is not surprising that the relationship of his own body to the

world of nature is a major preoccupation. While the first verse uses
natural imagery of flowers and trees, the second of rocks and
streams, the third begins with imagery of water but moves to
imagery of earth ('quicksand' while evoking life in 'quick', evokes
death as in 'sands of time,' and 'clay' is the body's final identity)
and wind. The dynamic 'force' that drives man and nature is now
spoken of as 'the hand' that controls ('ropes') both the wind that
blows about the world and the ship of death, so to speak, that the
poet sails ('my shroud sail') in his mortality:
The hand that whirls the water in the pool

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
In the fourth stanza the word 'stars' suggests both fire in their
shining and an imaging of physical matter that includes the whole
universe. Thematically, too, there is an important development in
these last two lines. It is man, i.e. human time, which, says the
poet, has fancifully invented a heaven, an immortality other than a
biological concept of a return to the first elements:
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall I calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
On first publication in the Sunday Referee, 29 October 1933, as in the

80 The Poetry
manuscript Notebook version, this last line read, more simply but
with less poetic richness, 'That time is all'. The force of natural
energy is now imaged as 'the fountain head'; while the reference to
love hints that it is a reality that continues alongside the creative-
destructive continuum shared by man and nature, though indi-
vidual love, like individuated human and natural life, is temporal.
The poem closes with the image of the worm that destroys poet
and lovers alike:
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

Howat my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Discarded lines from the first draft of the poem:
And I am dumb to tell the eaten rose

Howat my sheet goes the same crooked worm,
And dumb to holler thunder to the skies
Howat my cloths flies the same central storm9
pinpoint the influence of Blake both in language and idea if we

recall The Sick Rose':
o Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm ...
Thomas's own supposed tubercular symptoms at this time,

together with the recent news that his father was suffering from
cancer of the throat, may have given personal pressures to his
obsession with death and mortality. Likewise his plea in a letter at
this time, 'if only I could say with Blake, Death to me is no more
than going into another room tlO was not perhaps so far from his
poetic belief that death marked a return to nature, the literalness of
the earth's grave as exit always holding for Thomas profound
metaphysical implications.
While the fact that the processes of life go on, that the process of
generation in man and nature never fails, and that the seasons
change, are themselves witness of a beneficent force at the heart of
the universe ('the fountain head'), it is the concept of time as
measured by nature's processes that is supreme. This concept is
'18 Poems' 81
expressed in 'Especially when the October wind', which contrasts
man-made time as recorded by clocks with time measured by
nature, i.e. growth and decay - the poet's only sure knowledge:
Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock

Tells me the hour's word ...
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
In 'Especially when the October wind' the poet relates the

experiencing world of his own body to the impact of the natural
world about him. In the opening stanza it is the blustery autumnal
weather against the background of his hillside Swansea home and
the seascape of the bay below, the cries of land and sea-birds in the
air, that focus his feelings. An October poem, though not named as
a birthday one, it was first published on 24 October 1934 a few days
before his twentieth. It anticipates 'Poem in October', which
marked his thirtieth birthday, in its use of such aspects of nature as
birds, trees, weather, sun and sea to explore the poet's inner life,
and his distinctive language as the vital means both of creating and
understanding that experience. There are autumnal presentiments
of mutability and death in the images, while 'syllabic blood' brings
to mind that later 'leaved with October blood' of 'Poem in
October', though 'winter sticks' contrasts with 'winged trees' as a
description of bare branches in the subsequent, sunnier poem:
Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
Thomas's use of the word 'heart' to signify the poet is interestingly

reinforced by these lines from a review of poetry he wrote at this
time (September 1934): 'The true future of English poetry, poetry
that can be pronounced and read aloud, that comes to life out of
the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries.'ll
Certainly the impact of this poem lies in its impassioned, rhetorical
82 The Poetry
language rather than the cerebral, discursive and meiotic tones
more fashionable in English verse in the early thirties. Isolated in
his tower of words, a Yeatsian image both hieratic and romantic,
the poet celebrates the Swansea life before him in images of the
natural world, human and natural life blurred into association by
the power of the word, for 'star-gestured' evokes not only the
children hilariously at play in the park but also their heavenly
innocence, while 'thorny shires' suggests human lives not always
easy or happy:
Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell your notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
His hilltop Swansea is loud with the song of birds, and the poet
weaves his spider-like web of words that captivates and captures.
As inspiration drains away after its climax, a characteristically
sexual subtext, Thomas notes the diminished eloquence of art
beside the ominous message of the still calling sea-birds:
Especially when the October wind

(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make you of the heartless words.
The heart is drained that spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.
As we have seen in 'The force that through the green fuse drives
the flower' Thomas's preoccupation with the relationship between
his own physical body and the processes in the natural world is
intensively, but sometimes obscurely, explored in 18 Poems. Thus
the compelling rhythms of 'Light breaks where no sun shines',
with its echoing sound-shape of syllables wherein the lines of each
stanza follow a 6, 10, 4, 10, 4, 10 pattern, excepting the explosive 6-
'18 Poems' 83
syllable penultimate line, enact the shared identity of the physical
human body and the physical natural world. This is an identifica-
tion of man and the cosmos, wherein truly he is a child of nature
who returns to mother earth, elemental in his origins and his final
destiny. For at conception blood (,waters of the heart') moves like
the sea, while in the wormy processes of death and decay flesh
becomes earth:
Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
Not only do the processes in nature define the body's growth:
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like the sea
they also ultimately determine the return to first elements when

human consciousness is halted in earth:
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.
The 'allotment' of death has its source as a visual image in the

small cultivated plots of land, no doubt visible from Thomas's
hillside vantage point, particularly common in Wales during the
Depression. The word-play (paronomasia) where both meanings
of 'allotment' are implied is fundamental to Thomas's method of
composition, particularly in the early poetry. It is the individual
word or phrase, rather than the development of idea, that gives
propulsion to a poem by Thomas. Verbal precipitation in sound
and meaning is linked to a rhythmic impulsion rather than a
discursive sentence structure, as we saw in the use of the words
'green' and 'drive' in 'The force that through ... '. As usual, Dylan
84 The Poetry
Thomas himself has given the clearest account of his poetic
method, as in his 1951 comments:
I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious crafts-

man in words . . . to whatever wrong uses I may apply my
technical paraphernalia, I use everything and anything to make
my poems work and move in the directions I want them to: old
tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion,
paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes,
vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language
is there to be used. 12
As his letters indicate, Dylan Thomas was much preoccupied

with 'the mind-body relationship,13 at the time he was evolving his
original poetic style. In his emphasis on the body and its senses as
the source and form of man's perception, epitomized in his
comment 'all thoughts and actions emanate from the body.
Therefore the description of a thought or action ... can be beaten
home by bringing it onto a physical level . . . Every idea, intuitive
or intellectual, can be imaged and translated in terms of the body
... or its senses', 14 he was close to such Blakean concepts as 'If the
doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear . . .
infinite' and the suggestion that the whole creation will 'appear
infinite and holy ... by an improvement of sensual enjoyment' . 15
In 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' Blake repeatedly asserts that
'Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that call'd Body is a
portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul
in this age.'ll> Such terms bring to mind Thomas's comment in an
early letter that 'a live body is a building around the soul, and a
dead body a building without it'.17 We may remember that Thomas
knew Blake's letters -'I have been reading Blake's letters' he wrote
in December 1933,18 as well as his poetry, and had also declared
two months earlier 'I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him
that only the wings on his heels are in sight."9 It is a vivid
statement of poetic ancestry and of course they were finally flying
wing-to-wing in their luminous, visionary verses.
Thomas suggests in 'When all my five and country senses see',
included in Tile Mal' of Love, that visionary experience, including
the poetic, is attained through improvement of sensory perception:
that is, essentially physical perception, natural ('country') as
opposed to spiritual or moral. In the manner of Rimbaud, again
'18 Poems' 8S
bringing to mind Thomas's self-description as 'the Rimbaud of
Cwmdonkin Drive',2o he characteristically employs synesthesia,
the transference of sense impression, to register this visionary
experience. So we may also recall Rimbaud's 'Le Poete se fait
voyant par un long, immense et raisomle dereglemel1t de tous les
sens.'21 Thus in the opening lines touch is spoken of as sight, as
fingers will foresee ('the halfmoon's vegetable eye') the husk all life
must become and how even love must perish:
When all my five and country senses see,

The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and hand full zodiac
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by ...
In 'handfull zodiac' there is the suggestion the physical body

represents the wider universe, the macrocosm in the microcosm.
The senses are knowers, feeding their knowledge to the heart. At
death and the body's dissolution when these 'five eyes break' this
sensual and intuitional centre continues in nature ('love's coun-
tries'). We may compare Thomas's related, and fuller, exploration
of this continuing of sensual desire in 'In the white giant's thigh',
the last poem in his Collected Poems and interpreted later. The
continuing sensual vision, born from and learned through the
senses (in contrast, for example, to T.S. Eliot's asensory and
abstract revelation) is implied in the biological continuum of
nature's life cycle. By this visionary awareness man may see
himself truthfully as part of nature's process, a pantheism whereby
the senses may perceive the infinite:
My one and noble heart has witnesses

In all love's countries, that will grope awake;
And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.
The thrust of the poem is that the senses are adjuncts of sensual
man and his 'noble heart', the essential self that is indissolubly
linked to 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower'.
Thomas's poetic style is likewise based on the primacy of
'phYSical feeling', 22 seeking its roots in the senses, the 'sensual'
heart as the centre of intuitional, instinctive and emotional
86 The Poetry
awareness, and drawing its images from the physical body and the
natural world, itself an essentially physical phenomenon. When
writing his poetry 'Dylan worked upon a symmetrical abstract with
tactile delicacy; out of a lump of texture or nest of phrases he
created music, testing everything by physical feeling.,23 We may,
indeed, use Yeats's (dismissive) phrase 'sensual music'24 to
describe the poetic artifact, the 'monumental/Argument of the
hewn voice',25 as opposed to Yeats's 'monuments of unageing
intellect',26 Thomas creates. For Dylan Thomas, as we shall see, the
problem of 'those dying generations', be they 'the young/In one
another's arms' or 'birds in the trees'27 is solved by his vision of
their re-immersion in nature, Thomas's equivalent of Yeats's
'artifice of eternity'.
In the early poetry, then, Thomas explores the unity between
man and nature mainly in terms of his own body, with a
concentration on such processes as conception, birth, sexuality and
death. Indeed at times his sense of individual identity seems about
to be overwhelmed by his sense of the forces of nature, of which
his single body is but a part, though such lines as:
Today, this insect, and the world I breathe,

Now that my symbols have outelbowed space
(,Today, this insect')
image his poetry as extending his world beyond the microcosm of

his own body (the 'insect') to the macrocosm of the physical
universe, often, as we have seen, by registering his sense of
identity with it. Relatedly, as the sexual process in man is
important because it leads to regeneration, likewise the natural
world, it is implied, also repeats this sexual process:
And yellow was the multiplying sand,

Each growing grain spat life into its fellow
('From love's first fever')
Significantly, in the notable early poem'And death shall have no

dominion', which first appeared in the 1933 Notebook and was
finally revised for Twenty-five Poems, deliverance from death is not
through religious faith, since 'Faith in their hands shall snap in
two', but through nature:
'18 Poems' 87
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies,
a poetic statement of 'pushing up the daisies', the colloquial

expression no less simpliste than the equally familiar 'in heaven'.
Interestingly, the opening stanza declares man's unity at death
with the natural world, and uses the poet's characteristic device of
the transferred epithet to create the poetic richness of the new
image (we may recall the familiar 'man in the moon' and 'west
wind'):
And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon.
Interestingly, too, when Thomas revised this poem for publication

in Twenty-five Poems the movement was towards emphasis on the
physical unity with the natural world and away from reference to
man's soul, as this early version of these lines shows:
And death shall have no dominion.

Man, with soul naked, shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon. 2R
A fourth, discarded stanza includes such rejected lines as:
Man shall discover all he thought lost,

And hold his little soul within his fist ...
He knows his soul. There is no doubt. 29
Clearly, what Thomas is poetically certain of is the physical fact of

his own body, and the physical fact of the universe, in all their rich
potentia\' albeit subject to individual death and the process of
change implicit in the creative-destructive continuum man shares
with nature. Though individual love perishes, love itself continues:
'Though lovers be lost love shall not', and the final poem is more
pantheistic than Christian in its sentiment. Of course the opening
line echoes the biblical 'death hath no more dominion over him'
(Romans 6:9), while the line 'Though they sink through the sea
they shall rise again' brings to mind' And the sea gave up the dead
which were in it' (Revelation 20:13) - both New Testament
88 The Poetry
references. Evidently the Bible was always one of Thomas's main
sources of metaphor, particularly when speaking of the natural
world. Indeed, Thomas himself declared in 1951 that 'its [the
Bible's] great stories of Noah, Jonah, Lot, Moses, Jacob, David,
Solomon . . . I had, of course, known from very early youth; the
great rhythms had rolled over me from the Welsh pulpits; and I
read, for myself, from Job and Ecclesiastes; and the story of the
New Testament is part of my life.'30
While biblical language and rhythms influenced Thomas's style,
the Puritanism of his Welsh background colours the introspective,
obsessive, sexual and religious currents of feeling, particularly in
this early poetry. Regarding the impact of this Welsh Puritanism
on Thomas's life, Caitlin Thomas observed that 'though Dylan
imagined himself to be completely emancipated from his family
background, there was a very strong puritanical streak in him, that
his friends never suspected'. 31 'If I were tickled by the rub of love'
notably explores the conflicts of his Puritan conscience and his
strongly sexual imagination, and indeed appetites, faced with the
fact of death. In the opening stanza the poet declares that if he
could believe in sexual love, celebrate it, and, no doubt in
Lawrentian terms, accept its drive and power, he would not fear
the loss of innocence (the apple), or the punishment that follows
the loss ('the flood'), or the bad blood of new life that spring-like is
born imbued with its own mortality:
If I were tickled by the rub of love

A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.
'Rub' of course recalls Hamlet's soliloquy and its themes of death

and adolescent sexual disgust, and carries also its own common
sexual associations. In 'rooking girl' the lover is thought of as a
robber, and the image has its source in biblical reference ('And the
rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he woman') -
like the apple and the flood coming from the Genesis story. One is
reminded of Thomas's later line, 'Sin who had woman's shape' (in
'Ballad of the Long-legged Bait'), also based on the Genesis story of
'18 Poems' 89
the Fall. Of course there is subconscious conflict in this stanza, for
the poet is tickled by the rub of love, sex is desirable, but it brings
feelings of fear, guilt and death. He is aware that what attracts him
also repels him, and the poem's conflict of images and feelings
explores this. Thomas writes of the moment of conception in the
womb in the second stanza, relating his conflicts regarding
sexuality and death to that stage:
Shall it be male or female? say the cells,

And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon the baby's thigh.
Interestingly, though directed by strong and personal feelings, it is

the bodily processes that provide the poem's narrative movement,
often in a strangely impersonal way. For from the condition of life
in the womb, with its potential sexual appetites, Thomas passes to
the sexual appetites of adolescence, such as masturbation
(,rehearsing heat'):
I would not fear the muscling-in of love

If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.
The phrase 'devil in the loin' again associates the ideas of sex and
sin, while 'the outspoken grave', everywhere announcing its
victory, dramatically evokes the poet's obsession with death.
Casting aside the subjunctive of condition, in the fifth stanza the
poet speaks directly of himself, telling us he is in love. But the
'drug' of sexual desire makes him 'daft' and the language is far
from that of romantic verse; for he sees his lover anatomically,
'forks her eye' carrying a sexual pun. The narrative line of the
poem is again in terms of bodily process. The poet shares his world
with the devil, and old age and death are the ultimate reality, the
worm beneath his nail auguring death:
This world is half the devil's and my own,

Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl
90 The Poetry
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,.
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
Wearing the quick away.
In his sexual desires the poet shares his world with the devil, and
the poem registers his moral, emotional and sexual conflict. Faced
with these emotions and conflicts Thomas turns to the one
overwhelming reality: death. Whether six feet of earth ('the
rubbing dust'), the feather from the angel of death that touches
every nerve ('death's feather'), or sexual and religious impotence
('My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree') signify death's
ubiquity, man provides the language of its expression:
And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
My Jack of christ born thorny on the tree?
My words of death are dryer than his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor.
The language and conflicts of such a poem bring to mind

Thomas's 1938 statement that 'I hold a beast, an angel, and a
madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my
problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and uphea-
val, and my effort their self-expression. 132 While being an apt
comment on the religious, Freudian and essentially adolescent
conflicts of much of the early verse, Thomas's development was
away from this death-touched elaboration of his introspective
intensities, with their singular explorations on the physical map of
his own body, to a passionate, albeit elegiac, celebration of the
human condition on the wider map of the natural world around
him. Nature, in particular 'the green unraveller' of 'Where once the
waters of your face' is given a richer and fuller context as his poetry
progressed.
Twenty-five Poems
While Twenty-jive Poems continues the self-questioning and rebel-
lious mood of 18 Poems and there is the same obsessive concern
with death, sex, sin and the isolation of the individual, ·there are
poems of greater immediate clarity and intelligibility, such as the
earlier noted 'Out of the Sighs' and 'And death shall have no
dominion', whose first composition preceded many in 18 Poems, as
well as such notable poems as 'This bread I break', 'Ears in the
turrets hear' and 'The hand that signed the paper'. The latter,
Thomas's only explicitly political poem, dedicated significantly to
his political mentor Bert Triek in its 1933 Notebook version, may be
compared aptly with Auden's later 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'. Certainly
in its theme it is very much a 'thirties' poem, but characteristically
Thomas's poem on the tyrant makes him as much an Old
Testament figure as a contemporary one:
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death ....
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Men by a scribbled name.
Deliberately avoiding specific political context and comment, it is
the tyrant's lack of compassion and humanity, expressed in
Thomas's distinctively physical, impersonal style whereby image
takes the place of discursive reflection, that is registered with a
bardie, prophet-like authority:
The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.
91
92 The Poetry
Bearing in mind that there is little revision from the 1933 version
written when Thomas was nineteen, a glance at Auden's 1939
poem highlights the originality of Thomas's style, though at the
expense perhaps of irony and discursive flexibility:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
There is a deepening of Dylan Thomas's religious attitude to

experience in Twenty-five Poems, evident in the remarkable but
uneven sonnet-sequence'Altarwise by owl-light', the disturbing 'I
have longed to move away' and the crucial 'This bread I break'.
The sonnet-sequence displays the verbal pyrotechnics, a meta-
physical delight in the daring conjunction of the sexual and
religious, and conflict of image and feeling that is a feature of
Thomas's early poetry. Thomas cannot resist the pun, the joke, the
wittily surprising, and one is reminded of Yeats's comment that
'only the true believer dare blaspheme', albeit Dylan Thomas was
Bible-haunted rather than Bible-blest. Thus while in the sequence
Thomas refers to God the Father as 'old Cock from nowheres', the
Angel Gabriel as a 'two-gunned cowboy', the eighth sonnet
describing Christ's crucifixion is among the poet's most powerful
religious verse. The scene on Calvary is imaged as the most intense
and painful moment in time. Symbolising the death of all mankind,
'gallow grave' suggests the gallows setting of punishment and
death, while Christ's wounds represent the whole world, for Jack
Christ is everyman, and God shares Mary's grief. Yet the
crucifixion was God's will, the nails 'heaven-driven' by 'each
minstrel angle' (punning 'ministering angel'); for after three days
Christ's resurrection makes immortality for other men possible:
This was the crucifixion on the mountain,

Time's nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;
The world's my wound, God's Mary in her grief....
This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
'Twenty-five Poems' 93
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
I by the tree of thieves, all glory'S sawbones,
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,
And by this blowclock witness of the sun
Suffer the heaven's children through my heartbeat.
The world woke only slowly from its death ('snail-waked'), and,
speaking in the poem of Christ, Thomas interestingly insists that
death unsexes, so again associating death with sin. Interestingly,
too, and characteristically, Thomas defines the Christian state of
grace and salvation by reference to the New Testament emphasis
on childhood as being closest to the kingdom of heaven ('Except ye
be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into
the kingdom of heaven'). On this hilltop setting this most
significant moment in time (,mountain minute' linking both)
defeated time through Christ's sacrifice, 'this blowclock witness of
the sun', the pun linking Christ and nature. Of course, the poetic
mastery of this sonnet is due to the emotional intensity integrating
the linguistic inventions, local verbal pyrotechnics unified by the
passion's flame.
Whilst interpreting biblical narrative, often in terms of personal
mythology, such lines as these from 'Incarnate devil' (first entitled
'Poem for Sunday'):
Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heaven's hill,
register Thomas's Christian ambivalence. It is the ambivalence of
one imbued with biblical myth and story, but itself a heritage
belonging more strongly to his parents' generation. Whether
seeking or fleeing such belief, Thomas's poetry often seems a
bridge between a religious and a secular age, a religious and
secular imagination. Though religious in feeling and temperament
when he deliberately explores biblical event and theology he
usually emerges as doubting Thomas, inspired more by fable than
doctrine. Distancing himself from the Old Testament credo
Thomas continues:
94 The Poetry
The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree,
and in the final line of this poem on God's creation of the world,
the fiddling serpent holds the stage: 'A serpent fiddles in the
shaping time'. Today such verses as Ted Hughes's 'Crow' and R.5.
Thomas's more sardonic Old Testament vignettes are occasionally
not dissimilar in tone and import. Though in the last stanza Dylan
Thomas also characteristically signals our retained memory of
Eden-like landscapes, sacredly guarded:
We in our Eden knew the secret guardian

In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth.
Evocation of those Eden-like 'mighty mornings of the earth' were

to be Dylan Thomas's unique contribution to English poetry.
The poem '} have longed to move away' particularly reflects
Thomas's conflicts in matters of religious belief at this stage,
linking his impulse to reject the conventional Nonconformist
beliefs ('the spent lie') of his Welsh background with the desire to
escape from the fear of death, a fear that increases with passing
time and thereby is a powerful prop to the need to believe:
] have longed to move away

From this hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea.
But the poet cannot completely cast aside the conventional rituals
of chapel-going and the faith they imply:
] have longed to move away

From the repetition of salutes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
'Twenty-five Poems' 9S
Yet he will not accept a facile belief maintained only by ritual
observances and the ancient fear of death:
Neither by night's ancient fear,

The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
The picture of Thomas as a lost Nonconformist, wrestling with an

inherited religion and Puritan ethos has been vividly evoked by his
fellow Anglo-Welsh writer Gwyn Jones in his comment that 'bible-
blest and chapel-haunted, wrestle hard as we can, we stand
confessed the last, lost nonconformists of an Age'. I This poem
described the wrestling between religious doubt and an imagina-
tion haunted by biblical myth and language that was to remain in
Thomas's verse.
Perhaps the most crucial religious poem in Twenty-five Poems
with regard to Thomas's development as a poet is 'This bread I
break', for it suggests that the poet's sense of the unity of all
creation has become religious in character. Using the symbolism of
the Eucharist, in particular the bread and the wine, to register the
sacramental nature of the universe, the poet wittily speaks of how
these elements, the oat and the grape, were themselves robbed of
their flourishing life by man in order to make the bread and wine:
This bread I break was once the oat,

This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.
Once in this wine the summer blood

Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
Through the ambiguity of double identity, where the poet seems to

be speaking in the persona of Christ, so that Christ himself in the
96 The Poetry
language of the Eucharist speaks of giving (breaking) his own
body, the terms of the poem are very close to an immanent
pantheism:
This flesh you break, this blood you let

Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
Interestingly, Thomas used the phrase 'felt desolation in his vein'

in his story 'The Enemies', written six weeks later, to describe a lost
clergyman's fear when threatened by primitive, pantheistic forces.
Certainly while man's unity with nature suggests he is a citizen of
infinity and eternity in pantheistic theology, the Eucharistic
concept in this poem implies a sacramental identity for the
universe. 'The country is holy'2 was Thomas's later, confident,
celebratory affirmation. This concept of reality emphasises the
physical actuality of the object, and, like Hopkins's concern with
the 'inscape' and 'instress' of objects, demands for its expression a
sensuous rather than abstract use of language - what Dylan
Thomas characterised in his own work as 'the strong stressing of
the physical'. Notably, in this poem Thomas affirms that flesh and
blood, albeit inevitably sacrificed in the process of change, were
'oat and grape/Born of the sensual root and sap', 'sensual' being
the key word.
The image of 'the grape' appears in the remarkably controlled
and haunting poem 'Ears in the turrets hear', where the poet
registers his sense of isolation and fear of contact, both emotional
and physical - the poem was first titled 'Dare I?':3
Ears in the turrets hear

Hands grumble on the door,
Eyes in the gables see
The fingers at the locks.
Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone till the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?
Hands, hold you poison or grapes?
Twenty-five Poems' 97
Locked in his Yeatsian tower the romantic poet's apartness is
lucidly imaged yet 'the white house' suggests, too, the body, the
privacy of the 'bonebound island' which nevertheless for Dylan
Thomas represents the means of communication - 'Through my
small bonebound island I have learnt all I know, experienced all,
and sensed all' as he wrote in November 1933, a few months after
the poem's first, and largely unaltered, version, in July 1933 in the
manuscript Notebook, a pencil drawing of a face on the previous
page possibly referring to it.4 Certainly the following comments in
the November 1933 letter indicate the nature and source of the
poem's imagery, and its relationship to the theme of desire for and
fear of contact - '1 employ the scenery of the island to describe the
scenery of my thoughts, the earthquake of the body to describe the
earthquake of the heart..s
Beyond this island bound

By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast,
The land lies out of sound
And the hills out of mind.
No bird or flying fish
Disturbs this island's rest.
Fearing as much as desiring experience, a familiar puritan conflict,

an eighteen-year-old's intimations of 'the earthquake' focus his
temptation and uncertainty:
Ears in this island hear

The wind pass like a fire,
Eyes in this island see
Ships anchor off the bay.
Shall I run to the ships
With the wind in my hair,
Or stay till the day I die
And welcome no sailor?
Ships hold you poison or grapes?
The imagery of approaching ships and sailors, of rain beating on

sand and slates, bring to mind the youthful poet viewing Swansea
bay from his room on the hilltop Cwmdonkin Drive. They bring to
98 The Poetry
mind, too, his later reference to 'my readers, the strangers':
Hands grumble on the door,

Ships anchor off the bay,
Rain beats the sand and slates.
Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?
The chiming final couplet, with its remembered harmonies, closes

the more-than-usually clear but as usual carefully constructed
artifice of the 'Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive':
Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,

Hold you poison or grapes?
The Map of Love
The Map of Love, published in 1939, generally continues the style
and themes of the early poetry and it might wittily be said, as
Beckett did of Proust, the poet still resists the distortions of
intelligibility and reason! The book includes seven early stories
which, as we shall see, are closely linked to the early poetry both in
their themes, language and the worlds they create. Nevertheless
there is the beginning of that deepening and extension of poetic
sympathy and personal vision that characterises Thomas's later
work, as in the poem on the birth of the poet's son Llewelyn 'If my
head hurt a hair's foot', and particularly'After the funeral'.
Other interesting verses include the love poem to Caitlin 'I make
this in a warring absence', a somewhat obscure poem whose
opening arresting line is matched only by the final one 'Yet I make
this in a forgiving presence', and two poems on the writing of
poetry 'Once it was the colour of saying', and 'On no work of
words' which celebrates 'the lovely gift of the gab' even during a
poetically infertile time, as the striking opening stanza indicates:
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody

Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft.
'If my head hurt a hair's foot' was written, like' A saint about to
fall', when Caitlin Thomas was expecting her first child. In the
opening stanzas the child about to be born addresses its mother; let
me perish rather than cause you pain, says the child:
'If my head hurt a hair's foot

Pack back the downed bone ....
If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house.'
99
100 The Poetry
The bed is a cross place' the unborn child declares, 'cross' having
associations of pain and anger as well as Christian ideas of
suffering and sacrifice; while 'cross' is also a rustic word for sexual
intercourse. The mother replies that neither she nor the child can
escape the joy and anguish, the life and death, she carries:
'No. Not for Christ's dazzling bed ...

My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none.
Even at birth the child is 'dust-appointed', but birth is itself

miraculous:
The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
Has a voice and a house, and there you must crouch and cry.
Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,

At the breast stored with seas ...
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.'
Thomas echoes Donne both in thought and imagery, and the poem
brings to mind such lines as these from Donne's sermon 'Deaths
Duell':
Wee have a winding sheete in our Mothers wombe, that growes

with us from our conception ... for we come to seeke a grave . ...
Wee celebrate our owne funeralls with cryes, even at our birth.1
The dramatising of the theme in terms of a dialogue between

mother and unborn child has produced a more successful poem
than the less concisely controlled images of 'A saint about to fall'.
This use of colloquy helped direct the poet's imagination and
language beyond personal narrative and feeling.
Undoubtedly Thomas's major early poem was 'After the fune-
ral', which turned the poet's imagination outward from his
introspective concerns to the life of another person, and it signals
the beginning of his poetic maturity. Reading the poem on the BBC
in 1949 Thomas declared that it 'is the only one I have written that
is, directly, about the life and death of one particular human being I
knew - and not about the very many lives and deaths whether
'The Map of Love' 101
seen, as in my first poems, in the tumultuous world of my own
being or, as in the later poems, in war, grief, and the great holes
and corners of universal love'. 2 Correspondingly, the poem
indicates, too, an important widening of the role of nature in his
verse as he moves out of the solipsistic world of his early poetry to
a more externalised reality. For as well as the poet, the mourners,
and Ann Jones, the fox and fern, in their crucial metamorphosis as
the poem proceeds, are major protagonists in this formal elegy.
Commemorating the death of Ann Jones, who lived at Fern Hill,
the farm later celebrated in the poem of that name, a manuscript
poem written on 10 February 1933 (possibly the day of the funeral,
for the poet's aunt died on 7 February) is toe source of the final
poem. The opening lines of this Notebook poem present a satiric
view of the mourners, their vain chatter and mulish praise of the
dead woman who is spoken of as 'going to earth':
After the funeral mule praises, brays,

Shaking of mule heads, betoken
Grief at the going to earth of man
Or woman. 3
The reference to the dead woman in this early version is rather

general and shows little sense of personal loss or grief, and the
verses are those of a rebellious adolescent who mocks the
conventional religious belief of the mourners and what he takes as
their hypocritical tears and prayers:
The mourners in their Sabbath black

Drop tears unheeded or choke back a sob
Join in the hymns, and mark with dry bright looks
The other heads, (bent), spying on black books.
In a letter written on hearing his aunt was dying of cancer his

feelings reflect the self-centred dramatisation of adolescence rather
than concern:
Mother's sister, who is in the Carmarthen Infirmary suffering

from cancer of the womb, is dying .... Many summer weeks I
spent happily with the cancered aunt in her insanitary farm. She
loved me quite inordinately. 4
102 The Poetry
Nevertheless the Notebook poem was the source of the anger
and protest of the man who five years later composed an elegy of
deeply felt and passionate concern, even as ten years later the
'insanitary' farm was to inspire one of the most rhapsodic and
popular lyrics in the English language. In the final poem the earth
is 'the thick/Grave's foot':
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,

Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap heavily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot,
and the circumstances of the funeral now awaken in Thomas the

reactions of the boy to whom Ann and Fern Hill meant so much:
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.
For now, after the funeral griefs and meats (contemptuously and
succinctly imaged in the punning 'feast of tear-stuffed time and
thistles') it is the adult poet who imagines himself in the familiar
farm parlour, a room that haunted the poet and that he described a
few months later in his, also recollected, story 'The Peaches' that
relates a boyhood visit there:
The best room smelt of moth-balls and fur and damp and dead
plants. Two glass cases in wooden coffin-boxes lined the
window wall. You looked at the weed-grown vegetable garden
through a stuffed fox's legs ... there was ... a Bible with a clasp
- and a framed photograph of Annie, Uncle Jim, and Gwilym
smiling in front of a fern pot. ... The best room was rarely used. 5
Clearly it was always a room more inhabited by plants and

animals, albeit dead, than people; while beyond the window were
the living plants and animals of this farming countryside. It is the
fox and fern that Thomas identifies in the poem's funeral setting:
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.
Ann's heart is described as a fountain generously and selflessly
refreshing the 'parched worlds of Wales'. Thomas delighted in
puns and the term 'parch' for preacher or Reverend (from the
Welsh 'parchedig' meaning reverend) is echoed in 'parched',
sharpening the attack on Nonconformity and its rituals as in the
subsequent references to 'hymning heads', a cramped religion, and
Ann's 'cloud-sopped' faith. In his later genial vein in Under Milk
Wood Thomas speaks of 'a beer tent black with parchs', but his pun
in 'parched' is closer to Caradoc Evans's satiric note in Wales no. 3-
'It is nice to look at a list of contributors without a Parch' - an issue
to which Thomas contributed and which was published by the
time he wrote the poem, one he hoped was 'better than any of my
recent simple poems' (Letters, p. 287). The word 'puddles' returns
us to the very ordinary and homelier farmyard and retains the note
of humility and simplicity the poet desired in this memorial to his
'ancient peasant aunt'6 as he refers to her in the letter to Vernon
Watkins that contained the poem. He knows she would have been
too humble to accept such praise (to her 'a monstrous image'), but
the poet declares that the 'flood' of her love is holy and druid-like,
a word with connotations of ancient Celtic nature-worship; and he
insists on building this natural mythology of her love:
Whose hooded, 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).
It is, of course, a service of nature, not the chapel, the poet creates
as standing on the hearth of her poor home he calls on the seas to
celebrate her love and virtue that would never speak of itself, being
'wood-tongued'. Significantly, the earlier detail of the dead fox and
fern is now transformed to the living foxes and ferns of the woods
beyond the farm parlour; so that fox and fern return to the woods
exultant in nature's holiness. The natural world of trees ('a brown
chapel') and birds and animals is where, bell-like, her love rings,
above and beyond the 'hymning heads' - a dismissive reference to
the actual chapel mourners:
104 The Poetry
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a beUbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
The farm landscapes are her true church, and the flying birds
giving blessing. And as the farmhouse was surrounded by tall fir
trees, and the rise on which it stood sloped down to a stream and
wooded valley or dingle, it seems that the natural setting prompted
this imagery, as it later inspired the radiant images of Fern Hill.
Thomas continues his emphasis on the humility of the dead
woman, though predicating her atrophied religion with her
cramped body. The cadences of his panegyric bring about a
transformation, so that suffering and pain become sculptured
stone in death:
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.
Significantly, the closing lines complete the metamorphosis

whereby conventional attitudes to death and religion ('doud-
sopped' mocking the conventional belief in heaven) are rejected for
the natural immortality of the biological processes of returning life
(symbolised by 'the strutting fern lay seeds') and a belief in love
symbolised not by a crucified Christ but by the hunted fox:
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.
In confronting the death of a particular person, once dear to him,
and in coming to terms with this death as a poet writing an elegy
('this monumental/Argument of the hewn voice'), Thomas has
here indicated the fundamental role of nature in the shaping of
thought and feeling in his verse. The ultimately healing and
regenerative power of nature is now registered in an externalised
vision.
The Map of Love closes with the birthday poem 'Twenty-four years',
which presents an urgent summary of the attitudes and ideas that
inform the early work, reviewing life as a progress to death, the
elemental and elementary town. The image of the tailor, sewing a
shroud even at birth, represents the world of the flesh, the world of
mortal time, and Donne's comment 'Whilest wee are in the body, wee
are but in a pilgrimage, and wee are absent from the Lord,7 marks the
journey; though for Thomas the pilgrimage is back to nature:
Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes . . .

In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.
'Dressed to die', a variation on the slang expression 'dressed to kill',

the poet faces life's journey, the 'sensual strut', emphasising the
physical and sensual potential of man. Importantly, he remains here
the centre of the poem, and doomed by 'the meat-eating sun', in
vivid contrast to the equally deathward but more celebratory and
outward vision of his later birthday poems, with their expansive and
confident assertion of nature's joys and man's worth. We may
contrast the opening line of his thirtieth birthday's 'It was my
thirtieth year to heaven' and the exultant tones of his thirty-fifth
when 'The louder the sun blooms/And the tusked, ramshackling sea
exults' with the earlier 'meat-eating sun'.
But we anticipate the poet's 'fields of praise' as he moved in Deaths
and Entrances from the largely solipsistic universe of the early poetry
to the luminous chronicles of the natural world around him: his
inspiration now 'the green good'S (still punning!) rather than the dark
house of his own body.
Deaths and Entrances
Deaths and Entrances was published in 1946, and the title of the
volume is taken, of course, from Donne's sermon Deaths Duell:
'Our very birth and entrance into this life, is ... an issue from death.,]
The poems in this collection show a notable advance in sympathy
and understanding due, in part, to the impact of war. Also, in the
later poems he writes generally in a mood of reconciliation and
acceptance, having outgrown the earlier rebellious and blasphe-
mous attitudes of the enfant terrible. By this time, particularly in
such poems as 'A Refusal to Mourn' and 'Ceremony After a Fire
Raid' it could be said that Dylan Thomas had become a preacher in
verse. He had become, too, the first great civilian war poet, for
such poems commemorate the victims of large-scale air-raids,
massive bombing a new and terrible feature of the Second World
War, when the holocaust was not confined to the immediate
battlefield. A third, very practical, factor was Thomas's sale of his
early Notebooks in 1941, which marked a decisive break with his
poetry of adolescence. No longer was there the inspiration or
example to return to his introspective world.
Clearly Dylan Thomas's experiences as a fire-watcher in Soho,
where he worked for Strand films in the war years, inspired such
poems as 'Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged
a Hundred' and the magnificent 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid', one
of his major poems, and an instance of his ritualistic verse.
Interestingly his film script Our Country, written at the time (late
1943-early 1944) that he was writing 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid',
depicts, among other aspects of 'the face of war-time Britain', 2 the
bombed streets of London, including shots of St Paul's. Certainly
the language is echoed in his poetry on this theme as these lines,
with their ordinary, commonplace yet heroic lyricism, demons-
trate:
Then birds flying:

Suddenly, easily, as though from another country, over and
106
'Deaths and Entrances' 107
around the still, still-living image in the dead middle of
the hit-flat burnt-black city areas killed at night;
and all the stones remember and sing the cathedral of each
blitzed dead body that lay or lies in the bomber-and-dove-
flown-over cemeteries of the dumb, heroic streets.
And the eyes of St Paul's move over London. 3
'The words were written to be spoken and heard, and not to be

read' was Thomas's illuminating comment on this film script.
Characteristically Thomas used incidents and metaphors from the
life of nature - birds perhaps being its commonest living presence
in the city's streets - to embody roots of healing in contrast to war
and destruction. Incidentally, too, the rhythmical prose and its
adjectival progress (what the poet himself called 'good old 3-
adjectives-a-penny belly-churning Thomas'4 writing to Watkins
about Adventures in the Skin Trade) signposts the way to Under Milk
Wood. As ever in the poetry, of course, there is strict, tightly knit
formal structure: in a letter, again to Watkins, with whom he here
revealingly discussed his poetic practice, he speaks of the ceremo-
nial and musical form and tone - 'It really is a Ceremony, and the
third part of the poem is the music at the end. Would it be called a
voluntary, or is that only music at the beginning?'s Interestingly, in
the same letter, Thomas speaks of the imminent threat of the
German rockets, the V2s, referring to London 'which soon will be
shelled terribly by things that scream up into the stratosphere . . .
and then pour down on to Manresa Road' - the reference to
Manresa Road, where he lived, a familiar, final comic touch. But
evidently he shared the common terror.
'Ceremony After a Fire Raid' was first published in a May Day
Supplement of the leftist (Thomas thereby declining payment) Our
Time dedicated to Lorca, to whose poetry Watkins had introduced
Thomas in 1938. Like 'A Refusal to Mourn', written a year later, it
grieves a child's death during an air-raid, again linking birth and
death; imagery of the consuming flames ('its arms full of fires')
conjoins with the breast of the mother and the grave ('dug' as both
verb and noun announcing the familiar 'birth-death' conjunction):
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
108 The Poetry
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.
The requiem mass of Thomas's ceremony sings the return to the

first darkness that the child suffered through the 'star' that was the
falling bomb, returning her to the centuries of nature's cycle,
ironically echoing too 'the star' of birth (d. 'Vision and Prayer').
Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.
Though miracles cannot atone for the child's suffering, the poet, as
both priest and pantheist in his credo, prays for forgiveness until
her dust sings in nature's mystical unity (d. 'A Winter's Tale': 'The
nightingalelDust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her
wings' - considered later):
Forgive
Us forgive
Give
Us your death that myselves the believers ....
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.
Nature provides images both of tenderness ('child beyond cock-

crow'), vitality ('the flying sea') and compassion (,Love is the last
light'), the child a 'black husk' in the 'fire-dwarfed/Street':
Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.
Thomas's pantheistic ceremony includes not only biblical

('Adam and Eve' and the Agnus Dei 'white ewe lamb'), but pagan
myth and ritual, 'the adorned holy bullock' deliberately echoing
Keats's picture of both religious sacrifice and desolation in 'Ode on
a Grecian Urn', the mysterious priest 'leading the heifer . . . with
garlands blest' and streets of the 'little town. . . evermore. . . silent
. . . desolate':
I know not whether

Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock
Or the white ewe lamb
Or the chosen virgin
Laid in her snow
On the altar of London
Was first to die
In the cinder of the little skull.
In the last section the poet moves from grief and mourning to the
final triumphant music, the organ 'voluntary'. Clearly'steeples',
'statuary', 'weathercocks' and 'luminous cathedrals' etches war-
time London's skyline at night, whether bombed St Paul's
luminous with searchlights or the poet's view from his high office
window in Golden Square, Soho, of 'the blitzed church of St
Anne's . . . the weathervane on the spire was still intact and
glinted, a golden arrow, in the sun'.6 It was here Dylan Thomas
worked on such film scripts as Our Country; and here, too, he did
his rooftop fire-watching. As in Our Country urban destruction
('slum of fire') is mingled with religious metaphor ('the golden
pavements laid in requiems - surely also a 'Golden Square'
prompting!) and above all, images of natural energy and the glory
of the cosmos. The earlier eucharistic imagery of the bread and the
wine is joined with the life-giving puissance of the sea, always one
of Thomas's key affirmations, and the Genesis story of the
creation. In the controlled yet soaring ritualistic music of this final
section the poet transfigures the pain and lamentation to a cosmic
organ-roll of triumph. Only Thomas's recorded reading of it,
undoubtedly his most exalted performance, can evoke and unravel
110 The Poetry
the power of these lines. He is, as he so memorably said of Wilfred
Owen, 'the intoning priest over the ceremony ... the bell of the
broken body':7
Into the organ pipes and steeples

Of the luminous cathedrals,
Into the weathercocks' molten mouths . . .
Over the sun's hovel and the slum of fire
And the golden pavements laid in requiems,
Into the cauldrons of the statuary
Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames,
Into the wine burning like brandy,
The masses of the sea
The masses of the sea under
The masses of the infant-bearing sea
Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter forever
Glory glory glory
The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis' thunder.
Of Thomas's delivery of these lines, the BBC producer Aneurin

Talfan Davies wrote: 'his reading of the closing liturgical lines was
most majestic'. He adds this unforgettable picture:
Thomas sat before the microphone in the Swansea studio, a

forgotten cigarette stub in his fingers, his shoulders thrust back,
his chest bulging out from his oversized jacket and displaying a
vast expanse of rumpled shirt, while in contrast to this almost
comic picture, there came from his mouth like thunder made
articulate [the poem's last-lines].8
Davies claims that Thomas's 'poetry reading was a revelation of

the poet's creative impulse'.
'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London'
also shows Thomas's vision of man's final reabsorption into
natural life. Again, inspired by the incendiary raids on London, the
poet uses biblical language from the account in Genesis of the first
creation of the world to commemorate contemporary events: 'And
darkness was upon the face of the deep. . . and God said, Let there
be light . . . and God divided the light from the darkness . . . And
God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters'
(Genesis 1:2-6). But though he refuses to mourn he does write an
elegy for the child killed by the bombing. He refuses to mourn
because the fact of death must be accepted as part of the processes
of life and mutability in man and nature. Never until the end of the
world, when that unifying darkness, in which human, animal and
vegetal life is fathered, overwhelms all, light and earth obliterated,
and the very seas themselves are stilled:
Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
and never until the poet's own death, whereby he returns to the
primal elements of earth and water, here given religious identity
(,Zion,' 'synagogue'):
And I must enter again the round

Zion of the water bead,
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
will he with tears or prayers lament the burning of the child. The
poet refuses to mourn because the child is once more part of the
elements from whieh she came: her body is part now not of human
existence but the more ancient, elemental unity of earth ('the long
friends'). Mystical reunion with mother earth and the veins of her
own mother has effected nature's redemption from mortality ('the
grains beyond age'). The waters of the Thames, part of nature's
processes of the life and death that are change and transformation
such as London's daughter has suffered, are unmourning:
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,

Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
We may compare Wordsworth's more meditative, less bardie,

elegiac lines on Lucy:
112 The Poetry
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
('A slumber did my spirit seal')
and Shelley's similar, albeit triumphant assertion of the same idea

in 'Adonais': 'He is made one with nature'. In his study Religiolls
Trellds ill English Poetry Fairchild has stated that 'despite all its
Christian images, Thomas's A Refusal to Mourn .. ." is ... loyal
II
to traditional romantic pantheism .... It affirms the unity of all

creatures, human and nonhuman, living and dead, with death as a
return to the holy, hidden germs of life in water and corn'.9 Yet
Dylan Thomas has gone beyond nineteenth-century romantic
pantheism, as represented by Wordsworth, and recast for our own
time this belief in, and sense of, ultimate return to nature. Unlike
the passivity of Wordsworth's lines, Thomas's view of this return
suggests the shared energy of this reabsorption: it is there in the
renewed vigour and resurgence of the last stanza. Nor is it a
momentary drifting into such faith ('A slumber did my spirit seal')
but a sustained and argued belief related to the mythopoeic
concept of man's relationship to nature built up in the rest of the
poet's work. In this context the final line: 'After the first death,
there is no other', 'though provocatively ambiguous ... promises,
not resurrection, but continuing organic life'.10 The thought of the
poem suggests not so much a belief in Christian immortillity but
the simpler belief in the return to first elements embodied in the
commonly held idea of 'pushing up the daisies'. Likewise, in so far
as meaning in Dylan Thomas's poetry is partly the physical and
sensory enactment of the idea, the rhythmic structure promotes a
sellse of the motion, the force, which the child now shares with the
organic and elemental universe she has joined. Similarly the image
of 'the sea tumbling in harness' evokes physical and primal energy.
The ritualistic reading that the poem requires, as evidenced in the
punctuation and structure, and as demonstrated in the poet's own
recitation, is an essential part of its power and effect.
This poem has again indicated two major aspects of the role of
nature in the poetry of Dylan Thomas: his pivotal awareness of the
unity between man and the natural world and its increasingly
mystical and ritualistic expression in the later poetry; and the
poetic craftsmanship by which 'the description of a thought or
action' can be brought 'onto a physical level', which continues as
the basis of the originality of Thomas's poetic style and of his
vision of the world of nature. Though an elegy 'A Refusal to
Mourn' has also anticipated a third aspect, that pantheistic
celebration of the natural universe (incorporating the liturgical
tone and sacramental metaphor of 'Zion of the water bead ...
synagogue of the ear of corn') that is a major preoccupation in the
later work.
The line 'The country is holy: 0 bide in that country kind' from
'In Country Sleep' is perhaps the summa of Thomas's later
development as a poet, subsuming his concern with the ubiquity of
death, with childhood's visionary experience, and with the destiny
of sexual and spiritual love in the shared mutability of human,
animal and vegetal life. The Carmarthenshire countryside of Fern
Hill, near Llangain, and the landscapes of nearby Laugharne
provide, with two exceptions, the inspiration and setting of this
later work. Thomas had known this corner of west Wales since his
earliest days; and his development as a poet is the history of his
increasing immersion in it. 'Dylan had to have West Wales and the
sea and that solitary abandonment' notes Caitlin. II
Undoubtedly the impact of war contributed to the poet's
impulse to re-create childhood's lost vision. The first of such
poems drawing their inspiration from a particular Welsh setting,
and interestingly the last to be taken from some earlier verses in
the Notebooks just before Thomas sold them, was 'The Hunchback
in the Park', completed in July 1941. Cwmdonkin Park, which
bordered the poet's home in Cwmdonkin Drive, is remembered
and evoked in the fluid yet patterned rhythms he was to use in
'Fern Hill', the absence of punctuation deliberately instructing us
in the incantatory reading of the poem Thomas himself used.
Consequently such detail as the hunchback, the park's trees and
pools, the drinking fountain, and the evening bell are charged with
childhood's still haunting resonances, and re-created in flowing
images:
The hunchback in the park

A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock·
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark
114 The Poetry
Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Clearly the poet's recollections of his carefree childhood games in

the park are part of the recherche du temps perdu - 'Proust-like in my
conservatory' he described himself in 1933. 12 It is a desire to re-
create emotionally these times: in such celebrative lines as:
While the boys among willows

Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors
and night's less boisterous but similarly heightened flow of feeling:
All night in the unmade park

After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
The circumstantial precision and relevance of the images has

aroused much critical speculation. Thus there 'was indeed a
hunchback' who frequented the park at this time,13 the customary
fountain basin with the chained cup; and 'tigers' does aptly evoke
the boys' animal games and fantasies - with possibly an echo of
Blake's 'Tyger'. But why, we may ask, were the groves 'blue with
sailors', the wild boys 'innocent as strawberries'? The transferred
epithet from the more familiar 'wild strawberries' and 'innocent
boys' is a characteristic device of Thomas's; while no doubt the
p<?et's knowledge that the strawberry plant reproduces asexually
reinforced for him the idea of sexual innocence. Likewise the
groves where the boys played evoked for the poet the sailor suits
then fashionable for boys, while the park's bluebells, sometimes
called 'sailors' trousers' because of their flowers' similar colour and
shape, were also linked in the poet's mind. But as in 'After the
funeral' it is the nostalgia, the looking back to a now buried past,
that has transformed the Notebook source to a haunted and
haunting recollection, where the bell-like chimes are the sombre
notes of mutability.
If it was the need to turn away from the war and its destruction
which prompted the need to re-create the joys of childhood, clearly
Thomas's frequent return journeys to Wales at this time led to his
poetic inspiration being increasingly centred in the re-creation of
remembered childhood landscapes, places that kept something of
what he later called our 'Edenie hearts' . 14 It was while staying with
his parents in the cottage at Blaen Cwm, Llangain, near Fern Hill
farm and across the estuary from Laugharne, together with Caitlin
and Aeronwy, a cramped household but safe from the flying
bombs then falling on London, that Dylan Thomas wrote to
Vernon Watkins describing 'Poem in October' as 'a Laugharne
poem: the first place poem I've written'. 15 He enclosed a copy in a
second letter and added 'It's got, I think, a lovely slow lyrical
movement' and the apt request 'Will you read it aloud toO?'16
Thomas had contemplated the poem for three years, says Vernon
Watkins,17 and in so far as it is the first of his lyrically expansive
poems, celebrating the natural world in subtly wrought bu~
flowing rhythms and concentrated but exact, radiantly developed,
images it is not surprising that this crucial development in poetic
maturity took three years in its fruition. In 'Poem in October' there
are the first intimations of the optimistic pantheism that informed
the later poems, as the natural life of land and sea celebrates the
poet's birthday walk in the early morning and later awakens in him
the boy he once was. The lines are resonant with the lapping tide,
the calls of seagulls in flight, and the rooks on the wooded slopes
of Sir John's Hill:
It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Pries ted 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.
Biblical metaphor suggests the sacramental identity of the natural

world (,water praying', 'heron/Priested' and later 'the parables of
sunlight', 'the legends of the green chapels'). Interestingly, the
116 The Poetry
heron are priest-like in their solemn stance on the estuary's low
tides; while locally the word 'priest' is used for the implement
fishermen use to kill their catch,18 tapping it on the head, not
unlike the heron's beak stabbing the waters for fish: another
example of Thomas's use of the associative powers of language,
complementing the visual and rhythmic. On this autumn day the
birds of land and sea are flying. The bare branches of the trees they
inhabit are themselves like birds in flight - 'winged trees':
originally 'bare trees' in the manuscript sent to Vernon Watkins
but the substitution of 'winged' is characteristic of Thomas's
method of working through the individual word. Birds fly above
the farms, horses, and sea-waves, greeting the poet on his
birthday: 'flying my name' above the estuary recalls the Mabinogion
derivation of the name Dylan - 'sea-son of wave'. But, more
significantly, October rain showers are transformed into the
shower of long gone childhood days:
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.
Crossing the estuary from his Boat House home, the poet now
ascends Sir John's Hill on the other side of the bay, and sees below
him the dwindling rainy scene of church and castle:
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But 'fond climates and sweet singers' as he listened and wandered
that morning moved him from time present to time past ('beyond
the border'), and the vision of childhood summers like parables of
a sunlit land floods from the sky:
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again 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
In the prismatic light that falls from the skies' windows of nature's
natural cathedral the timeless landscapes, like Vaughan's 'bright
shoots of everlastingness', 19 are relived in the child's intensity of
vision. The increasing importance for Dylan Thomas of time past,
the urgency and poignancy of his Proust-like search, provide the
key to the structural and metaphoric complexity of his verse, as the
boy he once was lives again and it is through his tears and passion
that the poet rejoices in the rediscovered mystical sense of
communion with nature. It is not simply a matter of nostalgic
recollection, but rather the re-creation of the mystery of the boy's
empathy with the natural world. In this heightened, essentially
'illogical, unintellectual,20 and intuitional awareness that nature
affords, the dead enjoy 'the listening/Summertime of the dead'.
The 'true joy' of the child the poet once was, what Wordsworth
called 'the glory and the dream', 21 is visually and passionately
registered in lines where the natural world of trees and stones,
river and sea, fish and songbirds people and activate the boy's
harmonious vision:
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 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.
In a later letter Thomas tells how through tears of remembrance

this Laugharne setting always kept for him a timeless epiphany,
the past undead and held in a present state of happiness, and the
lost paradise regained (d. 'his tears burned my cheeks', 'the
listening/Summertime of the dead'):
118 The Poetry
the clock of sweet Laugharne ... that tells the time backwards,
so that soon, you walk about the town ... to the gulls on the
Strand, in the only Golden Age ... and then, but only through
my tears, the hundreds of years of the colossal broken castle,
owls asleep in the centuries, the same rocks calling as in Arthur's
time which always goes on there as, unborn, you climb the
stones to see river, sea, cormorants nesting like thin headstones
... and the undead ... the ... gulled, and estuaried one state of
happiness!22
This detail is close to the morning stroll that the poet takes on his
thirtieth birthday; more importantly, it hints at how the structure
and metaphor of such works as 'Poem in October' derive from the
poet's aim of embodying 'remembered tellings' for as he later
explained the rememberer may live himself back into active
participation in the remembered scene, adventure, or spiritual
condition. 23 Thus, while immediate delight in the beauty of this
scene has turned into the deeper, 'active participation' of the
visionary state nature can give, the sense of the oneness of man
and nature presented in terms of the boy's revivified joy, the poem
closes with the passing of the epiphany, a return to the actual
autumn scene of falling leaves ('leaved with October blood'). Self-
admonishingly he declares his longing that at a future time ('a
year's turning') he may again be able to celebrate on this hill his
'heart's truth':
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 then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
o may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
Remarkably, just over a year later Dylan Thomas did again

rediscover his 'heart's truth' in 'Fern Hill'. There is, however, an
interesting difference. While 'Poem in October' begins with
evocation of the present natural setting and it is in the course of the
poem/walk that he experiences and re-creates the childhood

vision, 'Fern Hill' sings from the beginning with the 'remembered
teIlings', registering the fading of innocence and joy, the chains of
mutability only at the close.
'It is a poem about happiness', said Dylan Thomas in 1950 about
the projected poem 'In Country Heaven' . An earlier and
undoubtedly the most famous of his poems about happiness, was
'Fern Hill', named after the Carmarthenshire farm whose landsca-
pes inspired the 'remembered tellings' the poem records. Near the
end of his life Thomas described the farm as 'a place with which I
have come to associate all the summer of my child[hoodJ ... a
lovely farm - a lonely farm - and a place with which I have come to
associate all the golden - never shone sun like that old rolling'. 24
That childhood and summer gold now shines on orchard and field,
daisies and barley, barking foxes and whinnying horses, lilting
house and pebbly streams in this uniquely radiant and singing
paean of happiness - perhaps the most difficult of poetic subjects.
Thomas neither philosophises, like Wordsworth, on childhood's
lost 'visionary gleam' nor evokes it with Blakean simplicities of
infant joy, but re-creates in a physical and direct way the
experience of childhood so that, as his friend Vernon Watkins
declared, 'out of a lump of texture or nest of phrases he created
music, testing everything by physical feeling'. 25 The 'created
music' casts an irresistible rhythmic spell as the state of joy,
excitement and wonder flows before us:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time 1 lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
A 'prince ... lordly' in his happiness and youthful innocence,

unaware of mortality, for Thomas's childhood tale is told not 'once
upon' but 'once below a time'; for him the rural settings and joys
flow by with a visionary intensity that invites our participation in
its emotional and sensuous life. It corresponds with the poet's call
120 The Poetry
for the 'active participation in the remembered scene'/" and is in
contrast with the heavily elegiac meditative tone of Hardy's lines
('heydays' a possible derivation?):
Swift as the light

I flew my faery flight;
Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.
I did not know

That heydays fade and go.
(,Regret Not Me')
Dylan Thomas's aim is to create the boy's ecstatic movement, his

heydays and 'faery flight', so that although Thomas used a
consistent and transforming development of metaphor (as 'apple
boughs ... apple towns ... windfall light' demonstrates), rhyth-
mic and sensuous intoxication subsumes the traditional use of
language in the immediacy and directness of our response.
Consequently the subtle intellectual sub text of the metaphor yields
on the surface to our emotional involvement. The farm landscapes,
birds, and beasts re-create for the adult poet the lost, visionary
world of childhood, and interestingly the child is the only person
in the poem:
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
Characteristically Thomas mingles Christian metaphor ( sabbath',

'holy' and later the child, echoing the nativity story, is 'blessed
among stables') and pagan nature-worship; while the familiar
nursery rhyme 'Little Boy Blue,/Come blow your hornlThe sheep's
in the meadowlThe cow's in the corn' is no doubt echoed in such
phrases as 'the calves/Sang to my horn' and the later 'sky blue
trades'.
Again, the 'Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive' adopts Rimbaud's

reasoned derangement of the senses to produce this visionary
verse. The farm landscapes have the fiery and fluid intensity of
impressionist painting, as they evoke the boy's excited delight in
fields where 'fire green as grass', 'tunes from the chimneys', air
and water flow by in one intoxicating, sensory flux. The substitu-
tion of 'sun' for 'day' in the familiar phrase 'all the day long'
introduces these luminous scenes sustained by hortatory and
hypnotic rhythms:
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
Night, too, and its natural worlds of owls and night jars, protects
the child who rides to sleep, ricks and horses entering the
beneficent moonlit dark. In similar, though less ecstatic vein, the
poet relates how he fell asleep, in the prose description of his visit
to the farm (,The Peaches'): 'There was a stream below the
window; I thought it lapped against the house all night until I
slept.t27 Now we watch and listen 'all the moon long' under the
stars-'it's a poem for evening and tears' Dylan's words:
And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the night-jars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
With the new day the world returns in all its pristine, primeval
glory and appears to the boy as Eden did to Adam. It is as though
he sees Creation spinning from the hand of God the creator ('the
first, spinning place'). Thomas personifies the farm as a returning
wanderer, and the lines have a sensuous beauty that in the poet's
empathy with the natural world recalls Keats's personification of
autumn, though Thomas's evocation has more religious, albeit
pantheistic, tones of feeling and celebration. He seeks the ancient
lineage of the morning's birth (he seeks a similar ancestry for the
returning spring in 'Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the
cuckoo's month'):
122 The Poetry
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
Such lines are dose to Traherne's: 'I sawall in the peace of Eden;
Heaven and Earth did sing my Creator's praises, and could not
make more melody to Adam, than to me. All time was Eternity and
a perpetual Sabbath.,2R Whereas for Shakespeare or Keats life
progresses towards a serene consummation where 'ripeness is all',
for certain seventeenth-century writers such as Vaughan and
Traherne, and Dylan Thomas follows them in this, childhood, with
its intimations of immortality, is the ideal age. Then we were a rung
nearer heaven. Vaughan celebrated childhood's innocent and
visionary moments in such lines as 'Happy those early days! When
I1Shin'd in my Angell-infancy' (,The Retreat'); while Traherne's
glimpses of eternity through the child's delight in nature in such
meditations as 'The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which
never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood
from everlasting to everlasting. . .. The green trees when I saw
them first ... transported and ravished me ... made my heart to
leap, and almost mad with ecstasy,29 suggest how, like Dylan
Thomas, he was 'environ'd with eternity,30 in this blissful state.
Substituting heart, with its associations of love and joy, for the
word 'day' in the familiar phrase Thomas continues to evoke his
ecstasy in elaborately wrought but essentially simple images of the
farm's environment (foxes, pheasants, sun, sky, hay), where all is
held in the spell of innocence and grace:
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothillg I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
There are, however, intimations of mutability and mortality as the

adult poet hints, for these morning songs must fade like the 'lamb
white days' (a New Testament image) of the 'green and golden'
children. Soon come lengthening shadows, the migrating swallows
at summer's end, for though 'young and easy' the child was also
paradoxically 'green and dying' like all nature's manifestations,
animal and vegetal. Both innocent and passing from innocence,
held in the chains of mortality, the child's morning song rings like
the sea's sounds in these lilting landscapes. It is a poetic vision
aptly defined in Yeats's words 'meaning by vision the intense
realisation of a state of ecstatic emotion symbolised in a definite
imagined region'. 31 Thus in 'Fern Hill', as increasingly in the later
verse, 'nature-description becomes a language for feeling',32 so that
it is not simply a matter of Thomas's poetry delighting in
describing the natural world but rather the means by which the
'active participation' of the reader in the life of nature described is
effected.
T.S. Eliot has said of the poetry of vision:
Dante's is a visual imagination. It is a visual imagination in a

different sense from that of a modern painter of still life; it is
visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw
visions. It was a psychological habit ... seeing visions was once
a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of
dreaming. 33
I think this comment can illuminate the role of nature in Thomas's

later verse: the natural world is conveyed not with the static
realism of a still-life presentation but rather with the fluid, active
and heightened evocation more peculiar to visionary experience;
while the 'disciplined' aspect of this presentation lies in the
elaborate, painstakingly achieved structure of sound, which pro-
duces an intensified emotional and affective response in the
reader. Though of course it must be remembered that the
relationship between form and content is not a divisible one, as
Dylan Thomas pointed out to Vernon Watkins, emphasising 'the
wholeness' in his work:
124 The Poetry
I think you are liable ... to underrate the value - or, rather, the
integrity, the wholeness - of what I am saying or trying to make
clear that I am saying, and often to suggest alterations or
amendments for purely musical motives. 34
We may, too, usefully recall Coleridge's 'I see them all so

excellently fair/I see, not feel, how beautiful they are'. 35 The
impulse and aim in Thomas's poetry is to 'feel', to share in, and
thereby register an 'active participation' in the beauty and wonder
of the natural world. The duality of the role of nature in his poetry
lies in the fact that it is a major preoccupation thematically and also
determines his poetic style, since Thomas's intuition of the organic
unity of man and nature led him to stress modes of sensory and
instinctive apprehension, and 'the strong stressing of the physical'
in the texture and aim of his verse. As an iconoclastic eighteen-
year-old he had revealingly, if unfairly, criticised the ratiocinative
and reflective, static rather than active, aspect of Wordsworth's
nature-mysticism:
He hadn't a spark of mysticism in him .... And mysticism is

illogical, unintellectual, and dogmatic ... Wordsworth was ...
the platitudinary reporter of Nature in her dullest moods ... He
writes about mysticism but he is not a mystic; he writes what
mystics have been known to feel. 36
Interestingly, Dylan Thomas excludes from his dismissal of

Wordsworth the 'Immortality Ode' and 'the pantheistic creed
expressed in Tintern Abbey'37 whose sentiments, though perhaps
less their expression, Thomas shared. Nevertheless his criticisms
show his early awareness of the non-rational basis of mysticism,
and the feeling of energy and active involvement rather than
trance or dream his own verse sought to bring about in the reader.
Of course, the element of 'discipline' in Thomas's verse is
demonstrably present in the unremitting and elaborate craftsman-
ship that lay behind the seemingly 'pure' inspiration of the
effortlessly flowing rhythms, with their echoing verbal harmonies.
The fact that Thomas's poetry is more easily understood after
hearing it read aloud, particularly by the poet, proves the
importance of the aural pattern in its structure. Sound and rhythm
frequently indicate which words and which ideas are linked; for
the structure of the poem was often musical rather than syntacti-
cal. Thomas often began a poem with a phrase or rhythm. This
would be modulated, extended and brought into a longer sequence
of word-patterns. There were over two hundred manuscript
versions of 'Fern Hill', not unusual in his later, scrupulously
crafted verse, since after adding a new phrase or even single word
or small alteration in punctuation, Thomas would rewrite the
whole poem. It was a method of composition he favoured, giving
as it did an organic growth and unity to the emotional and
intellectual life of the poem. The process resembled that of musical
notation, following an already determined musical pattern, with a
subtly increasing interplay of chiming consonants and vowels, as
the stanzas of 'Fern Hill' show. Relatedly, the corresponding lines
in each of the six stanzas have, with rare exceptions, the same
number of syllables: a sound-structure that links stanza to stanza,
as well as line to line. Above all, it is one maintained not at the
expense of meaning but is rather a method of shaping, developing
and communicating the sense - in all senses!
'A Winter's Tale', included in Deaths and Entrances, is the first of
the pastoral poems that weave, and seek to reconcile, the pattern of
life and death in terms of past and present. This increasingly
proved his primary inspiration, as his preoccupation with the past
widened and deepend beyond his concern with childhood. 'A
Winter's Tale' is 'the tale of rebirth which nature tells ['the
snowblind twilight ferries' and later the reborn nightingale 'spells'
and the voice of the dust of water 'tells'] even in the dead of
winter' .38 The poem opens with an expansive yet exactly evocative
celebration of country life in winter whose senuous richness
appeals to sight, sound, touch and smell:
It is a winter's tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,
And the stars falling cold,

And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.
126 The Poetry
Thus 'hand folded flakes' evokes the shape and touch of the falling
snowflakes, 'stealthy sail' contrasting their delicately arriving
whiteness with the breath of cattle in the cold air; while the smell
of hay, the owl's cry, and the movement of smoke from the
farmhouse chimney (like the white of the sheep in the fields), build
up the physical immediacy of this picture.
The present tense of these opening stanzas changes to the past
tense as the tale of the man 'Tom and alone in a farm house in a
foldlOf fields' begins; and we see him, 'the hurled outcast of light',
at prayer: 'He knelt, he wept, he prayed.' It is a prayer for love,
expressed in sexual terms, but a love that survives 'the time dying
flesh astride':
Deliver him, he cried,

By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride
At the moment of prayer for love, nature comes mystically alive

from the past, and the tale is now narrated in the present tense, as
the poet calls the reader's attention to this reborn life. Initially the
emphasis is on sound, and the 'intricately dead' come miraculously
to life in delicate and precisely recorded images:
Listen. The minstrels sing

In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring
Is telling. The wizened

Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind
swept strings
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.
At this moment's vision of the revivified past life of nature, the'she

bird' appears on the snow that is like manna on the ground at this
time of miraculous transformation, and the narrative resumes in
the past tense:
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet
downed.
Again, the symbol of regeneration has sexual energy and implica-

tions. In the next stanza description of the revivified life of nature
continues in the present tense, now with a visual emphasis; 'look'
rather than 'listen' is the poet's address to the reader:
Look. And the dancers move

On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.
The carved limbs in the rock

Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.
Thus, the long-dead horses gallop again, and trees, rocks, leaves,
stones and water, like the dancers and the pigeons, share this
renewal of energy and life and surpassing joy. We may contrast
Eliot's evocatlun of the past in 'East Coker', presented in the
context of human history rather than nature and with ecclesiastic
rather than dionysiac emphasis:
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of men and women
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie. 39
Stanzas 17-22 relate (in the past tense) how the man followed
the she bird across winter landscapes; while the vision of nature
dying back into the past is again recorded as a present reality, its
rites now completed:
128 The Poetry
The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.
Time now reasserts its dominance, burying 'the spring weather' of

rejuvenation and 'exultation'. Significantly, man and nature shared
the regenerative power of sexual love (we may compare the earlier,
less lyrically expansive expression of this in Thomas's earlier verse
'And yellow was the multiplying sand/Each golden grain spat life
into its fellow').4o A bird is the mythological figure which brings
about this dionysiac and ecstatic state in man and the natural
world, momentarily defeating time and death. As in Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale there has been a movement from the absence of
love to its revelation whose source owes more to nature and its
myths than to reason or psychology. At the poem's close, sexual
unity is mysteriously linked to unity with nature. If we compare
this with Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan' there is both a reversal of
sexual roles, for it is the man who is visited by the part real, part
symbolic bird; and, perhaps more importantly, a sense of harmony
and renewal ('melting snow') rather than of rape and violence.
Yeats, too, is more concerned with the social, historical consequ-
ences ('A shudder in the loins engenders thererrhe broken wall,
the burning roof and tower/And Agamemnon dead,).41 Contrast-
ingly, it is with that 'image of Nature as Paradise that has
continued to haunt the imagination of Men'42 and in a climax
where '''she bird" and the man ,"die" in sexual union, but phoenix-
like rise to new life'43 that Dylan Thomas's tale ends, winter snows
appropriately melting in the springtime of nature's bridal chamber,
albeit with intimations of the grave:
And he was hymned and wedded,

And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed
Bird, he was brought low,

Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.
But it is now time to turn to Thomas's last poems, what he called
'statements made on the way to the grave,44 but which energeti-
cally and healingly registered that optimistic pantheism his last
poems divined, while in solitary meditation he watched the
passing life of land and sea from his 'water and tree room on the
cliff' .45 It is a setting now famous and, unlike many stories that
accrued to the poet's life, a place of true legend and poetic
pilgrimage.
Collected Poems
The last poems include the seven new poems in Collected Poems
(1952), major contributions, complex in their craftsmanship and
metaphoric richness yet resonant and enduring in their poetic
appeal, and the two unfinished poems in manuscript 'In Country
Heaven' and 'Elegy' included in Collected Poems 1934-53 (1988).
Like all Thomas's later, and finest work, the last poems were
slowly composed, partly because of their meticulous structure and
partly because their passionate artifice envisioned the linked and
increasing eschatological themes of his later work. Contrary to the
falsifying myth of some critics and biographers who show little
understanding of Thomas's poetic aim and achievement, they
show, not a diminution of inspiration in these last years but new
and confident directions.
While Thomas always wrote humorous verse, it was only
'Lament', which tells the story of a lecherous, roaring boy, that he
chose to include in his Collected Poems, no doubt because it shares
the careful craftsmanship and precision in development of image
of his finest work. And while sustaining the Rabelaisian comedy
throughout its account of a devil-may-care, randy life-style it has
the darker, more tragic resonances that attend the end of this
roaring boy. Thomas completed this poem in March 1951, and
interestingly work sheets include a dedication to Henry Miller,
whom he visited at Big Sur in May 1950, and also a provisional title
'Miner's Lament'. In 1939 Thomas called Tropic of Cancer 'the best
modern fucking book',l and later relates how his friend Ivy,
landlady of Brown's, 'hid his books in the oven'!2 The poem has
five twelve-line stanzas, with nine or ten syllables to the line, and a
regular rhyme scheme (A BCD ABC D E F E F), though each
stanza has a slightly varied refrain. Clearly this chosen elaborate
structure both gave the poet confidence and brought a lucid
progress to the poet's handling of his theme. Here the poet is
returning to his early vein of satire on the narrowness of Welsh
Nonconformity, which he still delights in mocking as the black
sheep ('spit') of the chapel 'fold' looks back to his youth:
130
'Collected Poems' 131
When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ramrod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Ninepin down on the donkey's common,
And on seesaw Sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.
He develops his imagery, satirically, from the chapel ('black beast

of the beetles' pews', 'the black cross of the holy house'). With
sexual puns, too (,gooseberry', 'tit, 'wick-dipping'), and apt use of
the word 'coal' - as familiar a part of the South Wales scene as the
chapel - Dylan Thomas artfully develops the lewd humou'f and
impending comic doom. Triumphantly the 'old ramrod' recalls the
summer of his lusty career when he cared little about his 'coal-
black soul':
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,

Oh, time enough when the blood creeps cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal-black soul!
The poet mocks the conventional Nonconformist code, the refrain

mingling humour and pathos:
When I was a half of the man I was

And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ramrod, dying of downfall)
This downfall to a condition of physical exhaustion is described

with apt sexual imagery ('crumpled horn', 'limptime', 'slunk
pouting out'), and the old rake declares:
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,

Gristle and rind, and a roarer's life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.
132 The Poetry
Surrounded finally by chastity, piety, innocence and modesty, the
'deadly virtues' of a 'Sunday wife'! - the poet helplessly and
selfmockingly concludes:
For, oh, my soul found a Sunday wife

In the coal black sky and she bore angels! . . .
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
Significantly, this poem was written at the time Dylan Thomas was
writing Under Milk Wood (we may note such phrases as 'the
gooseberry wood', 'milky grass'); his work on the play
undoubtedly assisted in the dramatic, ironic and comic portraiture
the poem achieves. Its mingling of robust comedy and sexual
pathos is close to the mood and themes of Under Milk Wood.
Evidently, as well as a major new vein in his prose writing, Thomas
had here developed a rich, though minor, vein, in his poetry.
It was in 1951 that Thomas finished his most popular and his
clearest poem, 'Do not go gentle into that good night', written for
his agnostic father who was suffering from cancer of the throat,
'the only person' wrote Dylan 'I can't show the ... poem to ...
who doesn't know he's dying,.3 Random jottings on a manuscript
notepad show the son's anguish at his father's suffering: 'Oh pain
consumed him', 'Pain made him skin and bone and spirit'.4
Anguish grief and passionate protest, a plea and protest that has
since been universally shared, ring clearly and unforgettably
through a poem whose intensity of feeling is structured in the strict
artifice of the villanelle: a poem, on two rhymes, in five tercets and
a quatrain, the first line repeated as sixth, twelfth and eighteenth;
the third as ninth, fifteenth and last. Examination of the poem
shows that Thomas followed this pattern exactly. Skilfully, the
poet has taken a very familiar phrase, 'good night', and given it a
profound, sonorous, yet easily grasped, common identity as an
image of death:
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.
The second stanza registers the despair of wise men and the failure
of their writings to produce the revelation of light at death; the
third tells of the similar frustration of good men finally seeing the
frailty of their good deeds; while the fourth relates the grief of
those who wildly, thoughtlessly, enjoyed their days. The last
stanza focuses on the poet's dying father 'on the sad height' of his
passing, an image of a hill-like Golgotha rather than, for example,
the serene setting of Tennyson's crossing the bar. There is a
Yeatsian urgency in the passionate call of the repeated 'rage', as in
the injunction 'be gay' of the previous stanza. Thomas's protest
and language echoes Yeats's 'Did all old men and women rage. . .
As I do now against old age?' in 'The Tower'. We may also aptly
recall Yeats's 'raging in the dark' ('The Choice') and the tragic
gaiety celebrated in 'Lapis Lazuli', a poem on the inevitable
extinction of man and his works, and one that Thomas included in
his readings-'Poetry and its synonym, Yeats' Thomas's tribute in
a 1953 letter to Vernon Watkins:
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread . . .

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head.
He particularly loved the heroic finale 'Their ancient, glittering

eyes, are gay'. While Dylan Thomas's use of 'rage' and 'gay' clearly
owes something to Yeats, nevertheless his poem uniquely rings
with a passionate directness and common feeling, supremely
eloquent and paradoxically supremely artificial.
It is in the last poems, imaginatively nourished by the seascapes
and rural settings of Laugharne and the surrounding Carmarthen-
shire countryside, that Thomas's absorption with nature moves to
full realisation. Not only does the Laugharne seascape, the bay a
shared grave, become the one world of man and nature on their
voyage to death, as in 'Poem on his Birthday' and 'Over Sir John's
hill'. There is, too, as we shall see demonstrated in such poems as
'In Country Sleep', 'Prologue' and 'In the white giant's thigh', a
significant development in the role of nature, so that the pastoral
world evoked is a source of affirmation and pantheistic harmony.
In 'Poem on his Birthday' Thomas's concern with individual
death has become a universal sense of the doom shared with all
natural life in 'the bent bay's grave' as he watches from 'his house
on stilts high among beaks I And palavers of birds'. He surveys
flounders (a species of flat fish), curlews, minnows and hawks, the
life of sea and air hunting their prey, whose death is shown as part
134 The Poetry
of nature's pattern. From his cliffside home, on this day that is but
a grain in time's shifting sands, the world of the bay is imagined as
a graveyard (d. Auden's view of the world as a hospital) in which
every living thing moves inexorably towards death. The poet's
own birthday is like driftwood against this wider, final harmony:
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 ...
Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.
The herons are living-and-dying-birds (the poet does not see but
'perceives I Herons walk in their shroud'), yet are also emblematic
of nature's design and purpose, who both follow and ritualistically
commemorate this.
The poet witnesses, records and celebrates the scene, as in 'Over
Sir John's hill' and 'Prologue', finches and fishes moving before
him as he sings the anguish of this beautiful and doomed world.
Evening falls softly as thistledown on this pageant of nature's
mutability that includes, too, the past life of the bay ('wynds and
shells of drowned I Ship towns'):
In the thistledown fall,

He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fisl')es 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.
Perception of the delicate balance of the living and the dead in this
natural setting in lines such as 'Dolphins dive in their turn turtle
dust' resembles in attitude and image Vernon Watkins's 'Dolphins,
plunging from death into birth' from his poem 'Rhossili', 5
published in 1948; and there are other marked similarities of
language, such as Watkins's 'sandgrains and seawaves', 'overhead
wheel the herring-gulls, each with a plummet' and Thomas's
'sandgrain day' and 'gulls on their cold, dying trails'. Likewise the
idea of the curlews working their way towards death is paralleled
in Watkins's earlier 'Fidelity to the Living': 'The light, the bird at
peace in the sky, though pulled by a plummet of lead.,6
Dylan Thomas's description of the one world of man and nature
on their voyage to death in 'Poem on his Birthday' contrasts with
the dark journey to oblivion, autumnal and bleak, of D.H.
Lawrence's 'The Ship of Death'. It contrasts, too, with Yeats's
dichotomy between the natural, i.e. the phYSical, and the spiritual
in the voyage to death explored in 'Sailing to Byzantium', where
the 'dying generations' of 'fish, flesh, or fowl' and their 'sensual
ml.lsic' are dismissed in favour of the 'Monuments of unageing
intellect'. Rather it is with a deeper and more joyous sense of unity
with the physical life of land and sea that Thomas approaches
death.
Though death brings terror:

And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
it is 'love unbolts the dark'. 'Heaven' remains an illusion that the

poet paradoxically records rather than a Christian reality:
Heaven that never was

Nor will be ever is always true,
and, significantly, it is in terms of the natural world that Thomas

speaks of the dead:
And, in that brambled void,

Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.
Interestingly, the image of 'blackberry' to speak of the dead (albeit

scurrilously) occurs in Chaucer's 'Pardoner's Prologue': 'Once
dead ... their souls ... can go blackberrying'. Interestingly, too,
Vernon Watkins's perception of the spiritual continuity of histori-
cal time, with its 'shored up' past life, in 'Fidelity to the Dead':
136 The Poetry
The withered leaf is blest, and the bird with shrunk claw in the
shingle.
Under the shawl the life-yielding hand has caught the passion-
ate thread?
is similar to Dylan Thomas's version of the past life of the bay,

embracing the past existence of land and sea and the creatures
therein:
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,
In these lines Thomas suggests his own unity with these earlier
forms of life once he loses human identity, although via the pain
and, terror of death. This continuing process of existence whereby
at death a benign nature removes man from terror and uncertainty
by re-immersion in the natural world is the theme explored, as we
shall see, in 'In Country Sleep'.
In this, the last of Thomas's completed poems, living man, as
represented by the poet, is defined in terms of the four elements,
his five senses, and his capacity for love:
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,

Count my blessings aloud:
But it is the poet's increasing faith in the natural universe of sun

and sea, spring hillsides and bird-song, his delight in the exulting
energy of the sea and the 'bouncing hills', that is the last, deepest
cause for celebration:
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, rams hackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
Than 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 thunderclap spring.
Despite the opening elegiac pastoral, as the life of land and sea
moves to death, these final stanzas register the vigour and ubiquity
of the energising force that drives the natural world, the creator
rather than destroyer given emphasis ('louder', 'bouncing', 'Taller',
'thunderclap'). Stuart Holroyd has suggested that 'the god of
Dylan Thomas is wholly immanent, felt along the blood stream ....
He possesses no attributes ... but is conceived rather as a vague
Force or Power which is responsible for the harmony of the world
and is most discernible in that harmony'. He further notes that
'generally speaking, it [pantheism] represents the belief or feeling
that all creation has a common identity because all are manifesta-
tion of God'. 8 Certainly the last poems, with their pastoral settings
and ethos, seem to explore and define the natural world in terms of
a pantheism where God appears to be the immanent and vital
'Force or Power' rather than a transcendental being who controls
the cosmos while being outside it - the theological standpoint
sometimes found in R.S. Thomas's later verse.
Though charting his progress to death the close of 'Poem on his
Birthday' triumphantly registers the poet's final sense not of
individual isolation but of unity with the cosmos: the 'small,
bonebound island,9 as the poet spoke of himself in youth, has
reached the wider vision of 'the mansouled fiery islands'. It is an
image that includes the brightening stars as night falls and sea and
sky meet on the horizon: we may recall the poem's earlier
references 'Steered by the falling stars', 'the stars' seashore dead'
and 'the still quick stars'; for Thomas's vision now extends out and
into the cosmos, and away from the dark house of his own body,
the bright stars spanned with angels like Hopkins's 'fire-folk sitting
in the air' ('The Starlight Night'). I am indebted to Walford Davies'
suggestion that the 'man-souled fiery islands' implies an enriching
138 The Poetry
sense of humanity, signalling the humanism that doses a poem
whose context is primarily the life of nature:
and how
More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.
Worksheets of the poem (see pp. 293-6; numbered 1-4) show

how the poem was built up word by word, for once Thomas had
established the themes and stanza structure then individual words
were the basis of its growth, the word changed in accord with the
chosen pattern of sound and meaning. Thus 'shambling sky' (1) is
changed to 'seizing sky' in the final poem, an image that vividly
and exactly evokes death's ubiquity for the birds in flight; the
vague 'spiralling cloud' (1) becomes the image of the poet's
anguish and torment 'serpent cloud'. 'Herons on one leg, bless' (2)
is changed by apt metaphor to the themetically subtler 'herons,
steeple stemmed, bless'; likewise the substitution of 'dust' for 'pall'
brilliantly encapsulates the idea of metamorphosis in the line
'Dolphins dive in their turnturtle pall' (1). The worksheets also
illustrate the word lists that Thomas commonly employed for his
selection of image and rhyme. Sometimes unwanted words were
systematically crossed out (2), while this page also lists words of
similar meanings. The numbers refer to sections in Roget's
Thesaurus,1O an obvious source book for Thomas's method of
composition. Sometimes the poet lists possible rhymes: ball, call,
crawl, haul, squall, trawl, wall (3); sometimes words with related
meanings: keening, requiem, jeremiad, dirge, sackcloth, cypress
bell, angelus (4). Likewise the phrase "'fanes" [the word means
temple] of the foam' (4) includes the possibilities 'chantries' and
'minsters'. Folio 4 represents for the most part a blind alley as far as
the form the completed poem took, although the ideas that inform
the poem are more plainly set out than in their final interwoven,
metaphoric shaping. Thus we have the poet's view of himself and
his craft on his thirty-fifth birthday:
At half his bible span,

A man of words who'd drag down the stars to his lyric oven,
He looks back at his years. (4)
and his view of past time as 'The dead years spinning back to the
dark' (4). Close study of these manuscripts reveals the word by
word shaping and perfecting, the patient and meticulous process
of selection whereby the right word ultimately finds its right place
in the pattern, like discovering the appropriate piece in a jigsaw -
though not from a diminishing pile! Evidently, no poet worked
more painstakingly, more unhurriedly; for a complex artistry
reined Thomas's imagination in this unfolding scroll of nature's
design and purpose. The poet paints a crowded canvas, fascinated
by its artifice and tirelessly testing each and every word.
The comment in 'Poem on his Birthday'
finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky
is a general description of the particular incident that 'Over Sir

John's hill' describes, the poem itself perhaps most closely
illustrating how Thomas's inspiration drew from his cliffside
vantage point. The estuary and hill formed the view from the large
picture windows of his 'water and tree room on the cliff'; and it is
easy to see how the poem started, for a hawk seeking its prey was a
familiar sight, the sunlight dazzling its wings like a killer fire:
Over Sir John's hill,

The hawk on fire hangs still.
'Noosed' again suggests the hawk is the agent of death on the hill
that is place of execution ('fiery tyburn') for the blithe, doomed
birds. As in a richly detailed painting the scene unfolds, sun and
hawk and high clouds in last radiance as dusk beings ('hoisted
cloud, 'drop of dusk'). The sparkling light of the setting sun on the
waves transforms the estuary into a 'crystal harbour vale', a watery
domain where 'the sea cobbles sail' and herons cast their stilt-like
wavering shadows. But the time and setting is resonant too with
bird-song of 'sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrang-
ling hedges'. Evidently 'swansing' suggests not only their song at
the day's end but the last song of those soon to die, in this allegoryl
bestiary on the human condition. Initially enacting the swoop of
the hawk the verse changes to an elegiac rhythm after the kill as
the heron, familiar living yet emblematic figure in Thomas's
pastoral world (d. 'heron I Priested shore'), enters the drama,
140 The Poetry
fishing in the river Towy that flows into the estuary. The heron both
witnesses and commemorates the action as, shaped like a headstone,
his beak dips into the water; 'tilted headstone' like the dolphins'
'turnturtle dust' encapsulating Thomas's vision of life-in-death:
The flash the noosed hawk

Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron
In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.
Covered with jackdaws Sir John's Hill wears the judge's black cap,
and the allegory of guilt and justice is continued in the use of
'gulled' to describe the doomed birds; indeed throughout the
poem the images are both visual and allegorical in their implication
of natural justice in nature's hierarchic predatoriness and ubi-
quitous mortality. Thus 'Come and be killed' calls the hawk with
the nursery rhyme's simplicity,l1 the heron now the 'elegiac
fisherbird' paddling in the estuary's 'pebbly dab-filled I Shallow
and sedge'. Sedge denotes not only the grass-like plant growing in
watery places and home of the sedge-warbler, a common British
bird, but is also the word for a flock of herons. Ralph Maud relates
that a circled note on Thomas's worksheets reads 'Sedge is a lot of
herons' and nearby is the phrase 'a sedge of heron stilts'. Clearly
this led Thomas to choose 'shallow and sedge' rather than the
variants 'shallow and shadow', 'shallow and shade', 'shallow and
stones', 'shallow and shelves',l2 a characteristic and fascinating
illustration of Thomas's method of composition. And now the poet
enters the scene, later compared aptly to Aesop as he tells his fable
of nature's, and by implication human life's, deathward design. He
reads in nature the book of life, discerning death in a shell, relic of a
once living creature:
Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles

In the pebbly dab-filled
Shallow and sedge, and 'dilly dilly' calls the loft hawk,
'Come and be killed',
I open the leaves of the water at a passage
Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sand crabs
prancing
And read, in a shell,

Death clear as a buoy's bell.
Death permeates the closing stanza: the elms are 'looted' now
their singing birds are gone, and the natural setting is itself in
mourning ('tear of the Towy', 'wear-willow river'), and owl and
heron provide sounds of elegy and grief. In his recording Thomas
pronounced tear in this sense, though he read it as tear to Watkins
(see p. 59) implying perhaps a secondary meaning as the shallow
part of a river used for fishing, as well as rhyming it with 'wear-
willow'. The word 'grave' suggests, as a verb 'engrave', the poet's
carving of his ritualistic poetry of remembrance, marking nature's
rites; while as a noun it embodies the idea of the estuary as a
graveyard in which all nature, as in 'Poem on his Birthday', moves
inexorably to death. The whispering heron's wings, the hooting
owl, and flowing waters break the sound of elegiac silence in this
sculpted frieze. And dusk falls, almost a palpable experience in the
delicate music of this threnody, with its precise images and all
enveloping cadences. The river mirrors the heron's flight and
snapt feathers fall like snow in the gathering dark while the poet
carves, before the night that will engulf him too, these notes 'for
the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing', the traditional sea-
borne image of death embracing man and the animal creation. For
throughout the poem the poet has interceded on behalf of the birds
of the bay in rhythms and language biblical in origin:
the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,

Have mercy on.
God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,
For their souls' song.
In this poem's portrayal of the life of nature, whose chief

protagonists have been the birds of this estuary, Thomas has
woven his themes of mutability and death in a living pastoral
world of hillside and seascape. Characteristic, too, is the elabo-
rately wrought structure that determines the dramatic flow of the
verse; for it is composed of five twelve-line stanzas, each with the
rhyme scheme A ABC C 0 E A E 0 0, and the corresponding lines
of each stanza keeping a patterned syllabic count.
Similarly inspired is 'Prologue', but more directly and simply
descriptive, and a more expansive instance of this pastoral verse.
Picturing the summer's end and the fishermen crow-black on the
horizon, sandboys at play, herons, 'shells / That speak seven seas'
and 'Geese nearly in heaven', the poet looks at sunset from his 'sea
142 The Poetry
shaken house'. He writes in a world 'at poor peace' for his readers
('you strangers'), yet his art is sacred ('song/Is a burning and
crested act'), for Noah-like he is building the ark of his poetry into
which he invites all nature's creatures. In the first half of the poem
he focuses on the natural life of sea and estuary, while in the
second it is the animals of the nearby countryside he welcomes
and greets:
Haloo, on plumbed bryns,

o my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
Who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hair!
'Bryn' is the Welsh word for hill; and no doubt 'reverent rook'
owes something to his appearance in the rhyme 'Who Killed Cock
Robin?' ('Who'll be the parson? / I said the Rook'). The dove,
traditional bird of love, sings her praises of the natural world to
bird and beast, while the double meaning in 'Agape' continues the
idea of love as well as referring to the gaping mouths of the
'hullaballoing clan', animal cries reaching a climax, albeit 'with woe
/ In your beaks', in this modem bestiary. Significantly, this is the
poem that Thomas saw as a 'Prologue' to the Collected Poems,
referring to it as 'these seathumbed leaves'. (I have followed the
editors of Collected Poems 1934-53 in preferring Thomas's own
title.) The ark that the poet builds is a symbol of love that
transforms the coming flood (of evening tides and death) into a
flowering destiny, as he glories in the natural world, a universe
('this star') he praises despite the shed blood of man and beast. It is
a panegyric celebrating the one world of man and nature:
I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird

Roared, man torn, blood blest.
Hark, I trumpet the place
From fish to jumping hill! Look
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
The creatures of land and sea crowd and vivify these verses, the
poet's noisy 'neighbours' (in comparison God seems a vague,
named presence); and Thomas carefully lists animals (the word
'fell' denotes skin or covering of rough hair as well as pasture or
hill), fish ('finned', 'scale'), and birds ('gulled') as the neighbours
he succours:
But animals thick as thieves

On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!) ...
o kingdom of neighbours, finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece.
There are also echoes of John Dyer's 'Grongar Hill' which mingles
description and meditation in its view of the River Towy's seaward
journey, both in phrase ('Towy Flood', 'hill to hill', 'waving wood'),
and bestiary sentiment ('the fox securely feeds'), though Dyer's
poem lacks Thomas's strong animistic vision. Surviving the
apocalyptic flood 'when dark shoals every holy field' the ark rides
out, the poet and nature's creatures securely united:
We will ride out alone, and then

Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks!
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun . . .
And the flood flowers now.
One is reminded of Renan's observation that animals are 'trans-

formed by the Welsh imagination into intelligent beings. No race
144 The Poetry
conversed so intimately as did the Celtic race with the lower
creation, and accorded it so large a share in the moral life', 13
though in Dylan Thomas's verse they seem far from a 'lower
creation'. Maybe, too, Dylan Thomas inherited something of the
spirit of The Mabinogion, a collection of mediaeval Welsh tales
where animals, birds and fishes play vital, often magical roles, and
anticipated our contemporary concern with the world of nature
and its protection. Certainly, in comparing himself with Noah, the
first notable biblical drunkard, he may well also have remembered
the legend of Seithenyn, whose drunken negligence led to the
flooding of the lowlands (Cantre-Gwaelod), now Cardigan Bay.
Dylan wrote of how he 'drank Seithenyns of porter and
Guinness,14 on holiday in Ireland; while as a young journalist he
wrote an article on Llewelyn Prichard, whose poem 'The Land
Beneath the Sea', telling of the flood,15 he refers to. There seems an
echo of this legend of the chiming bells of drowned churches in
'the drowned deep bells / Of sheep and churches'. Mingling a
somewhat pagan pantheism with biblical reference Thomas
employs not only Noah's flood and ark but also images of cities
and their towers about to be destroyed - in contrast to nature's
Eden-like eternity:
herons, and shells

That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Day's night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw
Here there are echoes from Milton's Paradise Lost ('Our prison
strong, this huge convex of Fire ... immures us round Ninefield';
Book II, lines 434-6) and Paradise Regained ('with herds the pastures
thronged, with flocks the hills / Huge cities and high towered';
Book III, lines 260-1). Dylan Thomas had spectacularly read the
part of Satan in the 1947 BBC Third Programme production of
Paradise Lost, and the idea of a paradise lost and regained lies
behind his concept of the pastoral verse of this period, fearful as he
was of the world's destruction through atomic war. He wrote of
'Poem on his Birthday' that 'his death lurks for him, and for all, in
the next lunatic war, and still singing, still praising the radiant
1a (above) Swansea views, c.
1920: 'This sea town was my
world'. Cwmdonkin Park is
shown in the bottom right-
hand corner.
1b 5, Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea.

2a labove) D. J. Thomas, Dylan's father,
c. 1900, on graduation with first-class
Honours in English, University College
of Wales, Aberystwyth.
2b Dylan's mother, c. 1934.

3 Dylan as a very young boy, with his mother (right), his sister Nancy (left) and a family
friend.
4a Dylan at eleven: Grammar School mile winner.
4b and c (below) Dylan and Pamela Hansford Johnson, who visited Swansea in
September 1934.
5a (above left) Dylan with his mother in Gower, September 1934.
5b (above right) Dylan and Pamela on the beach, September 1934.
5c (be/ow) Family group, 1934, with Pamela Hansford Johnson, Auntie Pollie, Mrs D. J.
Thomas, Uncle Dai (Minister of Paraclete Church, Mumbles), Aunt Dosie Rees and
Uncle Bob.
(top left) Dylan's first london
address: 5, Redcliffe Street,
Chelsea.
(top right) Dylan sunbathing
while living at 21, Coleherne
Road,1935.
(right) Dylan aged 19, taken
while staying with Pamela
Hansford Johnson in Battersea,
Spring 1934.
7a (left) 'Sea View', Laugharne.
7b (centre) Dylan and Caitlin in
Blashford, Hampshire, shortly
after their marriage.
7c (bottom left) Dylan and Vernon
Watkins in Laugharne, 1939.
7d (bottom right) Dylan and Caitlin
play croquet at Heatherslade,
Vernon Watkins's Gower home,
1938.
8 Dylan having a piggy-back across the estuary at Laugharne. 1940.
9a (above) Wentworth Studios, Manressa Road, Chelsea.
9b (below 'eft) 'Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin look grave in Manressa Road',
Chelsea, 1944.
9c (below right) Dylan in 'The Salisbury' public house, St Martin's Lane, London, 1941.
lOa (above) 'King's Head and Ei~
Bells', Cheyne Row, Chelsea.
lOb (left) Dylan Thomas readi
Quite Early One Morning on t
BBC Welsh Home Servil
1948.
10c (below) Radio Times pictu
1949, of a broadcast fre
Swansea; Vernon Watkins (,
left), Dylan Thomas (far righ
next to Daniel Jones.
11 Dylan and his mother at Fern Hill Farm, 1952.
12a (left) and 12b (below) Mount
Pleasant Chapel and the grave
of Anne Jones, Dylan's aunt, at
Llanybri, near Fern Hill.
13a (above) Dylan's 'water and tree room' on the cliff and The Boat House just above the
beach.
13b (belowl View of laugharne estuary and Sir John's Hill from The Boat House balcony.
14a (top) Brown's Hotel,
Laugharne.
14b (centre) Dylan playing cards at Brown's, with Ivy and Ebbie Williams.
14c (be/ow) The Boat House and garden, and across the bay, Llanybri. Blaen Cwm and
Fern Hill lie the other side of the hill.
15a (above) Dylan, Caitlin and John Brinnin on The Boat House verandah.
15b (below) Family photograph, September 1953: Dylan, Llewelyn, Aeronwy, Mrs D. J.
Thomas, Colm and Caitlin.
16a (above) Dylan in his writing
shed,1953.
16b (below left) Dylan directing
Under Milk Wood: 'Love the
words' (instructed Dylan), New
York,1953.
16c (below right) Dylan Thomas's
grave, St Martin's churchyard,
Laugharne.
earth, still loving, though remotely, the animal creation also still
gladly pursuing their inevitable & grievous ends' .16 He likewise
viewed the projected long poem 'In Country Heaven', of which 'In
Country Sleep', 'Over Sir John's hill' and 'In the white giant's
thigh' were completed sections, as 'an affirmation ... of the
Earth', part of it remembered after 'the Earth has killed itself'. 17 It is
for this reason he emphasises the 'Prologue' as an introduction to
his Collected Poems, declaring his hope that 'the Prologue does read
as a Prologue, & not just another poem. I think ... that it does do
what it sets out to do: addresses the readers, the "strangers" with a
flourish and fanfare, and makes clear, or tries to make clear, the
position of one writer in a world "at poor peace".,18 It is an
interesting development from the more personal, private world of
the lovers and their 'griefs' whom he writes for in 'In my Craft or
Sullen Art', completed seven years earlier. Crucially, too, Thomas
sees the 'Prologue' as throwing light on his poetic method, aims,
and the direction of his future development.
What I am doing ... is writing a Prologue in verse: not dense

elliptical verse, but (fairly) straightforward and colloquial,
addressed to the (maybe) readers of the Collected Poems, & full
(I hope) of references to my methods of work, my aims, & the
kind of poetry I want to write. 19
The comment on the 'elliptical' element in his poetry is, Thomas

again his own best critic, aptly retrospective; and while such
phrases as 'my bellowing ark' and 'my flood ship's I Clangour as I
hew' incorporates both the 'hullaballoing clan' of nature's king-
dom and the poet's delight in sound and verbal music, there is the
usual self-parody at the noisy excitement of the poem's progress.
In apologising for holding up publication of the Collected Poems,
which as it turned out was to mark his recognition as a great poet
and turn the tide, alas too late, of his finances, he uncharacteristi-
cally revealed his chosen design:
I set myself a most difficult technical task: The Prologue is in two

verses - in my manuscript, a verse to a page - of 51 lines each.
And the second verse rhymes backward with the first. The first &
last lines of the poem rhyme; the second and the last but one; &
so on & so on. Why I acrosticked myself like this, don't ask me.2O
146 The Poetry
Wretchedly in need of money at the time, as his desperate attempts
to sell 'the vast wodge of working-sheets for the Prologue Poem'21
indicate, nevertheless he would not compromise his art, sticking to
the prologue 'which has taken the devil of a time to finish'. 22
Like 'Poem on his Birthday', 'Prologue' ultimately registers
sunlight rather than dark as the poet, at one with and rejoicing in
nature's kingdom, sets sail. Such poems suggest not so much a
'pessimistic pantheism',23 Empson's description of Thomas's reli-
gion, but rather an optimistic pantheism as the driving force of the
last poems, some related aspects of which it remains finally to
explore. These aspects are encapsulated in Vernon Watkins's
comment on Empson's notion of a 'pessimistic pantheism', notably
that 'every colour and glory and holiness of every creature was real
to Dylan, not a one-toned gloomy world, but the most rich and
variegated one belonged to his vision of God; and so the
pantheism' .24
Undoubtedly there is a fundamental development in the role of
nature in the last poems, both in terms of their almost exclusive
'country' settings and substance - encapsulated in his line 'The
country is holy: 0 bide in that country kind' - and also in terms of
the underlying imaginative purpose the poet explains in his
introduction to his 1950 BBC reading of the completed poems that
formed 'separate parts of a long poem' in preparation, the well-
titled 'In Country Heaven', though we have only manuscript
fragments of the title poem. The poem affirms 'the beautiful and
terrible worth of the Earth', the poet unequivocally proclaimed and
'it grows into a praise of what is and could be on this lump in the
skies'. However, Thomas's presentation of nature is directed by a
concept of time whereby physical immediacy produces an 'active
participation', though the poem may be one of remembrance,
prophecy or spiritual quest:
The remembered tellings, which are the components of the

poem, are not all told as though they are remembered; the
poems will not be a series of poems in the past tense. The
memory, in all tenses, can look towards the future, can caution
and admonish. The rememberer may live himself back into
active participation in the remembered scene, adventure, or
spiritual condition. 25
As we have seen, Dylan Thomas had anticipated this presentation

of the natural world in the poems of childhood and also in 'A
Winter's Tale'. 'In Country Sleep' (1947) became the first comple-
ted poem of the proposed sequence.
In 'In Country Sleep', like Yeats in 'A Prayer for my Daughter',
Dylan Thomas addresses his young daughter, and the poem is a
prayer for her happiness and well-being, though, unlike Yeats's
concern with social and traditional mores, it finds in nature the
ultimate good and security. The poem opens with a lyrical
exorcism of the fearful imaginings that folk-tales or fairy-tales, told
before sleep, might awaken; and the source of the imagery is,
appropriately, the children's 'Red Riding Hood' story of the
predatory 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. 26 'My father would often read
to me' his daughter Aeronwy has recalled. 'We both favoured
Grimm's Fairy Tales. He would enact the main characters becoming
the wolf or . . . child, giving creditable characteristics of evil and
good. We both relished the thrill of horror and fear. 127
Never and never, my girl riding far and near

In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap . . .
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.
Neither should the child come to fear sexuality, presented to her in

fairy-tales where gooseherds turn into handsome princes (we may
note the pun on 'hamlet', referring both to Shakespeare's prince
Hamlet and a small country village, ideas echoed in the preceding
image 'homes tall [farmyard] king'):
no gooseherd or swine will turn

Into a homes tall king or hamlet of fire
And prince of ice
To court the honeyed heart from your side
for she is protected in her 'country sleep' by nature ('fern and

flower' recalling earlier poems celebrating nature's hegemony):
From the broomed witch's spume you are shielded by fern

And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.
148 The Poetry
Forget your fears of sleep and the fictions of dreams, says the poet,
since only death threatens, the 'stern bell' tolling and the 'Thief'
moving in time through the poem:
Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern
Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell

Shall harrow and snow the blood.
For the poet rejects the unreal ('moonshine') fears bred in legend
or theology:
For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves

Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear.
It is death, not folk-tales of wolves, sexuality or the agents of

nature, who is the ever-present and meekly subtle thief to be
feared:
Fear most
For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood

Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind
And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.
The poet registers a complete faith in nature:
The country is holy: 0 bide in that country kind,

Know the green good.
We may note the pun on 'good' with its echoing 'green god'; and a
succession of religious images are used as metaphors of nature and
nature's benignity:
A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint's cell

The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves
Her robin breasted tree . . .

Sanctum sanctorum the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling,
In contrast to Hopkins, nature is celebrated for itself not as earthly

evidence of a transcendent divinity. Thus, significantly, it is the hill
which is holy, and fables (legends) are inspired by the living,
nourishing grass:
the fables graze

On the lord's-table of the bowing grass.
Buddhist as well as Christian metaphor is employed to register the

beneficence and security of nature:
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood

Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
Lie in grace.
Dylan Thomas suggests the imperceived but unavoidable advent

of death, the 'sly and sure' thief, to his daughter ('my own, last
love'). The source of this image of the thief coming unawares is
probably Revelation 3:3 - 'I will come upon thee as a thief, and
thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee'.
Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure
And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,

This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks
In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls
Of the hearthstone tales my own, last love.
With precise evocative imagery drawn from the natural world,

paradoxically tender and delicate in impact, Thomas depicts the
approach of death, the unseen thief who since his daughter's birth
('the falling star you were born') has nightly visited:
This night and each night since the falling star you were born,
Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,
As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides
Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls.
This figurative narration of the imperceptible growth of mortality

150 The Poetry
even in the child vividly illustrates Thomas's early poetic claim -
and aim - that 'the description of a thought or action - however
abstruse it may be - can be beaten home by bringing it onto a
physical level'. 28 And likewise the second section of the poem
opens with a celebration of the hidden energy and 'blood' of
natural life, lyrically exultant in mood and metaphysical in its
implications:
And high, there, on the hare -
Heeled winds the rooks
Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books
Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox
Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist
Of the wood! Pastoral beat of the blood through the laced leaves!
Such pastoral spirit and sentience brings to mind the poet's

declaration that '1 want my sentimental blood . . . the blood of
leaves, wells, weirs, fonts, shells, echoes, rainbows, olives, bells,
oracles, sorrows.'29 The poem ends with the idea that in nature's
cycle death brings re-immersion into its forms and forces and what
is lost, what death in fact steals or removes, is only the beliefl
superstition that heaven or hell follows. Paradoxically,30 therefore,
never need she grieve that this death (and re-immersion) will not
happen, that she will be left forsaken and afraid, divorced from
'The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother', as Thomas
earlier expressed this in 'A Refusal to Mourn', the poetic argument
again sustained by paradox. The thief's (death's) progress is
unalterable, being part of nature's laws; and we may note the
words 'designed', 'ruly' contrasted with 'lawless':
he comes to my love like the designed snow,

And truly he
Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew's ruly sea,
And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he
Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair ...
He comes to take
Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake
He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking
Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.

This re-immersion into the physical universe that death occasions,
following nature's pattern and order, becomes, in these last poems,
an affirmation and celebration of that universe and man's unity
with it. It is a Mahler-like 'song of the earth'.
'In the white giant's thigh' attempts exploration and definition of
man's soul as being born from nature and as journeying back to it,
following a time of transience when it lingers in memory. The dead
women's unquenchable yearning to love and to conceive is linked
to the creative energy of nature:
Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,

Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Reference to the 'white giant' suggests the likely source of the

poem's inspiration to be the Cerne Abbas white giant on the upper
slopes of the chalk hill there. This striking hill figure, cut in the turf
(,hacked I Hill' in the poem), is considered to be of Romano-British
origin and is evidently a pagan fertility symbol; for while the giant
carries a cudgel ('cudgelling' is the poem's word), his potently
erect penis is dramatic, both visually and as symbol. Local legend
has it that copulation on the grass within the phallus cures
barrenness in women. Not only does internal evidence in the poem
such as 'cudgelling, hacked I Hill' suggest that Thomas knew of
this giant, but also the fact that he lived in Ringwood, the home of
Caitlin Thomas's mother, on the Dorset and Hampshire border
about twenty miles away, and was likely to have seen it when
visiting or travelling that way.
In the poem the desires and passions of the women are
presented as remaining after death, even when their memorials are
erased and they have passed from memory:
Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,

Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away.
For the poet the curlews' cries carry their everlasting longing for
the unconceived sons on this hill; this yearning seems part of all
nature's creative urge:
152 The Poetry
And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill.
Dylan Thomas suggests that while alive, too, the women's love-
making shared nature's creative impulse; and he characteristically
employs imagery of the seasons, animals and the countryside
setting to celebrate their sexual pleasures with the 'rough riding
boys,:31
Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved

In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with anyone
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay.
The poet feels the strength of the women's desires and yearning
still, for though dead they 'clasp me to their grains in the gigantic
glade, I Who once green countries since were a hedgerow of joys' .
In choosing the word 'grains' Thomas may well have had in mind
the obsolete use of the plural form to mean the fork of the body;
and there is a characteristic pun, for grains echoes 'groins'.
Nature, in its changing forms ('ducked and draked white lake
that harps'), seasons (,lewd, wooed fields flow to the coming
frost'), and animal life ('does roister . . . horned bucks climb'),
manifests and shares this sexual energy and force:
Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk

And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house

And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost ...
. . . the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime.
But whatever their sexual joys these women bore 'no mouthing
babe to the veined hives' and were 'a boulder of wives', and the
poem's opening line is later echoed in: 'Now curlew cry me down
to kiss the mouths of their dust' as the sad, haunting 'curlew's cry',
voice of the women, awakens the poet's response to nature's
elemental, creative drive.
Recalling Dylan Thomas's comment concerning 'the remem-
bered telling' of 'In Country Heaven' that 'the rememberer may
live himself back into active participation in the remembered
scene, adventure or spiritual condition',32 we may observe that the
poet has returned to the present tense to link in the closing stanza
'images of death from the first section and images of life from the
second section,33 that celebrated the women's joyous, albeit
barren, love-making. Consequently, although the women of the
hill are dead it is 'a death as cyclical as life', 34 signifying the
'unbreakable will of nature for germination',35 the poem effecting
what Sanesi has identified as deriving from Celtic origins, 'the
reconciliation of irreconcilables .. . bathed in an everlasting
pantheism' .36 Domestic imagery is linked with local nature images
to suggest the continuing life-cycle, while registering the 'active
participation' the poet seeks:
The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro

Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard.
Significantly, the cut branches bleed ('ran red'), while the dead
women embrace the poet from their hillside homes in the fruitful
earth ('from houses where the harvest kneels') who once heard the
rain tell nature's tale. These lines recall the combination of
domestic and natural imagery that Thomas employed in 'After the
funeral', though of course there is less personal anguish in this
reconciliation of life and death in t(!rms of nature's life-cycle. As
was the case with Ann Jones, the poet builds a mythopoeic
conception of the women's love as existing in nature (d. 'brown
chapel', 'walls of the ferned and foxy woods'). It is this 'evergreen'
love he seeks and commemorates:
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved

Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood.
Thus, though the women's graves are hidden by the fallen

autumnal leaves, names and epitaphs worn away, their memorial
crosses engulfed in grass, the poet celebrates their love as existing
perpetually in nature, sustained by the eternal paradox of life and
nature's cyclical process ('dead and deathless', 'daughters of
darkness flame'), a continuing courtship of new and past lovers:
the women of the hill

Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.
The idea of sexual union between 'daughters of darkness' and a

giant may, incidentally, owe something to the biblical story: 'There
were giants in the earth in those days . . . when the Sons of God
came unto the daughters of men' (Genesis 6:4). This union of the
divine and the human brought about the punishment of the flood.
So again it seems a biblical subtext might contribute to Thomas's
pastoral 'poem in progress'. Certainly R.S. Thomas's comment to
me in 1980 that 'There's nothing Welsh about Dylan Thomas
except that he knew his Bible' is true in respect of his biblical
knowledge and references!
Unfinished Poems
In their edition of Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems, 1934-53 Walford
Davies and Ralph Maud have included a rewritten and seemingly
finished sixteen lines of 'In Country Heaven' within the volume 'as
a valued part of the corpus of Thomas's poems'. 1 These are the first
three stanzas and the first line of the fourth stanza of the projected
poem, and were found in the notebook dated October 1951. The
editors include the earlier forty-three-Iine manuscript, consisting of
eight five-line stanzas and three additional lines, in the 'Notes' to
'In Country Heaven', 2 suggesting with reference to Thomas's letter
to Margaret Taylor on 11 July 1947 that the first version was written
before he left for his holiday in Italy in April 1947. 3 Whatever its
exact dating this is a seminal manuscript, second only to the early
Notebooks, but in itself more important than any single item in
them. It signals a major development in Thomas's last poems, an
imaginative concept that gives an urgent social dimension to the
primarily pastoral verses.
Previously the fullest version was published in the Weekend
Telegraph Magazine (16 Dec. 1968, p. 13), but this forty-two-line
version, introduced by Douglas C1everdon, omits the final line
'Young Aesop fabling by the coracled Towy', and has 'the night'
rather than 'his night' (I. 26), as does Daniel Jones in his shorter
version (The Poems, 1971, p. 16), though Jones rightly prefers
'dewfall stars' (1. 8) to 'downfall stars'. The Caedmon record 'Dylan
Thomas: In Country Heaven - The Evolution of a Poem (1971),
includes the last line 'Young Aesop fabling ... ' of the early
manuscript, and traces the evolution of the final form of the
sixteen-line revised version of the 1951 notebook. 4 In his comments
C1everdon suggests Thomas had been working on it for almost a
year. Interestingly, in his book The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas
(1966) Moynihan refers to 'the manuscript of this poem [In
Country Heaven] in the possession of John Malcolm Brinnin', 5 and
his quotations from it suggest it is the same early version. But he
significantly adds that 'this glimpse of paradise ... Thomas
155
156 The Poetry
fashioned sometime between 1946 and 1949' and that it 'was
apparently laid aside'. 6 Moynihan not only anticipates the earlier
provenance of the 'ur-manuscript', 7 but anticipates too the new
conception that grew in Dylan Thomas's imagination, particularly
the roles of man, God and nature in his 'regeneration myth'.s
Since 1945 Dylan Thomas, like so many, had been haunted by
the threat of the world's destruction through atomic warfare,
speaking in a 1946 broadcast 'On Poetry' of the poet as 'one of
whose responsibilities is to know and feel all that is moving around
and within him on this ... apparently hell-bent earth,.9 It is likely,
too, in 1947 that Thomas had been imaginatively preoccupied with
ideas of a Paradise lost and regained, for he took part in the ten
broadcasts on Radio Three of the ten books of Milton's Paradise
Lost, learning long passages by heart. The destruction of Earth in
atomic war was certainly an epic theme, and the impulse to evoke a
Paradise regained, after a Paradise lost, is characteristic of
Thomas's imaginative drive. Nature as touchstone and symbol of a
lost Eden had inspired his visionary verse on childhood; while
wartime bombing of civilians had given powerful public resonance
to such poems as 'A Refusal to Mourn . . .' and 'Ceremony after a
Fire Raid', wherein individual death is resolved through a
ritualistic pantheism. It is therefore not surprising that Thomas
should have responded so urgently to the postwar threat of atomic
annihilation.
When working on the poem in 1950-1 this threat clearly
preoccupied Thomas, and in his prose 'Note' that he sent to the
Editor of Botteghe Oscure together with 'In the white giant's thigh'
(where both were published in November 1950) he speaks of his
poem about the end of the world. Referring to the early manuscript
of 'In Country Heaven', he explains his intention to develop it as a
frame for the three poems 'In Country Sleep', 'Over Sir John's hill'
and 'In the white giant's thigh'. He introduced his BBC reading of
these poems in September 1950 with a fuller version of the 'Note'.
In this broadcast prose introduction Dylan Thomas signals the
imaginative enrichment of his confrontation with death and
destruction on this planet, for 'The godhead, the author, the milky-
way farmer, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, quintessence,
the beginning Word' bears the impulse and power of pity and
grief. He describes how 'He, on top of a hill in heaven, weeps
whenever ... one of his worlds drops dead .... And ... light and
His tears glide down together, hand in hand.'loThis closely follows
the language and import of the early manuscript's opening:
Always when he, in Country Heaven,
(Whom my heart hears),
Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,
Humble in all his planets,
And weeps on the abasing hill ....
Light and his tears glide down together

(0 hand in hand)
From the country eyes, salt and sun, star and woe. 11
What is most striking in the reworked opening stanzas is the

emphasis on destruction, particularly in the description of the
Godhead:
Out of the pierced eyes and the cataract sky,

He cries his blood, and the suns
Dissolve and run down the ragged
Gutters of his face: Heaven is blind and black. 12
The description of the Godhead here has become more anthropo-

morphic ('ragged / Gutters of his face'), but he remains mainly 'the
eternal sympathetic spectator',13 to borrow Maud's apt phrase, a
weeping presence who laments rather than intercedes, regarding
creation with pity and tears. It is 'country heaven' that is blind and
black, and the imaging of it in 'the cataract sky' and 'the suns /
Dissolve' anticipates nuclear holocaust. The perishing of animal
life is lucidly as well as lyrically expressed, but a paradise regained
is also suggested in the religious image of 'angels':
Then in the last ward and joy of beasts and birds

And the canonized valley
Where are all sings, that was made and is dead,
And the angels whirr like pheasants
Through naves of leaves. 14
Of the planned 'In Country Heaven' sequence of poems Maud

crucially noted (in Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry, 1963) that
'Dylan Thomas, supposedly the lyric poet, the singer of the self, is
in these last poems responding perhaps as fully as any writer of
158 The Poetry
our time to the basic problem facing mankind in the atomic age, the
problem of total annihilation' .15 The seed of that response was the
forty-three-line early manuscript, and Thomas's return to it
marked not a fading but a renewal of inspiration. Evidently he now
saw it as the over-arching poem of the sequence.
This manuscript was originally entitled 'In Country Sleep', but
Thomas crossed out 'Sleep' and substituted 'Heaven', presumably
after writing 'In Country Sleep' in the spring and summer of
1947. 16 This signals the poet's perception of the imaginative
direction of the 'country' poems. 'In Country Sleep' addressed the
poet's daughter and posits nature as the deliverer from death, the
punning image in 'know the green good' the crux of the poem; for
nature lyrically dominates his imagination as an exorciser of the
ubiquitous fear of death. Hence the optimistic pantheism of his last
verse. As in 'A Winter's Tale' the miracle ofrenewed and returning
life is made manifest in nature. These first manuscript fragments of
'In Country Heaven' continue the poet's celebration of the natural
universe, and in his effort to 'bring man from mortality to
immortality,17 nature becomes a heaven where in 'the canonized
valley ... the angels whirr like pheasants.' Death and destruction
are registered in this pastoral setting, though the landscapes are
quick with the living and the dead:
Doused in hamlets of heaven swing the loft lamps,
In the black buried spinneys
Bushes and owls blowout like a spark,
And the seraphic fields of shepherds
Fade with their rose-
White, God's bright, flocks, the belled lambs leaping. 18
'Country Heaven' is paradoxically a mythopoeic version of nature

wherein paradise lost points to paradise regained, all safe in
'Heaven's keeping' and 'country sleep':
And the long fox like fire

Prowls flaming among the cockerels
In the plunged farms of Heaven's keeping,
But they sleep sound.
To earth, air, fire and water, the 'four elements' noted in 'Poem on
his Birthday', is added Pity:
For the fifth element is pity,
(Pity for death):
No fowl or field mouse that night of his kneeling
Lies in the fox's fires
Or twice dies in the screech-owl's eyes.
Lamentation for loss becomes a hymn of praise for the joy, beauty
and mystery of 'Earth', its remembering and telling a paradise
regained. Thomas's explanatory 'Note' unfolds the pastoral fable of
Earth's destruction: 'The countrymen of heaven crouch all together
under the hedges and ... surmise which world, which star, which
of their late, turning homes, in the skies has gone forever. And this
time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The
Earth has killed itself. t19 The poet also chronicles how, subsuming
the fact of death and destruction, 'those heavenly hedgerow men
... call to one another, through the long night, Light and His tears
falling, what they remember . . . what they know in their Edenie
hearts, of that self-called place'. 20 The genesis of that telling, as well
as of this prose paraphrase, rests in the early manuscript - as
instanced in these concluding lines:
All the canterbury tales in the wild hedge-

Row of the small, brown friars,
The lithe reeve and the rustling wife
Blithe in the tall telling of his pitch
Time go sleeping
Under the switchback glide of his tears.
The reader has no doubt also heard other echoes, for images and
inhabitants of this 'In Country Heaven' ur-manuscript Thomas
used in the subsequent parts of the projected long poem,
confirming the unity of the poem and its concept as set out in the
prose account. 'This manuscript had provided something of the
tone of the new 'In country sleep', 21 observe Davies and Maud,
noting the repeated use of 'spinneys'. The fox too, a familiar in
Thomas's verse, that prowls 'In Country Heaven' 'flaming among
cockerels' is 'Among the cocks like fire and red fox / Burning' of 'In
Country Sleep' and later in 'In the white giant's thigh' 'a torch of
foxes foams' and we learn of 'the fox cubbed / Streets'. In this poem
also, 'the small, brown friars' reappear as 'the scurrying, furred
160 The Poetry
small friars squeal'; while the longing women were once a
'hedgerow of joys'. 'In the white giant's thigh' particularly
illustrates 'the reciprocity of life and death, remembrance and
desire',22 and has something of the pantheistic reverie Thomas's
prospective 'Note' hints at as the hedgerow men tell what they
remember. Personages of the ur-manuscript of 'In Country
Heaven' likewise reappear in 'Over Sir John's hill': not only of
course 'the shooting-star hawk', as 'The hawk on fire' the later
poem's chief protagonist, but the last line's reference to 'Young
Aesop fabling by the coracled Towy' becomes the poet as 'Young
Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle'. As usual in the later
verse, even the early manuscript of 'In Country Heaven' has a
careful musical design of sound and stanza structure wherein the
eight five-line stanzas alternate his chosen pattern of 9, 4, 11, 7, 8,
and 11, 7, 9, 8, 4 syllables a line.
Structured through a concept of memory, Thomas's favoured
technique, since, as he explained, 'the memory, in all tenses, can
look towards the future, can caution and admonish', the long
poem was to grow 'into a praise of what is and could be on this
lump in the skies'.23 The hill is the dominant landscape in country
heaven, and its protagonists whether human, animal, conflated in
the term 'heavenly hedgerow men', or even the referential
Godhead, seem subsumed in Thomas's instinctive pantheism. This
optimistic pantheism certainly provides an illuminating contrast
with, for example, the apocalyptic pessimism of Yeats's vision of
destruction in 'The Second Coming'. Not surprisingly Dylan
Thomas discussed enthusiastically with Stravinsky in 1953 the idea
of his writing a libretto about the world re-created after a
holocaust, beginning with a new Eden.
Dylan Thomas's unfinished 'Elegy' for his father, which he was
working on in the weeks before his final American visit, runs to six
three-line stanzas rhymed in quatrains plus an incomplete line in
Collected Poems 1934-53, the editors omitting Vernon Watkins's
bracketed extension but adding - rightly I think - two 'valuable'
lines Thomas seems to have been dissatisfied with, as the 'Notes'
explain. The first stanza confirms the poet's comments, also
included in the 'Notes' to the poem, on his father's pride, kindness
and stoicism in facing death, as well as the fact that he finally
became blind; Thomas's words 'an old kind man in his burning
pride,24 closely followed in the third line:
Too proud to die, broken and blind he died

The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold, kind man brave in his burning pride.
Dylan Thomas again suggests a continuing of love and renewed

life in nature, albeit in elegiac pastoral rather than what Thomas
called the 'conventionally romantic,25 mood of 'In the white giant's
thigh':
Oh, forever may

He live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love,
Among the long flocks, and never lie lost

Or still all the days of his death.
'Flocks', with its association of a company of birds or other animals

as well as the idea of a pastoral congregation, develops the
pantheistic theme; while 'the long flocks' brings to mind the
terrestrial 'long friends' of the earlier 'Refusal to Mourn'. As in
'Refusal' also there is a conflation of the dying man's mother and
mother earth as the final and universal mother - a benign nature
('kind ground')
though above
All he longed all dark for his mother's breast
Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground

The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Death is the final arbiter, albeit of a dark justice, and the poet
images the processes of dying as a return to nature, the 'elemen-
tary town' of 'Twenty-four Years' and 'the first dead' of' A Refusal'.
But here it is a personal anguish the poet registers, and the
language is metaphysical as well as threnodic in import:
The rivers of the dead
Moved in his poor hand I held, and I saw

Through his faded eyes to the roots of the sea.
162 The Poetry
The poem now closes on an elemental note, and contrasts also with
the angry protest of 'Do not go gentle into that good night', as the
poet tells 'the air that drew away' from his dying father to 'Go calm
to your crucifixed hill'. The 'crossed I Hill' of the second stanza has
become the sacramental'crucifixed hill', bringing to mind vistas of
'the sad height' of 'Do not go gentle into that good night,26 and 'Sir
John's just hill'.27
While always a doubting Thomas, particularly in his early verse
and ambivalent attitudes to Christianity, evidently, since he
possessed a religious sensibility, Dylan Thomas was a God-
haunted poet, though he was, of course, more inspired by his
sensuous and intuitive pantheism than a philosophical or theologi-
cal concept. Part of the poet's 'Note' to the Collected Poems has a
dominantly pastoral context when he compares his poetic rites
with those of a shepherd making ritual observances to the moon to
protect his flocks. The later verse highlights the ambiguity of his
remark in 1951 that his aim was to produce 'poems in praise of
God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God'.28 For Thomas
was always deeply imbued with an instinctive pantheism, identify-
ing God with the life-force manifested in the universe, rather than
the traditional forms of Christianity.
'As nature is all we have, and all I am is a man, I'm quite
interested in man and nature,29 was Dylan Thomas's defence of his
preoccupation with nature in 1952. For him nature is neither a
superficial pastoral escape nor simply a source of didactic senti-
ments: it represents the vital life-force in the universe. It seems to
be the case that Thomas went beyond the simple division between
human civilisation and nature, seeing man as existing in a state
between the two, transiently linked with human civilisation, but
having come from and ultimately returning to 'the green good'.
Herein lay his originality as a poet. Undoubtedly Dylan Thomas's
popularity is due in part to his rediscovery of the voice of nature,
his animistic vision speaking in the liberating wonder and
strangeness of his style, however complex its forms. Nor should it
surprise us that such words as hill, water, wind, sea, bird and, of
course, green frequent his poetry. The life of nature, increasingly
depicted in particular land and seascapes peopled by the creatures
of land, sea and air, is the affirmative source of his inspiration. It
may well be that Thomas's appeal lies in his healing of man's sense
of alienation from his roots in nature. He 'is a poet through whom
Nature speaks', commented Edith Sitwell. 30
Part Three
The Prose
Introduction
The publication of Dylan Thomas's Collected Stories and Collected
Letters, together with the broadcasts published in Quite Early One
Morning, the immediately and enduringly popular Under Milk
Wood, miscellaneous critical writing and reviews (some of this
published in Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings) now demonstrates
the extent and variety of this prose writing. Much of it was in
important ways as original and compelling as his poetry. There are,
too, his published film scripts which include The Doctor and the
Devils, Twenty years A-Growing, Rebecca's Daughters, Me and My Bike,
and The Beach of Falesa, whose composition clearly influenced his
later development as an original writer for radio with precise poetic
power and dramatic skills in creating dialogue and atmosphere.
His contributions to the jointly written The Death of the King's
Canary show his continuing gift for surreal farce and humour as
well as parody. As his contributions to the school magazine and to
the newspaper on which he worked indicate he was a natural
prose writer. In contrast to his method of composition in poetry,
Thomas wrote prose fairly rapidly and fluently, especially at the
beginning; and his flair for humour and parody, his cogent and
confident criticism, and his poetic intensity are soon evident.
Nevertheless, as James Agate said of The Doctor and the Devils, he
brought to his increasingly commissioned prose work his distinc-
tive genius, transforming what might have been 'hack' work
undertaken for money-making reasons, such work seldom written
without care and delight, though sometimes unfinished.
165
The Early Stories
Though he thought it less important than his poetry, throughout
his career Dylan Thomas's prose composition was linked with his
development as a poet, but this is particularly so in the early
stories, which are close in theme and language to the early verse.
These stories are strong in style and atmosphere and sensuous
power but weak in narrative, being introspective and subjective to
an unusual degree. Certainly the stories are close to the universe of
the early poems, being richly charged in their language, almost
surreal in the worlds they create, and owing much to a fertile
imagination and an adolescent's obsessional, introspective con-
cerns with religion, sex and death. 'Naturally, my early poems and
stories, two sides of an unresolved argument, came out of a person
who came willy-nilly out of one particular atmosphere and
environment' Dylan Thomas declared in 1952,1 turning our
attention to the personality and Welsh background that produced
them. The prose is essentially a poet's prose, being sensuous,
strongly rhymthmic, and rich in metaphor; and like Thomas's own
poetry at this time it is impassioned, apocalyptic, and the magic of
the word and the emotions of the author direct the narrative.
Apart from four experimental prose pieces, including three
stories-in-progress published in the Swansea Grammar School Maga-
zine, Thomas's first actual story was the bizarre but compelling
'After the Fair', written soon after his nineteenth birthday. It is a
haunting tale that shows already his gift for dialogue. It also has an
element of realism that was to take a lesser role in the early stories
but anticipates his later comic, sharply focused prose style. Such
early stories as 'The Tree' are rich in biblical rhythms and echoes,
while the satiric tone of 'The Burning Baby', a notable tale based on
the episode of Dr William Price's cremation of his son, in its
grotesque portraiture of lecherous and incestuous ministers clearly
shows the influence of the Anglo-Welsh writer Caradoc Evans,
whom Dylan Thomas greatly admired. It is in this story, written in
December 1934, that the palingram 'Llareggub' first appears.
166
Regrettably publishers were too squeamish to publish a collection

of these stories in the thirties; and apart from the six included in
The Map of Love, though published in America in 1955 several
remained unavailable in book form in this country until 1971.
Contrasting these stories with his later broadcast reminiscences
when writing to his publishers in 1953 Dylan Thomas aptly
described them as 'very young and violent and romantic' and as
'the death and blood ... group typified by "The Burning Baby"', a
characteristically succinct and balanced judgement. 2
'After the Fair' has an unusually clear narrative outline and
precise yet poetic evocation of scene and atmosphere that
anticipates his later broadcasts:
The fair was over, the lights in the coco-nut stalls were put out,
and the wooden horses stood still in the darkness, waiting for
the music and the hum of the machines that would set them
trotting forward. One by one, in every booth, the naphtha jets
were turned down and the canvases pulled over the little
gaming tables. The crowd went home, and there were lights in
the windows of the caravans.
The central character is a young girl who has left home, and she
walks through the deserted fair, her loneliness and the strangely
magical setting poignantly conveyed:
Nobody had noticed the girl. In her black clothes she stood
against the side of the roundabouts, hearing the last feet tread
upon the sawdust and the last voices die in the distance. Then,
all alone on the deserted ground, surrounded by the shapes of
wooden horses and cheap fairy boats, she looked for a place to
sleep. Now here and now there, she raised the canvas that
shrouded the coco-nut stalls and peered into the warm darkness .
. . . Once she stepped on the boards; the bells round a horse's
throat jingled and were still; she did not dare breathe again until
all was quiet and the darkness had forgotten the noise of the
bells .... But there was nowhere, nowhere in all the fair for her
to sleep.
In this clear, musical prose, sensitively conveying sound and touch

and sight, we see the girl arrive at the Fat Man's caravan, their
beautifully controlled conversation edged with that humour
168 The Prose
Thomas was to develop in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
stories. The tale closes with the arresting, fantastic, and compell-
ingly surreal image of the girl, holding a baby she tries to comfort,
and the Fat Man riding the speeding roundabout in the dark, wind-
swept night:
As the roundabout started, slowly at first and slowly gaining

speed, the child at the girl's breast stopped crying and clapped
its hands. The night wind tore through its hair, the music
jangled in its ears. Round and round the wooden horses sped,
drowning the cries of the wind with the beating of their hooves.
And so the men from the caravans found them, the Fat Man
and the girl in black with a baby in her arms, racing round and
round on their mechanical steeds to the ever-increasing music of
the organ.
Regrettably perhaps Thomas moved from this more objective

and realistic handling of experience, albeit occasionally touched by
fantasy, to obsessively introspective solipsistic, often morbid,
preoccupations in his prose: more original in style and theme but
more limited in appeal. These tales depict a phantasmagoric world,
usually of dark, perverse passions, though sometimes attractively
and sensuously lyrical as in 'A Prospect of the Sea', and, though
they are separate stories, Thomas was probably speaking of them
in his references to 'the linking together of several short story
sequences' for they often read more like sequences than plotted
narratives. 3 Discussing in 1953 a collection that would include
some of these early tales and the later broadcast reminiscences of
childhood, Thomas suggests an interesting autobiographical unity
such 'a hotchpotch of a book' would nevertheless possess,
throwing valuable light on his conception of these early stories: 'a
kind of oblique autobiography: a growing-up told (a) in stories written
while growing up, and (b) in memories of childhood written when grown
up' .4 The two very different accounts of growing up were of course
published posthumously and separately as A Prospect of the Sea and
Quite Early One Morning.
In 1934 Thomas wrote of 'My novel of the Jarvis Valley ... with a
chorus of deadly sins, anagrammatised as old gentlemen, with the
incarnated figures of Love and Death . . . an Immaculate Concep-
tion . . . a mock Christ, and the Holy Ghost'. 5 As we shall see a
mock Christ is the naif hero/victim of 'The Tree', while the
anagrammatised old gentlemen appear in 'The Holy Six'. In 'The
Holy Six' Thomas conveys an atmosphere of primitive, sensual,
mephitic, phantasmagoria, and the six clerical gentlemen are also
symbols, as in a progress of the mediaeval Seven Deadly Sins.
From the beginning Thomas delighted in such devices as anagram,
and clearly Stul is an anagram of 'lust', Edger of 'greed', Vyne of
'envy', and Rafe of 'fear'; so that to Mr Rafe the women represent a
'Massacre of the flesh', 'the shaping wombs' meant 'the death of
the flesh' and 'the male nerve was pulled alone'. Other characters
include Mr Luctyre (cruelty) and Mr Stipe (spite), and the story is
again set in the Jarvis valley. We learn of such familiar figures as
Mr and Mrs Owen, the Reverend Mr Davies of Llareggub, and
even the 'bald girls from [distant] Merthyr'! The story opens in
poetically apocalyptic vein, and the Holy Six make their bizarre
entrance:
The Holy Six of Wales sat in silence. The day was drawing to a
close, and the heat of the first discussion grew cooler with the
falling sun. All through the afternoon they had talked of nothing
but the disappearance of the rector of Llareggub, and now, as the
first lack of light moved in a visible shape and colour through the
room, and their tongues were tired, and they heard the voices in
their nerves, they waited only for the first darkness to set in. At
the first signs of night they would step from the table, adjust
their hats and smiles, and walk into the wicked streets. Where
the women smiled under the lamps, and the promise of the old
sickness stirred in the fingertips of the girls in the dark
doorways, the Six would pass dreaming, to the scrape of their
boots on the pavement, of the women throughout the town
smiling and doctoring love. To Mr Stul the women drifted in a
maze of hair, and touched him in a raw place. The women
drifted around Mr Edger. He caught them close to him, holding
their misty limbs to his with no love or fire. The women moved
again, with the grace of cats, edging down the darker alleys
where Mr Vyne, envious of their slant-eyed beauty, would
scrape and bow. To Mr Rafe, their beauties, washed in blood,
were enemies of the fluttering eyes.
An earlier story, 'The Enemies', had told of the Reverend Mr

Davies's misadventure, losing his way in the Jarvis hills and
arriving at the home of Mr and Mrs Owen. Interestingly, this tale
170 The Prose
reveals the closeness of the themes of these narratives to Thomas's
early poetry, for the poet's pantheistic vision, pagan in its atavistic
overtones, is vividly registered. Thus the lost clergyman 'is
frightened of the worm in the earth, of the copulation in the tree, of
the living grease in the soil'. Threatened by these dark pantheistic
forces he 'felt desolation in his vein', a phrase used in the poem
'This bread I break' written six weeks earlier. An eerily anthropo-
morphic world of nature besets the frightened clergyman: 'Outside
the window was the brown body of the earth, the green skin of the
grass, and the breasts of the Jarvis hills; there was a wind that
chilled the animal earth, and a sun that had drunk up the dews of
the fields; there was creation sweating out of the pores of the
trees.' Christian conflicts are imaged at the story's end, when
confronted by the 'dark mind . . . and dark body' of Mr and Mrs
Owen, he 'stared and prayed, like an old god beset by his enemies'.
Likewise in 'The Visitor' in dying Peter's vision when 'the dead,
picked to the symmetrical bones, were huddled in under the soil
by the wind . . . the worm and the death-beetle undid the fibres of
the animal bones . . . and the weeds through the sockets and the
flowers on the vanished breasts sprouted up with the colours of
the dead life fresh on their leaves' we are moving in the world of
the poetry of this period. Such poems as 'The force that through
the green fuse drives the flower' and 'And death shall have no
dominion' are echoed in the imaging of death, a visitor like the
thief in the later verse of 'In Country Sleep' though at this stage
more violent than benign, but in Dylan's phrase about these stories
'the incarnated figure ... of death':
And the blood that had flowed, flowed over the ground,
strengthening the blades of the grass, fulfilling the wind-planted
seeds in its course, into the mouth of the spring. Suddenly all the
streams were red with blood, a score of winding veins .... He
saw the streams and the beating water, how the flowers shot out
of the death.
Notably, the somewhat morbid poetic fantasy reaches an

unusually arresting narrative climax to close this significantly titled
tale 'The Visitor':
Rhiannon, he said, hold my hand, Rhiannon.

She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him
with an unbreakable sorrow.
Hold my hand, he said. And then: Why are you putting the
sheet over my face?
Here Dylan Thomas's notion of the mysterious and inarticulate

unity of man and nature in death is disturbingly and dramatically
conveyed.
'The Tree', the second story Thomas wrote and the first in his
poetic, apocalyptic and biblical vein, is darkly, even savagely,
lyrical, though it benefits from a clearer narrative progression.
Here the poet has a tale to tell; and he tells it with apt dialogue and
dramatic effect. Set in the Jarvis hills, again the natural world is
more threatening than benign, and Bible-reading, as in Caradoc
Evans's stories, is a rather sinister pastime. Even the child, a
constant figure in Thomas's prose writing, is more malevolent than
innocent as he listens to the gardener:
'In the beginning', he would say 'there was a tree.'

'What kind of tree?'
'The tree where the blackbird's whistling.'
'A hawk, a hawk', cried the child ...
The gardener would look up at the tree, seeing a monstrous
hawk perched on a bough or an eagle swinging in the wind.
We learn that 'the gardener loved the Bible ... reading of the first
love and the legend of apples and serpents. But the death of Christ
on the tree he loved most'. While moving in primitive, Old
Testament landscapes the inner lives of these larger-than-life
figures follow pagan nature-worship and beliefs:
His [the gardener] world moved and changed as spring moved

along the branches, changing their nakedness; his God grew up
like a Tree from the apple-shaped earth, giving bud to His
children and letting His children be blown from their places by
the breezes of winter; winter and death moved in one wind.
Such writing recalls the creative-destructive unity of man and

nature perceived in poems such as 'The force that through the
green fuse drives the flower', also written towards the end of 1933.
In the strange countryside of the Jarvis hills, with its primitive
intensities and Simplicities, rural Carmarthenshire transformed by
biblical atmospherics clearly neighbours the stark world of Cara-
doc Evans's rural Cardiganshire, as in the idiot's entry to the tale:
172 The Prose
There was an idiot to the east of the country who walked the
land like a beggar. Now at a farmhouse and now at a widow's
cottage he begged for his bread. A parson gave him a suit, and it
lapped round his hungry ribs and shoulders and waved in the
wind as he shambled over the fields.
But unlike Caradoc's suffering troglodytes, Dylan Thomas's idiot is

nourished by his mysterious and lyrical bond with the natural
world, an empathy Keatsian in its sensitivity and sensuousness but
more metaphysical in its implications:
He had known of the Jarvis Hills; their shapes rose over the
slopes of the county to be seen for miles around, but no one had
told him of the valley lying under the hills. Bethlehem, said the
idiot to the valley, turning over the sounds of the word and
giving it all the glory of the Welsh morning. He brothered the
world around him, sipped at the air, as a child newly born sips
and brothers the light. The life of the Jarvis valley, steaming up
from the body of the grass and the trees and the long hand of the
stream, lent him a new blood. Night had emptied the idiot's
veins, and dawn in the valley filled them again.
'Bethlehem', said the idiot to the valley.
On Christmas morning the child discovers the idiot, observes his

Christ-like patience:
So the child found him under the shelter of the tree, bearing
the torture of the weather with a divine patience, letting his long
hair flow where it would, with his mouth set in a sad smile.
As in his early poetry Dylan Thomas seems to be exploring the

relationship between biblical story and contemporary reality as the
crucifixion in the garden proceeds swiftly, dramatically, yet with
an ironically casual, almost homely touch: 'Stand up against the
tree.' The idiot, still smiling, stood up with his back to the elder.
'Put out your arms like this.' The idiot put out his arms.
The child ran as fast as he could to the gardener's shed, and,

returning over the sodden lawns, saw that the idiot had not
moved but stood, straight and Smiling, with his back to the tree
and his arms stretched out.
'Let me tie your hands.'

The idiot felt the wire that had not mended the rake close
round his wrists. It cut into the flesh, and the blood from the cuts
fell shining on to the tree.
'Brother', he said. He saw that the child held silver nails in the
palm of his hand.
Wittily, in this snowy Christmas setting, and aptly relating biblical

and present time, the reference to Bethlehem clearly echoes the
Carmarthenshire village of that name, a hamlet near Llangadog.
Thereby, too, the idiot's innocence and holiness in this Welsh
Bethlehem setting is identified with that of Christ's childhood, and
we may aptly recall Dylan Thomas's reference to 'a mock Christ' in
'my novel of the Jarvis Valley'. In this story biblical narrative has
been interpreted in modern and personal terms, as in Thomas's
early verse, for evidently poet and prose writer run together here.
The Map of Love contains both prose and verse, a rare form of
publication in a major poet, yet so shared are the themes and
language that the resulting whole is one of perfect harmony.
Undoubtedly the most striking of Dylan Thomas's early stories is
'The Burning Baby', its title the provisional one for the hoped-for
publication of these stories in the thirties. In addition to the poetic
power of the language it sustains the dramatic progress of its
emotions and plot. Thomas's fellow Anglo-Welsh writer and friend
at this time, Mr Glyn Jones, has valuably suggested the source of
this compelling tale. Visiting Aberystwyth with Dylan Thomas in
1934 to meet Caradoc Evans, Glyn Jones told him the story of Dr
William Price of Llantrisant, the Welsh doctor and druidic figure
who chanted pagan addresses to the moon, boasted of supernatu-
ral powers, named his much-loved illegitimate son Iesu Grist Oesus
Christ) and cremated him on a hilltop when he died at five years of
age, chanting wild laments over the body. Incidentally, Dr Price's
successful defence of himself at a subsequent trial made cremation
legal in this country. Glyn Jones recalls that Dylan listened to this
story while smoking and lounging on his bed at their Aberystwyth
hotel, so engrossed that he afterwards discovered the bedsheet to
be riddled with cigarette burns! Clearly the incident of the child's
cremation fired the poet's imagination; and indeed the death by
fire of a child he was later to commemorate memorably in his
poetry, and similar themes of nature's role are explored in both,
although a subsidiary element in this satiric but elemental tale.
174 The Prose
Evidently influenced by Caradoc Evans's stories, religious
hypocrisy is mocked, for the central character is the vicar Rhys
Rhys and the child he burns is the baby his daughter conceives by
him. This event opens the tale:
They said that Rhys was burning his baby when a gorse bush
broke into fire on the summit of the hill. The bush, burning
merrily, assumed to them the sad white features and the rickety
limbs of the vicar's burning baby. What the wind had not blown
away of the baby's ashes, Rhys Rhys had sealed in a stone jar.
Soon we meet the vicar's eldest son, a changeling, an idiot, with

long green hair, who has had strange sexual adventures, for his
sister 'was to him as ugly as the sow faced woman of L1areggub
who had taught him the terrors of the flesh. He remembered the
advances of that unlovely woman'. Interestingly, this is the first
appearance of the word 'L1areggub', its coining a device employed
also in Samuel Butler's title Erewhon. The son enters the scene
vividly in this primeval world, Thomas delighting in the evocation
of Gothic horror:
They heard his son howl in the wind. They saw him walking
over the hill, holding a dead animal up to the light of the stars.
They saw him in the valley shadows as he moved, with the
motion of a man cutting wheat, over the brows of the fields. In a
sanatorium he coughed his lungs into a basin, stirring his fingers
delightedly in the blood. What moved with invisible scythe
through the valley was a shadow and a handful of shadows cast
by the grave sun.
Such writing not only brings to mind Thomas's own tubercular

symptoms as an adolescent and his preoccupation with this, but
the rural farm landscapes near Blaen Cwm and Fern Hill farm,
albeit here imaginatively re-created in somewhat sinister colours.
The morbid description of the boy's discovery of a dead rabbit is
used to release feelings of horror and cruelty:
The rabbit's head was riddled with pellets, the dogs had torn
open its belly, and the marks of a ferret's teeth were upon its
throat. He lifted it gently up, tickling it behind the ears. The
blood from its head dropped on his hand. Through the rip in the
belly, its intestines had dropped out and coiled on the stone.
This shares something with Thomas's description, though pre-
sented with grim humour, of a not dissimilar incident in a letter
written from Blaen Cwm in 1933.
Some hours ago a man came into the kitchen, opened the bag he
was carrying, and dropped the riddled bodies of eight rabbits
onto the floor. He said it was a good sport, showed me their torn
bellies and opened heads, brought out the ferret from his pocket
for me to see. The ferret might have been his own child, he
fondled it so .... He called it Billy Fach. 6
Interestingly, too, the same paragraph in the letter relates that

'There are a few books on the floor beside me - an anthology of
poetry from Jonson to Dryden, the prose of Donne, a Psychology
of Insanity.' He also lists a Bible.
But to return to the unfolding narrative of 'The Burning Baby' we
read that 'It was, they said, on a fine sabbath morning in the
middle of summer that Rhys Rhys fell in love with his daughter.'
Clearly the adolescent poet is morbidly obsessed with the corrup-
tion of the flesh:
He [Rhys RhysJ moved his hand up and down her arm. Only the
awkward and the ugly, only the barren bring forth fruit. The
flesh of her arm was red with the smoothing of his hand. He
touched her breast. From the touch of her breast he knew each
inch of flesh upon her. Why do you touch me there? she said.
Rhys Rhys's immolation of the child his daughter conceives by him

is described in the light of the minister's religious guilt and horror
at the corruption of the flesh, albeit his own. It is an eloquent and
dramatic scene:
Surrounded by shadows, he prayed before the flaming stack,

and the sparks of the heather blew past his smile. Burn, child,
poor flesh, mean flesh, flesh, flesh, sick sorry flesh, flesh of the
foul womb, burn back to dust, he prayed.
Undoubtedly hypocrisy is the chief target of Thomas's ferocious

satire, and like Caradoc Evans his rooted instinct is to mock and
wound the Nonconformist clergy, depicted in their chapel setting
and ethos:
176 The Prose
That night he preached of the sins of the flesh. 0 God in the
image of our flesh, he prayed.
His daughter sat in the front pew, and stroked her arm. She
would have touched her breast where he had touched it, but the
eyes of the congregation were upon her.
Flesh, flesh, flesh, said the vicar.
Dylan Thomas's mockery turns to a sardonic, biting comedy as he

attributes perverse desires to the religious and 'respectable' in his
satiric attack, exploiting its possibilities on a wider, but less realistic
canvas than Caradoc Evans:
Rhys Rhys sat in his study, the stem of his pipe stuck between
his flybuttons, the bible unopened on his knees. The day of God
was over, and the sun, like another sabbath, went down behind
the hills .... Merry with desire, Rhys Rhys cast the bible on the
floor. He reached for another book, and read, in the lamplit
darkness, of the old woman who had deceived the devil. The
devil is poor flesh, said Rhys Rhys.
Characteristically, too, Dylan Thomas sets the burning of the

child's body in the familiar pattern and symmetry of nature's and
man's dissolution; such words as 'worm' and 'star' derived from
the language of his early poetry:
The fruit of the flesh falls with the worm from the tree.
Conceiving the worm, the bark crumbles. There lay the poor star
of flesh that had dropped, like the bead of a woman's milk,
through the nipples of the wormy tree.
Written shortly before his twentieth birthday 'The Burning Baby'

both dramatically and poetically notably embodies his emotional,
intellectual and instinctual preoccupations at this point.
Perhaps the most charming and pleasing of these early tales are
the lyrical effusions such as 'A Prospect of the Sea', a beautiful
evocation of high summer in Carmarthenshire countryside as
experienced by a boy already a precocious pantheist. Is not this a
picture of those green and golden summers of 'Fern Hill', in prose,
but a powerfully sensuous and rhapsodic one?
It was high summer, and the boy was lying in the corn. He
was happy because he had no work to do and the weather was
hot. He heard the corn sway from side to side above him, and
the noise of birds who whistled from the branches of the trees
that hid the house. Lying flat on his back, he stared up into the
unbrokenly blue sky falling over the edge of the corn. The wind,
after the warm rain before noon, smelt of rabbits and cattle. . . .
Now he was riding on the sea, swimming through the golden
corn waves, gliding along the heavens like a bird .... This was
the best summer since the first seasons of the world. He did not
believe in God, but God had made this summer full of blue
winds and heat and pigeons in the house wood.
A dream-like country girl, half princess, half temptress, appears

and kisses him, exciting his desires and fears, but 'if he cried aloud
to his uncle in the hidden house, she would make new animals,
beckon Carmarthen tigers out of the mile-away wood'. The
afternoon moves to evening in a richly poetic prose, both precise
and evocative in its effect, that demonstrates Thomas's early
mastery of image and rhythm, particularly in the creation of a
haunting, holistic pastoralism:
The afternoon was dying; lazily, namelessly drifting westward

through the insects in the shade, over hill and tree and river and
corn and grass to the evening shaping in the sea; blowing away;
being blown away from Wales in a wind, in the slow, blue grains,
like a wind full of dreams and medicines; down the tide of the
sun on to the grey and chanting shore where the birds from
Noah's ark glide by with bushes in their mouths, and tomorrow
and tomorrow tower over the cracked sand-castles.
Such writing anticipates the visionary and healing pantheism of

the last poems. But now, racing the boy to the sea, Venus-like the
girl disappears in the 'flesh and bone water' and waves. 'Come
back! Come back!' cries the boy, his words, like Captain Cat's later
in Under Milk Wood, chiming the theme that was to shape Thomas's
development as a prose writer. That development was an ever
more poignant search for temps perdu, a quest later enriched by
humorous and exact recollection. The story ends on a note of
bucolic romanticism and pastoral healing that is sustained by
biblical myth and language, not unlike the later poem 'Prologue':
On a hill to the horizon stood an old man building a boat . . .

And through the sky, out of the beds and gardens, down the
178 The Prose
white precipice built of feathers, the loud combs and mounds,
from the caves in the hill, the cloudy shapes of birds and beasts
and insects drifted into the hewn door. A dove with a green petal
followed in the raven's flight. Cool rain began to fall.
This story was first published in 1937, shortly before 'Prologue to

an Adventure', which appeared in the first number of Keidrych
Rhys's magazine Wales and which it seems was to be part of a
'reversed version of Pilgrim's Progress' and 'tells of the adventures
of Anti-Christian in his travels from the city of Zion to the City of
Destruction' as Dylan wrote. 7 This prose piece whose opening
sentence 'As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I
walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with
the loud electric faces' graced the front cover of Wales, told of the
wanderings of Daniel Dom and his visit to the pub/club called
Seven Sins. But Dylan Thomas turned from the style and
preoccupations of the early stories to the very different prose of the
Portrait stories when just over a year later he published' A Visit to
Grandpa's', the first of these autobiographical, humorous and
nostalgically recollected stories of childhood and adolescence. It
was a fruitful and maturing change of direction. Clearly the early
fiction, influenced by the climate of Freudian psychology, its
expression echoing biblical language and rhythms, is dominated
by the sexual and death-haunted preoccupations of an inwardly
turned and highly poetic imagination. It explores rites whereby the
natural world unites the living and the dead, and registers the
passing from innocence to experience, particularly in sexual terms.
That passage is marked by considerable guilt and morbidity. I
think such factors as Thomas's work as a journalist in Swansea, his
marriage to Caitlin in 1937 and their settling in Laugharne in 1938,
turned Thomas's eye away from his introspective intensities and
outward to the world around him, both realistically observed and
exactly recollected. Once he had discovered this new direction in
'A Visit to Grandpa's' he followed it with sureness and vigour,
perhaps prompted, too, by the refusal of several publishers to
publish the proposed collection of sixteen stories titled 'The
Burning Baby' fearing they might offend public taste at that time.
Dylan Thomas spoke of'A Prospect of the Sea' as 'one of my own
favourites'S when his editor at Dent, Richard Church, excluded it
from The Map of Love, complaining that it had 'moments of
sensuality without purpose [and it] brings us near the danger
zone'. Even as late as 1955 when Dent posthumously published A

Prospect of the Sea, the phrase 'the death from playing with yourself'
was excluded from this title story. However, Richard Church had
perceptively urged Dylan, as he records in 1936, 'to write a story
about my earlier world,9 in contrast to what the poet referred to as
the 'twenty difficult and violent tales' in his letter of reply to him.
But whatever the motives and inner compulsions, in two years the
highly charged prose of the tales in The Map of Love, of which
Thomas's description of himself in 1934 as'I am a Symbol Simon' to
is an apt description, had given way to that rich and authentic
blend of the pathos and comedy of compassionately observed
Welsh life. It became Thomas's forte as a prose writer. The opening
pages of a projected 'book about Wales with a slender central
theme of make-belief, a certain amount of autobiography, and also
a factual Journey of the more popular kind,l1 seem to have been
attempted while Thomas was in Cornwall in the spring of 1936 but,
more make-belief than autobiography or fact, the manuscript was
abandoned. t2
Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Dog
It was, of course, the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog stories,
written in Laugharne in the years immediately preceding the war,
that signalled Dylan Thomas's real emergence as a master of prose.
They mark Dylan Thomas's discovery that his vein of comedy,
already present in his letters and the school magazine parodies,
could prove a new and significant means of expression. The
composition, early in 1938, of the first of these stories, 'A Visit to
Grandpa's', a lively tale with its already assured and distinctive
blend of pathos and comedy and its vivid Carmarthenshire
settings seen through the innocent but acute observation of the
child, was decisive in Thomas's growth as a prose writer. From this
point the jester and entertainer in the poet's personality, largely
absent in the high seriousness of his best verse, had discovered a
role in literature, a role where the poet's gift for comedy was
enriched by a piercing nostalgia and that haunting perception of
mutability and death that veined his poetry. Elements of personal
recollection vivified by Thomas's flair for dramatic presentation
and precision of style no doubt directed the poet's newly acquired
control of narrative. Thus, while in 'A Visit to Grandpa's'
description of the countryside is close to that of 'A Prospect of the
Sea' in such lines as 'we passed through the wood full of pigeons,
and their wings broke the branches as they rushed to the tops of
the trees', this familiar lyricism changes to realistic description of
incident and setting as the boy and his grandfather visit Llan-
stephan village by pony and trap:
When we came to Uanstephan village at the top of the hill, he

left the cart by the 'Edwinsford Arms' and patted the pony's
muzzle and gave it sugar, saying: 'You're a weak little pony, Jim,
to pull big men like us.'
He had strong beer and I had lemonade, and he paid Mrs
180
'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog' 181
Edwinsford with a sovereign out of the tinkling bag; she
inquired after his health, and he said that Llangadock was better
for the tubes. We went to look at the churchyard and the sea,
and sat in the wood called the Sticks, and stood on the concert
platform in the middle of the wood where visitors sang on
midsummer nights .... Grandpa paused at the churchyard and
pointed over the iron gate at the angelic headstones and the poor
wooden crosses. 'There's no sense in lying there', he said.
While such a word as 'tinkling' illustrates the sensory exactitude of

this prose style, the topographical detail of the pub's name, the
wood that is indeed called 'the Sticks', and the family churchyard,
as well as the Llanstephan sea at the foot of the hill, serve Thomas's
vivid and quick delineation of place, character, plot and atmos-
phere. Even the boy's dream fantasy is now rooted in tradition and
custom, the style tinged with lyricism and comic invention:
I woke late on my last morning, out of dreams where the

Llanstephan sea carried bright sailing-boats as long as liners; and
heavenly choirs in the Sticks, dressed in bard's robes and brass-
buttoned waistcoats, sang in a strange Welsh to the departing
sailors.
Farcical incident, of the kind probably heard by Dylan in the gossip

of pub or club, which he so enjoyed, aptly enlivens the tale and is
related with narrative flair and appropriateness:
Once, grandpa told me, the parson had bought three ducks at
Carmarthen Fair and make a pond for them in the centre of the
garden, but they waddled to the gutter under the crumbling
doorsteps of the house, and swam and quacked there. When I
reached the end of the orchard path, I looked through a hole in
the hedge and saw that the parson had made a tunnel through
the rockery that was between the gutter and the pond and had
set up a notice in plain writing: 'This way to the pond'.
The ducks were still swimming under the steps.
Unable to find his grandfather the boy alerts the neighbours and
with mounting tension and concern, the actions and reactions of
each participant briefly but vividly depicted, the villagers' proces-
sion proceeds to the sound and colour of excitement and carnival,
182 The Prose
anxiety made exuberantly comic by Dylan Thomas's pictorial and
dramatic mastery:
I called across to a man who leant on a spade in a field beyond

the garden hedge: 'Have you seen my grandpa this morning?'
He did not stop digging, and answered over his shoulder: '1
seen him in his fancy waistcoat.'
Griff, the barber, lived in the next cottage. I called to him
through the open door: 'Mr Griff, have you seen my grandpa?'
The barber came out in his shirtsleeves.
I said: 'He's wearing his best waistcoat.' I did not know if it
was important, but grandpa wore his waistcoat only in the night.
'Has grandpa been to L1anstephan?' asked Mr Griff anxiously.
'He went there yesterday in a little trap', I said.
He hurried indoors and I heard him talking in Welsh, and he
came out again with his white coat on, and he carried a striped
and coloured walking-stick. He strode down the village street
and I ran by his side. . . .
As Dan Tailor searched for his overcoat, Mr Griff was striding
on. 'Will Evans', he called outside the carpenter's shop. 'Dai
Thomas has been to L1anstephan, and he's got his waistcoat on. . ..
We called at the butcher's shop and Mr Price's house, and Mr
Griff repeated his message like a town crier.
We gathered together in Johnstown Square. Dan Tailor had
his bicycle, Mr Price his pony trap .... The tailor led the way,
ringing his bell as though there were a fire or a robbery, and an
old woman by the gate of a cottage at the end of the street ran
inside like a pelted hen. Another woman waved a bright
handkerchief.
'Where are we going?' I asked.
Grandpa's neighbours were as solemn as old men with black
hats and jackets on the outskirts of a fair.
Exact recollection of Welsh settings and attitudes, as in this

evocation of the old men's solemnity that adds to the comic pathos
of the occasion, inspired Thomas's narrative, and his repeated
reference to the detail of his grandfather's 'fancy' waistcoat shows
his ability to build up the comedy of the situation with tellingly
used invention. The final scene on Carmarthen bridge has a
peculiarly Welsh blend of comedy and high seriousness, and more
than a tinge of pathos as we learn the old man's reason for his
flight to L1angadock, unlike Llanstephan an inland village, the
other side of Carmarthen. The story turns, too, on the emphasis
and concern given to a person's place of burial, especially in Wales
at this time, and of course this direct yet philosophical acceptance
of death would have stirred Thomas's imagination, but it results
here in a tale very different from the story of Dr Price's cremation.
A moving blend of comedy and pathos informs this scene, Dylan
Thomas's grandfather with the Biblical aura of 'a prophet who has
no doubt' while his neighbours press their arguments and
strangely haunting enticements. Piercing nostalgia inspires a
spring of comedy, veined with mutability and death:
Mr Griff raised his stunted barber's pole. 'And where do you

think you are going', he said, 'with your old black bag?'
Grandpa said: 'I am going to L1angadock to be buried.' And he
watched the coracle shells slip into the water lightly, and the
gulls complain over the fish-filled water as bitterly as Mr Price
complained:
'But you aren't dead yet, Dai Thomas.'
For a moment grandpa reflected, then: 'There's no sense in
lying dead in L1anstephan', he said. 'The ground is comfy in
L1angadock; you can twitch your legs without putting them in
the sea.'
His neighbours moved close to him. They said: 'You aren't
dead, Mr Thomas.'
'How can you be buried, then?'
'Nobody's going to bury you in L1anstephan.'
'Come on home, Mr Thomas.'
'There's strong beer for tea.'
'And cake.'
But grandpa stood firmly on the bridge, and clutched his bag
to his side, and stared at the flowing river and the sky, like a
prophet who has no doubt.
This story was soon followed by 'The Peaches' and 'One Warm
Saturday' in the same year, while 1939 saw the composition of the
others in The Portrait, as Thomas extended his impassioned and
faithful remembrance of childhood and adolescence to his Swan-
sea days' as a young dog' as well as the vignettes of visits to rural
Carmarthenshire. Undoubtedly his experience working as a jour-
nalist on the South Wales Evening Post, although for little more than
184 The Prose
a year, had helped to turn his eye outward to the distinctive and
varied life of Swansea and its neighbouring communities. It was a
more profitable gaze for his development as a prose writer than the
introspective stasis of his earlier, almost surreal, fantasies, however
rich and compelling their language. We may aptly recall the old
reporter's comments in Thomas's closely observed, though fictio-
nally presented, comedy of his drinking tours of the Swansea
pubs, and the poet's confident reply:
When I showed this story a long time later to Mr Farr, he said:

'You got it all wrong. You got the people mixed. The boy with
the handkerchief danced in the 'Jersey'. Fred Jones was singing
in the 'Fishguard'. Never mind. Come and have one to-night in
the 'Nelson'. There's a girl down there who'll show you where
the sailor bit her. . . .
'I'll put them all in a story by and by', I said.
The writer Richard Hughes, author of A High Wind in Jamaica,

who lived in Laugharne and was a close friend of Dylan Thomas in
the thirties, claims to have first suggested the title 'Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Dog' for these stories which Dylan Thomas
variously described as 'stories towards a Provincial Autobiography
... about Swansea life ... adolescence in the suburban nights,
friendships" and 'a series of stories about Welsh people'.2 Soon
after publication of 'A Visit to Grandpa's' in New English Weekly he
wrote to the editor that 'I am working busily on some new stories; I
want to write a whole lot like that one you liked about Grandpa,
stories of Swansea and me.'3 Certainly Thomas rightly emphasised
their autobiographical element and their strong sense of place, and
that combination of colourful yet realistic description that he called
'illuminated reporting', 4 no doubt with his journalistic experience
in mind. Interestingly, too, Thomas had advised his young writer
friend Trevor Hughes 'To hell with all the preconceived notions of
short story writing', urging that he jump 'into the sea of yourself
like a young dog, and bring out a pearl'.s Thomas's sudden dog-
dive into the seas of an earlier self certainly produced in the Portrait
stories an original and very Welsh pearl! He was, of course, alert to
the palindromic possibilities of the word 'dog', commenting in
1934 that 'In the beginning was a word I can't spell, not a reversed
Dog,!6
Undoubtedly the title was an appropriate one since the stories
do carefully present a picture of the poet's growing consciousness
of himself and of his worlds during childhood and youth; and he
characteristically hides the real seriousness of his picture behind
the mask of comedy, since humorous self-parody was always
something he delighted in. He denied the influence of Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, saying that 'the name given to
... portrait paintings by their artists is 'Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man' ... I made a bit of doggish fun of the painting-title and
... intended no possible reference to Joyce: He does add,
however, that 'the shaping of some of my Portrait stories might
owe something to Joyce's stories in the volume Dubliners. But then
Dubliners was a pioneering work in the world of the short story,
and no good storywriter since can have failed, in some way,
however little, to have benefited by it.'7 Certainly as Joyce's
Dubliners encapsulates a people, time and place, so does Dylan
Thomas's Portrait, albeit in illuminated recollection, more painting
than photograph. 'Swansea ... city of laughter, little Dublin', said
Dylan.
The picture that Dylan Thomas gives of Wales in the Portrait is, of
course, mostly an idealized and exuberant one, genial in tone, and
nostalgic in his recherclle du temps Gallois, as he drew extensively upon
his memories of childhood and youth. He was developing, too, a
consuming, though generally unjudging, curiosity about other
people's lives, and vividly depicts the various communities in which
he was brought up. Checking the 'Portrait ... Young Dog proofs'
Thomas wrote that 'I've kept the flippant title for - as the publishers
advised - moneymaking reasons'. 8 Nevertheless it was dearly an
artistically well-chosen one, for the collection has a unity of tone and
structure. Part of that unity is the picture it gives of its author in the
carefully planned series of stories, for each deals with a stage in his
childhood, youth or early manhood, and he never repeats a situation
or experience. Usually Thomas is the observer and interpreter, a little
apart from the rest of the group. He is ever aware of other people's
discomfort, and quick to see the pathos of their situation. Though
humorous, and occasionally gently satiric, Dylan Thomas's attitude,
as in Under Milk Wood, is compassionate and, despite all their
imperfections and oddities, he accepts and delights in the humanity
of his characters.
In 'The Peaches' the poet again looks back to a childhood visit to
Carmarthenshire, this time to his aunt's farm, Fern Hill, whose
landscapes inspired the later poem, and whose farm parlour is
186 The Prose
described in 'After the funeral' which commemorates, of course,
her death. It was written in 1938 at much the same time as the
story, five years after Annie Jones's death. Evidently his nostalgic
gaze inspired his poetry as well as his prose, and both were still
imaginatively and emotionally linked. At once the setting, charac-
ters and situation are vividly and sympathetically described in the
colours and clarity of childhood's vision:
The grass-green cart, with 'J.Jones, GorsehiII' painted shakily on

it, stopped in the cobblestone passage between 'The Hare's Foot'
and 'The Pure Drop'. It was late on an April evening. Uncle Jim,
in his black market suit, with a stiff white shirt and no collar,
loud in new boots, and a plaid cap, creaked and climbed down.
He dragged out a thick wicker basket from a heap of straw in the
corner of the cart and swung it over his shoulder. I heard a
squeal from the basket and saw the tip of a pink tail curling out
as Uncle Jim opened the public door of 'The Pure Drop'.
Exact selection of words, such as 'grass-green', 'shakily', 'cobbles-

tone', 'loud', 'creaked', 'curling' evoke sight, atmosphere and
sound so that the reader is immediately involved in this world and
the unfolding tale. While Uncle Jim stops for a drink we sense his
guilt as he addresses the waiting boy: '''1'11 be out straight away",
he said fiercely, as though I had contradicted him'. We are now
alone with the nervous boy, anxiously looking into the window of
the pub:
I sat alone on the shaft of the cart in the narrow passage,

staring through a side window of 'The Hare's Foot'. A stained
blind was drawn half over it. I could see into half of ~ smoky,
secret room, where four men were playing cards .... They all
drank out of brown pint tankards and never spoke, laying the
cards down with a smack, scraping at their match boxes, puffing
at their pipes, swallowing unhappily.
The boy has a long wait, his fearful imagination beginning to race
as
the passage grew dark too suddenly, the walls crowded in, and
the roofs crouched down. To me, staring timidly there in the
dark passage in a strange town, the swarthy man appeared like a
giant in a cage surrounded by clouds. . . two white hands darted
out of the corner witll invisible cards. . . . I called, 'Uncle Jim,
Uncle Jim', softly so that he should not hear.
Comedy has given way to the frightened boy's fantasies, and we

are reminded it is the portrait of the artist as he recalls one of his
imagined tales:
A story I had made in the warm, safe island of my bed, with

sleepy midnight Swansea flowing and rolling round outside the
house, came blowing down to me then with a noise on the
cobbles. I remembered the demon in the story, with his wings
and hooks, who clung like a bat to my hair.
Thomas remembers, too, the patient, neglected horse, and the

boy's concern:
And all this time the old, broad, patient, nameless mare stood
without stirring, not stamping once on the cobbles or shaking
her reins. I called her a good girl and stood on tiptoe to try to
stroke her ear as the door of 'The Pure Drop' swung open and
the warm lamplight from the bar dazzled me and burned my
story up.
Finally they set off and Uncle Jim 'sang hymns all the way to
Gorsehill in an affectionate bass voice and conducted the wind
with his whip. He did not need to touch the reins.' Incidents of the
journey are dramatically evoked, the narrative alert with life and
adventure as Uncle Jim stopped the trap 'to light his pipe and set
the darkness on fire and show his long, red, drunken fox's face to
me', while 'between hymns she cursed the mare in Welsh'.
Reaching the farm, the poet clearly delights in recalling the details
of the household and the warm welcome, so much in contrast with
his earlier experiences:
I saw the plates on the shelves, the lighted lamp on the long, oil-
clothed table, 'Prepare to Meet Thy God' knitted over the fire
place, the smiling china dogs, the brown-stained settle, the
grandmother clock, and I ran into the kitchen and into Annie's
arms.
188 The Prose
Clearly the nostalgia of the adult poet informs this recollection of a
time and place and person now lost to him, its warmth and
security as dear to him as to the boy he once was; and these
lovingly detailed, ebullient chronicles of time past increasingly
enrich Thomas's prose. Yet he is at pains to record, too, and to
record with a playful humour his liking as a child to dramatise
himself and his situation, seeing himself even then in the centre of
his own story of the event:
There was a welcome then. The clock struck twelve as she [his
aunt] kissed me, and I stood among the shining and striking like
a prince taking off his disguise. One minute I was small and cold,
skulking dead-scared down a black passage in my stiff, best suit,
with my hollow belly thumping and my heart like a time bomb,
clutching my grammar school cap, unfamiliar to myself, a snub-
nosed story-teller lost in his own adventures ... the next I was a
royal nephew ... embraced and welcomed, standing in the snug
centre of my stories and listening to the clock announcing me.
His portrait of himself is also not simply the 'dog among the
fairies', is often far from the tough, happy-go-lucky tomboy,
unlettered and insensitive, that the Dylan Thomas legend post-
humously and falsely assembled:
I climbed the stairs; each had a different voice. The house

smelt of rotten wood and damp and animals. I thought that I had
been walking long, damp passages all my life, and climbing
stairs in the dark, alone.
We are reminded, too, that this farm inspired in the boy that joyous
and mysterious empathy with the natural world later celebrated in
the poem 'Fern Hill', whether in his account of the ubiquitous and
lilting stream he heard as he fell asleep: There was a stream below
the window; I thought it lapped against the house all night until I
slept', or the imaginative yet animal and instinctive feeling for
nature released when he played and roamed the farm's fields and
dingle:
On my haunches, eager and alone, casting an ebony shadow,

with the Gorsehill jungle swarming, the violent impossible birds
and fishes leaping, hidden under four-stemmed flowers the
height of horses, in the early evening in a dingle near

Carmarthen, ... I felt all my young body like an excited animal
surrounding me.
The singular ingredient of religious and sexual feeling that so

pervaded Dylan Thomas's imagination, and in consequence both
his poetry and stories, also enriches the texture of this tale, though
treated with humour and an idiosyncratic but wholly convincing
realism. It turns out that Annie's son Gwilym wishes to be a
preacher, and not only writes hymns which he sings to himself
'treble and bass', but writes poems to girls changing 'all the girls'
names to God', and boasts of having met actresses while on a
religious tour! But Gwilym is presented to us with humour, rather
than satire, and it is a convincing, at times arresting picture,
particularly when he invites Dylan to watch him preaching in the
old barn he uses as a chapel:
A dusty wagon with the name painted out and a white-wash

cross on its side stood in the middle. 'My pulpit cart', he said,
and walked solemnly into it up the broken shaft. 'You sit on the
hay; mind the mice', he said. Then he brought out his deepest
voice again, and cried to the heavens and the bat-lined rafters
and the hanging webs: 'Bless us this holy day, 0 Lord, bless me
and Dylan and this Thy little chapel for ever and ever, Amen.
Keenly aware of the life peculiar to Wales at this time Thomas

vividly describes the sermon his cousin Gwilym preaches, parody-
ing the hwyl that characterises Welsh preaching. It is a compelling
scene, the final eloquently exasperated reference to God as a
'bloody cat' an instance of Thomas's imaginative comedy at its
best, wholly in character with the world of the farm boy's religious
fervour, yet, as in the later portrayal of the Reverend Eli Jenkins in
Under Milk Wood, more sympathetic and affectionate than derisive
or hostile:
I sat on the hay and stared at Gwilym preaching, and heard his
voice rise and crack and sink to a whisper and break into singing
and Welsh and ring triumphantly and be wild and meek .... '0
God, Thou art everywhere,. all the time, in the dew of the
morning, in the frost of the evening, in the field, and the town, in
the preacher and the sinner, in the sparrow and the big buzzard.
190 The Prose
Thou canst see everything, right down deep in our hearts; Thou
canst see us when the sun is gone; Thou canst see us when there
aren't any stars .... Thou canst see everything we do, in the
night and day, in the day and night, everything, everything;
Thou canst see all the time. 0 God, mun, you're like a bloody
cat.'
It is part of Thomas's narrative allusiveness that later climbing to

the top of a tree with his friend Jack, Dylan sees Gwilym
masturbating in 'the lavatory in the corner of the field. . . reading a
book and moving his hands'; and while visiting the pig sty with
Gwilym Dylan learns his uncle 'sold it [the piglet] to go on the
drink', reminding us of the opening of this tale. Cousin Gwilym
adds for good measure: 'Last Christmas he took a sheep over his
shoulder, and he was pissed for ten days.' We read, too, that
Gwilym imparted the information 'in his deepest rebuking
whisper, his eyes fixed on the sky'! The visit to the bam-chapel is a
haunting night-time scene when Gwilym
lit a candle on top of the pulpit cart. It was a small light in the big
bam. The bats were gone. Shadows still clung upside down
along the roof. Gwilym was no longer my cousin in a Sunday
suit, but a tall stranger shaped like a spade .in a cloak .... The
straw heaps were lively. I thought of the sermon on the cart: we
were watched.
On this occasion Gwilym takes confessions, and it is in this strange

setting that Dylan lists the delinquencies of the enfant terrible, the
young dog. Whether invented or real such a 'confession' does of
course save this account from the sentimentality always apt to
enter into romantic recollections of childhood and Thomas always
took pleasure in shocking his readers:
I let Edgar Reynolds be whipped because I had taken his

homework; I stole from my mother's bag; I stole from Gwyneth's
bag; I stole twelve books in three visits from the library, and
threw them away in the park; I drank a cup of my water to see
what it tasted like; I beat a dog with a stick so that it would roll
over and lick my hand afterwards; I looked with Dan Jones
through the keyhole while his maid had a bath . . . I pulled my
trousers down and showed Jack Williams; I saw Billy Williams
beat a pigeon to death with a fire-shovel, and laughed and got
sick.
It is for the snobbish, insensitive behaviour of the well-to-do Mrs

Williams who visits the farm with her son Jack, who is also to
holiday there, that Thomas reserves his satiric shafts. Disdaining
Annie's offer of tinned peaches for tea, a treat that Annie has
proudly offered, and ostentatiously dusting the chair before sitting
on it, she cruelly rejects Annie's warm-hearted, peasant kindness.
Chauffeur-driven she leaves 'the ruin of Gorsehill', a description
closer to the farm of the story than poem; for here Thomas has
described its state of neglect and dereliction, largely due to Jim
Jones's spendthrift drinking. We hear Annie's pathetic cries of 'Oh,
why do you have to do it, Jim? There's nothing left now' as the
boys in their bedroom listen to his drunken return at midnight. As
well as being a vividly told and poignantly humorous tale in itself,
it is perhaps the best introduction not only to 'Fern Hill' but to
'After the funeral', Dylan's panegyric on Annie's death.
The remaining eight stories are Swansea stories, though two of
them, 'Extraordinary Little Cough' and 'Who Do You Wish Was
With Us?', describe visits to Gower, the first a camping outing to
Rhossili and its 'sweeping five-mile beach', an entertaining account
of the adventures of schoolboy Dylan; the latter a more melancholy
tale of a walk to Worm's Head, Dylan now a few years older and
accompanied by a friend who is tormented by his brother's death
from tuberculosis. The opening sentence of 'Extraordinary Little
Cough' confirms the backward gaze to a time of past happiness,
but the narrative is bracingly frank, and this first paragraph not·
only exuberantly conveys the boys' irrepressible excitement but
also Dylan's calm reflections on possible disasters:
One afternoon, in a particularly bright and glowing August,

some years before I knew I was happy, George Hooping, whom
we called Little Cough, Sidney Evans, Dan Davies, and I sat on
the roof of a lorry travelling to the end of the Peninsula. It was a
tall, six-wheeled lorry, from which we could spit on the roofs of
the passing cars and throw our apple stumps at women on the
pavement. One stump caught a man on a bicycle in the middle of
the back, he swerved across the road, for a moment we sat quiet
and George Hooping's face grew pale. And if the lorry runs him
192 The Prose
over, I thought calmly as the man on the bicycle swayed towards
the hedge, he'll get killed and I'll be sick on my trousers and
perhaps on Sidney's too, and we'll be arrested and hanged,
except George Hooping who didn't have an apple.
Very much in the young dog vein the story relates the boys'
adventures on that seaside holiday, as they meet and flirt with
some schoolgirls and also encounter the school bullies, Brazell and
Skully, Thomas particularly exhibiting his now assured use of
dialogue. The comedy of adolescence informing the story is very
like that of 'The Fight', where Thomas, at much the same age,
describes his first meeting with Dan Jones. In 'The Fight' their
eager and earnest discussions of poetry, their verbal games and
inventions, albeit now conveyed by Dylan Thomas with the fond
but ironic comedy of the adult poet and story writer, provide the
best introduction to the young Dylan of the juvenile school
magazine writings and his first versifying. In 'Extraordinary Little
Cough', despite the lyrical and shrewd scoring of this comedy of
early adolescence, the story ends on a note of pathos, albeit a
pathos born of an adolescent's sense of life's terrible seriousness.
George Hooping, nicknamed Little Cough, the gang's weakling,
has been bullied and humiliated in the course of their holiday
escapades, but to prove his toughness to the other boys he has
been running for hours across the five miles of Rhossili's sands on
this summer's evening. In the closing sentence, and with the
graphic illumination of a painting, Thomas images the exhausted,
vulnerable boy: 'And when I stared round at George again he was
lying on his back fast asleep in the deep grass and his hair was
touching the flames.'
There is, in each story, a specific well-defined mood, and when
we read the Swansea stories it is clear that each area of the town
has a particular meaning and impact for Thomas, and the Swansea
streets are full of emotional connotations. Usually a mood of
nostalgia directs the experience:
I was a lonely nightwalker and a steady stander-at-corners. I

liked to walk through the wet town after midnight, when the
streets were deserted and the window lights out. alone and alive
on the glistening tram-lines in dead and empty High Street
under the moon, gigantically sad in the damp streets by ghostly
Ebenezer Chapel. And I never felt more a part of the remote and
overpressing world, or more full of love and arrogance and pity
and humility, not for myself alone, but for the living earth I
suffered on .... I leant against the wall of a derelict house in the
residential areas or wandered in the empty rooms, stood terrified
on the stairs or gazing through the smashed windows at the sea
or at nothing, and the lights going out one by one in the avenues.
This is, of course, very much the portrait of the artist, and the
account rings with such a personal directness and intensity of
feeling, that it again serves as perhaps one of the most illuminating
and true introductions to the young Swansea poet featured in the
early notebooks, the eloquently vulnerable and self-dramatising
'Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive'. But in evoking the compassion of
the artist this writing conveys Thomas's widening feeling for
humanity; and what distinguishes the Portrait stories is the
humorous, true-to-life yet swift depiction of character and the
equally colourful and authentic portrait of their communities. This
is illustrated in the affecting, picaresque yet touchingly sad
comedy of 'Old Garbo', perhaps Thomas's most realistic pub story.
Here compassion for the adult world of suffering, indignity and
loss is presented, unusually, through the adult's rather than the
child's vision of the world. It tells of Thomas's initiation as a young
reporter into pub life, both the pleasures of beery, brief conviviality
and the wounds it often hides. We are reminded that the poet grew
up in the Swansea of the Depression, and that its poverty,
unemployment and misery left its mark on his memory. Thus Mr
Farr, the senior reporter, sets out to meet Thomas for their
Saturday night pub tour:
Mr Farr hurried down High Street, savagely refusing laces and

matches, averting his eyes from the shabby crowds. He knew
that the poor and the sick and the ugly, unwanted people were
so close around him that, with one look of recognition, one
gesture of sympathy, he would be lost among them and the
evening would be spoiled forever.
Mr Farr's invitation had been brief but appealingly racy:
'You must come along with me one night', Mr Farr said

slowly. 'We'll go down the "Fishguard" on the docks; you can
see the sailors knitting there in the public bar. Why not tonight?
194 The Prose
And there's shilling women in the "Lord Jersey". You stick to
Woodbines, like me.'
Describing his own walk through wet, crowded Swansea on this

Saturday morning, Dylan Thomas reveals his eye for the sad, zany
comedy of human life, the vivid, passing moment caught by his
unerring choice of the exactly evocative word - as in 'prominently',
'rubber' and later 'broken, empty pram':
The rain had stopped and High Street shone. Walking on the
tram-lines, a neat man held his banner high and prominently
feared the Lord. I knew him as a Mr Matthews, who had been
saved some years ago from British port and who now walked
every night, in rubber shoes with a prayer book and a flashlight,
through the lanes .... Should I take the long way through the
Arcade, and stop to look at the old man with the broken, empty
pram who always stood there, by the music store, and who
would take off his cap and set his hair alight for a penny?
Clearly Mr Matthews anticipates the more hilarious gusto of Jack

Black's voyeuristic denunciations in Under Milk Wood, and like Jack
Black he is part of an exuberantly casted eccentric community!
Entering the snug of the Fishguard, in the poor, dockside area,
Dylan and Mr Farr see Mrs Prothero and her pals ('We call her Old
Garbo because she isn't like her, see'):
In the back room, under a damp royal family, a row of black-

dressed women on a hard bench sat laughing and crying, short
glasses lined by their Guinnesses .... And on the one chair, in
the middle of the room, an old woman, with a bonnet tied under
her chins, a feather boa and white gym-shoes, tittered and wept
above the rest.
Old Garbo is described sharing and drinking her sorrows on

hearing her daughter has just died in hospital in childbirth, 'so all
the old girls came round to sympathise, and they made a big
collection for her, and now she's beginning to drink it up and
treating round'. The conversation of the women drinking is
succinctly conveyed and the scene in the snug has that blend of
pathos and comedy Thomas always deftly handled, the prose now
possessing a Dickensian vigour, authenticity and sad merriment:
Before a new audience, the women cried louder, patting Mrs
Prothero's knees and hands, adjusting her bonnet, praising her
dead daughter.
'What'll you have, Mrs Prothero, dear?'
'No, have it with me, dear, best in the house.'
'Well, a Guinness tickles my fancy.'
'And a little something in it, dear.'
'Just for Margie's sake, then.'
'Think if she was here now, dear, singing "One of the Ruins"
or "Cockles and Mussels"; she had a proper madam's voice.'
'Oh, don't, Mrs Harris!'
'There, we're only bucking you up. Grief killed the cat, Mrs
Prothero. Let's have a song, dear.'
'The pale moon was rising above the grey mountain.'
Dylan gets drunk, and the next day walks in Cwmdonkin Park to
recover from his hangover and writes 'the first three lines of a
poem without hope' on 'a ball of waste paper that the wind blew
down the gravel path'. But we learn how Old Garbo discovers that
her daughter had not in fact died, and flees to 'a boozer over the
bridge' for as she couldn't face her friends; and this tragi-comedy
ends as she jumps from the bridge to the sea below. 'None of Old
Garbo's friends came in that night.'
During the thirties Dylan Thomas was, of course, becoming a
connoisseur of pub life, in Swansea, Laugharne and the London
bohemia of the Chelsea and Soho pubs, and was no doubt
collecting those anecdotes and snippets of heard and overheard
conversation that were always to salt his prose comedy. In this
loose-tongued, beery atmosphere it was his habit to jot down word
and phrase and vivid incident on cigarette packets or any handy
and easily pocketed fragment of paper he might quickly scribble on
-useful aids to his in any case retentive and exact memory of
human behaviour and speech. Recalling their years in Laugharne
just before the war, when Thomas was writing these stories, Caitlin
Thomas describes his friendship with Ivy Williams, landlady of
Brown's, and their daily exchange of gossip, noting that 'Dylan
adored her: they both loved gossip and scandal. They would spend
the whole morning in her kitchen talking about the awful things
people were doing, who was sleeping with whom, who had been
fighting or poaching or up in court.'9
No doubt such experience contributed to the Portrait stories,
196 The Prose
particularly 'Old Garbo' and the final one 'One Warm Saturday',
Thomas's favourite. The poet is wandering by himself about
Swansea on this hot bank holiday, and contrasts his isolation with
the happy, 'disporting families' on the sands:
In a huddle of picknicking women and their children,

stretched out limp and damp in the sweltering sun ... among
the ice-cream cries, the angrily happy shouts of boys playing
ball, and the screams of girls as the sea rose to their waists, the
young man sat alone with the shadows of failure at his side.
Closer to the experience than in his later narrative broadcasts,

joyous and nostalgic in their recollection of summer days, his self-
portrait of the adolescent artist's melancholy deepens, although
presented in a vein of ironic comedy:
The young man, in his wilderness, saw the holiday Saturday set
down before him, false and pretty, as a flat picture under the
vulgar sun, the disporting families with paper bags, buckets and
spades, parasols and bottles, the happy, hot, and aching girls
with sunburn liniments in their bags, bronzed young men ...
children up to no sense with unrepeatable delight in the dirty
sand, moved him, he thought dramatically in his isolation, to an
old shame and pity; outside all holiday, like a young man
doomed forever to the company of his maggots.
Clearly we are again in the company of the Dylan Thomas of the

early poems, and the description vividly contrasts with the poet's
comic remembrances of 'Holiday Memory', written eight years
later, the comedy here veined with loss and nostalgia:
August Bank Holiday. A tune on an ice-cream cornet. A slap of

sea and a tickle of sand. A fanfare of sunshades opening. A
wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive water .... I
remember the sea telling lies in a shell held to my ear for a whole
harmonious hollow minute by a small, wet girl in an enormous
bathing-suit marked 'Corporation Property' . I remember sharing
the last of my moist buns with a boy and a lion. Tawny and
savage, with cruel nails and capacious mouth, the little boy tore
and devoured. Wild as seed-cake, ferocious as a hearth-rug, the
depressed and verminous lion nibbled like a mouse at his half a
'Portrait a/the Artist as a Young Dog' 197
bun, and hiccupped in the sad dusk of his cage .... In those
always radiant, rainless, lazily rowdy and sky-blue summers
departed, I remember August Monday from the rising of the sun
over the stained and royal town to the husky hushing of the
roundabout music and the dowsing of the naphtha jets in the
seaside fair.
Returning to 'One Warm Saturday', we see the poet joining in a

family game of cricket on the crowded sands, until a dog carries
the ball into the sea and swims with it out of reach, and we meet
again that Swansea Cassandra fondly and familiarly named
'Matthews Hellfire', the tristesse and fun of the bright holiday
canvas compelling our gaze:
a hell-fire preacher on a box marked 'Mr Matthews' was talking

to a congregation of expressionless women. Boys with pea-
shooters sat quietly near him. A ragged man collected nothing in
a cap. Mr Matthews shook his cold hands, stormed at the
holiday, and cursed the summer from his shivering box. He cried
for a new warmth. The strong sun shone into his bones, and he
buttoned his coat collar. Valley children, with sunken, impudent
eyes, quick tongues and singing voices, chests thin as shells,
gathered round the Punch and Judy and the Stop Me tricycles,
and he denied them all.
Behind the mask of jester Thomas's feeling and compassion for the
truly dispossessed is very evident, and while the puritanical Mr
Matthews 'cast down the scarlet town' and the innocent pleasures
of a summer's day the poet himself bitterly regrets that he has not
accompanied his friends to 'Porthcawl's Coney Beach' now that 'all
his friends had vanished into their pleasures' and he dejectedly
'stood, listening to Mr Matthews, the retired drinker, crying
darkness on the evening sands, with money hot in his pocket and
Saturday burning away'. But the young dog's regrets at missing
the day's pleasures mix with the ironic comedy of the self-mocking
portrait of the artist:
He thought: Poets live and walk with their poems; a man with
visions needs no other company. Saturday is a crude day; I must
go home and sit in my bedroom by the boiler. But he was not a
poet living and walking, he was a young man in a sea town on a
198 The Prose
warm bank holiday, with two pounds to spend; he had no
visions, only two pounds and a small body with its feet on the
littered sand; serenity was for old men.
But walking later through the public gardens he sees a beautiful

young woman sitting on the park bench and she catches his glance
and 'her smile confessed her body bare and spotless and willing
and warm under the cotton, and she waited without guilt'. But
while admiring her the poet is divided in his response for 'How
beautiful she is, he thought, with his mind on words and his eyes
on her hair.' Missing his chance through his uncertainty and verbal
romanticising he retreats to a nearby hotel bar, but she arrives
there with friends and the young man's conflicting emotions of
desire, guilt and fear are viewed with the irony of the detached
observer, and again the self-portrait of the artist is very different
from that of the raffish young dog of the title or indeed of the later
legend. Thomas ironically charts the romantic agonies of young
love.
The young man in the window seat, still bewildered by the

first sudden sight of her entering the darkening room, caught
the kiss to himself and blushed. He thought to run out of the
room and through the miracle-making Gardens, to rush into his
house and hide his head in the bed-clothes and lie all night
there, dressed and trembling, her voice in his ears, her green
eyes wide awake under his closed eyelids. But only a sick boy
with tossed blood would run from his proper love into a dream,
lie down in a bedroom that was full of his shames, and sob
against the feathery, fat breast and face on the damp pillow. He
remembered his age and poems, and would not move.
Eventually the young man goes to a party with the young

woman, gets drunk and fantasises on the sexual fulfilment
promised but which, characteristically, eludes him in the strange,
dilapidated 'tenement house' where he gets lost, desperately
undertaking a dream-like, impossible search for her. The story, and
the book, end, however, not with the poet's personal loss but with
an elegiac, ruthful celebration of the loves and lives and loss of
common humanity.
For a long time he waited on the stairs, though there was no
love now to wait for and no bed but his own too many miles
away to lie in .... Then he walked out of the house on to the
waste space .... The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle
fell across the brick-heaps and the broken wood and the dust
that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known
and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and
loved and died and, always, lost.
Adventures in the Skin Trade
and The Death of the King's
Canary
Mostly written in May-June 1941, the three chapters of the
unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade describe young
Samuel Bennet's departure for London and his subsequent
adventures on arrival at Paddington Station, in a nearby room full
of furniture, in a bathroom where a girl, probably unsuccessfully,
tries to seduce him, and a bizarre night club. The opening chapter,
'A Fine Beginning', much superior to the later ones largely because
its comedy is allied to a fundamental seriousness, begins where
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog leaves off. A Fine Beginning" ,
III I
averred Dylan Thomas, 'is the first chapter of a novel in progress to

be called "Adventures in the Skin Trade". The novel is a semi-
autobiographical continuation of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog", and takes the principal character of that book of stories up to
the age of twenty.,J Clearly there are autobiographical elements in
its inspiration and context. While the later chapters present, albeit
deliberately, a chaotic, undiscriminating transcript of experience,
the departure from Wales portrays the gestures, rebelliousness and
tribulations of late adolescence with urgency and inner compul-
sion. Creeping downstairs in the early hours before leaving the
young Samuel Bennet tearfully damages china, furniture, his
schoolmaster father's marked essays, his sister's framed photo-
graph, so that he can 'never come back':
Most of the history sheets on the table were already marked

and damned with his father's violet writing. With a lump of coal
from the dead fire, Samuel marked them again, rubbing the coal
hard over the careful corrections, drawing legs and breasts in the
margins. . . . He burnt the edge of his mother's sunshade at the
200
'Adventures in the Skin Trade' 201
gas-mantle, and felt the tears running down his cheeks and
dropping onto his pyjama collar.
Even in the first moment of his guilt and shame, he
remembered to put out his tongue and taste the track of his
tears. Still crying, he said, 'It's salt. It's very salt. Just like in my
poems.'
Here the depth and conflict of feeling gives resonance to the

adolescent peccadillos, and the comedy is generated in emotional
perplexity. While his rebellion and the young dog's desire for a
freer, more permissive life-style is set against his rejection of the
provincial, puritanical background, the barbed comedy is rooted in
a moral dilemma, as in his reactions while sitting in the buffet at
Paddington near a woman he assumeS to be a prostitute:
Dear Mother, he wrote with his finger on the back of an

envelope, looking up, between every few invisible words, at the
unnoticing woman opposite, this is to tell you that I arrived
safely and that I am drinking in the buffet with a tart .... She is
about thirty-eight years old and her husband left her five years
ago because of her carryings on. . . . And you need not worry
that I shall break my heart trying to reform her, because I have
always been brought up to believe Mortimer Street is what is
right, and I would not wish that on anybody. Besides, I do not
want to reform her.
While the London scenes are entertaining in their picaresque

comedy as our hero, with a Bass bottle stuck to his little finger,
enjoys his adventures, the odd characters he meets, unlike the
depiction of his parents and sister and his Swansea self, are types
rather than individuals and the settings, such as the Gayspot club,
only of passing interest. Though Thomas wrote stories and
dialogue quickly, certainly in comparison with the glacier-like
composition of his poetry, they were carefully revised. Nevetheless
he spoke of Adventures in the Skin Trade as 'the only really dashed-
off piece of work I remember doing'. 2 The plan of the novel was
that the hero should experientially lose his skins, ending up on
Paddington Station again, literally naked apart from the empty
Bass bottle on his finger! Clearly there was considerable comic
potential, but though Dylan Thomas was talking of finishing the
novel as late as 1953, he never returned to it, despite the appeal to
202 The Prose
him of its anarchic fantasy. There has, of course, been some
speculation on why the comic and picaresque exploits of a young
man who leaves his provincial home for a London paved with
pleasure and adventure, if not gold, did not further inspire him.
Entertaining though they are, I think the adventures remained
incomplete because, like his own contributions to The Death of the
King's Canary at much the same time, they represented an amusing
but light craft unanchored to that piercing nostalgia and that
perception of the death-touched transience of man's joy and
sadness that inspired Dylan Thomas's finest prose. Cartoon-like in
their comedy the zany encounters of Samuel Bennet among
furniture-filled rooms and louche clubs tell of lost souls in a style,
after the gripping opening of 'A Fine Beginning', lacking that
passion and joyous verbal spell-binding so characteristic of the
poet. 'Come back, Come back!' was the cry that gave resonance
and that grail-like quest to his writing, soon to find new and
popular expression in his broadcast reminiscences.
The Death of the King's Canary, a product of that summer of 1940
when Dylan Thomas stayed at John Davenport's Marshfield
house, and on which they collaborated, tells of the Poet Laureate's
election and the consequent gathering of rival poets at the new
Laureate's country house. There is much poetic madness in the gay
goings on, and the book combines literary satire and surrealistic
farce. Aware it might give offence, he wrote to John Davenport:
'We must do the last pages of the Canary then, and have it
published quickly and make some money and enemies', 3 but it was
not published until 1976. There is wit in the writing, and
undoubtedly Dylan Thomas contributed to the parodies of modern
poets, for we know he delighted in this kind of writing and the
parody of Empson, 'Request to Leda', was published later in the
number of Horizon Guly 1942) devoted to Empson. Other very
effective parodies include that of Dylan Thomas's own verse
(,Lamentable Ode' by Albert Ponting) and 'Parachutist', presum-
ably of Spender. The comments in the literary biographies of these
poets sometimes recall Dylan Thomas's later satiric piece 'How to
be a Poet'. Interestingly, it is the poetaster who always inspired
Thomas's deepest scorn. I would conclude that young Ponting
might represent Dylan Thomas himself, for he is presented with
Dylan Thomas's usual early view of himself as a young man
innocently bewildered (but not all that bewildered) and amused by
the silliness and snobbishness of the various vices Anglais of
Adventures in the Skin Trade' 203
English life humorously, and with some relish, portrayed and
mocked. Ponting shyly yet knowingly endears himself to the
motherly cook and knowingly shy kitchen-maid, finding cosier
comforts in that life-style below stairs and below the salt.
The road not taken is always of special interest in the work of a
major author, and as a satiric novel it represents the kind of writing
Thomas chose not to develop at length. Those sections which, I
think, most strongly suggest his authorship recall the later
chapters of Adventures in the Skin Trade, and both were, of course,
unfinished novels of this period. Significantly, they do not recall
the opening episode of Samuel Bennet passionately preparing to
leave home, where there is real feeling and urgency. Thomas's
finest comedy derives from a passionate humanity and a verbal
invention that was to be increasingly fostered by the discipline and
potential of the broadcast word.
Part Four
Film Scripts, Broadcasts,
Last Stories, Letters and
Under Milk Wood
Introduction
The prose written in the last ten years of his life reveals Thomas's
mature powers as an artist in cOmedy. It is more varied than the
early work, more certain yet more subtle in its effects. Most of it
was commissioned work, much of it for the BBC, and while he
regarded these excursions into prose as primarily a means of
earning money, and something subsidiary to the task of writing
poetry, what is at once evident is the pleasure he took in this
writing, his enjoyment of the role of entertainer, whatever the
sadness behind the laughter, and the consistently high quality of
the writing. By the early forties and the war years Dylan Thomas
had become, as Richard Burton observed, famous among the bars,
and he was often the fount of entertainment as he leaned against
the bar, cigarette in mouth, while his talk and comic stories soon
filled the room. Such talk is, of course, as ephemeral as the beery
conviviality that encouraged it, though I think we can find echoes
and instances of these arias of comedy not only in his later stories
and dramatic narratives but also in such occasional prose-pieces,
often set-pieces, as his letters. Vernon Watkins soon and percep-
tively realised that while Thomas's poetry arose from the poet's
isolation, his in some ways no less remarkable prose arose from his
social life. The poet of tragic vision was also the born jester, Lear
and Fool as one, and quickly responsive, as Watkins noted, to the
'heroic comedy of people's lives', 1 for Dylan Thomas had the gift of
comedy as abundantly as the gift of imagination. And the
originality of his later prose style was honed on the accomplished
reader's sharp awareness of the potential of the speaking voice. If
there is a literary ancestry, it is no longer Caradoc Evans or Joyce,
but that earlier popular and theatrical performer Dickens. Gwen
Watkins has recalled her and Dylan's enjoyment of reading
Dickens aloud one happy afternoon in the garden at Pennard, and
his life-long delight in his writing. 2
207
Film Scripts and other
Prose Items
During the war, two important factors determined his later
development as a prose writer. The first was Dylan Thomas's
employment to write film scripts, both documentaries for the
Ministry of Information and also features. Some of these film
scenarios have been published, including Twenty Years A-Growing;
The Beach of Falesa, based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson set
on a South Seas island and wherein themes of primitivism and
superstition evidently interested Thomas; a film operetta Me and
My Bike; and Rebecca's Daughters set in south-west Wales in the
1840s and telling of the Rebecca rioters who protested violently
against toll-gate taxes, Poor Law Amendment and consequent
poverty and distress. It is a vividly unrolling story. But
undoubtedly The Doctor and the Devils, written in 1944 and
published a few months before Thomas's death, is the most
effective and interesting of his film scripts. It was the first film
scenario to be published in book form before, and in fact, without
film production, which took place finally in 1986. It heralds a
literary quality unusual in the medium and in its style, dramatic
power and presentation of low life in Edinburgh early in the last
century may be regarded as a notable item in Thomas's develop-
ment as a prose writer. It was based on the historically true
incident of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, who supplied the
famous and eccentric anatomist with dead bodies for anatomical
study and research. Dylan Thomas creates a drama of Jacobean
horrors irridescent with his own poetic vision of death, corruption
and terror. The provisional title 'The Business of Death' summed
up both plot and morbid detail. The poet's attraction to his tale
brings to mind young Dylan Thomas's boast 'I'd prefer to be an
anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any dayd and his interest in
Beddoes, also an anatomist; for Dr Rock's self-declaration as 'a
material man ... to study the flesh, the skin, the bones, the organs,
208
Film Scripts 209
the nerves of Man, is to equip our minds with a knowledge ... to
search beyond the body' echoes Beddoes's 'I search with avidity for
every shadow of a proof or probability of an after-existence both in
the material and immaterial nature of man'. 2 A similar obsession
with the processes and metaphysics of death had long motivated
Thomas's poetry and prose. We are close to the macabre world of
the early stories; though by now Thomas is much more deft in the
swift evocation of atmosphere, character and grotesque comedy;
and clearly he enjoyed writing it. Certainly the black-robed but
bejewelled Dr Rock, the distinguished but amoral surgeon who
mocks and flouts the conventions of respectable society, belongs to
'melodrama' - Thomas's description - when we first meet him:
Closer now, we see that he is a youngish man in severe

professional black; and his long cloak is the other darkness
around him.
Closer still, we see his body and face as he strides down
towards us. He wields his stick like a prophet's staff. We see the
deep-set eyes behind the large spectacles; the wide sensual
mouth tightened into its own denial.
Clearly the technique of film presentation here was remembered in

the writing of Under Milk Wood with its reiterated 'Come closer
now'. It is in the presentation of the life of the poor, the young and
old begging and sleeping in the streets and easy victims for the
murderers, that Thomas excells. The violent, desperate low-life of
tavern, lodging house or 'rag and bone alley', where the only
comfort is cheap gin in the face of random cruelty and total
squalor, is portrayed with remarkable visual power. And while
there is a Jacobean horror and terror in the later detail of the
murders, clearly Thomas's anger and compassion inspires his
depiction of the suffering beggars and helpless victims of this
society, his sketches at times reminiscent of Dickens and Mayhew.
Thomas's later concentrated verbal dexterity, both visually and
emotionally effective, is evident in his description of the city
market-place where 'The straw-strewn cobbles of the Market are
crowded with stalls. Stalls that sell rags and bones, kept by rags
and bones. '.' . There are many, many children, some very old.' At
his dinner party Dr Rock mocks the cultured hypocrisies of the rich
and successful of the city, declaring
210 Films, Broadcasts, Last Stories, Letters, etc.
Look any night at the streets of this 'cultured city'. Observe with
academic calm, the homeless and the hopeless and the insane
and the wretchedly drunk lying in their rags on the stinking
cobbles. Look for yourselves, sirs, at the beggars, and the
cripples, and the tainted children, and the pitiful, doomed girls.
Write a scholastic pamphlet on the things that prowl in the
alleys, afraid to see the light; they were men and women once.
Be proud of that if you can.
Leaving the house Dr Rock's colleague Murray walks though the

humanity-littered streets and Thomas's exact, occasionally poetic,
evocations, convey the degradation:
On both sides of the street are many ragged bodies, of men,

women and children. Some are stretched out asleep; some are
sprawled drunk, their hands still clutching a bottle; some are
huddled together, like large, dishevelled birds, for company and
warmth. A few have not managed to reach the comparative
shelter of the sides of the street, but lie, ungainly outcasts,
snoring scarecrows and men of garbage, across the cobbled
middle.
The graveyard scenes combine horror and comic grotesquerie as

the grave-robbers, ironically known as 'Resurrectionists', set about
their ghoulish business:
Now the lantern-carrier stops at a new grave, and lowers his

light.
The grave is only a tidy heap of newly turned earth; no stone
stands at its head. . .. The spade-bearer puts down his
implements. We hear his whisper:
Hallelujah.
And the tall, top-hatted man whispers:
Go to it, Mole ....
And the tall one, looking carefully, slyly, around, whispers
again:
Quiet as death tonight:
And the one who carried the spade whispers in return:
Praise be the Lord ....
Film Scripts 211
We see that the chain has a large hook at the end. We see it
thrust into the hole the spade has dug. And we hear the noise of
steel knocking on wood.
The chain, in the hands of the short man, wriggles above the
earth like a snake.
Having levered up the fresh corpse, delivered it to Dr Rock's

academy and been paid, the men reappear in the tavern, the
description that of sardonic comedy for:
All three are drunk, though solemnly as befits men whose

business is death.
The very tall top-hatted man. . . is a cadaverous clown; a deacon

of the drinking cellar, a pillar of unrespectability.
Death, of course, particularly inspires Thomas's imagination, as in

Dr Rock's account of his elderly colleague Manson: 'Now he's old
and ill. He knows death. He can hear it growling and scratching
around him now, like a dog after a bone.' These Jacobean echoes
deepen when the villainous Fallon and Broom go one better than
the body-snatchers and trap the old, frail, and lonely into their
lodging house, there suffocating them to provide fresh corpses,
sometimes getting them drunk first like the dancing Mrs Flynn,
'gay as an old cat', and the idiot boy Billy Bedlam as they seek the
higher payments for younger bodies. Billy's murder is described
and suggested with full Websterian intensity and planned horror,
reminding us that Dylan listed Webster as an influence on his early
verse: 3
FALLON: [Slowly] You mustn't be frightened, Billy .... It'll all be

over soon. No more bein' hungry ....
Now Fallon, slow as a priest, is moving towards us and Billy.
CUT to shot, from door, of Fallon moving towards Billy, and of
Billy's bewildered, but still smiling face ....
FALLON: [Slowly] No more ... cold.
CUT to shot, from Billy's angle, of Fallon moving, as though in
procession, down the room ....
And suddenly we hear the voice of Billy: screaming.
Outside their women-friends and accomplices listen:

The scream mounts, breaks, and bursts out again. The crash of a
falling chair.
And now it is not a scream that comes from beyond the door, but
a terrified howling.
Dr Rock's assistant Murray has a secret alliance with the

beautiful but destitute 'Sweet Jennie Bailey', and her refusal to
meet him anywhere but the tavern strikes a note of personal and
poetic pathos particularly reminiscent of Webster, a London
production of whose play The Duchess of Malfi Thomas twice
visited. 4 Jennie protests: 'Where else could you take me,
sweetheart, except for a walk in the fields - and in winter too!
Kissing in a hedge like two robins.' Reminiscent of Webster, too, is
the horrific discovery of her body by Murray when he opens the
sack holding a newly delivered corpse for Dr Rock's dissecting
table.
The use of voices, particularly children's voices, to comment on
the events, anticipates Under Milk Wood, though here the effect is
more sinister in keeping with the horrors of The Doctor and the
Devils:
CLOSE-UP of children's faces.

VOICE: Where's Billy? Billy Bedlam?
And the voices of the children answer as we see a close-up of Alice:
VOICES OF THE CHILDREN: Gone, gone ....

VOICE: :Where's Jennie? Jennie Bailey?
And Alice's voice answers as we see a close shot of a sack put

down and hands undoing the sack:
ALICE'S VOICE: Gone, gone.
Interestingly, too, in view of the later structural techniques of

Under Milk Wood, Murray's guilt and conflicts are presented as
recalled voices for' as he moves through the garden so we hear the
voice of his mind, and the remembered voices of others'.
Though the film script ostensibly seeks to explore the question of
ends justifying means through Dr Rock's character, Thomas most
effectively touches the nerve of moral issues when confronted with
Twelve Hours in the Streets' 213
the poor directly, as in Dr Rock's contempt for religious respecta-
bility, always a preoccupation close to Dylan Thomas, on giving
Billy Bedlam some money one cold, winter night in the dark street:
Now he'll hurry as fast as he can on his bent bones to the nearest
tavern, and fuddle his few poor wits. . .. Oh, how the pious
would lift their hands to heaven to think of a man giving money
to an idiot so that he could get drunk and be warm and happy
for an hour or two. Let him die rather a frozen idiot in the gutter!
Significantly, too, remembering the role of the child as the

touchstone of innocence in Thomas's prose, it is a child's terror at
hearing his name that brings Rock to realise that ends do not
justify means, and his involvement in the murders in that he knew
what was happening:
ROCK: It's a bitter cold night to be running about in the streets.

You should go home.
The child in the shadows shakes her head.
CHILD: Granny says I canit go home till I got four-pence ....
Rock fumbles in his pocket for another coin.
The child holds out her hand from the shadow around her.
ROCK: What's your name, lassie?
CHILD: I'm Maggie Bell.
ROCK: [Almost as though to himself] I'm Doctor Rock.
And the child runs screaming into the darkness.
Now Rock is haunted, too, by this question 'Did I set myself above
pity? - 'the fifth element' that particularly concerned Thomas in his
last, unfinished poem. Demonstrably, such writing for films
extended the poet's control of narrative, dialogue, and the
sustaining of atmosphere and character in areas other than the
short story. It fostered, too, his increasingly visual use of language
in his prose work.
TWEL VE HOURS IN THE STREETS
It was in January 1945, while living in New Quay, that Thomas

outlined a projected book, Twelve Hours in the Streets, headed in his
typescript 'A Book of Streets', which took a time-sequence and
evocation of communal street-life that was followed in Under Milk
Wood, though the setting here is London. His aim was 'to take the
life of the streets from twelve noon to twelve midnight. Thus the
street can fit the hour, and vice versa; streets that to my mind, and
perhaps to the minds of many others, recall instantly some specific
hour of the day or night. . .. And the whole might well be an
imaginative, picaresque perhaps, cross-section of the life of the
English streets for a whole modem day.'s Again Dylan Thomas
shows a scholarly source of instruction, adding that 'There is a kind
of Elizabethan analogy to this in Nicholas Breton's 'Elizabethan
Day' reprinted in Dover Wilson's Penguin book on Elizabethan
England.' The unpublished summary in the three-page typescript
shows the atmospheric compilation of detail he has learned from
his work on film scripts;6 and its concern with the wretched, the
slum settings, not only brings to mind scenes in The Doctor and the
Devils but his constant pity for the urban poor:
And the courts and alleyways, the little winding ways where
children play - 'the sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor';
and a Paradise Row, a rickety alley where the women shout out
of the windows and old men are to be seen Sitting, sun or rain, in
their dark doorways, looking out at the stained, grey world.
There is a Dickensian sweep in the crowded picture of 'the

boarding-house streets, where thousands of elderly people live
meek, mad lives on little mean pensions behind the grim Victorian
fa~ades'. Then we are suddenly aware of the visual impact of the
film writer and Thomas's quick sensitivity to sound.
And the dockside streets: the warehouse streets: the unex-

pected streets where one might feel a hundred miles from water
and then, suddenly turning a comer, would see a great ship's
funnel over a warehouse or crane swinging and the voices of the
sea.
He speaks of the 'oddities of streets, human and architectural',

with his unrelenting but compassionate eye for the indifferently
dispossessed, grotesque survivors:
Trainers and exhibitors of performing fleas who push around

their circus in an old pram. Little stone boys in niches of obscure
'Twelve Hours in the Streets' and 'The Londoner' 215
back-street walls. The little green pagodas in the middle of
elegant squares where the methylated spirit drinkers meet.
Clearly Dylan Thomas is drawing on his experience of war-torn

London: too, his war poems coming to mind in such lines as 'the
blitzed streets. Streets which are no longer streets but testimonies.
Or, testaments of ash and dust. Streets with no life.' Such
fragments display the continuity of Thomas's preoccupations and
development, though this is all we have of the project. The poet
was consequently pursued for two years for the return of the £50
advance, a writ being served on him one day as he left the BBC,
after a broadcast reading of 'A Visit to Grandpa'S' on Wednesday
Story.
Ralph Maud has drawn attention to another London-based
Under Milk Wood analogue, a 1946 BBC Overseas Service script,
'The Londoner', set in Hammersmith where the Thomases had
briefly stayed in 1942. Plotless, like Under Milk Wood, it is dramatic
rather than descriptive - unlike the 'Book of Streets'. In its use of a
Narrator to present a day in the life of this Shepherd's Bush family
.and the various voices of wife, husband, children, neighbours,
workmen, shoppers (listed 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc.) it is a path to Under
Milk Wood. As well as the dreams of characters, the device of music
and pub sounds anticipate the later radio play; however, its
portrait of immediate postwar London, despite its reminders of
wartime bombing and shortages, lacks the poetic vision, vivid
characterisation and robust comedy Thomas later developed. As
Maud suggests in his 'Introduction' to it in the American
publication The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts, 'only when
we hear Lily alone in the kitchen does the script apgroach
something like the imaginative quality of Under Milk Wood'
LILY: Empty the teapot - must have a new one-

only this morning the kitchen was so neat -
soak the frying pan - wish it wasn't fish-
oh why do people have to eat. ... hope Ted's
not tired of stews - got my basket and the doorkey? -
and now I'm ready for the queues. 8
Clearly, in addition to the name Lily and the kitchen-comedy, the

SUCcinctly phrased monologue points to Milk Wood's humour.
Broadcasts
Even more notable and influential than his film work was, of
course, Dylan Thomas's work for radio, not only as writer, critic
and narrator but also as an actor and, especially, as poetry reader,
particularly in the post-war years when he broadcast almost
weekly. Richard Burton vividly remembered his reading of Private
Dai Evans in David jones's In Parenthesis, while his dramatisation
of Satan in Paradise Lost was a renowned performance, and his
broadcast readings of Blake and Hopkins were uniquely powerful.
Undoubtedly this varied BBC work made him even more attuned
and sensitive to the possibilities of the spoken word. Such
broadcast talks as 'Reminiscences of Childhood', 'Memories of
Christmas', 'Holiday Memory' and 'Return Journey', all largely
autobiographical, and the later' A Visit to America' and 'A Story'
which he read on television in 1953, belong to Thomas's most
original, personal contribution to English prose style. They
represent the creation of a medium of expression that uses the full
potential of language to evoke aurally and visually place, person,
time and atmosphere. It was an alchemy of the word and spell of
the speaking voice that were returned to the dramatic pre-
eminence they held on the Elizabethan bare and viewless stage
when the poet's words prompted 'our imaginary forces'. It was
Thomas's genius in writing for radio that he realised and was able
to exploit the conditions of sound broadcasting, achieving fullest
expression in that 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood. It has become,
of course, one of the most popular and often-performed plays of
this century. Relatedly, too, while it seems likely that Dylan
Thomas was the most accomplished actor and reader among the
major English poets, we must always remember that his favourite
prose writer was Dickens, who was also a popular performer of his
own work, both men achieving particular fame and success on
their American tours. Likewise both fashioned a prose style that
was especially compelling when read aloud, and theatrically
entertaining, even its darker sketches of the human condition as
216
Broadcasts 217
indeed previewed in Dylan's work in The Doctor and the Devils. But
in saying this I particularly recall that Under Milk Wood opens with
the voices of the drowned dead remembering the sweetness of life,
the chains of mortality sounding like the nearby sea's sounds
through the play. Similarly we have the sad comedy and pathos of
human life encapsulated in such haunting episodes as Captain Cat
and the dead Rosie Probert recalling their long gone sexual and
love life. It is, of course, the recherche du temps perdu that gives
Thomas's prose the profound, darkling seriousness that underlies
and underpins the joyous and genial comedy. Relatedly, Thomas's
finest celebration of Swansea life is perhaps in 'Return Journey',
the broadcast feature whose moving lamentation for loss and
mutability, masked though it is by the hilarious comedy of the pub
conversations and schoolboy and adolescent bravura and bragga-
docio, had its inspiration in the poet's heartbroken walk through
that town on the morning after it was devastated by bombing,
Dylan saying 'Our Swansea is dead' and in tears as he surveyed
the wounds of war. 1 It may be said that Dylan Thomas was in his
poetry as uncompromisingly difficult and as full of stylistic hauteur
as the other two great poets of the first half of the twentieth
century, Yeats and Eliot; yet in his prose he had the common touch
and an easily turned key to the heroic comedy and never-far-off
sadness of everyday life. This accounts, I think, for the fact that his
recollections of Christmas, childhood, holidays, characters and
lines of Under Milk Wood, are already part of our popular
consciousness and commonly shared literary currency; so succinc-
tly memorable was his expression and so richly and idiosyncrati-
cally human was his response to the world he breathed. Another
reason for his immediate and lasting popularity as a prose writer
was his enduring perception of the first innocence of man, albeit
registered through his impassioned backward glance and longing.
Discussing publication of his broadcast reminiscences, post-
humously collected under the title Quite Early One Morning (1954),
Thomas, again his own best critic, epitomised them as 'all fairly
riotously innocent'. 2 In the early broadcasts the narrator domin-
ates, there is little dialogue except for occasional comments and the
exchanges of children, and the first talk, 'Reminiscences of
Childhood', has become part of Thomas's biography, so authentic
is his account of his Swansea childhood, focusing on the lost world
of childhood when he 'carried a wooden rifle in Cwmdonkin Park
and shot down the invisible, unknown enemy like a flock of wild
birds. And the park itself was a world within the world of the sea
town ... that park grew up with me.' Born in 1914 Thomas grew
up under the shadow of the First World War and its losses, and this
is echoed in the reference to 'The Front' when he defines the
parameters of his childhood world:
This sea town was my world; outside, a strange Wales, coal-

pitted, mountained, river run, full, so far as I knew, of choirs and
sheep and story-book tall hats, moved about its business which
was none of mine; beyond that unknown Wales lay England,
which was London, and a country called 'The Front' from which
many of our neighbours never came back.
Humorous references like 'the museum, that should have been in a

museum' flow alongside recollection of 'patient men with the
seaward eyes of the dockside unemployed, capped and mufflered,
dangling from their mouths pipes that had long gone out' and an
apt fantasy closes the piece, though description of the town
remains exactly and poetically evocative, whereby time is defeated
(always Thomas's preoccupation), when the boy in the dame
school imagines he can fly:
I fly, like Dracula in a schoolboy cap, level with the windows of

the school, peering in until the mistress at the piano screams,
and the metronome falls with a clout to the ground, stops, and
there is no more Time; and I fly over the trees and chimneys of
my town, over the dockyards, skimming the masts and funnels;
over Inkerman Street and Sebastopol Street and the street of the
man-capped women hurrying to the Jug and Bottle with a fish-
frail full of empties; over the trees of the eternal park, where a
brass band shakes the leaves and sends them showering down
on to the nurses and the children, the cripples and the out-of-
work.
Illuminatingly in this first talk Thomas declares that 'the

recollections of childhood have no order; of all those every-
coloured and shifting scented shoals that move below the surface
of the moment of recollection, one, two, indiscriminately, sud-
denly, dart up out of their revolving waters into the present air:
immortal flying-fish'. In this vivid yet careful account of how
chance treasure from a submerged past is raised, like his later
Broadcasts 219
remark 'I am the kind of human dredger that digs up the wordy
mud of his own Dead Sea,3 Thomas notes the key inspiration. But
notes too that incidents and episodes were built into a formal
pattern, a narrative structure both moving and entertaining. Thus
in his 'Memories of Christmas' the poet uses the image of the
snowball, as well as the boys' Christmas-time adventures, to link
his recollections, in this instance 'the immortal flying fish' of a
snow-bound, Christmas world:
All the Christmases roll down the hill towards the Welsh-
speaking sea, like a snowball growing whiter and bigger and
rounder . . . and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-
freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring
out whatever I can find.
He continues this use of an image for formal structure: 'In goes my

hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at
the margin of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs Prothero
and the firemen.' Thomas now dramatically relates an episode of
exuberant comedy; schoolboy excitement and hilarity pointed by
the distress of the Prothero household at this untimely and indeed
unseasonal disaster.
The incident opens vividly with lyrical yet waggish enticement
as Thomas depicts himself with mock-heroic verve:
It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was

in Mrs Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It
was snowing .... Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped
in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as
jaguars and terrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling they would
slink and sidle . . . and Jim and I, furcapped and moccasined
trappers from Hudson's Bay off Eversley Road, would hurl our
deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never
appeared.
The last, brief sentence illustrates Thomas's sure instinct for

succinct comedy, later displayed in the 'call' to Ernie Jenkins
because 'he likes fires'. Poetic metaphor and mock-heroic style
continue the comic fantasy:
We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling

silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday-
that we never heard Mrs Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the
bottom of the garden.
The poet as jester heightens the merriment:
'Fire!' cried Mrs Prothero, as she beat the dinner-gong. And we

ran down the garden with the snowballs in our arms, towards
the house, and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-
room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs Prothero was
announcing ruin like a town-crier in Pompeii. This was better
than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row.
After discharging their snowballs into the clouds of smoke, missing
Mr Prothero who stood 'in the middle of the room, saying'A fine
Christmas!' and smacking at the smoke with a slipper, the boys
rushed to phone the fire-brigade:
'Let's call the police as well', Jim said.
'And the ambulance:
'And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.'
Excitedly the two boys watch the arrival of Jim's aunt, Miss
Prothero, and the episode ends on a note of touching absurdity
and pathos; Thomas's irony as so often more affectionate than
Dickens's harder tone:
Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to
them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three
tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke
and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: 'Would you
like something to read?'
Of course, the words on the page have to be read aloud for the
prose to register its full effectiveness, since the poet's skill as
broadcaster calculated the nuance of sound and visual power in
each word, each cadence of phrase and sentence. The profeSSional
radio performer guides the poet's hand. And the piece moves on to
comic and nostalgic remembrance of the family Christmas gather-
ing, now part of our popular literary consciousness, and concludes
with a haunted and haunting incident when the boys go carol-
singing.
Broadcasts 221
Undoubtedly, then, the popularity of Thomas's broadcasts rests
in his possession of the common touch, their shared humanity in
all its joyous vulgarity as well as pathos, Tom, Dick and Harry,
uncles and aunts snatching their happiness at Christmas or on a
sunny August Bank Holiday on Swansea bay. Thus the appeal of
'Holiday Memory' when 'the trams that hissed like ganders took us
all to the beautiful beach' and all enjoyed 'the same hymn and
washing of the sea that was heard in the Bible'. Looking back to
bygone innocence and happiness Dylan Thomas remembers his
childhood plea: 1111£ it could only just, if it could only just?", your
lips said again and again as you scooped in that hob-hot sand ....
"If it could only just be like this for ever and ever amen". August
Monday all over the earth, from Mumbles.' How different of
course, from Auden's detached, supercilious 'August for the
people and their favourite islands.' What he calls the 'beauty of a
common day' and its rag-tag simple pleasures Thomas here shares
and delights in, albeit now transformed by loss and passing time
and veined with ironic comedy:
There was cricket on the sand, and sand in the sponge cake .
. . . Girls undressed in slipping tents of propriety; under invisible
umbrellas, stout ladies undressed for the male and immoral sea .
. . . Little naked navvies dug canals .... Recalcitrant uncles
huddled over luke ale in the tiger-striped marquees. Mothers in
black, like wobbling mountains, gasped under the discarded
dresses of daughters who shrilly braved the goblin waves ....
And fathers, in the once-a-year sun, took fifty winks .... Lolling
or larrikin that unsoiled, boiling beauty of a common day, great
gods with their braces over their vests sang, spat pips, puffed
smoke at wasps, gulped and ogled, forgot the rent, embraced,
posed for the dicky-bird, were coarse . . . winked, belched . . .
looked at Ilfracombe, played hymns on paper-and-comb.
With jesting, yet compassionate comedy, 'all the fun of the fair in
the hot, bubbling night' is described, a poet's sophisticated word-
play linked to a music-hall's popular humour:
In her tent and her rolls of flesh the Fattest Woman in the
World sat sewing her winter frock, another tent, and fixed her
little eyes, blackcurrants in blancmange, on the skeletons who
filed and sniggered by. . . .
Girls in skulled and cross-boned tunnels shrieked, and were
comforted.
Young men, heroic after pints, stood up on the flying
chairoplanes, tousled, crimson, and against the rules.
Jaunty girls gave sailors sauce.
At the day's end Thomas's mastery in evoking sound and sight,

the auditory and visual imagination directed by poetic image and
rhythm, confirms him as the poet of Everyman as we share the
walk home:
And as we climbed home, up the gas-lit hill, to the still homes

over the mumbling bay, we heard the music die and the voices
drift like sand. And we saw the lights of the fair fade. And, at the
far end of the seaside field, they lit their lamps, one by one, in the
caravans.
Though perhaps the most poignant and telling image occurs in the
earlier evocation of the children playing on the sunny, crowded
beach:
But over all the beautiful beach I remember most the children
playing, boys and girls tumbling, moving jewels, who might
never be happy again.
Dylan Thomas was now establishing this broadcasting prose style,

and Gwen Watkins has recalled the quiet joy of Dylan reading a
draft of this radio script to her, and enquiring anxiously 'Do you
think it's any good really?,4
Dylan Thomas's broadcast talks were surprisingly varied and
include memorably vivid and entertaining accounts of his visits to
the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, the 1951 Festival of
Britain on London's South Bank, and of course to America. It has
now been forgotten how wide was his broadcasting experience, for
he not only took part in literary programmes, both scripted and
direct broadcasts, but also took part in more geheral programmes,
such as 'Country Magazine' and in 1951 'Question Time', now
more familiarly known as 'Any Questions'. London, Llangollen or
his own criss-crossing of America on his lecture tours are, of
course, generally conveyed with his own unique blend of high
comedy, rich in verbal invention and wit, and an unerring eye for
Broadcasts 223
the pathos and strangeness of human behaviour. Walking home
late at night through a dark lane he hears the voices of lovers,
observes that
for at night the heart comes out, like a cat on the tiles.
Discourteously I shone my torch. There, in the thick rain, a
young man and a young woman stood, very close together. . . .
And a yard from them, another young man sat staidly, on the
grass verge, holding an open book from which he appeared to
read. And in the very rutted and puddly middle of the lane, two
dogs were fighting, with brutish concentration and in absolute
silence.
He closes his celebration of London's festival with his comment

that 'This is the first time I have ever truly seen that London whose
sweet Thames runs softly; that minstrel mermaid of a town, the
water-streeted eight-million-headed village in a blaze .... And this
is what London should always be like, till St Paul's falls down and
the sea slides over the Strand.' On the mixture and mingling of
peoples singing and dancing in Llangollen 'in this transformed
valley', despite an outside 'world on its head', he concludes that
'the only surprising thing about miracles, however small, is that
they sometimes happen'. But while always ready to rejoice in
people enjoying themselves, and depicting this with his instinctive
common touch, his caustic asides are also to hand, such as the later
reference to 'the rich who should be ... slimming for the eye of the
needle', New Testament theology assisting his comic prose as well
as his religious verse!
Quite Early One Morning also contains some of Dylan Thomas's
notable broadcast essays in literary criticism, some like 'Wales and
the Artist', 'How to begin a Story', and 'The English Festival of
Spoken Poetry', mingling comedy with sharp social and literary
comment. Thus in 'Wales and the Artist' he savagely mocks those
Welsh artists who 'anglicize themselves beyond recognition ...
stifling their natural ardour so that they may disparagingly drawl
... corseting their voices so that no lilt or inflection of Welsh
enthusiasm may exult or pop out .... They set up', concludes
Dylan, 'in grey, whining London, a little mock Wales of their own.'
Nevertheless, of course, Thomas had made such a move, geog-
raphically, from time to time, and remained, however much Wales
meant to him ancestrally and emotionally, suspicious of inward-
looking, narrowly focused perspectives, roundly but perhaps
unfairly declaring that 'too many of the artists of Wales stay in
Wales too long, giants in the dark behind the parish pump ...
enviously sniping at the artists of other countries rather than
attempting to raise the standard of art of their own country by
fervently working at their own words, paint, or music.'
Dylan Thomas's critical introductions to such poets as Henry
Vaughan, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, W.H.Davies, of whose
Autobiography of a Super-tramp he gave a serialised BBe reading in
1948, and Idris Davies, are carefully researched and written. They
are informative and sympathetic, and striking for the swift
delineation of a variety of other men's poetic worlds. It is
impressionistic rather than academic criticism, and finely sensitive
in its response to the poet, as when he describes the sudden
maturing of Owen's poetry under the horrors and hell of trench
warfare:
To see him in his flame-lit perspective, against the back-

ground, now of the poxed and cratered war-scape, shivering in
the snow under the slitting wind, marooned on a frozen desert,
or crying, in a little oven of mud, that his 'senses are charred', is
to see a man consigned to articulate immolation. He ... is
himself the intoning priest over the ceremony, the suicide, the
sunset. He is the common torch. He is the bell of the church of
the broken body. He writes love-letters home for the illiterate
dead ... the unhonoured prophet in death's country.
Dylan Thomas also comments, with the insight of a practitioner, on

Owen's technique and later on the impact of his friendship with
Sassoon. Likewise, the social background of the South Wales
mining valleys that inspired Idris Davies's verse is succinctly
described when he tells us that poets were writing in
passionate anger against the inequality of social conditions. They

wrote, not of the truths and beauties of the natural world, but of
the lies and ugliness of the unnatural system of society under
which they worked - or, more often ... under which they were
not allowed to work. They spoke in ragged and angry rhythms of
the Wales they knew: the coal-tips, the dole-queues, the stubborn
bankrupt villages, the children, scrutting for coal on the slag-
heaps, the colliers' shabby allotments ... silicosis, little Moscow
up beyond the hills.
Broadcasts 225
Thomas early perceived, too, that [dris Davies shaped his anger
into real poems achieving 'a lyrical simplicity which in no way
lessens the intensity of his hatred of injustice'. The beauties of the
natural world, originally and delicately presented in Edward
Thomas, Dylan Thomas registers long before this poet became
fashionable, observing that 'he knew a thousand country things:
the diamonds of rain on the grassblades, the ghostly white parsley
flower, mouse and wren and robin, . . . the missel-thrush that loves
juniper.... The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew.' He
knows, too, Edward Thomas's devotion to John Clare, Hardy and
William Barnes, and the drawings of Morland and Crome. At all
times Dylan Thomas is aware of the common humanity of the poet,
for he is 'a poet for such a very tiny bit of his life; for the rest, he is a
human being, one of whose responsibilities is to know and feel, as
much as he can, all that is moving around and within him'.
Returning from his talks on poetry and the poet to his narrative
sketches and tableaux, undoubtedly the most dramatically effec-
tive of these broadcasts, and the most original, is 'Return Journey'.
[t is a search for a lost self as the poet walks through Swansea
looking 'for someone after fourteen years'. Like Under Milk Wood,
and in many ways its equal in theatrical sparkle and poetic
resonance, it has a dramatic structure. This is based on the
narrator's meeting with several distinct groups and individuals in
their particular settings - the pub clientele, reporters, passers-by
on the Swansea streets and seaside promenade, teacher and park-
keeper as he revisits school and park. Asked whether she
remembers 'Young Thomas', the barmaid replies 'Lots of Thoma-
ses come here, it's a kind of home from home for Thomases' and to
the poet's now familiar description of his younger self as 'a
bombastic adolescent provincial Bohemian with a thick-knotted
artist's tie ... and a cricket shirt dyed bottle green, a gabbing,
ambitious, mock-tough, pretentious young man' her reply has a
trenchant dramatic individuality and verve, quite distinct from the
narrator's voice and persona:
BARMAID
There's words what d'you want to find him for I wouldn't touch
him with a barge-pole ... would you, Mr Griffiths? Mind, you
can never tell. I remember a man came here with a monkey.
Called for 'alf for himself and a pint for the monkey. And he
wasn't Italian at all. Spoke Welsh like a preacher.
The clipped, varied conversation between the barmaid, narrator
and customers indicates that Thomas has now learned, no doubt
guided by his work on film scripts, to write extended dialogue that
is in character as well as racy. Leaving the pub he moves through
the snowy, war-damaged town where 'the voices of fourteen years
ago hung silent in the snow and ruin, and in the falling winter
morning I walked on through the white havoc'd centre where once
a perky young man I knew had mucked about as chirpy as a
sparrow'. Now the voices speak in character; more than evocations
by the narrator th~y have an identity of their own, whether the
passer-by, who responds to the poet's self-description: 'used to
wear an overcoat sometimes with the check lining inside out so
that you could play giant draughts on him. He wore a conscious
woodbine, too' with:
PASSER-BY
What d'you mean, conscious woodbine? ... Oh, him! He owes

me half a crown. I haven't seen him since the old Kardomah
days.
or the measured, pedantic tones of the schoolmaster's blank verse

recollections:
SCHOOLMASTER
Oh yes, yes, I remember him well,

though I do not know if I would recognise him now:
nobody grows any younger, or better ...
he looked like most boys, no better, brighter, or more respectful; ...
he helped to damage the headmaster's rhubarb,
was thirty-third in trigonometry,
and, as might be expected, edited the School Magazine.
Particularly clever, in one of the flashbacks to the past, is the

monologue of the girl he once flirted with as he swaggered along
the prom, his implied replies and her friend's reactions contribut-
ing to the comic vivacity of her outbursts and exchanges:
GIRL
Don't you say nothing, Hetty, you're only encouraging. No

Broadcasts 227
thank you, Mr Cheeky, with your cut-glass accent and your

father's trilby! I don't want no walk on no sands. What d'you say?
Ooh listen to him, Het, he's swallowed a dictionary. No, I don't
want to go with nobody up no lane in the moonlight, see, and
I'm not a baby-snatcher neither .... You seen me wearing my ...
no you never .... Oh go away and do your homework, you. No
I'm not then. I'm nobody's homework, see. Cheek! Hetty Harris,
don't you let him! Oooh, there's brazen! Well, just to the end of
the prom .... No further, mind.
Again, essentially dramatic, it is prose that requires dramatic

performance.
The poet's search leads him through the bombed sites of former
haunts, to the shore, the Uplands, where 'the journey had begun of
the one I was pursuing through his past'. Inevitably the pilgrimage
ends in Cwmdonkin Park, 'the snow still sailing and the childish,
lonely, remembered music fingering on in the suddenly gentle
wind'. To his enquiry 'What has become of him now?' as 'dusk was
folding the Park around, like another, darker snow' to the sound of
the tolling park bell 'Dead ... dead ... dead', replies the Park
Keeper at this journey's moving end. But 'the remembered music'
became part of a wider celebration of the human condition in Ul1der
Milk Wood, the source of which is to be found in the earlier
broadcast of 1945, 'Quite Early One Morning', less dramatic than
'Return Journey' but a seminal narrative sketch.
In the New Quay setting, Thomas describes an early morning
walk from his hillside home down to the harbour, exactly and
vividly evoking the precipitous position of this small 'cliff-perched
town' that overlooks Cardigan bay. We view the 'salt-white houses
dangling over water', the 'bow-windowed villas squatting prim in
neatly treed but unsteady hill streets' and in the distance below
'the quay shouldering out, nobody on it now but gulls and the
capstans'. Closely following this seaside town's topography,
Thomas's style delightfully combines poetic fantasy with realistic
detail in his depiction of 'the splashed church, with the cloud in
the shape of a bell poised over it, ready to drift and ring', and the
gently mocking comedy, at the expense of Welsh Nonconformity,
in relating how 'the chapel stood grim and grey, telling the day
there was to be no nonsense. The chapel was not asleep, it never
cat-napped nor nodded nor closed its long cold eye. I left it telling
the morning off and the sea-gull hung rebuked above it.' Perhaps
Dylan remembered, too, the Mabinogion derivation of his name as
'Sea son of Wave' as the narrator speaks of himself as one who
'walked through the streets like a stranger come out of the sea,
shrugging off wood and wave and darkness with each step'.
Significantly 'the town was not yet awake' becomes the reiterated
chime as we are introduced to the still-sleeping inhabitants and
their dreams. Again the humour combines fantasy and chapel-
baiting burlesque:
In the head of Miss Hughes, 'The Cosy', clashed the cymbals of

an eastern court. Eunuchs struck gongs the size of Bethesda
Chapel. Sultans with voices fiercer than visiting preachers
demanded a most un-Welsh dance.
There are many anticipations of Under Milk Wood, with the

characters, however, generally presented through the poet narra-
tor's words rather than dramatised as individuals; though at the
end they speak in verse as 'the voices of the town blown up to me,'
as he climbs back home along the cliff paths. Clearly the Reverend
Thomas Evans is a progenitor of Eli Jenkins, though neither a poet
nor as certain and reassuring in his belief:
Parchedig Thomas Evans making morning tea,

Very weak tea, too, you mustn't waste a leaf.
Every morning making tea in my house by the sea,
I am troubled by one thing only, and that, belief.
while Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard is close in word and character to her

famous later appearance:
Open the curtains, light the fire, what are servants for?
I am Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and I want another snooze.
Dust the china, feed the canary, sweep the drawing-room floor;
And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes.
Captain Tiny Evans has undergone sea-changes in his transforma-

tion to Captain Cat, though still sailing the Kidwelly; here a less
nostalgically romantic character is depicted, but clearly again a
source:
Broadcasts 229
I am Captain Tiny Evans, my ship was the Kidwelly,
And Mrs Tiny Evans has been dead for many a year.
'Poor Captain Tiny all alone', the neighbours whisper,
But I like it all alone and I hated her.
But the haunting presence of the contralto Madam Jenkins has, like
her voice, sadly gone from Thomas's imagination by the time of
Milk Wood's composition:
Clara Tawe Jenkins, 'Madam' they call me,

An old contralto with her dressing-gown on,
And I sit at the window and I sing to the sea,
For the sea does not notice that my voice has gone.
Very much present in Under Milk Wood, however, is that sense of a

timeless innocence, a dazzling morning-song of a lost Eden, that
the poet notably registers on this morning walk, enshrined in the
birds of land and sea:
I heard the cocks crow from hidden farmyards, from old roosts
above the waves where fabulous sea-birds might sit. . . the wind
blew the time away. And I walked in the timeless morning.
It is enshrined, too, in the closing lines' evocation of the sea-town

morning's eternal renewal and loss:
Thus some of the voices of a cliff-perched town at the far end of

Wales moved out of sleep and darkness into the newborn,
ancient, and ageless morning, moved and were lost.
Five years later Dylan Thomas took up again the theme of the
voices of a small Welsh town by the sea, this time Laugharne,
referred to as Llareggyb, his 'play for voices', though post-
humously and universally celebrated as Under Milk Wood.
Last Stories
A Prospect of the Sea (1954) was published posthumously though
Dylan Thomas had selected the material in the volume. Part I
contains eleven of the early pre-war stories, the first selection of
this work published in book form in this country, but of new and
particular interest are the items in Part II, for they indicate the final
direction of Thomas's development as a story writer and as a prose
writer separate from his work for radio. They certainly confirm his
continuing zest and the jester's developing comic spirit, with its
blend of instinctive joi-de-vivre and the haunting sense of innocence
and loss.
'Conversation about Christmas', published in Picture Post, is a
colloquy between adult and child, the speakers named as 'Small
Boy' and 'Self', an imaginary duologue in nostalgia not unlike the
earlier broadcast 'Memories of Christmas' . Caitlin Thomas
shrewdly noted that 'underneath all the external flamboyance,
Dylan was a fairly conventional man. He'd had a lot of rules bred
into him in childhood, and he liked all the traditional highlights of
a year - Christmas and birthdays.t1 His delight in Christmas and
summer holidays informs such popular talks, giving them the
warmth and sureness of touch that ensured their immediate and
lasting success; likewise his notable birthday poems mark the
turning year. The recollected Christmas jollity is, of course, edged
with Thomas's death-touched melancholy for 'the great iced cake
loomed in the centre of the table like a marble grave', and the
comedy of the family songs is the resilient, everyday comedy of
loss, for Auntie Hannah who 'laced her tea with rum, because it
was only once a year' and who later 'had got on to the parsnip
wine, sang a song about Rejected Love, and Bleeding Hearts, and
Death, and then another in which she said that her Heart was like a
Bird's Nest'. The warmth and the seasonal excitements of the
family gathering amidst the food and drink and pleasures of the
noisy room is set against a characteristic injunction by the adult
poet. 'Look out of the frost-scribbled window: on the great
230
Last Stories 231
loneliness of the small hill, a blackbird was silent in the snow',
while the haunting unexpressed mystery of the closing conversa-
tion between the man and child remind one that Thomas's
inspiration was also that of a father.
Three other very different items illustrate Thomas's range as a
prose writer in these last years. In the short story 'The Followers'
he depicts, with light ironic comedy, the odd, self-conscious
feelings and behaviour of late adolescence. A scene is presented
swiftly and sharply:
It was six o'clock on a winter's evening. Thin, dingy rain spat

and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone
long and yellow. In squeaking goloshes, with mackintosh collars
up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the
offices bundled home against the thistly wind.
While poetic fantasy images the home-bound older men as

'clinging on to the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas ...
wafted back, up the gasHt hills' low-key comedy describes that
return 'to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives
called Mother, and old, fond, f1eaback dogs, and the wireless
babbling'. In contrast to this seemingly comfortable indoor world,
the reader is left out in the cold, wet, Swansea evening, the shops
closing, 'a newsboy ... calling the news to nobody, very softly ...
in his own pool of rain', and where a young man, awaiting his
friend Leslie, the story's two restless followers, emerges from the
grey rain, self-consciously moved by the bedraggled scene:
It was the saddest evening I had ever known.

A young man, with his arm round his girl, passed by me,
laughing; and she laughed back, right into his handsome, nasty
face. That made the evening sadder still.
Leslie, too, carried his umbrella but he used it only to press

doorbells; and he was also 'trying to grow a moustache'. Both
young men whistle admiringly at passing, homeward-bound girls,
while assessing whether they can afford a pint. They visit the
Marlborough, which, like the night, is cold and damp: 'that
evening it was the saddest room I had ever known' in a Swansea
dismissed as 'the dizzy, ditchwater town at the end of the railway
lines'. The eye is sympathetic yet critical that records their
adolescent attitudes, observes the 'barmaid with gold hair and two
gold teeth in front like a well-off rabbit's .... She looked up as we
came in, then blew on her 'nails again and polished them without
hope.' 'Oh, for our vanished youth', exclaims the narrator. The
tone is ironic, realistic, disenchanted, even in the description of the
various drinkers, as the 'dejected regulars grew grand and muzzy
in the corners, inventing their pasts, being rich, important, and
loved, . . . influential nobodies revised the earth,. . . a party with
earrings, called "Frilly Willy" played the crippled piano'. Even-
tually 'a wet girl brushed by' and without a word the young men
follow her, despite the reflection, 'I wonder what's the point in
following people, it's kind of daft'. Peeping through the curtains of
her home, they observe a scene that is, unlike their erotic fantasies,
disappointingly but, in its way, reassuringly domestic, familiar:
'Everything there in the warm kitchen, from the tea-caddy and the
grandmother clock, to the tabby that purred like a kettle, was good,
dull and sufficient.' After supper Hermione and her mother take
out the photograph album, the young men still watching in the
rain, and they remember their eccentric, now dead relations, the
sorcery of old photographs binding youth and age, presence and
absence in eerie uncertainty. Then the ghostly voices, including
Aunt Katinka's whose picture mother and daughter have been
secretly and expectantly smiling over, exclaim 'Why are those two
boys looking in at the window?' At once the boys run off on their
different ways, unspeaking but gripped by the experience. Com-
pared with Thomas's earlier study of adolescence, 'One Warm
Saturday', 'The Followers' is less conSciously poetic in style, the
wry comedy stemming from the author's increased detachment
and drawn with irony rather than sentiment, wit or robust bawdy.
A beguiling realism creates a present in which the past finally and
mysteriously impinges on a ghost story's conflation of the familiar
and the strange.
In 'How to be a Poet' Thomas ridicules by exaggeration certain
types of would-be poets. Published in 1950, it was his last
excursion into humorous literary criticism and shows a more
sharply satiric, woundingly witty, vein than usual. The well-
chosen dunciad of poetasters begins with the Civil Service 'week-
end' poet who assiduously cultivates his way to promotion
through poetry. This neo-Georgian 'lyrical' poet, we are told,
'dropped into the Civil Service at an age when many of our young
poets are now running away to Broadcasting House, today's
Last Stories 233
equivalent of the Sea' and the portrait is amusingly venomous:
His ears are uncannily sensitive: he can hear an opening being
opened a block of offices away. And soon he learns that a poem
in a Civil Service magazine is, if not a step up the ladder, at least
a lick in the right direction. And he writes a poem. It is, of course,
about Nature; it confesses a wish to escape from humdrum
routine and embrace the unsophisticated life of the farm
labourer; he desires, though without scandal, to wake up with
the birds.
After publishing some slim volumes Cribbe - whose name 'goes
the small, foetid rounds' - decides he must write a novel, and
Thomas concludes caustically that when the whole of Cribbe's
trilogy has appeared, he 'rises, like scum, to the N .I.B. committee'.
The next target is a rather 'sensitive' young man named Cedric,
also aspiring to the status of poet, and 'to follow in Cedric's
footsteps - (he'd love you to, and would never call a policeman. . .)
- you must . . . arrive at the University with your reputation
already established as a coming poet and looking, if possible,
something between a Guards' officer and a fashionable photo-
grapher's doxy'. The picture of Cedric shows Thomas's mastery of
innuendo and irony, the sentence with a scorpion sting in its tail.
He mocks thirties' socio-political concerns in a passage of high
comedy, the precious conversation between Cedric and Rodney
swelling to a fine crescendo that is neatly pricked by the comic
bathos of Cedric's final decision:
Social awareness! That was the motto. He would talk over
coffee - (,Adrian makes the best coffee in the whole of this
uncivilised island.' 'Tell me, Rodney, where do you get these
delicious pink cakes?' 'It's a secret.' 'Oh, do tell. And I'll give you
that special receipt that Basil's Colonel brought back from
Ceylon. . .') - of spending the long vacation in 'somewhere really
alive. I mean, but really. Like the Rhondda Valley or something. I
mean, I know I'll feel really orientated there .... Books, books. It's
people that count. I mean, one's got to know the miners.' And he
spends the long vacation with Reggie, in Bonn.
Thomas displays his talent for literary parody in appropriate
pastiche verses, such as the Audenesque 'long, lax, lackadaisical
rhythms, dying falls, and images of social awareness' of:
After the incessant means-test of the conspiratorial winter
Scrutinizing the tragic history of each robbed branch,
Look! the triumphant burgeoning! spring gay as a worker's
procession
To the newly-opened gymnasium!
Look! the full employment of the blossoms!
Dylan Thomas was losing neither his bite nor his zest, whatever
the false legend of failing energies fostered by critics and
journalists unacquainted with his extensive and varied output in
these final years. Certainly zest and energy mark the very different
comedy of 'A Story', where Thomas's attitude to his subject is
completely sympathetic, and which he wrote within a few months
of his death. Shortly before leaving for the fatal American tour, he
read it on television with an exuberance that brings to mind the
remark by Nicolette Devas, Caitlin's sister, that he 'read Mr
Pickwick aloud with a "Welsh revivalist fervour,,!,2
'A Story' indeed describes with a Pickwickian gusto and comic
panache 'a day's drinking outing, by charabanc, to Porthcawl,
which, of course, the charabanc never reached, and it happened
when I [Dylan] was so high and much nicer'; and this opening
invites us to the nostalgic comedy of this familiar Welsh jaunt
presented through a child's eye-view. It is a shared adventure:
The first I heard of the annual outing was when I was sitting
one evening on a bag of rice behind the counter, under one of
my uncle's stomachs, reading an advertisement for sheep-dip,
which was all there was to read.
There is some difficulty before departure, and the comedy of

character and situation begins to delight and enchant in the
innocently viewed domestic drama:
'If you go on that outing on Saturday, Mr Thomas', she [Mrs

Thomas] said to my uncle in her small, silk voice, 'I'm going
home to my mother's.'
Holy Mo, I thought, she's got a mother ....
'It's me or the outing, Mr Thomas.'
I would have made my choice at once, but it was almost half a
minute before my uncle said: 'Well then, Sarah, it's the outing,
Last Stories 235
my love.' He lifted her up, under his arm, on to a chair in the
kitchen, and she hit him on the head with the china dog. Then
he lifted her down again, and then I said goodnight.
In these circumstances the boy has to join the outing and Thomas's
deft handling of dialogue and incident vividly depicts the thirsty,
impatient travellers and the fiercely disapproving watchers:
'What can we do with him [the boy], when we stop for

refreshments?' ...
'Twenty-six minutes to opening time', shouted an old man in a
panama hat, not looking at his watch. They forgot me at once.
'Good old Mr Cadwalladwr', they cried, and the charabanc
started off down the village street.
A few cold women stood at their doorways, grimly watching
us go. A very small boy waved good-bye, and his mother boxed
his ears. It was a beautiful August morning.
The increasingly hilarious journey, with its pastoral setting and

occasional notes of pathos, is sustained by skilfully rhythmic prose
and the poet's gift for the exact word in comic observation. It is
richly inventive comedy, but no doubt inspired by Dylan's recently
joining such an outing from Laugharne. Soon:
We were out of the village, and over the bridge, and up the hill
towards Steeplehat Wood when Mr Franklyn, with his list of
names in his hand, called out loud: 'Where's old o. Jones?'
'Where's old O.?'
'We've left old O. behind.'
'Can't go without old 0.'
And though Mr Weazley hissed all the way, we turned and
drove back to the village, where, outside the Prince of Wales, old
O. Jones was waiting patiently and alone with a canvas bag.
'I didn't want to come at all', old o. Jones said as they hoisted
him into the charabanc and clapped him on the back and pushed
him on a seat and stuck a bottle in his hand, 'but I always go.'
And over the bridge and up the hill and under the deep green
wood and along the dusty road we wove, slow cows and ducks
flying until 'Stop the bus!' Mr Weazley cried, 'I left my teeth on
the mantelpiece.'
'Never you mind', they said, 'You're not going to bite nobody' ,
and they gave him a bottle with a straw. . . .
'Twelve minutes to go', shouted back the old man in the
panama.
The picaresque narrative moves as leisurely as the charabanc

passing from pub to pub, the comedy memorably sustained by the
robust drinkers, for 'closing time meant nothing to the members of
that outing. Behind locked doors, they hymned and rumpused all
the beautiful afternoon. And, when a policeman entered the
Druid's Tap by the back door, and found them all choral with beer,
'Ssh!' said Noah Bowen, 'the pub is shut.' A counterpoint is
provided by the boy's lonely, solitary musings in the bus on the
frequent stops, not unlike Dylan's waiting for Uncle Jim in the cart
in the earlier tale 'The Peaches'. When later the members 'had
drunk the Mountain Sheep dry', the pub's choice of name no
doubt Thomas's recollection of the Swansea pub the Mountain
Dew where his schoolmaster father drank each day, the boy's first
recognition that 'from a flagpole by the Gent's fluttered the flag of
Siam. I knew it was the flag of Siam because of cigarette cards',
becomes the declaration, with equally apt surreal fantasy, that 'the
flag of Siam ... fluttered now at half mast'. The story closes on a
note of sustained comic pathos 'as dusk came down warm and
gentle on thirty, wild, wet, pickled, splashing men without a care
in the world at the end of the world in the west of Wales', the child
drifting 'to sleep against my uncle's mountainous waistcoat'. The
exuberance of this short story, the last Thomas wrote but certainly
his most humorous and most successful, again demonstrates not a
diminution of his inspiration but, in Caitlin Thomas's words, 'that
he was at the peak of his powers as a writer in the last months of
his Iife,.3
Asked to contribute to a BBC television series 'Personally
Speaking', Dylan Thomas transformed what was really a routine
assignment into the writing of one of the most popular short
stories in English. He arrived at the makeshift studio, the library of
a Cardiff clergyman, 4 with his manuscript of this boozy outing. He
rewrote, revised, and altered right up to performance, as was the
case with Under Milk Wood, so important to him the nuance of each
word and phrase he was to read. Reviews in national newspapers
spoke of his reading as 'a joy' and 'almost a tour de force'. Certainly
some manuscript work sheets of the tale have omissions as richly
Last Stories 237
comic as those finally included, 5 such as the child's response to his
uncle's "'See nobody steals it now" - "Where's the driver?" I
asked. "He's gone to get petrol." I heard him, inside, ordering five
pints of petrol.' Likewise, the Breton onion-man 'necklaced with
onions . . . propped his bicycle against the flagpole and went in'.
Work sheets reveal that 'Enoch Davies was lifting his pint up with
his teeth. It was a regular Inferno', while 'alone and aloof, I
watched the old boozed children shindy in the bar'. Description is
likewise consistently developed, for 'my uncle stood in the middle
big as a marquee' and "Go away, Dai", which was not my name,
my uncle shouted to me.' Evidently within three months of his
death Dylan Thomas's artistic effort lay in shaping and pruning his
still prodigal imagination.
The Collected Letters
There are more than a thousand letters in Dylan Thomas's Collected
Letters, over nine hundred pages by a master of English prose,
poetic, comic, moving, witty, occasionally bawdy, always carefully
written and captivating, for there is seldom a dull moment or
sentence. 'Prose with blood pressure' as Thomas quipped of Under
Milk Wood? 1 - perhaps so in their poetic fantasy and verbal
intoxication. They are also, of course, both instructive and
fascinating in their discussion of the craft of poetry, and like
Keats's letters, those of Dylan Thomas provide the best guide to his
own poetry, particularly as we have seen, as regards the evolution
of his strikingly original style. Likewise, a later letter on the writing
of Under Milk Wood is still the most illuminating introduction to the
play, and as entertaining. The story they tell begins with the
seventeen-year-old Swansea poet, this correspondence fully set-
ting down his ideas on politics, sex and society. The letters then
display his reactions to London life as a young man; record his
happy first years of marriage in pre-war Laugharne; and later
unfold his war-years in London and Oxford, his year's stay in New
Quay, Cardiganshire, and his last years in Laugharne. They vividly
describe, too, visits to Italy, to Persia, to Prague and, of course, to
America. We have a rich and changing autobiographical portrait of
the artist, beginning more-or-Iess where the Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Dog left off. In and through these letters the sad and happy
times, both movingly recorded, are flavoured with Thomas's usual
gifts for self-parody and comic invention. If we read between the
lines there are shrewd assessments of himself and 'the world he
breathed', while cameo sketches of people and places crowd the
pages.
A born letter-writer, with an almost physical delight in words, he
enchants, not without calculation it must be said, both the reader
and usually no doubt the recipient. Sometimes his letters run to
several pages, for he spent much time on them - often revising, as
in the account of Under Milk Wood, and clearly he enjoyed writing
238
'The Collected Letters' 239
them. Even when abjectly apologising or begging, their composi-
tion fired his imagination and lightened his mood. His apology to
Vernon Watkins for failing to tum up as best man at his wedding is
one of these arias of comic fantasy and misadventure, as is his
apology for missing a Swansea Medical Association dinner, Dylan
wishing on himself 'the Death of a Thousand Cuts' and inventing a
friend's advice - 'Whatever you do, don't get ill in Swansea, it's
more than your life's worth. Go in with a cough and they'll
circumsize you: 2 Writing to Princess Caetani on his lateness in
replying, and sending the second half of Under Milk Wood for
publication in her magazine Botteghe Oscure, Thomas relates how
'the drafts of letters piled up, and time lapped on' and the wet,
wintry Laugharne seascape beyond the window of his neverthe-
less 'word splashed hut' becomes the vivid and thereby exorcising
articulation of guilt and misery:
(These pages, I think, are wilting in the grey nearly permanent

drizzle that sighs down onto this town and through the bird-
scratched matchboard roof into my word splashed hut. It isn't
rain, it must be remorse. The whole fishy bay is soaked in guilt
like the bad bits of poems-not-to-be oozing to the marrow . . .
and the half-letters curling and whining in the warped drawers.
I'm writing this guilty noise in a cold pool, on a November
afternoon, in mists of depression .... This weather gets me like
poverty: it blurs and then blinds, creeps chalky and crippling
into the bones, shrouds me in wet self, rains away the world.)3
Always the compulsive writer, but on this day not to his financial
benefit, though unwittingly laying up treasure for others, both
literally and metaphorically, Thomas effectively adopted a self-
dramatising mode in letters, even when lamenting his unhappi-
ness and poverty. And indeed acute financial anxieties darken the
last letters, but they become matter for comic pleading even when
so hard-pressed by long-standing tax and National Insurance
demands. 'Dylan would lie in bed at night tormented by fears of
what the morning post might bring.'4 How ironic now to read of
the sums the manuscripts of these letters later fetched, like the first
in the Collected which was sold for £2,200 in 1981!5 His irrepressible
comic vision similarly turned a bleak winter's scene to the humour
of 'it's raining on the sea, the herons are going home, the
cormorants have packed Up', 6 for to the end letter-writing cheered
Thomas out of his depressions or worries.
But generally Thomas loved relating anecdotes, fantastic and tall
stories, describing the distinctive atmosphere of places and their
eccentrics. Writing from Blaen Cwm he spoke of the rabbit-catcher
'whose ferret might have been his own child, he fondled it so. He
called it Billy fach? the Welsh farm 'parlour with a preserved
sheep dog . . . where the Bible opens itself at Revelations', and a
visit to the Edwinsford Arms, a 'sabbath-dark bar with a stag's
head over the Gents and a stuffed salmon caught by Shem and a
mildewed advertisement for pre-1914 tobacco'.s Clearly we are
near to the world of Under Milk Wood! Likewise his vignettes of pre-
war Laugharne such as the 1934 visit on a 'fallen angel of a day'
when 'in the very far distance, near the line of the sky, three
women and a man are gathering cockles. The oyster-catchers are
protesting in hundreds around them.,9 His adventures, as a youth
on Gower beaches and in the west Wales farming country around
Blaen Cwm, usually unremarkable incidents in themselves, or later
in bohemian London, before, during and after the war, immedi-
ately involve and delight the reader. It is easy to understand and
see how, glass in hand, he became such a popular pub raconteur.
Thus a walk to post the letter he is writing from Blaen Cwm
involves us in the atmospheric drama of 'I'll walk down the lane. It
will be dark then; lamps will be lit in the farmhouses, and the
farmers will be sitting at their fires, looking into the blazing wood
and thinking of God knows what littleness, or thinking of nothing
at all but their own animal warmth.'tO
As we have seen, and as these letters abundantly confirm, from
the outset Dylan Thomas was a natural prose writer of prodigal
imagination. Additionally, not only did he quickly note and
structure oddities of human behaviour, he had in his persona the
gift of comedy as abundantly as the gift of imagination. We have
seen this in the way his letters move from a mood of everyday
despair or self-denigrating apology and take wing on language of
comic narration and fantasy. From first to last, too, the letters
cogently offer a consistent and coherent key to his own verse. They
show the wisdom of Keats in their insight into the poet and his
craft, and are as amusing as Wilde's in their wit and comedy.
Under Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas's letter to Princess Caetani on the composition,
characters, and poetic nature of Under Milk Wood, accompanying
the enclosed manuscript of 'the first half of something I am
delighting in doing', entertainingly and succinctly sets out his own
view of what he here calls 'Llareggub, A Piece for Radio Perhaps',
reviving the palingram first used in 'The Burning Baby' in 1934 and
given its seemingly more Welsh, less obviously parodic form,
Llaregyb, after Thomas's death. He first relates how he came to
conceive the play in terms of a particular place, Laugharne, and
how he presents the life of this small town on different levels of
emotional truth and with different kinds of portraiture, induding
sight and sound, poetic description and comic parody, drama and
narration:
Out of my working. . . came the idea of 'Llareggub' . . . Out of it

came the idea that I write a piece, a play, an impression for
voices, an entertainment out of the darkness of the town I live in,
and to write it simply and warmly and comically with lots of
movement and varieties of moods, so that, at many levels,
through sight and speech, description and dialogue, evocation
and parody, you come to know the town as an inhabitant of it. 1
There are over sixty characters in the play, many of them and their
sayings now household words, so popular has the play proved,
and undoubtedly both the comedy and the sadness of their lives
stem from Thomas's acute but compassionate observation of the
habits and foibles of the Welsh scene. One of Caitlin Thomas's first
portraits of Dylan sets him in the gossipy Laugharne setting of
Brown's, and I recall myself how the back-kitchen of the pub was
the gathering-place for the locals, especially when the pub was
nominally shut, cooking and drinking and the exchange of news
and scandal going on together (albeit my experience was at
Maesteg!):
241
Dylan loved all that small-town pomp and the nonsense gossip
that he lapped up every morning in Ivy Williams' kitchen . . . it
was where she did her cooking, but she ran it like a bar. People
sat around the kitchen table drinking after hours, drinking on
Sundays (when the pubs were supposed to be shut) ... and
drinking from early morning before the main bar opened. Dylan
found it very cosy, and it was here that he picked up all the
character vignettes which he moulded into Under Milk Wood. The
folk of Laugharne were engaged in an endless wrangle of feuds,
affairs, fights, frauds and practical jokes, and Dylan would
return home at lunch-time ... full of the stories he had heard. 2
Here Dylan was the entertained rather than the entertainer, and
the Welsh bonhomie (rather than the London bohemianism of
Chelsea or Fitzrovia) is an apt window on to the play.
Interestingly, there is no real sense of evil in the world of Under
Milk Wood: vice and virtue are seen as attributes of individuality,
and eccentricity and vivid individuality crowd 'this place of love'.3
Dylan Thomas's attitude of 'unjudging love' that seeks to under-
stand his characters, 4 finding the innocence beneath their all-too-
common human weaknesses and eccentricities, is evident from his
survey of the characters in this early letter. Mr Edwards will always
prefer his money, Miss Price her privacy to the sharing of marriage,
while Dai Bread's Welsh menage atrois of both a fat, mothering wife
and sensual, gypsy-like one thrives on its mixture of love and hate.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard's cold, always spotless home welcomes
only dead husbands, while even Mr and Mrs Pugh are suited to
each other, her happiness in nagging, his in plotting her murder.
With witty and shrewd frankness Thomas outlines his disarming
poetic psychology:
And the 1st Voice is really a kind of conscience, a guardian angel.

Through him you will learn about Mr Edwards, the draper, and
Miss Price, the sempstress, and their odd and, once it is made
clear, most natural love. Every day of the week they write love
letters to each other, he from the top, she from the bottom, of the
town: all their lives they have known of each other's existence,
and of their mutual love: they have seen each other a thousand
times, and never spoken: easily they could have been together,
married, had children; but that is not the life for them: their
passionate love, at just this distance, is all they need. And Dai
'Under Milk Wood' 243
Bread the baker, who has two wives: one is loving and
mothering, sacklike and jolly; the other is gypsy slatternly and,
all in love, hating: all three enjoy it. And Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
who, although a boardinghouse keeper, will keep no boarders
because they cannot live up to the scrupulous and godlike
tidiness of her house and because death can be the only boarder
good enough for her in the end. And Mr Pugh, the schoolmaster,
who is always nagged by his wife and who is always plotting her
murder. This is well known to the town, and to Mrs Pugh. She
likes nagging; he likes plotting, in supposed secrecy, against her.
He would always like plotting, whoever he lived with; she
would always like nagging, whoever she lived with. How lucky
they are to be married. 5
While in the Portrait stories Thomas's gift was to depict the heroic
comedy of ordinary lives, in Under Milk Wood his poetic and
imaginative aim, as he notes in his concluding comments here, was
to illumine the strangeness of simple lives and, paradoxically, the
simplicity of that strangeness, his peculiar genius the illumination
of the ordinary, the everyday, the familiar:
And so with all of them, all the eccentrics whose eccentricities, in
these first pages, are but briefly and impressionistically noted:
all, by their own rights, are ordinary and good; and the 1st Voice,
and the poet preacher, never judge nor condemn but explain
and make strangely simple and simply strange.
These words remind us that this small sea-town under Milk Wood
is bathed in 'the gleam I The light that never was on sea or land' to
quote Wordsworth, and as so often Dylan Thomas's Romantic
Imagination sought to rediscover 'the glory and the dream' whose
loss Wordsworth eloquently laments. So while Llaregyb is rooted
in Welsh life Thomas's final play becomes, as he says a year later,
'an extravagant play ... about a day's life in a small town in a
never-never Wales', 6 a work as much of imagination as of
experience. But to return to his account of the characters, we may
at once see his genial and generous view of human nature in his
portrait of the cheerfully promiscuous Polly Garter, of the happily
drunken Cherry Owen, of the denunciations of Jack Black the
cobbler further stimulating erotic delights, and Mary Ann Sailors'
heavenly convictions regarding Llaregyb. It is a brilliant prog-
ramme to the play:
And Polly Garter has many illegitimate babies because she loves
babies but does not want only one man's. And Cherry Owen the
soak, who likes getting drunk every night; and his wife who
likes living with two men, one sober in the day, one drunk at
night. And the cobbler who thinks the town is the wickedest
place to live in in the world, but who can never leave it while
there is a hope of reforming it; and, oh, the savour his cries of
Gomorrah add to the pleasures of the little town wicked. And
the old woman who every morning shouts her age to the
heavens; she believes the town is the chosen land, and the little
river Dewi the River of Jordan; she is not at all mad: she merely
believes in heaven on earth?
While the severe moral code of Welsh Nonconformity is evident in

the cobbler's obsessions with sexual sinfulness, clearly Dylan
Thomas has deep affection for Mary Ann Sailors' serene confide-
nce that Llaregyb 'is the chosen land', a reflection of the gentler
side of religious belief. Clearly rural west Wales has provided the
raw material of Welsh life that has enriched Thomas's pastoral
vision, for at these moments the world of Under Milk Wood is close
to that sometimes evoked in Thomas's letters, as when writing
from Blaen Cwm in 1945 of 'the woman with the gooseberry
birthmark who lies with dogs, the farm labourer who told me that
the stream that runs by his cottage side is Jordan water and who
can deny him'. 8
Dylan Thomas's 1951 letter on Under Milk Wood also explains the
final form the play took, showing the town and its characters
during the course of a day. It opens 'out of the darkness' of a
spring night and with the dreams of the inhabitants; and 'the piece
will develop', Thomas continues, 'from this, through all the
activities of the morning town - seen from a number of eyes, heard
from a number of voices - through the long lazy, lyrical afternoon,
through the multifariously busy little town evening of meals and
drinks and loves and quarrels and dreams and wishes, into the
night and the slowing-down lull again. . .. And by that time, I
hope to make you utterly familiar with the places and the people.'9
Time sequence provides the narrative sequence, and there is no
plot, no central action, and the characters remain basically the
same, come to no deeper or transforming knowledge of themselves
than they possessed at the outset, as we meet them at the different
times of the day. Douglas Cleverdon, the BBC producer of the
play, remembers that when discussing an earlier form of the play,
titled 'The Village of the Mad', wherein the eccentric villagers led
by Captain Cat are to be tried in court but prefer their isolation to
the conformist's sane world outside, Dylan Thomas welcomed his
proposal 'to drop the plot altogether, and simply carry on with the
life of the town until nightfall'.10 Certainly, too, Dylan Thomas
increasingly saw Laugharne as 'this timeless, beautiful, barmy
(both spellings) town, in this far, forgetful important place of
herons, cormorants ... castle, churchyard, gulls, ghosts, geese,
feuds, scares, scandals', 11 a refuge and sanctuary from the outside
world, whether of London or America, for him.
His talk on Laugharne ends: 'and, through envy and indigna-
tion, they label and libel it a legendary lazy little black-magical
bedlam by the sea'. 12 Clearly 'the town that was mad' and its
eccentrics becomes the all-too-human, Arcadian, but paradoxically
sane world of Milk Wood. Recalling Thomas's stout defence of Mary
Ann Sailors: 'she is not at all mad, she merely believes in heaven on
earth', we may now usefully consider the paths that led to Under
Milk Wood, both literary and personal, some abandoned but all part
of his slow journey over several years to Llaregyb. A public much
wider than the usual poetry-reading one at once saw in Under Milk
Wood a play by a famous modern poet that everybody could
understand, enjoy, and that both amused and moved them. Its
language sparkled and gave delight, even in its chimes of sadness
and death; its characters, for all their eccentricity, were of the stuff
of ordinary life. It was a dramatic experience easy to share, to
identify with. How did it come about?
Dylan Thomas had been, of course, an enthusiastic amateur
actor, and an accomplished professional reader, occasionally in
roles demanding an actor's dramatic power and flair. It is therefore
not surprising that as early as 1939, after taking part in a one-act
farce in Laugharne Dylan Thomas said that 'What Laugharne
really needs is a play about well-known Laugharne characters,;13
though when requested to write a verse feature for radio at this
time he replied that 'I don't think I'd be able to do one of those long
dramatic programmes in verse; I take such a long time writing
anything, & the result, dramatically, is too often like a man
shouting under the sea. tl4 In the ten intervening years, however,
Thomas had learned, as we have seen, through his radio and film
scripts, to write with dramatic clarity and had disciplined his
verbal gifts to this end. By the time he started writing Under Milk
Wood he was a master of dialogue as well as dramatic monologue
and the swift yet evocative delineation of atmosphere and
character. Speaking of the influence of broadcasting on him he
later declared that 'it is impossible to be too clear. I am trying for
more clarity now. At first I thought it enough to leave an
impression of sound and feeling and let the meaning seep in later,
but since I have been giving these broadcasts . . . I find it better to
have more meaning at first reading.'t5 Not surprisingly, then, nor
by chance, do the voices of the drowned who open Under Milk
Wood speak in immediately understood, albeit haunting words, of
their longing for life's remembered pleasures and sights:
FIRST DROWNED: How's it above?

SECOND DROWNED: Is there rum and laverbread?
THIRD DROWNED: Bosoms and robins? ...
FIRST DROWNED: Fighting and onions?
SECOND DROWNED: And sparrows and daisies?
THIRD DROWNED: Tiddlers in a jamjar? . . .
FIRST DROWNED: Washing on the line?
SECOND DROWNED: And old girls in the snug?
THIRD DROWNED: How's the tenors in Dowlais?
FOURTH DROWNED: Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
As well as his work on film scripts and wartime documentaries, a

more esoteric literary influence on Thomas's use of voices, and
indeed his method of ironic portraiture, was Edgar Lee Masters'
Spoon River Anthology. It was Dylan Thomas's own suggestion that
he should do a BBe programme on this at the time he was writing
Under Milk Wood. Clearly the play was much in his mind over this
period, as his introduction to his reading of excerpts shows. 'In this
sequence of poems', wrote Thomas, 'the dead of the town of Spoon
River speak, from the graveyard on the Hill, their honest
epitaphs.,16 Revealingly, he adds that 'now, in death, they are
trying to make their peace with God in whom they might not even
believe'. These Spoon River folk gossip about themselves and each
other, frank in their sexual and other revelations. This poetic
combination of sex and death no doubt delighted Dylan Thomas,
and indeed his own play might be aptly prefaced by Yeats's late
opinion that only two subjects can interest a serious mind - sex
and the dead. Undoubtedly Thomas was drawn to Masters' work
by its mocking exposure of small-town puritanism and savoured
the indignation it provoked, for he introduces it with a vigour that
brings to mind his own earlier sardonic jests. 'Masters', he writes,
'knew what he was writing about; and his detestation of the bitter
and crippling puritanism in which he struggled and simmered up
was nothing less than treacherous. "He knows us too well, the liar"
was a common attitude.,17 Pointing out Spoon River's success in the
ironic comment that 'it shocked the American public so profoundly
that it sold a great number of copies', Thomas's words also evoked
its enraged audience:
the hand-lifted horror of the giant parish press, the praIne

pulpits, the thin, baffled, fiour officials of taste in the literary
periodicals, and the innumerable societies of militant gentility. 18
But only a few phases were deleted from Under Milk Wood's first
BBC production, and only the more secluded puritans were
shocked!
Nevertheless Dylan Thomas has enjoyed a lasting, though
subdued, disapproval from the more earnest and humourless.
More centrally, he warms to Masters' presentation of 'the conflict
between materialism and idealism,19 and commends 'his fierce,
wounded, compassionate version of the skewbald truth' :20 bring-
ing to mind the small-town greed of Mog Edwards who prefers to
'hug his lovely money to his own heart' and the wounded passions,
requited and unrequited, of the citizens of Llaregyb in all their
parochial yet universally shared intensity.
The childhood nostalgia and elegiac pastoralism of Hare Drum-
mer surely found an echo in Thomas's heart as he read:
Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's

For cider, after school, in late September?
Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the frosts begin? ...
Now, the smell of the Autumn smoke,
And the dropping acorns,
And the echoes about the vales
Bring dreams of life. They hover over me.
Conrad Siever's dream of death under the apple tree has close
kinship with Thomas's poetic pantheism, with perhaps Hardy'S
graveyard ruminations not far away!
here under the apple tree
I loved and watched and pruned
With gnarled hands
In the long, long years, . . .
To move in the chemic change and circle of life,
Into the soil and into the flesh of the tree,
And into the living epitaphs
Of redder apples!
A literary ancestor of Bessie Bighead is Willie Metcalf, who slept in

the stable with dog and horses, and no doubt Dylan Thomas took
particular delight in his intimations of the dead and of his roots in
nature:
In April days in this cemetery

The dead people gathered all about me,
And grew still, like a congregation in silent prayer,
I never knew whether I was p<lrt of the earth
With flowers growing in me, or whether I walked -
Now I know.
Rosie Probert's name is perhaps an echo of Spoon River's Rosie

Roberts, who met her lovers at Madam Lou's, and 'the eternal
silence' of dead Emily Sparks that spoke to Reuben Pan tier
reverberates in Captain Cat's cry of 'Come back, come back' to
Rosie Probert, 'up the silences and echoes of the passages of the
eternal night'. Interestingly, too, Spoon River's 'Epilogue' begins
with the 'First Voice' and 'Second Voice' speaking from the
graveyard, joined later by Third and Fourth Voices; and 'The Milky
Way' speaks of 'orbits unending I Life never ending'.
Alongside this American literary influence may be set a Welsh
one, particularly when we remember that the undoubted first
genesis of Under Milk Wood was the broadcast narrative 'Quite
Early One Morning', which describes New Quay, Dylan Thomas's
third seaside home. Not only does the steep hillside topography
match Llaregyb's setting, but Thomas's wood-and-asbestos bunga-
low, Majoda, faced the bay at L1anina, where local legend spoke of
a sea-drowned church and cemetery, something that, not surpris-
ingly, remained in and haunted the poet's imagination, for Under
Milk Wood opens, not with the graveyard dead, but the voices 'of
the long drowned' remembering and longing for the joys of life. At
Milk Wood's opening the voices of the dead come from the sea,
even as at the end night descends again and 'the lights of the
lamps in the windows call back the day and the dead that have run
away to sea'. Captain Cat voyages to the dead in his dreams 'and
the long drowned nuzzle up to him' for blind Captain Cat provides
the link between the living and the dead:
FIRST DROWNED: Remember me, Captain?

CAPTAIN CAT: You're Dancing Williams!
FIRST DROWNED: I lost my step in Nantucket.
SECOND DROWNED: Do you see me, Captain? the white bone
talking?
I'm Tom-Fred the donkeyman ... we shared the same girl
once . . . her name was Mrs Probert . . .
WOMAN'S VOICE: Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come
on up, boys, I'm dead.
THIRD DROWNED: Hold me, Captain, I'm Jonah Jarvis, come to
a bad end, very enjoyable.
FOURTH DROWNED: Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea lawyer, born in
Mumbles, sung like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon,
tattooed with mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.
FIRST DROWNED: The skull at your earhole is
FIFTH DROWNED: Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that
pawned the ormolu clock.
Often the life of the play is conveyed through the impassioned

nostalgia of the dead. As we have seen it is Thomas's nostalgic eye
that exalts and animates the view, and in a radio talk on 'Living in
Wales', written shortly after his return and while preoccupied with
Under Milk Wood, it is remembrances of Wales while still living in
England that inspire the finest passages. In its mixture of social
comedy and poetic evocation of Welsh settings, whether of Gower,
Carmarthenshire or Cardiganshire, it gives us a glimpse of the
mind and imagination that was conceiving Under Milk Wood:
I could remember . . . the tin roofed chapels where I trebled

Aberystwyth and made calf eyes at the minto-sucking girls ....
But all this was easy stuff, like settles in corners, hams on the
hooks, hymns after stop-tap, tenors with leeks, the hwyl at
Ebenezer, the cockles on the stalls, dressers, eisteddfodau,
Welshcakes .... What was harder to remember was what birds
sounded like and said in Gower; what sort of a sound and shape
was Carmarthen Bay . . . what silence when night fell in the
Aeron valley. . . . I could not remember . . . if the old, booted
body that bore its grumbles ... up Portland Place [to Broadcast-
ing House] to do its morning rant was the same as that which,
hoofed with seaweed, did a jig on the Llanina sands and barked
at the far mackerel. 21
Phrases in this passage have been recognisably woven into the

texture of Under Milk Wood, and the poet's sensitivity to the natural
world and its changing sounds and movement of darkness and
light anticipate the language of Milk Wood, where both social
comedy and natural life are part of its dramatic vitality and
structure.
Thus passing time and changing scene are conveyed in a
tapestry of natural sight and sound, wherein 'You can hear the
dew falling . . . and you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the
darkest-be fore-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-
filled sea'. Later in night's silence 'listen', says the poet, to 'the
grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds
in Milk Wood'; while as night ends and 'time passes. Listen .... An
owl flies home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak. And the dawn
inches up.' Similarly at night the life of chapel, pub, dairy, bakery
and the harbour-side homes of the town is evoked with comic
detail and apt, delicate, imagery, night variously imaged as a
'mouse with gloves', 'black flour', and a donkey 'with seaweed on
its hooves':
It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and

brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow,
coughing like nannygoats, sucking min toes, fortywinking halle-
lujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky
Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery
flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting
silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles,
past curtained fern pot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy
dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin
teacaddy.
Best read aloud for the verbal harmonies to be fully appreciated,

the buoyant movement of these sentences is kept under strict
'Under MIlk Wood' 251
control, with rhythms cunningly varied. Clearly Thomas became
increasingly adept at weaving a catalogue of words for incantatory,
comic or descriptive effect. Sometimes the stylistic device is the
accumulation of words similar in sound and associations as in 'the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea'. His
selection of words in never arbitrary: in the dreams of boys the sea
becomes 'jollyrodgered' and they sleep in the 'bucking ranches of
the night' - pirates and cowboys being appropriate boyish
associations. Similarly, Thomas often employs the transferred
epithet: 'dogs sleep in the wetnosed yards' and cats 'lope sly,
streaking' on the 'one cloud of the roofs'. No less evocative and
involving than the opening descriptions of night are the dreams of
the inhabitants of the town 'fast, and slow, asleep'. A catalogue of
twelve nouns, woven in a poet's cadences that remind us of
Thomas's rhythmic mastery in such verses as 'Fern Hill', invites us
into these dreams:
Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the
movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays
and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall· and
despairs and big seas of their dreams.
Before entering their dreams we may aptly recall that the

technique of dreams was used to explain the characters in 'Quite
Early One Morning', and that Thomas had always been interested
in the Freudian psychology of dreams, declaring that '1 have read
only one book of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams', and while
adding that he did 'not recall having been influenced by it' he
added that 'no honest writer today can possibly avoid being
influenced by Freud through his pioneering work on the
Unconscious' .22 That dreams should play such an important part
in the structure and characterisations of Under Milk Wood was
evidently not by chance. They provided a road, indeed a key, to the
past that opened up not only nostalgia but flights of fancy and
poetic licence. Thus Evans the Death, the undertaker, incidentally
named as 'Thomas the Death' in earlier manuscript versions no
doubt with Dylan Thomas's delight in self-parody, lyrically
sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the
goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into the
field where his mother is makin~ welsh-cakes in the snow, and
steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and climbs back to bed
to eat them cold and sweet under the warm, white clothes while
his mother dances in the snow kitchen crying out for her lost
currants.
As usual in Dylan Thomas's writing fantasy is rooted in fact, for it

was the Welsh custom to use snow in the mixture when making
Welsh cakes. Not only did this give them a delicious lightness but
snowfall gave an excuse for making them! It is with a lyrical
symbolism that recalls Thomas's early pastoral tales that 'Mary
Ann Sailors dreams of the Garden of Eden' and 'in her smock-frock
and clogs':
goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen

garden, ducking under the gippo's clothespegs, catching her
apron on the blackcurrant bushes, past bean rows and
onionbeds and tomatoes ripening on the wall towards the old
man playing the harmonium in the orchard, and sits down on
the grass at his side and shells the green peas that grow up
through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew.
Other dreams follow more popular notions of Freudian interpre-

tation in their sexual fantasy and phallic imagery. Thus Gossamer
Beynon 'finds, with no surprise, a small rough ready man with a
bushy tail winking in a paper carrier' and as she sighs II' At last, my
love" . . . the bushy tail wags rude and ginger'; while Mae Rose
Cottage:
peals off her pink-and-white skin in a furnace in a tower in a

cave in a waterfall in a wood and waits there raw as an onion for
Mister Right to leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves
like a brilliantined trout.
With more romance and pathos, as well as that ironic comedy that,
like the sexual innuendo in the play, saves Thomas's writing from
the sentimental:
Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the
workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a
couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of
daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen
who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn't looking and
never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.
Undoubtedly, the comedy stems from Thomas's acute yet

compassionate observation of the habits and foibles of the Welsh
scene, a knowledge and experience built up over many years; and
his delight in mocking the strict Nonconformist sexual code
remains, although now more genial and humorous than sharply
satiric. In his evocation of the 'bible-black' night reference to the
various sleepers is enlivened by ironic inclusion of 'the fancy
woman' and 'in the blinded bedrooms' such texts as 'Thou Shalt
Not on the wall', while Jack Black's dreams are wholly in character,
with their hyperbolic and comic sexual repression and denuncia-
tion:
Come now ... to the bible-black airless attic over Jack Black the
cobbler's shop where alone and savagely Jack Black sleeps in a
nightshirt tied to his ankles with elastic and dreams of . . .
chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried
double bed of the wood.
Similarly the rhythms and language of the gossiping neighbours

derive from the South Wales dialect of English, their Welsh
chronique scandaleuse like an operatic duet:
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: Poor Mrs Waldo.

SECOND NEIGHBOUR: What she puts up with.
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: Never should of married
SECOND NEIGHBOUR: If she didn't had to
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: Same as her mother
SECOND NEIGHBOUR: There's a husband for you ...
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: And carrying on
SECOND NEIGHBOUR: With that Mrs Beattie Morris
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: Up in the quarry ...
SECOND NEIGHBOUR: Oh it makes my heart bleed
FIRST NEIGHBOUR: What'll he do for drink
SECOND NEIGHBOUR: He sold the pianola.
A later and similar exchange of scandal and gossip produces the

fondly malicious 'There's a nasty lot live here when you come to
think.'
2S4 Films, Broadcasts, Last Stories, Letters, etc.
Like all-seeing television cameras the First and Second Voices
pick out and introduce us to the characters of Llaregyb, as they
move about their daily chores and pleasures. No attempt is made
to differentiate these two narrative voices, though generally the
Second Voice introduces their dreams and thereby something of
their inner lives. The Reverend Eli Jenkins, who, as Thomas
intended, 'talks only in verse', becomes one of the central
characters in the play, the others being Captain Cat and Polly
Garter, rather than an 'anonymous exhibitor and chronicler' as
Thomas called the First Voice. Thus Thomas's 'poet preacher' is
described at his morning activities 'in Bethesda House' as 'he
gropes out of bed into his preacher's black, combs back his bard's
white hair. . . opens the front door. . . and hearing the sea break
and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses and tells them
softly to empty Coronation Street'. The scholar bard and minister is
presented with affectionate irony, and 'his morning service'
celebrates the beauty of Welsh scenery. His poetaster's list of
Welsh mountains and rivers, set in the popular and hymn-like
form and simplicity of his verses, is prompted by the sounds of
Llaregyb's sea and sea-birds. His poem suggests the innocence of a
small, bucolic Eden that is central to the ethos of the play:
By Carreg Cennen, King of time,

Our Heron Head is only
A bit of stone with seaweed spread
Where gulls come to be lonely.
A tiny dingle is Milk Wood

By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer
To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.
This innocence is sometimes pointed to in comic irony as when, on

hearing Polly Garter's moving song of sexual reminiscence, he
joyously exclaims 'Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation', and
resuming his morning rounds he 'hurries on through the town to
visit the sick with jelly and poems'.
While lively rhythms and sounds of 'the clip clop of horses on
the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of
horse-shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-
ounced boughs' introduce the morning scenes, the afternoon is
registered in slow, sleepy, easeful rhythms and images:
The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the
dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in
its lap. The meadows still as Sunday .... Donkeys angelically
drowse on Donkey Down.
For all the sexuality, the place retains its Eden-like innocence and
landscapes for 'Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or poem-
room' where each afternoon he writes 'his Lifework' in 'the White
Book of Llaregyb'. Nevertheless the sexual undertones and double
entente that are as much part of the life and language of the playas
the pastoral lyricism enter even Eli Jenkins's parlour for we learn
that his father Esau 'undogcollared because of his little weakness,
was scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping
with his weakness in the corn. . . . "Poor Dad"', grieves the
Reverend Eli, 'to die of drink and agriculture', again innocently
achieving a double entente denied his verses!
The coming of evening is visibly and palpably evoked, as was
the bustle of the morning and the languor of the warm spring
afternoon, for now 'each cobble, donkey, goose and gooseberry
street is a thoroughfare of dusk ... and night's first darkening
snow, and the sleep of birds, drift under and through the live dusk
of this place of love'. Relatedly, the characters are described at their
evening pursuits but always appropriately in character: thus 'Mr
Ogmore and Mr Pritchard, who all dead day long have been
gossiping like ghosts in the woodshed . . . reluctantly sigh and
sidle into her [Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard'sJ clean house'.
Significantly, and with total appropriateness, Dylan Thomas's
direct references to incidents from The Mabinogion, the mediaeval
Welsh tales, occur through the character of the poet-preacher Eli
Jenkins, a bardic figure likely to be familiar with such literary
sources and legends as he writes his Lifework in 'the White Book
of Llaregyb', the title echoing the Black Book of Carmarthen, an
early manuscript collection of Welsh verse. Eli Jenkins writes:
Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that
dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the Celts left the Land of
Summer and where the old wizards made themselves a wife out
of flowers.
Interestingly, these words closely echo Arthur Machen's 'Twm

Barlwm, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of peoples that dwelt
in that region before the Celts left the Land of Summer', quoted in
Gwyn Jones's' A Prospect of Wales', which Thomas probably knew
since he visited Gwyn Jones in 1952 and was himself invited to do a
book of Welsh fairy-tales for Oxford University Press. The 'wife
made out of flowers' refers of course to the Mabinogion's Blo-
deuwedd who was magically created from the blossoms of the oak,
the broom and the meadowsweet. With similar appropriateness in
his characterisation, but a very different facet of Welsh Nonconfor-
mity, Thomas dearly delights in the satiric humour of Jack Black's
night-time persona as he:
prepares once more to meet his Satan in the Wood. He grinds his
night-teeth, closes his eyes, climbs into his religious trousers,
their flies sewn up with cobbler's thread, and pads out, torched
and bibled, grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk.
Such phrases as 'religious trousers' and 'torched and bibled' evoke

a stylised, baroque comedy both more universal and identifiable
than the grotesquerie of Thomas's early phantasmagoric stories.
LikewisC' Mr Waldo's nostalgic drinking song of the poor
chimbley sweep, with his comforts of parsnip gin and neglected
young wives, strikes common and commonly shared notes of
bathos and bawdy, the more effective as it is preceded by Eli
jenkins's sentimental and respectable literary recollections and
followed by Blind Captain Cat who, 'like a cat ... sees in the dark',
and 'through the voyages of his tears ... sails to see the dead'. His
darkly impassioned recherche du temps perdu, and Polly Garter's love
songs for a dead lover, are at the heart of the play, with their
haunting sense of loss that is healed only in death. In the afternoon
sun Captain Cat 'slumbers and voyages' back to the past when,
earringed, tattooed, randy brawler and boozer, 'Tom Cat's tart'
Rosie Probert was 'the one love of his sea-life that was sardined
with women'. Rosie Probert remembers 'My pretty sugar sailor I
With my name on you belly I When you were a boy I Long long
ago' and to his yearning 'seesaw sea' cries of 'Lie down, lie easy. /
Let me shipwreck in your thighs', the three intermingling themes
of the play, love, sex and death are fused in the profound yet lucid
poetry of her reply:
ROSIE PROBERT
Knock twice, Jack,

At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.
CAPTAIN CAT
Rosie Probert.
ROSIE PROBERT
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.
While 'Come back, come back', cries Captain Cat, 'up the silences
and echoes of the passages of the eternal night' . Metaphysical in its
eschatology, yet movingly, and above all dramatically direct in its
haunting notation of the pathos and ultimate mystery of the
human condition, this testamentary lyric is of course close to
Thomas's last verse. This is especially so if we remember Rosie
Probert's last response to Captain Cat's final search as he sails
through his tears of remembrance: 'Rosie, with God. She has
forgotten dying.' Such is the effervescent, often surface, comedy of
the play we do not always remember its profound seriousness.
One's impression that the final section of the play, covering the
characters at their evening pursuits, is rather short and might well
nave been extended had Thomas returned from America, is, I
think, confirmed by a manuscript list of 'More Stuff for Actors to
Say' that included such items as 'Song by Thomas the Death, Song
by Lily Smalls, Ocky Milkman talking to his non-existent wife,
Nightmare by Lord Cut-Glass, P.c. Attila & poachers ... Pub stuff,
Voices for gravestones, Epitaphs, Sinbad Sailors fearing the dark,
Mrs Willy Nilly telling fear-stories to Willy Nilly and children.,23
More character-songs would obviously have further contributed to
the play's pantomime and burlesque element, and the paucity of
pub scenes in the play is surprisingj while gravestones and
epitaphs suggest the continuing impact of Spoon River Anthology,
and fear of the dark and the telling of fear-stories bring to mind
both Thomas's early prose and the strange but finally comic
incidents in his later tales. Dylan Thomas's gift for succinct comic
portraiture is certainly evident in his note on 'P.c. Attila &
Poachers' that 'He is so suspicious that, when they tell him they
are going right, he goes left. They always tell him the truth.'
Interestingly, Dylan Thomas himself wrote as late as July 1953
regarding a version he sent then to his literary agent that 'dusk
arrives too sharply and suddenly . . . the whole of the day up to
dusk much overbalances in emphasis and bulk, the day after dusk.
. . . Now I am paying as much attention to the evening as, say, to
the morningj and I hope to improve Milk Wood very much
structurally by this.'24
Much use is made of music to create the atmosphere and assist
the changing moods of the play, and this use of song notably
contributes to the play's appeal and effectiveness. The teasing song
of the children with its echoes of children's games and rhymes
helps to evoke the lively morning 'that is all singing', while its
familiar phrases, rooted in popular consciousness, ring true to the
play's common touch:
GIRL
Kiss me in Milk Wood

Or give me a penny.
What's your name?
THIRD Boy
Dicky.
GIRL
Kiss me in Milk Wood Dicky

Or give me a penny quickly.
THIRD BOY
Gwennie Gwennie
I can't kiss you in Milk Wood.
GIRLS' VOICES
Gwennie ask him why.
GIRL
Why?
THIRD BOY
Because my mother says I mustn't.
GIRLS' VOICES
Cowardy cowardy custard

Give Gwennie a penny.
By contrast there is the nostalgic sexuality of Polly Garter's song for

her dead lover in this honest lyric:
Now when farmer boys on the first fair day

Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I'll lie there in their arms
For they're good bad boys from the lonely farms,
And I always think as we tumble into bed

Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.
While the couplet's sad refrain rings again through the last
moments of the play, Polly Garter's song is a lively memory of
sexual fact and fantasy, like Mr Waldo's later ditty about the
chimbley sweep, and has the repetition and refrains of folk-song as
it generously recalls every 'Tom, Dick and Harry':
I loved a man whose name was Tom

He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry.
The use of song enables Thomas not only to evoke but quickly
change mood and atmosphere, an innovative dramatic device in
the early fifties. Of course Thomas well knew how Welsh pub
singing easily moves from bawdy to hymn, aria to folk-song! The
echoing children's playground songs are the background beat to
Captain Cat's obliquely bawdy song, with its nursery-rhyme-like
celebration of birth and copulation, 'Crack' and 'Snail' neatly
transferred:
Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail

Kept their baby in a milking pail
Flossie Snail and Johnnie Crack
One would pull it out and one would put it back.
Of course, the vein of sexual comedy and sexual puns runs

through and salts the play, not only saving it from sentimentality
but contributing to its humour, humanity and vivacity. We have
already seen how the characters reveal their sexual desires and
feelings with a poetic yet disarming and comic frankness, as in
Captain Cat's 'sardined' sex-life and his yearning for the 'ship-
wreck' of orgasm. With more innocence and fantasy Mae Rose
Cottage 'listens to the nanny goats chew, draws circles of lipstick
round her nipples' and confides to the unlistening goats 'I'm fast.
I'm a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I'm seventeen. I'll go to hell
... I'll sin till I blow up' and 'lies deep, waiting for the worst to
happen'. Double entente has a field day with such sexual puns as
'martyr' and 'music': 'she was martyred again last night' waspishly
exclaims a gossip about 'Saint Polly Garter', and Mrs Organ
Morgan innocently laments 'Oh, I'm a martyr to music', while
Gossamer Beynon hungrily and innocently longs 'to gobble him
up' despite Sinbad Sailors' being common. When the play was first
broadcast in January 1954, after minor BBC censorship - 'Parlez-
vous jig-jig' and 'Let me shipwreck in your thighs' surviving but
'wriggle her roly-poly bum', 'strip her to the nipples' and 'draws
circles of lipstick round her nipples' cut (afterwards referred to as
'the two tits and a bum' at Broadcasting House)2s - some were
shocked, as usual. Under Milk Wood was in advance of its time, not
only in its sexual frankness, but more importantly in its dramatic
originality. It was innovative in its use of music and song, its
colloquial vitality and its sexual jests, and the earthy humanity that
underlay its poetic language and characterisation. Very different
from the contemporary poetic drama of Eliot and Fry, it heralded a
new and successful form of poetic drama. Its originality in some
respects anticipates the revival of English theatre that began at the
Royal Court in 1956; though perhaps its distinctive innovations of
song and parody and poetic medley place it closer to Joan
Littlewood's work at Stratford East. Under Milk Wood is clearly
closer to The Hostage than Look Back in Anger, though outlasting
both in its popularity.
Curiously the play's name Under Milk Wood, has received little
comment or investigation. It is all the more surprising when we
remember that the choice of each and every word, whether in
poetry or prose, was a matter of considerable deliberation for
Dylan Thomas. In the play itself, Milk Wood is largely a place of
reference rather than the location of the action; like the 'gooseberry
wood' of Thomas's contemporaneous Rabelaisian poem 'Lament'
visited mainly by the lovers, the 'hunched courters' -and-rabbits'
wood' lures also the voyeur Jack Black! But we should remember
that the main theme of the play, and the subject it celebrates, is the
life-force, both in man and nature. It is springtime, when not only a
young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, and the twin and
merging themes of love and sexuality are the strongest in the play,
though sometimes given particular poignancy by loss and remem-
brance. Love and sensuality are what the dead long for too! Thus
the interweaving of sexual comment, innuendo and pun are
neither superficial divertissement nor immature humour but part of
the ever-changing kaleidoscope of human love and sexuality. The
life-force that the play celebrates, subsuming and transforming
death in this celebration, is at the same time spiritual, physical and
cosmic. Any reference to milk, in a poet as conscious of the
associative power of language as Dylan Thomas, includes not only
associations with copulation, birth and growth, semen and
mother's milk, but also the energies and otherness of the milky
way. It is well to remember that when writing this play he was also
preoccupied with 'In Country Heaven' and, explaining this poem,
he spoke of 'The godhead, the author, the milky-way farmer'.
Dylan Thomas's declared aim for 'In Country Heaven' was that it
should be 'an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the
Earth. . . a praise. . . a poem about happiness'. 26 Is not this close to
Polly Garter's now universally treasured 'Isn't life a terrible thing,
thank God!' and Under Milk Wood the praise and play about
happiness that Thomas's words desiderate? Of course, Thomas's
view of human love is not a simplified one: there is the comedy of
the arid exchanges between Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and her dead
husbands, and the bitter but mutually stimulating battle between
Mr and Mrs Pugh, nagger and potential poisoner happily united,
while Mr Mog Edwards 'hugs his lovely money to his own heart'
and he and Miss Price remain 'happily apart from one another'.
While unrequited love satisfactorily serves the needs of some, it is
fulfilled sexual love, as in Polly Garter or Captain Cat, and by
implication in Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen, and Dai Bread and his
two wives (the ironic comedy of the text 'God is Love' above their
bed!) that points to the ethos of the play. For Under Milk Wood
celebrates, to use Keats's words, 'the holiness of the heart's
affections', however frail, at times deluded, these may be. Indeed
no love is more tenderly commemorated than that of Bessie
Bighead for Gomer Owen, whatever the affectionate comedy it
gives rise to, a tenderness that remains at the centre of the loving
relationships in the play irrespective of their reciprocity. Thus,
though we may have laughed on hearing of Bessie's one and only
kiss from Gomer Owen, her final obituary is at the heart of the
play's ethos:
Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Llaregyb and you

will find the few haggard rags and one poor glittering thread of
her history laid out in pages there with as much love and care as
the lock of hair of a first lost love. Conceived in Milk Wood, born
in a barn . . . she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen
kissed her when she wasn't looking because he was dared. Now
in the light she'll work, sing, milk ... and sleep until the night
sucks out her soul and spits it into the sky. In her life-long love
light, holily Bessie milks the fond lake-eyed cows.
In Milk Wood such love is sacred, giving Bessie's poor life a

radiance until death's cosmic anonymity. For as well as the life-
force and fertility, each quick with the 'body of Spring with its
breast full of rivering May-milk' on 'this one spring day', Under
Milk Wood, this 'place of love', celebrates Polly Garter 'giving the
'Under Mille Wood' 263
breast in the garden to my bonny new baby' and Mary Ann Sailors'
back garden that is, neither simply symbolically nor mythically, but
for her entirely obviously and literally 'the garden of Eden'. Milk
Wood is the paradox of innocence and sexuality sustained
throughout and registered in the final lines of the play:
The Wood ... that is a God-built garden to Mary Ann Sailors ...
that is the fairday farmhands' wantoning ignorant chapel of
bridesbeds, and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved
sermon on the innocence of men.
Eros and Agape, the erotic and the idealised and remembered
faces of love are subsumed in Thomas's harmonious vision of Milk
Wood, where the teased and tormented boy Dicky flees from the
predatory girls 'howling for his milky mum, . . . and the fat birth-
smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her arms he'll never forget'
and where Eve-like Gossamer Beynon is 'the only woman on the
Dai-Adamed earth' and 'Sinbad Sailors places on her thighs still
dewdamp from the first mangrowing cock-crow garden his
reverent goat-bearded hands'. Evidently the worlds of Under Milk
Wood and the last poems are as integrally linked as those of the
poetry and prose in the early thirties. 'They remember places,
fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and myster-
ies' Dylan Thomas said of the 'tellings' of 'In Country Sleep' .27
Under Milk Wood's characters likewise tell of and remember 'their
Edenie hearts', both before and after cock-crow. 'The hawk on fire'
presides over Sir John's Hill, while for Mary Ann Sailors 'His kind
fire' presides 'in Llaregyb's land' that has nevertheless 'fallen head
over bells in love', a pun that points to the all-too-human heart of
the play, composed though it is of landscapes and affections as
'holy' - an oft repeated word - and sacramental as those of
Thomas's last poems.
'An extravagant play . . . about a day's life in a small town in a
never-never Wales~ and a 'play set in a Wales that I'm sad to say
never was' wrote Dylan Thomas in November 1952 and January
1953 of his work-in progress Under Milk Wood;28 though he had
specifically written in 1948 of the early pages of Under Milk Wood
that 'a radio play I am writing has Laugharne, though not by name,
as its setting', prefacing this with the words 'I really do know it
intimately, love it beyond all places in Wales, and have longed for
years to write something about it. ,29 This, of course, was a year
before his return to live there, and certainly after he moved to the
Boat House Laugharne became the setting and daily inspiration of
Under Milk Wood, despite its original source in the New Quay
narrative 'Quite Early One Morning'. Not only does the 'Voice of a
Guide-Book' laconically refer to 'this small, decaying watering-
place', the 'salty individuality' of its inhabitants, the 'two-storied
houses' of Coronation Street, 'cobbled streets' and 'a few
eighteenth-century houses of more pretension', but Dylan Tho-
mas's own sketch of Under Milk Wood particularly notes 'L1areggub
Hill', 'Salt Lake Farm' on its summit. It is clearly Sir John's Hill,
rising from the bay and estuary, and in his sketch Thomas aptly
writes 'Me, Curly Floyd, the cockier'. The actual hill-farm is called
'Salt House Farm', evidently the source of Milk Wood's named
farm. The wooded hill-slopes of Sir John's Hill, which met the
poet's gaze from his home, writing shed, and cliff-side walk, are
clearly 'Milk Wood' as the play's descriptions show: 'L1aregyb Hill
... among green lathered trees, ... strewn away farms, where
farmboys whistle, dogs shout, cows low, but all too far away ... to
hear.' This was Thomas's daytime view of the hill where milking
cows grazed, where the trees' distant foliage does indeed resemble
green lather, and where he hourly watched the changing light of
sea, hill and estuary until 'dusk showers slowly down over byre,
sea and town'. Interestingly, in Dylan's map of the town,
Coronation Street closely corresponds to King Street, the main
street that in fact leads into the town and to the Town Square, the
Town Hall, School and Welfare Hall, places noted by Thomas on
his street-map, at its far end. The Town Square and the Town Hall
Bell provide a focus in the play, such as for the gossips. Chapel and
pub (Brown's) are in King (Coronation) Street, where Thomas's
sketch also puts them, and there is an actual King Street shop
called 'Manchester House'. The lower part of the town borders the
estuary and is very much below Sir John's Hill, and indeed under
Milk Wood. I make these minor topographical points since they
again demonstrate how Thomas's imagination was often rooted in
a literal base. And being an imaginative work Under Milk Wood,
though mainly drawing its inspiration from Welsh life, created its
own magical, springtime, lusty, love- and death-haunted, micro-
cosm of man and nature.
Despite his several years' work on Under Milk Wood it was wholly
in character that he lost the manuscript on two occasions, once
leaving it in a Cardiff, later a Soho bar, a Wildean combination of
misfortune and carelessness! Indeed Dylan Thomas seemed all too
often not only feckless financially but simply careless of his own
welfare. Whatever his poetic progress there remained throughout
his life a rooted incapacity for, perhaps an instinctive opposition to,
material progress.
Later on his fatal American visit Dylan Thomas was due to meet
Stravinsky to write the libretto of an opera on the atomic
destruction of the world and its renewal, an epic concept that
greatly excited the poet. If we think of Under Milk Wood and this
proposed collaboration with Stravinsky for a libretto recalling the
beauty and mystery of earth (could there have been a more apt
commission for Dylan Thomas?), clearly his death at thirty-nine
was by then as tragic a loss of prose writer as poet. Certainly, too,
Under Milk Wood marked as much a new threshold as a culmination
of his powers. Importantly, despite the very apparent griefs and
family difficulties now racking him, and his life-long openness to
the world around him - whether wartime destruction or the new
atorriic threat - Dylan Thomas never succumbed to the nihilism
and humourless stridency of some of our major twentieth-century
writers in English. Protected by the common touch, Thomas was
still celebrating in poetry and prose the worth of man and the
beauty of what he called 'this apparently hell-bent earth'. Contrary
to some critics' views, his latter prose and verse - and 1951 saw the
completion of three major poems including 'Poem on his Birthday'
and 'Do not go gentle into that good night' - mark a writer at the
height of his powers. They clearly suggest not failing but new
springs of inspiration. Such works, like his letters, reveal a great
twentieth-century poet tragically cut off.
We may fittingly conclude this study of Thomas's life and work
with his own words on the American poet Edgar Lee Masters,
written the year before he died, and aptly referring also to Yeats:
He was never deluded into thinking that the truth is simple and
one-sided, that values are clearly defined: he knew that the true
motives of men about their business on earth are complex and
muddled, that man moves in a mysterious way his blunders to
perform, that the heart is not only a bloody pumping muscle but
... a 'foul rag-and-bone shop', in Yeats's phrase, a nest of errors,
a terrible compulsion that lives by its hurt. 30
That hurt, and the poetic compulsion that redeemed it, whether
comic or tragic, produced Dylan Thomas's vision of the human
condition.
Appendix
The piece on Chelsea, in the form of ten captions for photographs
of Chelsea taken by Bill Brandt, is given below. I wish to point out
that the Dylan Thomas Trust kindly considered the captions in the
light of my suggestions that they were by Dylan Thomas, but were
not convinced of his authorship. I would like to thank them, and
David Higham Associates, for their interest in and consideration of
this matter. It seems to me, however, that there is strong
circumstantial evidence, and stylistically there is good reason, for
taking the view that the captions were written by Dylan Thomas,
though no authorship is named in the Lilliput publication.
Not only, it seems, did Dylan Thomas enquire as to who might
write the captions for Brandt's Chelsea photographs, but he
received the following letter a few weeks after their publication
from the publishers Peter Lunn:
15th September, 1944
PUA.71D.G.IM.H.
D.Thomas, Esq.,
ao Editorial Dept.
Lilliput,
43, Shoe Lane,
London, EC4.
Dear Sir,
Mr Bill Brandt with whom, we understand, you cooperated by writing
the commentary for the pictures on Chelsea published in the August
Number of Lilliput has suggested that we should contact you. We
intend to publish a book of photographs in the near future and would
like to hear from you if you would be interested to edit the book and
write the commentary for it.
266
Appendix 267
Would you be good enough to telephone us for the purpose of
making an appointment with the writer?
Yours faithfully,
For and on behalf of
Peter Lunn (Publishers) Ltd.
This letter, a copy of which is now in the Dylan Thomas archive in

the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, was clearly forwarded
from the Lilliput office to Majoda, New Quay, where Thomas had
recently moved. He replied from Majoda on 20 September 1944 to
Peter Lunn Ltd:
Thank you for your letter of the 15th.

I am very interested indeed in the idea of editing, and writing the
commentary fOf, the book of photographs you mention ....
Yours faithfully,
Dylan Thomas
In a footnote to this letter Paul Ferris confirms this, speaking of 'a

small publishing firm (Peter Lunn Ltd) that wanted Thomas to
write an illustrated book about the streets of London. It had been
impressed by captions he wrote for a feature in the magazine
Lilliput (Collected Letters, p. 523). Incidentally, this project got only
so far as Thomas's three-page typescript of 'The Book of Streets'.
Dylan Thomas had previously written eight three-line verse
captions for photographs, called 'A Dream of Winter', in the
January 1942 issue of Lilliput, of which Brandt had taken two
London winter scenes. The 1944 Chelsea photographs centre on
that part of Chelsea between Dylan Thomas's Manresa Road
home, just off the King's Road, and the river, and one of them is
that of Dylan and Caitlin in this studio flat, the caption ending with
the comment 'Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin look grave in
Manresa Road'. It seems to me very likely that Dylan Thomas
accompanied Brandt on this Chelsea tour, for the captions include
reference to two of his favourite Chelsea pubs, the 'King's Head &
Eight Bells' and the 'Black Lion'. Characteristic features of
Thomas's style include the compilation of word lists usually with
comic deflation in the detail ('two volumes of the history of
Birmingham') and occasional sexual innuendo ('Etiquette for
Young Ladies, the bound Quiver'); parody and satire especially at
268 Appendix
the expense of the poseurs and the puritanically glum (Carlyle);
the gift for mimicry in snippets of conversation; and the poetic
transformation of scene and atmosphere - as in the early morning
view from Battersea bridge, Thomas exactly evoking 'a cold mist
mazing' the river, the chimneys of Battersea power station
'commanding' out of the mist and the cries of the 'off-white gulls'.
The sad fate of Carlyle's dog is the kind of comic tall-story Thomas
loved, often beginning as a pub fantasy. In a letter nearly ten
years later (15 February 1953) Dylan repeated his story of Carlyle's
dog, embroidering the joke further on learning his friend
Keidrych Rhys was writing to the Western Mail from the family
farm near Llandilo: 'Keidrych is, I see from the correspondence
column in the Western Mail, ranting in Llandilo now. I don't
know what happened to him & our Dumb Friends. Do you think
something similar happened to his little charges as did to Carlyle's
dog? Carlyle used to talk to it for hours, week after week, year after
year, and at last it could bear it no longer & threw itself out of the
window. Have you read anywhere recently of a mass animal
suicide?' His jibe that Carlyle was 'stern with the flowers' is a
typical jest at the puritan's expense. Particularly characteristic of
Dylan Thomas, too, is the structure of recollection on which the
captions are based, 'you will remember' the key to these vignettes
of Chelsea scenes and life. His later broadcast talk 'Living in
Wales' was similarly structured through the word 'remember'.
Remembrance, with a hint of nostalgia, was particularly apt for the
wartime readership of LiIliput, many of them servicemen abroad. It
seems to me this description of Chelsea not only stands on its
own, but is an instance of Thomas's prose style at its best.
Importantly, also, in 1944 it is an early example of his later mastery
as an artist in comedy in his broadcasts and stories, yet with a
restraint and seriousness, as in his references to the Chelsea
Pensioners and the 'lean and hungry poets' in their garrets, that
his later prose sometimes turned to more boisterous jesting. Not
by chance, I suspect, does the remark that these poets are writing
'for a credulous posterity what the dubious present will not accept'
occurs in the caption for the picture of Dylan in his top-floor
Chelsea bedsitter flat. Throughout the piece there are literary
references, here of course appropriate to the Chelsea streets and
houses he writes of, and such material is a feature of Thomas's
many later BBC talks on writers, whether he drew it from his own
knowledge and research or literary chat with friends in pub or club
or wherever.
The captions are here published as separate paragraphs. The
first comments on the photograph of the Thames that includes a
Appendix 269
view of Battersea Bridge and power station; the second depicts the
'Black Lion' near Cheyne Row, the commentary mocking 'inarticu-
late writers nostalgic for a past they never knew'. While for the
t/:lird photograph of a painter in Flood Street, the caption mainly
speaks of the nearby King's Road when it was a setting for painters
and their canvases, and is gently humorous at their expense. Flood
Street runs between the King's Road and Cheyne Walk, location of
the fourth caption. This demonstrates Dylan Thomas's ability to
parody artistic affectation and chi-chi posturing through snatches
of conversation, as in his later 'How to be a Poet', and some
'fugitives from the Cheyne-gang' - perhaps the wittiest and
Thomas's most characteristic verbal pun in this piece - are
photograph in the 'Blue Cockatoo' on Cheyne Walk. The next
paragraph humorously captures the variety of Chelsea life through
the long, winding sentence of lists, while the sixth retrospectively
evokes Chelsea evenings of talk and music, sophistication b<ilth
hinted and mocked. Here reference is also made to Whistler and
his house at 97 Cheyne Walk, shown in the photograph, and which
faces the river at the far end of Cheyne Walk towards Chelsea
Reach, the caption aptly closing with echoes of Spenser's famous
line on the Thames, a device Eliot used in The Waste Land. Brandt's
picture - of two Chelsea Pensioners chatting prompts further
description of the narrow streets leading to the river, evidently a
resident recording and delighting in their atmosphere and habi-
tues. The next illustration features 125 Old Church Street -
opposite which Thomas stayed in no. 84 in 1942 - and the house
has a plaque commemorating William de Morgan who was a
member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, whom Dylan pokes gentle fun
at, and mention of Chelsea gardens prompts evocation also of
Rossetti, Swinburne and Carlyle, evocation characteristically
edged with comedy. Likewise the picture of Dylan and Caitlin is
supported by a caption of wider context, varied in tone and style.
Finally the photograph of Cheyne Row is enlivened by comic
fantasy, and also significantly refers to the Chelsea pub Thomas
particularly favoured - though it is not quite in the picture. The
vignettes of these 'riverward streets', their 'careful trees', and
'great rooms, like barns pretending to be Cathedrals' vividly
evokes features of Chelsea that, like other instances in this 1944
description, are to be found today. It is not surprising that Dylan
Thomas should have been invited to do a book of London streets.
'Streets' were a narrative device he favoured, employing it in film-
scripts as well, of course, as Under Milk Wood. It seems Dylan
lodged briefly in Oakley Street in 1942, near Cheyne Rowand the
'Blue Cockatoo'.
270 Appendix
CHELSEA WORD-PICTURES (1944)
You remember the river, perhaps at early morning with a cold mist
mazing it, and the four tall famous chimneys of the Power House
commanding out of the mist. You remember the bridges, the bits of
boats, old river ribs, hulks in the sad mud, and the tugs puffing up river
and bowing their funnels to the bridges; and the barges, and the loud,
off-white gulls. Perhaps you remember Turner, and Whistler, who saw
in the grey winter water, through river sunrise and sunset, an eternal
lovely London.
Perhaps you remember Chelsea as a haven of hangers-on, an artistic
dead-end cramped full with failures in painters' uniform, with inarticu-
late writers nostalgic for a past they never knew. There were parties
with unpleasant sherry and conversation conscientiously remembered
from period novels. But now some life is noising back to the pub and the
studio; painters have come to live here who really paint pictures; there
are writers whose job it is to write. Here is John Davenport outside the
Black Lion: erudite, argumentative film-writer, parodist, musician, and
conversationalist.
If all the canvases in Chelsea were laid end to end, what a pity.
Perhaps you remember how hard it was to walk down King's Road
without meeting a painter of Cornish fishing-boats, or a shaggy man
sitting on a shooting-stick and drawing Old Chelsea with supreme
regard for the passers-by. 'Modern' was a term of abuse. Picasso was a
'decadent', and the man whose work was accepted by the Royal
Academy wore to his envious contemporaries an oily halo. But now
new painters have come to live and work here. Peter Rose-Pulham, who
was a photographer, paints strong shapes in Flood Street.
In the Blue Cockatoo on Cheyne Walk they have left Dali ('he's a
conventional draughtsman with a cultivated phobia') and the Marx
brothers ('the only true Surrealists after Bosch'), and Education ('I want
them to run about naked, unashamed.' 'In this weather, Nina?') and are
talking about themselves. Here over coffee, they lay their problems
bare. They are fugitives from the Cheyne-gang. And all over the Quarter
(yes, the Quarter!) other emancipated couples in discreet cafes sit, sip,
reconstruct society, and recognise in one another the Greatness that is
Underneath.
But Chelsea, to many, is one large curiosity shop: prints, picture
frames, canvases, vases, trinkets, Chinese china, furniture, secondhand
books (Ouida, Principles of Topiary, two volumes of the History of
Birmingham, Etiquette for Young Ladies, the bound Quiver), tapestries,
chandeliers, birds in glass cases, candlesticks, Irish harps, seem to fill
the sprawling, built-over village: and here in his workshop is Alfred
Rorke, aged eighty-two, a cabinet-maker. He was apprenticed to his
father in 1887, and has made beautiful furniture for Kensington Palace,
St james's Palace, and Magdalen, Oxford.
Appendix 271
Chelsea might mean, in retrospect, to you, evenings of music in calm
rooms, of readings by the firelight, of talk talk talk until early morning
over black coffee (oh the hiss of the probably Turkish cigarette-end in
the coffee cup!). Walk down a road and hear music. Perhaps it is Olga
Hedegus with her cello in 96 Cheyne Walk, where Whistler lived,
painted, destroyed reputations with a sentence, and experimented with
the colour of his wallpaper. Oh, all the words that are written and
spoken around and about here, the lines that are drawn, the notes that
are played! Outside the sweet Thames runs softly.
Chelsea, perhaps, is its studios to you; its dilettantes, charlatans,
cranks; it is the river, it is the dark interior of the curiosity shop, it is the
narrow streets, the intimate houses; perhaps it is just another suburb.
But to the Chelsea Pensioners it is the end of marching and fighting all
over the world; it is a place where you can buy a bit of tobacco,
remembering how much tobacco cost in the good days, and drink a pint
of beer, remembering how good beer used to be, and where you can
walk and talk with the other old, indomitable men in the gardens or in
the quiet streets by the Thames.
Is it the gardens of Chelsea that you remember, gardens where once
the decorative pre-Raphaelite poets chanted their drowsy verse to ladies
with golden hair and goitres, or where young men in knickerbockers
discussed the New Age and the air was masculine with strong tobacco?
Think of the gardens. Over the lawns leapt Rossetti's wombat;
Swinburne squeaked on the wall, as in Beerbohm's lovely drawing;
Carlyle was stern with the flowers. This bird is de Morgan pottery. The
young girl at the window is quite recent.
Or is Chelsea, to you, a bustling busy suburb of shops and cinemas
and pubs, a place where the only peace is in the garrets of the lean and
hungry poets who, by the light of a candle in a beer bottle, write for a
credulous posterity what the dubious present will not accept? They are
the salt of Chelsea's soil; because of them, hearts and eyes kindle, and
girls mutter proudly 'I have a little room in Chelsea'. Yesterday a girl
from a Government office, who woodcuts fish, saw two poets and a
model, all together, at once. Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin look
grave in Manresa Road.
Perhaps it is the face of Chelsea that you remember; and when you
are away from it, you make in your mind the patterns of riverward
streets again, the late Georgian houses, the plaques to the famous and
the forgotten, the neat pretty boxes with bright doors, the careful trees
in the narrow ways, the roof studios and the great rooms, like barns
pretending to be Cathedrals. You see Cheyne Row, looking towards the
Thames, where the 'Eight Bells' still stands and where Thomas Carlyle
is said to have bored his dog so deeply that it committed suicide by
jumping through the top floor window.
Notes
Notes to Part One: Dylan Thomas's Life
1. Dylan Thomas, 'Reminiscences of Childhood', Quite Early

One Morning (London, 1954) p. 1.
2. Vernon Watkins, Collected Poems (Ipswich, 1986) p. 288.
3. Dylan Thomas, quoted by Geoffrey Moore in 'Dylan Tho-
mas', Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet, ed. E. W. Tedlock
(London, 1960) p. 251.
4. Edward Thomas, The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas, ed.
John Moore (London, 1939) p. 156.
5. The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones and T. Jones (London,
1949) pp. 63-4.
6. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London,
1985) p. 25.
7. I am indebted for this information to Paul Ferris's Dylan
Thomas (London, 1977) p. 25.
8. Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill (London, 1957) p. 56.
9. J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (London, 1956) p. 92.
to. Thomas, Collected Letters, pp. 76-7.
11. Dylan Thomas, 'The Fight', Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog (London, 1940) p. 77.
12. Edward Thomas, Life and Letters, p. 168.
13. Thomas, 'Reminiscences of Childhood', p. 1.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15. Thomas, 'Return Journey', Quite Early One Morning, p. 76.
16. Thomas, Collected Letters, p. 43.
18. Ibid., p. 3.
19. Thomas, 'Reminiscences of Childhood' (Second Version),
Quite Early One Morning, p. 9.
21. Dylan Thomas, 'Three Nursery Rhymes', Swansea Grammar
School Magazine, vol. 27, no. 3 (December 1930) p. 82.
272
Notes 273
22. Dylan Thomas, 'Modern Poetry', Swansea Grammar School
Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3 (December 1929) pp. 83-4.
23. Swansea Grammar School Magazine, vol. 27, no. 3 (December
1930) p. 112.
24. Ibid., vol. 27, no. 1, p. 11.
25. Ibid., vol. 27, no. 4 (April 1931) pp. 128-30.
26. Dylan Thomas, 'Old Garbo', Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog, pp. 186-7.
27. Augustus John, 'The Monogamous Bohemian', Adam (Dylan
Thomas Memorial Number), no. 238 (December 1953) p. 10.
28. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America, p. 26.
29. Geoffrey Moore, 'Dylan Thomas', The Legend and the Poet,
p.254.
31. Caitlin Thomas, with George Tremlett, Caitlin (London,
1986) p. 44.
33. Ibid., p. 161.
34. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
35. Ibid., p. 84.
36. Ibid., p. 85.
37. Ibid., p. 60.
38. Ibid., pp. 54-5.
39. Ibid., p. 85.
40. Ibid., p. 62.
41. Ibid., p. 43.
42. Thomas, 'The Peaches', Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,
pp.13-14.
43. Ibid., pp. 29-30.
44. Quoted in Daniel Jones, My Friend Dylan Thomas (London,
1977) pp. 26-7. I am particularly indebted to Daniel jones's
book here.
45. Thomas, 'Return Journey', pp. 75-6.
47. Dylan Thomas, in an address to the Scottish PEN centre on 4
September 1948 at the Scotia Hotel, Edinburgh, and pub-
lished in Voices of Scotland, December 1948, p. 22.
48. Ibid., p. 22.
49. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Adam, no. 238, p. 68.
50. Gwyn Jones, 'Welsh Dylan', Adelphi, vol. 30, no. 2 (February
1954) p. 115.
274 Notes
51. Dylan Thomas, 'On Reading One's Own Poems', Quite Early
One Morning, p. 130.
52. Dylan Thomas, 'A Painter's Studio', Texas Quarterly, vol. iv,
no. 4 (Winter 1961) p. 56.
54. Vernon Watkins, 'Introduction' to Dylan Thomas: Letters to
Vernon Watkins (London, 1957) pp. 12-13.
55. Vernon Watkins, 'Introduction' to 'Poetry and the Poet', I
That Was Born in Wales, ed. Gwen Watkins and Ruth Pryor
(Cardiff, 1976) p. 29. I am also here indebted particularly to
Gwen Watkins's Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul, 1983).
56. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, pp. 5-6.
57. Thomas, Collected Letters, pp. 254-5.
58. Ibid., p. 261.
59. Ibid., pp. 296 and 304.
60. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, pp. 29, 37 and 59.
61. Vernon Watkins, in Gwen Watkins's Portrait of a Friend, p. 60.
62. Ibid., p. 33.
64. See Watkins, Portrait of a Friend, p. 92.
65. Ibid., p. 36.
66. Dylan Thomas, quoted by Constantine Fitzgibbon in his The
Life of Dylan Thomas (London, 1965) p. 281.
67. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, p. 83.
69. Nicolette Devas, Two Flamboyant Fathers (London, 1966)
p. 198. I am here particularly indebted to her book for
information.
70. ·Watkins, Portrait of a Friend, p. 107.
72. Thomas, 'On Reading One's Own Poems', Quite Early One
Morning, p. 130.
73. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, pp. 92-3.
75. Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 211.
77. Ibid., p. 792.
78. Dylan Thomas, from broadcast talk quoted in Fitzgibbon, Life
of Dylan Thomas, p. 341.
79. Dylan Thomas, 'Prologue', Collected Poems 1934-53 (London,
1988) p. 3. The Editors convincingly point out that
Notes 275
'Prologue' is preferable to the previous title ' A u thor's
Prologue'.
BO. Dylan Thomas, 'Laugharne', Quite Early One Morning, p. 71.
81. Thomas, Collected Letters, pp. 689-90.
82. Thomas, 'Prologue', Collected Poems 1934-53, p. 1.
84. Dylan Thomas, 'Over Sir John's hill', Collected Poems.
85. Watkins, 'Introduction', Letters to Vernon Watkins, p. 19.
87. Ibid., p. 732.
88. I am indebted for this information to Paul Ferris, Dylan
Thomas, p. 223.
90. Thomas, 'Laugharne', p. 71.
91. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, p. 179.
92. Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill, pp. 35 and 58-9.
93. Ibid., p. 36.
94. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, pp. 116 and 124.
95. Ibid., p. 120.
96. Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill, p. 53.
97. Thomas, 'Laugharne', Quite Early One Morning, p. 71.
98. Watkins, 'Introduction', p. 19.
99. Thomas, quoted in Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 341.
100. Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 351.
102. Ibid., p. 753.
103. Ibid., p. 845.
104. Dylan Thomas, 'Poetic Manifesto' (1951), Dylan Thomas: Early
Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London, 1971) p. 154.
105. Dylan Thomas, 'I Am Going to Read Aloud', The London
Magazine, vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1956) p. 16.
Thomas, p. 242.
107. Ibid., p. 242.
109. See Poetry and Film (Gotham Book Mart, 1972). This booklet
includes Thomas's comments.
110. Dylan Thomas, quoted by Ferris in Dylan Thomas, p. 240.
111. Ibid., p. 241.
112. Dylan Thomas, 'I Am Going to Read Aloud', The London
276 Notes
113. Ibid., p. 17.
114. Quoted in Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 232.
115. Dylan Thomas, 'I am Going to Read Aloud', The London
116. Quoted in Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 235.
117. Quoted in Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 409.
118. Dylan Thomas, 'A Visit to America', Quite Early One Morning,
p.63.
119. Ibid., pp. 64 and 67.
120. See Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 245.
121. Dylan Thomas, 'A Visit to America', Quite Early One Morning,
pp.64-5.
122. See Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 374.
124. Ibid., p. 792.
125. Ibid., p. 701.
126. See Fitzgibbon, Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 344.
127. Ibid., p. 374.
128. Ibid., p. 226.
129. Ibid., p. 343.
131. Dylan Thomas, 'The Cost of Letters', Early Prose Writings,
p.152.
133. Quoted by Gwen Watkins in Portrait of a Friend, p. 143.
135. Ibid., p. 748.
136. Ibid., pp. 748-9.
137. Dylan Thomas, 'Festival of Spoken Poetry', Quite'Early One
Morning, pp. 128 and 129.
139. Ibid., p. 58.
Thomas, p. 293.
142. Philip Toynbee in his review of Collected Poems, Observer, 9
November 1952.
143. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Gwen Watkins's Portrait ofa Friend,
p. 139, and to which I am indebted for the account of this
and Watkins's last visit.
144. Ibid., p. 139.
Notes 277
145. Ibid., p. 140.
147. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America, p. 211.
148. A. T. Davies in his 'Note' to the 'Laugharne' talk, Quite Early
One Morning, p. 176.
149. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America, p. 203. Gittins's Last Days of
Dylan Thomas also interestingly depicts these last episodes,
as of course does Paul Ferris.
150. I am particularly indebted to Paul Ferris's accounts in the
chapter 'Alcohol and Morphia', Dylan Thomas, pp. 299-309.
151. Thomas, 'Prologue', Collected Poems: 1934-53, p. 2.
152. See Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 224.
153. Quoted in Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet, ed. E. W.
Tedlock (London, 1960) p. 64.
Notes to Part Two: The Poetry
The Early Notebooks and other Manuscript Verse

1985) p. 298.
2. Ibid., p. 310.
3. Quoted in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas,
ed. R. Maud (London, 1968) p. 274.
4. Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. Daniel Jones (London, 1971)
p.222.
5. Thomas, Poet in the Making, p. 106.
6. Ibid., pp. 81-2.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., pp. 158-9.
9. Ibid., pp. 191-2.
10. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934-53 (London, 1988) p. 75.
11. Poet in the Makind, pp. 97-8.
12. Ibid., pp. 109-10. See the final version in Dylan Thomas:
Collected Poems 1934-53, pp. 72-3.
14. See Gwen Watkins's Portraitofa Friend (Llandysul, 1983) p. 33.
16. Ibid., p. 116.
17. Ibid., pp. 266-7.
18. Ibid., p. 17.
19. Dylan Thomas, 'I am Going to Read Aloud', London Magazine,
278 Notes
vol. 3, no. 9 (September 1956) p. 14.
20. Caitlin Thomas, with George Tremlett, Caitlin (London, 1986)
p.68.
22. Poet in the Making, p. 180.
24. Ibid., p. 90.
25. Ibid., p. 98.
26. Ibid., pp. 89-90.
27. Thomas, The Poems, edited Daniel Jones, p. 176.
28. Daniel Jones, in The Poems, p. 272.
29. 'Paper and sticks' is included in Collected Poems: 1934-53,
p.97.
30. 'General Preface to the Notes', Collected Poems 1934-53, p. 160.
'18 Poems'
1. Dylan Thomas, 'On Poetry', Encounter, vol. III, no. v (1954)
p.23.
1985) p. 38.
4. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. B. Forman
(London, 1935) p. 384.
5. Dylan Thomas, 'Book Review', Adelphi, vol. 3 (September
1934) pp. 418-19.
7. Ibid., p. 90.
8. Ibid., p. 39.
9. Dylan Thomas, Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan
Thomas, ed. R. Maud (London, 1968) p. 249.
11. Thomas, 'Book Review', Adelphi, vol. 3 (September 1934)
pp.418-19.
12. Dylan Thomas, 'Poetic Manifesto', Early Prose Writings, ed.
Walford Davies (London, 1971) p. 158.
13. Martin Dodsworth, 'The Concept of Mind and the Poetry of
Dylan Thomas', Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays, ed. Wal-
ford Davies (London, 1972) p. 112.
Notes 279
15. William Blake, William Blake: Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes
(London, 1939) p. 187.
16. Ibid., p. 182.
18. Ibid., p. 75.
19. Ibid., p. 25.
20. Ibid., p. 487.
21. Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres Completes de Arthur Rimbaud, ed.
Rolland de Reneville et Jules Mouquet (Paris, 1951) p. 254.
22. Vernon Watkins, 'Introduction', Dylan Thomas: Letters to
Vernon Watkins, ed. Vernon Watkins (London, 1957) p. 13.
23. Ibid., p. 13.
24. W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', The Collected Poems
(London, 1952) pp. 217-18.
25. Dylan Thomas, 'After the funeral', Collected Poems: 1934-53
(London, 1988) p. 74.
26. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', pp. 217-18.
27. Ibid.
28. Thomas, Poet in the Making, p. 186.
29. Ibid., p. 187.
30. Dylan Thomas, 'Poetic Manifesto', Early Prose Writings,
pp.157-8.
31. Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill (London, 1957) p. 57.
32. Thomas, Col/ected Letters, p. 297.
'Twenty-five Poems'
1. Gwyn Jones, Introduction to Welsh Short Stories (London,
1956) p. xiii.
2. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934-53 (London, 1952)
p.163.
3. In John o'London's Weekly, 5 May 1934.
4. I am indebted for this information to Poet in the Making: The
Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, ed. R. Maud (London, 1968) p. 317.
1985) p. 39.
'The Map of Love'

1. John Donne, Deaths Duell, Sermons of John Donne, vol. x, ed.
E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter (Berkeley, Calif. 1961) pp.
232-3.
280 Notes
3. Dyla~ Thomas, Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan
Thomas, ed. R. Maud (London, 1968) p. 168.
1985) pp. 12-13.
5. Dylan Thomas, 'The Peaches', Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog (London, 1940) pp. 23-4.
7. Donne, Deaths Duell, p. 234.
8. Dylan Thomas, 'In Country Sleep', Collected Poems: 1934-53
(London, 1988) p. 140.
'Deaths and Entrances'

1. John Donne, Deaths Duell, Sermons of John Donne, vol. x, ed.
Simpson and Potter (California, 1961) p. 231.
2. See the review of Our Country in Dylan Thomas in Print: A
Bibliographical History, ed. Ralph Maud (London, 1972)
pp.138-9.
3. Dylan Thomas, Our Country, Wales, Autumn 1943, p. 76.
1985) p. 487.
5. Ibid., p. 518.
6. J. Maclaren-Ross, 'The Polestar Neighbour', London Magazine,
vol. 4, no. 8 (November 1964) p. 103.
7. Dylan Thomas, 'Wilfred Owen', Quite Early Gne Morning,
p. t02.
8. A. T. Davies, 'Preface', Quite Early Gne Morning (London,
1954) p. viii.
9. H. N, Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. VI (New
York and London, 1968) p. 412.
to. Walford Davies, 'Notes', Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems, ed. W.
Davies (London, 1974) p. 125.
p.110.
1985) p. 11.
13. Daniel Jones, 'Notes', Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. Daniel
Jones (London, 1971) p. 271. Dr Jones also confirms that the
hunchback 'stayed from the moment the park opened until it
closed'.
Notes 281
14. Dylan Thomas, 'Three Poems', Quite Early One Morning,
p.157.
16. Ibid., p. 519.
17. Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed.
Vernon Watkins (London, 1957) p. 115.
18. In confirmation of the use of the word see Bill Bundy,
'Spreading the Net: Survey of the Lore and Language of
Welsh Fisher Folk', Anglo-Welsh Review, no. 59 (Autumn 1977)
p.70.
19. Henry Vaughan, 'The Retreat', The Works of Henry Vaughan,
vol. I, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1957) p. 419.
20. Thomas's words to define mysticism, Collected Letters, p. 26.
21. William Wordsworth, 'Ode on Intimations of Immortality',
Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Derbyshire, vol. 4
(Oxford, 1947) p. 280.
23. Thomas 'Three Poems', Quite Early One Morning, p. 154.
24. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (London,
1977) p. 45.
25. Watkins, 'Introduction', Letters to Vernon Watkins, p. 13.
26. Thomas, 'Three Poems', Quite Early One Morning.
27. Dylan Thomas, 'The Peaches', Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog (London, 1940) p. 16.
28. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations (London, 1908)
p.157.
29. Ibid., p. 157.
30. Thomas Traherne, The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, ed.
G. L. Wade (London, 1932) p. 198.
31. W. B. Yeats, in 'Letter to His Father', July 1913, The Letters of
W. B. Yeats, ed. A. Wade (London, 1954) p. 583.
32. Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas (Milton Keynes, 1986) p. 80.
33. T. S. Eliot, 'Dante', Selected Essays (London, 1934) p. 243.
35. S. T. Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London,
1978) p. 364.
37. Ibid., p. 26.
38. Derek Stanford, Dylan Thomas (London, 1954) p. 101.
39. T. S. Eliot, 'East Coker', Four Quartets (London, 1952) p. 16.
40. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934-53 (London, 1988) p. 21.
282 Notes
41. W. B. Yeats, 'Leda and the Swan', Collected Poems (London,
1952) p. 241.
42. 'Introduction', The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse,
introduced and edited by J. Barrell and J. Bull (London, 1974)
p.2.
43. Davies, 'Notes', Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems, ed. W. Davies
(London, 1974) p. 126.
44. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Harvey Breit, 'Talks with Dylan
Thomas', A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, ed. J. M. Brinnin (New
York, 1960) p. 197.
45. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, p. 707.
'Collected Poems'
1985) p. 408.
2. Ibid., p. 757.
3. Ibid., p. 800.
4. Dylan Thomas, from notes on a page from a Basildon Bond
notepad in the National Library of Wales manuscript collec-
tion.
5. Vernon Watkins, The Collected Poems, pp. 119-20.
6. Ibid., p. 116.
7. Ibid., p. 116.
8. Stuart Holroyd, 'Dylan Thomas and the Religion of the
Instinctive Life', A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, ed. J. M. Brinnin
(New York, 1960) p. 143.
10. See David Holbrook, Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night (London,
1972) p. 127.
11. The familiar nursery rhyme '0 what have you got for dinner
Miss Bond?' is included in Songtime, ed. P. Dearmer and M.
Shaw (London, 1915) p. 37.
12. I am indebted for this information to Ralph Maud, Entrances to
Dylan Thomas' Poetry (Lowestoft, 1963) p. 116.
13. Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races (London, 1896) p. 21.
15. This article, 'Tragedy of Swansea's Comic Genius', was
published in Herald of Wales, 25 June 1932.
16. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (London,
1977) p. 263.
Notes 283
17. Dylan Thomas, 'Three Poems', Quite Early One Morning
(London, 1954) pp. 156-7.
19. Ibid., pp. 830-1.
20. Ibid., p. 838.
21. Ibid., p. 841.
22. Ibid., p. 838.
23. William Empson, quoted by Constantine Fitzgibbon in his The
Life of Dylan Thomas (London, 1965) p. 260.
24. Fitzgibbon records Vernon Watkins's comment on this on
p.262.
25. Thomas, 'Three Poems', pp. 156-7.
26. See 'Images from Childhood', Of Wolves and Men, B. H. Lopez
(London, 1978) pp. 263-4.
27. Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis, Christmas and Other Memories (Lon-
don, 1978) p. 14.
29. Ibid., p. 279.
30. Bearing in mind the complexity and structure in this poem we
may note Dylan Thomas's comment: 'I like things that are
difficult to write and difficult to understand; I like "redeeming
the contraries" with "secretive images'" (ibid., pp. 181-2). Cf.
also Blake's 'without Contraries is no progression', in William
Blake: Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes (London, 1939) p. 181.
31. We may note Thomas's comment: 'Poetry ... should be as
orgiastic and organic as copulation, dividing and unifying,
personal but not private' (Collected Letters, p. 182).
32. Thomas, 'Three Poems', pp. 156-7.
33. W. T. Moynihan, 'In the white giant's thigh', The Explicator
Cyclopaedia, vol. 1: 'Modern Poetry', ed. C. Walcutt and J.
Whitesell (Chicago, 1966) p. 315. '
34. Arthur Giardelli, in review of Nella Coscia Del Giganto Bianco,
Anglo-Welsh Review, no. 64 (1979) p. 145.
35. R. Sanesi, quoted by Giardelli, ibid., p. 144.
36. Sanesi, ibid., p. 142.
Unfinished Poems
1. 'Notes' to 'In Country Heaven', Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems
1934-53, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London, 1988)
p. 259. The Editors' Notes to individual poems, single volu-
284 Notes
mes, and the unfinished verse are essential keys to Thomas's
work.
2. Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53, pp. 260-1.
1934-53, p. 261.
4. Dylan Thomas: In Country Heaven - The Evolution of a Poem,
Caedmon TC 1281 (1971).
5. William T. Moynihan, The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas
(London, 1966) p. 227.
6. Ibid., p. 273.
1934-53, p. 262.
8. ~oynihan, The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, p. 271.
9. Dylan Thomas, 'On Poetry', Quite Early One Morning, p. 170.
p.156.
11. Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53, p. 260.
12. Ibid., p. 155.
13. Ralph Maud, Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry (Lowestoft,
1963) p. 112.
15. Ralph Maud, Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry (Lowestoft,
1963) p. 112.
16. See 'Notes', 'In Country Heaven', Dylan Thomas: Collected
Poems 1934-53, p. 261.
17. William T. Moynihan, The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas,
p.273.
18. Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53, pp. 260-1. The text of
the early manuscript disussed here is taken from these pages.
p.156.
20. Ibid., p. 157.
1934-53, p. 261.
22. Eric J. Sundquist, "'In Country Heaven": Dylan Thomas and
Rilke', Comparative Literature, 31 (Winter 1979) p. 77.
23. Dylan Thomas, 'Three Poems', Quile Early Olle Morning,
p.157.
24. See 'Notes' to 'Elegy', Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53,
p.264.
Notes 285
1985) p. 798.
27. Dylan Thomas, 'Over Sir John's hill', Dylan Thomas: Collected
Poems 1934-53, p. 143.
28. Dylan Thomas, quoted by J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in
America (London, 1956) p. 105.
29. Dylan Thomas, 'Interview with Dylan Thomas', Occident,
University of California (Spring 1952) pp. 5-6.
30. Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet, ed. E. W.
Tedlock (London, 1960) p. 149.
Notes to Part Three: The Prose
The Early Stories

1. Dylan Thomas, 'I am Going to Read Aloud', London Magazine,
September 1956, p. 15.
1985) p. 862.
3. Ibid., p. 127.
4. Ibid., p. 862.
5. Ibid., p. 136.
6. Ibid., p. 29.
7. Ibid., pp. 271 and 193.
8. Ibid., p. 363.
9. Ibid., p. 227.
10. Ibid., p. 136.
11. Ibid., p. 227.
12. Some manuscript pages are included in the 'Sib thorp' Archive
material, National Library of Wales.
'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog'

1985) pp. 416-17.
2. Ibid., p. 286.
3. Ibid., pp. 276-7.
4. Ibid., p. 333.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
286 Notes
6. Ibid., p. 137.
7. Dylan Thomas, 'Poetic Manifesto', Dylan Thomas: Early Prose
Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London, 1971) p. 157.
p.59.
'Adventures in the Skin Trade' and 'Death of the King's Canary'

1985) p. 494.
2. Ibid., p. 485.
3. Ibid., p. 472.
Notes to Part Four: Film Scripts, Broadcasts, Last Stories, Letters

and Under Milk Wood
Introduction
1. Vernon Watkins, quoted in Gwen Watkins's Portrait of a Friend
(Llandysul, 1983) p. 196.
2. Watkins, Portrait of a Friend, p. 134.
Film Scripts and other Prose Items

1985) p. 134.
2. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, quoted in 'Introduction' to Selected
Poems, ed. J. Higgens (Manchester, 1976) p. 9.
3. In a letter to Henry Treece, see Thomas, Collected Letters,
p.297.
4. Ibid., p. 184.
5. Ibid., p. 537.
6. The following quotations are from the typescript in the
National Library of Wales.
7. Ralph Maud, 'The London Model for Dylan Thomas's Under
Milk Wood', The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts (New
York, 1970) p. 210.
8. Dylan Thomas, 'The Londoner', The Doctor and the Devils and
Other Scripts, p. 220.
Notes 287
Broadcasts
1. See Gwen Watkins, Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul, 1983) p. 92.
1985) p. 862.
3. Dylan Thomas, '1 Am Going to Read Aloud', The London
4. See Watkins, Portrait of a Friend, p. 115.
Last Stories
p.67.
2. Nicolette Devas, Two Flamboyant Fathers (London, 1%6)
p.203.
3. Caitlin Thomas, Caitlin, p. 179;
4. See Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (London, 1977) p. 293.
5. These holograph worksheets, from which the following
quotations are taken, are in the National Library of Wales.
'The Collected Letters'

1. In interview with Mimi Josephson, 'Poet in the Boat House',
John o'London's Weekly, 7 August 1953, pp. 701-2.
1985) p. 740.
3. Ibid., p. 844.
p.l72.
5. See Paul Ferris, in Thomas, Collected Letters, p. 5.
7. Ibid., p. 29.
8. Ibid., pp. 557, 560.
9. Ibid., p. 138.
10. Ibid., p. 29.
'Under Milk Wood'

1986) p. 813.
p.118.
288 Notes
3. Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood (London, 1954) p. 76.
4. Dylan Thomas, 'This Side of the Truth', Collected Poems 1934-
53 (London, 1988) p. 89.
6. Ibid., p. 848.
7. Ibid., p. 814.
8. Ibid., p. 558.
9. Ibid., p. 813.
10. Douglas Cleverdon, 'History of the Text', The Growth of Milk
Wood (London, 1969) p. 19.
11. Dylan Thomas, 'Laugharne', Quite Early On,e Morning (Lon-
don, 1954) p. 70.
12. Ibid., p. 72.
13. Quoted in Cleverdon, Growth of Milk Wood, p. 1, where this
incident is related.
15. Thomas, quoted in 'Preface' to Quite Early One Morning, p. vii.
16. Dylan Thomas, 'Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters',
Harper's Bazaar, June 1963, p. 115.
17. Ibid., p. 69.
18. Ibid., p. 68.
19. Ibid., p. 68.
20. Ibid., p. 115.
21. Dylan Thomas, Broadcast talk 'Living in Wales', in Constan-
tine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London, 1965)
pp.340-1.
22. Dylan Thomas, 'Poetic Manifesto', Dylan Thomas: Early PrOfZe
Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London, 1971) p. 158.
23. This list is included in Cleverdon's Growth of Milk Wood,
pp.36-7.
24. Thomas, Collected letters, p. 904.
25. I am indebted for this information to Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas
(London, 1977) p. 368.
26. Thomas, Quite Early One Morning, pp. 156-7.
27. Ibid., pp. 156-7.
28. Thomas, Collected Letters, pp. 848 and 863.
29. Ibid., p. 668.
30. Thomas, 'Dylan Thomas on Edgar Lee Masters', Harper's
Bazaar (June 1963), p. 115.
A Dylan Thomas Companion 289
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Select Bibliography
Works by Dylan Thomas
(i) Poetry
18 Poems (London, 1934).

Twenty-five Poems (London, 1936).
The Map of Love (London, 1939).
Deaths and Entrances (London, 1946).
In Country Sleep (New York, 1952).
Collected Poems (London, 1952).
Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, ed. R. Maud
(London, 1968). New edition: The Notebook Poems (London, 1989).
Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. Daniel Jones (London, 1971).
Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-53, ed. W. Davies and R. Maud
(London, 1988).
(ii) Prose
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (London, 1940).

Under Milk Wood (London, 1954).
Quite Early One Morning (London, 1954).
A Prospect of the Sea (London, 1955).
Adventures in the Skin Trade (London, 1955).
Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed. Vernon Watkins
(London, 1957).
Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas, ed. Constantine Fitzgibbon (Lon-
don, 1966).
Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies (London,
1971).
The Death of the King's Canary, with John Davenport (London, 1976).
The Collected Stories (London, 1983).
Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London, 1985).
Douglas Cleverdon's The Growth of Milk Wood (London, 1969)
includes textual variants of Thomas's Under Milk Wood.
297
298 Select Bibliography
(iii) Film Scripts
The Doctor and the Devils (London, 1953).

The Beach of Falesa (London, 1964).
Twenty Years A-Growing (London, 1964).
Rebecca's Daughters (London, 1965).
Me and My Bike (London, 1965).
The Doctor and the Devils and Other Scripts (New York, 1970).
The other scripts include the verse captions 'A Dream of Winter'
and the BBC prose script 'The Londoner'.
Dylan Thomas The Film Scripts ed. John Ackerman (with Intro-
duction) 1993.
Standard Bibliographies
J. Alexander Rolph, Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography (London, 1956).

Ralph Maud (ed.), Dylan Thomas in Print: A Bibliographical History
(London, 1972).
Georg M. A. Gaston, Dylan Thomas: A Reference Guide (Boston,
1987).
The largest collection of Dylan Thomas's manuscripts is at the

University of Texas, including manuscripts of 'In Country Heaven'
and 'Elegy'. The Notebooks are in the Poetry Collection of the State
University of New York at Buffalo. The British Museum holds the
letters to Vernon Watkins and some early poems of Dylan Thomas
(c. 1931-3) presented by Trevor Hughes. The National Library of
Wales, Aberystwyth, has some letters, some manuscript sheets of
'A Story' and of 'Elegy', presented by Emlyn Williams, and
correspondence concerning the commissioned book Twelve Hours
in the Streets, together with a three-page resume in typescript.
There is also some Dylan Thomas material in the 'Sibthorp' Papers.
Books about Dylan Thomas

(including part material, of particular interest)
Ackerman, John, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work (London, 1964).
__, Welsh Dylan, Catalogue of Welsh Arts Council Exhibition
(Cardiff, 1973).
__, Welsh Dylan (Cardiff, 1979; revised paperback edn, London,
1980).
Select Bibliography 299
Brinnin, J. M., Dylan Thomas in America (London, 1956).
Brinnin, J. M. (ed.), A Casebook on Dylan Thomas (New York, 1960).
Cox, C. B. (ed.), Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays (New
Jersey, 1966).
Davies, A. T., Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body (London, 1964).
Davies, James A., Dylan Thomas's Places (Swansea, 1987).
Davies, Walford, Dylan Thomas (Cardiff, 1972). Revised and enlarged
1990.
__ (ed.), Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays (London, 1972).
__, Dylan Thomas (Milton Keynes, 1976).
__, Dylan Thomas (Milton Keynes, 1986).
Devas, Nicolette, Two Flamboyant Fathers (London, 1966).
Emery, Clark, The World of Dylan Thomas (London, 1971).
Ferris, Paul, Dylan Thomas (London, 1977).
Fitzgibbon, Constantine, The Life of Dylan Thomas, (London, 1965).
Heppenstall, Rayner, My Bit of Dylan Thomas (London, 1957).
__, Four Absentees (London, 1960).
Holbrook, David, Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night (London, 1972).
Gittins, Rob, The Last Days of Dylan Thomas (London, 1986).
Jones, Daniel, My Friend Dylan Thomas (London, 1977).
Jones, T. H., Dylan Thomas (London, 1963).
Kershner, R. B. Jr, Dylan Thomas: The Poet and his Critics (Chicago, 1976).
Kidder, Rushworth M., Dylan Thomas: The Country of the Spirit
(Princeton, NJ., 1973).
Korg, Jacob, Dylan Thomas (Indiana, 1965).
Lewis, Min, Laugharne and Dylan Thomas (London, 1967).
Maud, R. N., Entrances to Dylan Thomas's Poetry (Lowestoft, 1963).
McKenna, Rollie, Portrait of Dylan (London, 1982).
Moynihan, W. T., The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas (London, 1966).
Murdy, L. B., Sound and Sense in Dylan Thomas's Poetry (The Hague,
1966).
Olson, Elder, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago, 1954).
Peach, Linden, The Prose Writing of Dylan Thomas (London, 1988).
Pratt, Annis, Dylan Thomas's Early Prose (Pittsburgh, 1970).
Read, Bill, The Days of Dylan Thomas (London, 1964).
Sanesi, Roberto, Nella Coscia del Gigente Bianco (altro / La Nuova
Fogli Editrice).
Sinclair, Andrew, Dylan Thomas: Poet of his People (London, 1975).
Stanford, Derek, Dylan Thomas (London, 1954).
Tedlock, E. W. (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Tile Legend and the Poet (London,
1960).
300 Select Bibliography
Thomas, Caitlin, Leftover Life to Kill (London, 1957).
__, Not Quite Posthumous Letter to my Daughter (London, 1963).
__, with George Tremlett, Caitlin (London, 1986).
Thomas-Ellis, Aeronwy, Christmas and Other Memories (London,
1978).
Tindall, W. Y., A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas (London, 1962).
Treece, Henry, Dylan Thomas (London, 1949).
Watkins, Gwen, Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul, 1983).
Williams, R. c., A Concordance to the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
(Lincoln, 1967).
Other Books Cited
Blake, William, William Blake: Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes

(London, 1939).
Fairchild, H. N., Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. VI (New
York and London, 1968).
Mabinogion, The, translated by Gwyn Jones and T. Jones (London,
1949).
Moore, John, The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas (London, 1939).
Renan, Ernest, The Poetry of the Celtic Races (London, 1896).
Watkins, Vernon, The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich,
1986).
Watkins, Vernon, I That Was Born in Wales (Cardiff, 1976).
Index
Note: Works by Dylan Thomas appear under title; works by others
appear under the author's name.
Adelphi ijournal), 22, 31, 76 Bevan, Aneurin, 46

Adventures in the Skin Trade (DT: Bible, Holy: in OT's poetry, 88, 92-
unfinished novel), 22, 107, 200-3 3, 109-10, 115, 123, 154; in DT's
'After the Fair' (DT: short story), short stories, 171, 173
166-8 Bishopston (Gower), 21, 25, 27, 33
'After the funeral' (DT: poem), 7; Blaen Cwm (cottage), 28, 115, 174-
sources, 28, 57; as elegy, 28, 101- 5,240,244
4, 153, 186, 191; images, 67; Blake, William, 71, 119, 216; 'The
qualities, 99-104; nostalgia in, Marriage of Heaven and Hell',
114 84; 'The Sick Rose', 80; 'Tyger',
Agate, James, 165 114
'All all and all the dry worlds lever' 'Book of Streets', see Twelve Hours ill
(DT: poem), 70 the Streets
'Altarwise by owl-light' (DT: Borrow, George, 12
poem),92 Botteghe Oscure (journal), 156, 239
America, see United States of Bottkol, Joseph MeG., 45
America Brandt, Bill, 30, 266, 269
'Among Those Killed in the Dawn BretonJ Nicholas: 'Elizabethan
Raid was a Man Aged a Day', 214
Hundred' (DT: poem), 106 Bridges, Robert, 75
'And death shall have no Brinnin, Malcom, 6, 11, 41, 48-9,
dominion' (DT: poem), 69, 86-7, 155
91,170 British Broadcasting Corporation
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 34 47 (BBC), 207, 215, 216
atomic warfare, 156-8, 265 Burke, William and Hare, William,
Auden, W. H., 43, 47,134; 'August 208; see also Doctor and the Devils,
for the people', 221; 'Epitaph on a The
Tyrant', 91-2 'Burning Baby, The' (DT: short
story), 166-7, 173-6, 178, 241
'Ballad of the Long-legged Bait' Burton, Richard, 207, 216
(OT: poem), 88 Butler, Samuel: Erewhon, 174
Beach of Falesa, the (OT: film script),
29,165,208 'Cabaret' (OT: poem), 60
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 66, 68, Caedmon" records, 155
208-9 Caetani, Marguerite, Princess, 239,
Beerbohm, Max, 271 241
'Before I knocked' (DT: poem), 69 Cameron, Norman, 22
301
302 Index
Carlyle, Thomas, 31-2, 268-9, 271 Death of the King's Canary (DT:
'Ceremony After a Fire Raid' (DT: novel, with John Davenport), 27,
poem), 27, 32, 106-9, 156 165,202-3
Cerne Abbas giant, 25, 151 Deaths and Entrances (DT: poems),
Chapman, Max, 24 28, 34, 73, 106-29
Chaucer, Geoffrey: 'Pardoner's Dent, Edward (publisher), 178-9
Prologue', 135 Devas, Nicolette, 29, 234
Chelsea: DT lives in, 29-32; Dickens, Charles, 43, 207, 209, 216,
captions for Brandt's 220
photographs of, 266-71 'Do not go gentle into that good
Church, Richard, 17S-9 night' (DT: poem), 49, 52, 132-3,
Cleverdon, Douglas, 155, 244 162,265
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 124 Doctor and the Devils, The (DT: film
Collected Letters (DT), 165, 23S-40 script), 29, 165, 20S-14, 217
Collected Poems (DT): sources, 2S; Doctor (The) and the Devils and Other
published, 52; early poems in, 5S; Scripts (DT), 215
contents, 73-4; themes, 130-54; Donne, John, 71, 78, 100, 105, 106
prints version of 'In Country Douglas, Norman, 30
Heaven', 155; see also 'Prologue' dreams: in Under Milk Wood, 251-2
Collected Stories (DT), 165 Dyer, John: 'Grongar Hill', 143
'Conversation about Christmas' Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings,
(DT: imaginary dialogue), 230 165
'Conversation of Prayers, The' (DT: Dylan Thomas: The Poems (ed. Daniel
poem),32 Jones), 57-8
Cornford, John, 47
'Country' Magazine' (BBC radio Earp, T. W., 29
programme), 222 'Ears in the turrets hear' (OT: poem;
Criterion (journal), 22 earlier 'Dare 1'), 69, 91, 96-8
Czechoslovak Writers' Union, 34, 18 Poems (DT): published, 19,23,75;
47 originality, 57, 64, 71; images, 63;
contents, 70; meaning, 75-6;
Dafau-Labeyrie, Francis, 52 themes, 77-90
Daiches, David, 44 'Elegy' (DT: unfinished poem), 49,
Davenport, John: DT stays with, 27; 53, 77, 130, 160-2
DT collaborates on Death of the elements (four), 135, 158-9
King's Canary with, 27, 202; in Eliot, T. 5.: DT on, 10; reading, 43;
Chelsea with DT, 30, 270 and understanding poetry,
Davies, Aneurin Talfan, 110 75;and nature, 78; assesory
Davies, Sir Dai, 20 revelation, 85; on poetry of
Davies, Idris, 224-5 vision, 123; difficulty of 217;
Davies, Walford, 137, 154; co-edits poetic drama, 261; 'East Coker',
DT: Collected Poems, 155, 159 127; The Waste Land, 269
Davies, W. H.: Autobiography of a Empson, William, 22, 146, 202
Super-tramp, 224 'Enemies, The' (DT: short story),
de Morgan, William, 269, 271 96, 169-70
death: as poetic theme in DT, 67-8, 'English Festival of Spoken Poetry,
SO, 86-7, 90, 100-1, 107-13, 135- The (DT: broadcast talk), 223
7, 140-1, 149, 160-2; in DT's 'Especially when the October wind'
short stories, 170-1, 183 (DT: poem), 70, 81-3
Index 303
Evans, Caradoc, 20,103,166,171-6, 'Holy Six, The' (DT: short story), 18,
207; My People, 20 169
'Extraordinary Little Cough' (DT: 'Holy Spring' (DT: poem), 32
short story), 191-2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 10,66,75,
78, 137,216
Fairchild, H.N.: Religious Trends ill Horizon (journal), 47, 202
English Poetry, 112 'How to be a Poet' (DT: prose
Fern Hill, 7, 17, 101-2, 113, 174, 185 piece), 31, 202, 232-4, 269
'Fern Hill' (DT: poem): writing of, 'How to begin a Story' (DT:
27-8, 32, 39, 125; images in, 67, broadcast talk), 223
120; and childhood vision, 77, Howard, Brian, 30
118-23, 188; rhythms, 113, 119, Hughes, Richard, 27, 35, 184
251; on happiness, 119-21; Hughes, Ted: 'Crow', 94
structure, 125; and' A Prospect of Hughes, Trevor, 70, 184
the Sea', 176; and Ann Jones, 191 'Hunchback in the Park, The' (DT:
Ferris, Paul, 267 poem), 27, 57, 74, 113-14
Festival of Britain (1951), 222
'Fight, The' (DT: short story), 18, 'I dreamed my genesis' (DT: poem),
192 70
'Find meat on bones' (DT: poem), 'I fellowed sleep' (DT: poem), 70
69 'I have longed to move away' (DT:
'Fine Beginning, A', see Adventures poem), 69, 92, 94-5
in the Skin Trade 'I, in my intricate image' (DT:
Fitzgibbon, Constatine, 30, 42, 46 poem),27
Followers, The' (DT: short story), 'I make this in a warring absence'
50,231-2 (DT: poem), 99
'Force (The) that through the green 'I see the boys of summer' (DT:
fuse drives the flower' (DT: poem),70
poem), 69, 78-80, 82-3, 270 'If I were tickled by the rub of love'
Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation (DT: poem), 70, 88-90
of Dreams, 251 'If my head hurt a hair's foot' (DT:
'From love's first fever to her poem), 99-100
plague' (DT: poem), 69-70, 96 'Image' (DT: poem), 59
Fry, Christopher, 261 'In Country Heaven' (DT: poem):
influence of Paradise Lost on, 33;
Garcia Lorca, Federico, 107 influence of Laugharne on, 39;
Gower, 16, 191 writing of, 49; and nature, 52,
Grigson, Geoffrey, 22 145-6; on happiness, 119;
published in Collected Poems,
'Hand that Signed a paper felled a 1934-53, 130; parts, 145-7; and
city, The' (DT: poem), 69, 91-2 remembering, 153; versions, 155-
Hardy, Thomas, 28, 45, 120 60; and Under Milk Wood, 261
Hedegus, Olga, 270-1 'In Country Sleep' (DT: poem), 33,
Henderson, Wyn, 24 77, 113, 133, 136, 145, 147-50,
Heppenstall, Rayner, 31 156, 158-9, 263
'Here in this spring' (DT: poem), 69 'In my Craft or Sullen Art' (DT:
'Holiday Memory' (DT: broadcast poem),145
talk), 196-7, 216, 221-2 'In the beginning' (DT: poem), 69-
Holroyd, Stuart, 137 70
304 Index
'In the white giant's thigh' (DT: Landor, Walter Savage, 12
poem), 33, 49, 53, 67, 85, 133, Laugharne: influence on DT, 3, 17,
151-4, 156, 161; as part of 'In 37-9, 113, 115-18, 133, 178; DT
Country Heaven', 145, 156 first lives in, 25-6; DT's
'Incarnate devil' (DT: poem; earlier permanent home in (Boat
'Poem for Sunday'), 93 House), 27, 34-41, 50-1;
'International Eisteddfod, The' (DT: portrayed in Under Milk Wood, 37,
broadcast talk), 50, 222 40,239,241-5,263-4; DT buried
Iran (Persia), 34, 46-7 in, 54; in DT's letters, 240
Is Your Ernie Really Necessary (DT: 'Laugharne' (DT: broadcast talk),
film script), 29 50,53
Italy, 34 Lawrence, D. H., 'The Ship of
Death', 135
Janes, Alfred, 12, 19, 21 Levy, Mervyn, 12, 19, 21
Jesus Christ, 92-3, 95, 104, 168, Lewis, Alun, 40
172-3 Lewis, Wyndham, 22
John, Augustus, 11, 24, 35 'Light breaks where no sun shines'
Johnson, Pamela Hansford, 5, 14- (DT: poem), 70
17, 31, 70 Lilliput (magazine), 30, 266-8
Jones, Ann (nie Williams: DT's Littlewood, Joan, 261
aunt); marriage, 7; and Fern Hill, 'Living in Wales' (DT: Broadcast
7, 17; DT's elegy to ('After the talk), 34, 249, 268
funeral'),28, 101-4, 153,186,191; Llangain, 32-3
in 'The Peaches', 189, 191 Llangollen, 51, 222-3
Jones, Daniel: friendship with DT, Llanina, 248
12-13, 18-19, 22-3; writes verse Llanstephan (Carnarthenshire),
with DT, 19, 57; in wartime 180-3
London, 30; and DT's fame, 34; 'Llareggub' ('Llaregyb'; DT's
edits Dylan Thomas: The Poems, invented place): first use of, 19,
57 -8, 155; version of 'In Country 166, 174; in short stories, 169, 174;
Heaven', 155; in DT's 'The Fight', in Under Milk Wood, 229, 241, 243,
192; My Friend Dylan Thomas, 18 254-6
Jones, David: In Parenthesis, 216 Lockwood Library, State University
Jones, Glyn, 70, 173 of New York, Buffalo, 57
Jones, Gwylim (DT's cousin), 189- London, 21-2; see also Chelsea
90 Londoner, The' (DT: broadcast
Jones, Gwyn, 95; 'A Prospect of script), 215
Wales', 256 Lorca, Federico Garcia, see Garcia
Jones, Jim, 7 Lorea, Frederico
Joyce, James, 10, 207; Dubliners, 185; love: in Under Milk Wood, 262-3
Portrait of the Artist as a Young LUlln, Peter (publisher), 266-7
Man, 185
Mabinogion, 4, 116, 144, 228, 255-6
Keats, John, 68, 76, 121-2, 238, 240, Machen, Arthur, 256
262; 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 109 Map of Love (DT: collection), 26; and
Kenyon College (USA), 42 DT's early poems, 61, 71; images
in, 63; publication, 75, 99;
'Lament' (DT: poem), 49, 74, 130-2, themes, 99-105; prose works in,
261 167, 173, 178-9
Index 305
MarIes, Gwilgm, see Thomas, 'Old Garbo' (DT: short story), 11,
William 193-6
Marshfield, Gloucestershire 'On no work of words' (DT: poem),
(house), 27, 202 99
Masters, Edga~ Lee, 265; Spoon 'On Poetry' (DT: broadcast talk),
River Anthology, 246-8, 258 156
Maud, Ralph: on word 'sedge'. 140; 'Once Below a Time' (DT: poem),
edits DT: Collected Poems (with 73
Walford Davies), 155; and 'In 'Once it was the colour of saying'
Country Heaven', 155, 157, 159; (DT: poem), 99
and 'The Londoner', 215; 'One Warm Saturday' (DT: short
Entrances to Dylan Thomas's story), 183, 196-9, 232
Poetry, 157; Poet in the Making, 57 Our Country (DT: film script), 106-
Mayhew, Henry, 209 7,109
Me and My Bike (DT: film script), 29, 'Our eunuch dreams' (DT: poem),
165,208 70
'Memories of Christmas' (DT: 'Out of the sighs' (DT: poem), 64-
broadcast talk), 216, 219-20, 230 5,91
Miller, Arthur, 44 'Over Sir John's hill' (DT: poem),
Miller, Henry, 130 33, 52, 54, 133-4, 139-41, 145,
Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 33, 144, 156, 160, 162
156,216 Owen, Wilfred, 59, 110, 224;
'Missing' (DT: poem), 58 'Strange Meeting', 63
Moore, Geoffrey, 12 Oxford,33
Moore, Henry, 22 Oxford Book o/Welsh Verse, 5
Morning Post (newspaper), 22
Moynihan, W. T.: The Craft and Art pantheism, 4, 50, 146, 162
0/ Dylan Thomas, 155-6 'Paper and Sticks' (DT: poem) 73-4
Muir, Edwin, 22 Paraclete Congregational Church,
'My Hero bares his nerves' (DT: Newton, Mumbles, 7
poem), 69, 72-3 'Peaches, The' (DT: short story), 7,
'My world is pyramid' (DT: poem), 17, 102, 121, 183, 185-91, 236
70 Persia, see Iran
mysticism, 124 'Personally Speaking' (TV series),
236
nature: DT's feeling for, 18; in DT's Picture Post (magazine), 230
poetry, 77-SO, 82-3, 86,108,112, Poe, Edgar Allan, 67
146, 151-2, 162; and lost Eden, 'Poem in October' (DT), 27-8, 32,
156; see also pantheism 39, 44, 81, 115-18
New English Weekly, 22, 184 'Poem on his Birthday' (DT), 24, 49,
New Quay (Cardiganshire), 32-3, 67, 77, 133-9, 141, 144, 158, 265
227, 248, 264 Ponting, Albert (DT pseudonym),
'New Quay' (DT: poem), 33 202-2
New Verse Ooumal), 22 Portrait o/a Artist as a Young Dog (DT:
New York,48-9 autobiography): and Welsh
Noah (biblical figure), 144 holidays, 17; writing, 26, ISO;
Notebook (DT): DT sells, 28, 106, translated into French, 52;
113; as source, 57-70, SO, 101-2, humour in, 168, 180, 185;
114 described, 180-99, 243; title, 184-5;
306 Index
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog- Rhys, Keidrych, 25, 178
cont. and Adventures in the Skin Rimbaud, Arthur, 84-5, 121
Trade. 200; and DT's letters, 238 Rorke, Alfred, 270
Prague, 34, 47 Rose-Pulham, Peter, 270
Price, Dr William, 166, 173 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 47
Prichard, Llewelyn: 'The Land Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 31-2, 269,
Beneath the Sea', 144 271
'Process in the weather of the heart, Rota, Bertram, 57
A' (DT: poem), 70
process poems, 69-70 'Saint about to Fall, A' (DT: poem),
'Prologue' (DT: poem): depicts 99
Laugharne, 36-7, 39; writing of, Salt House Farm (Laugharne), 264
49,51-3; the man's unity with Sanesi, Roberto, 153
nature, 77, 141-3; nature in, 133- Sassoon, Siegfried, 224
4, 143, 146, 1J77; and collected senses (physical), 84-6
Poems, 145; and poetic method, sexual love: as theme, 60-1, 72; and
145 DT's puritanism, 88-90
'Prologue to an Adventure' (DT: Shakespeare, William, 122; The
prose piece), 25, 178 Winter's Tale, 128
Prospect of the Sea, A (DT: 'Shall gods be said to thump the
collection), 168, 179,230-1 douds' (DT: poem), 69
'Prospect of the Sea, A' (DT: short Shelley, Percy Bysshe: 'Adona is',
story), 168, 176-9, 180 112
Proust, Marcel, 114, 117 Sir John's Hill (Laugharne), 36, 264;
see also 'Over Sir John's hill'
'Question Time' (BBC radio Sitwell, Edith, 34, 162
programme), 222 'Song of the Mischievous Dog, The'
Quite Early One Morning (DT: (DT: poem), 10
collected broadcasts), 165, 168, South Wales Daily Post (title changed
217,223 to SOllth Wales Evening Post), 10
'Quite Early One Morning' (DT: SOllth Wales Evening Post, 183
broadcast talk), 32, 227, 248, 251, Spanish Civil War, 12-13,47
264 Spender, Stephen, 202
Spenser, Edmund, 269
Rebecca's Daughters (DT: film script), 'Spire cranes, The' (DT: poem), 62-
29,165,208 4,69
Rees, Rev. David (DT's unde), 7 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 208
Rees, Dosie (DT's aunt), 32 'Story, A' (DT: TV broadcast), 50-I,
Rees, Richard, 31 216,234-6
'Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Strand magazine, 11
Fire, of a Child in London' (DT: Stravinsky, Igor, 52, 160, 265
poem), 27, 32,77,106-7,110-13, Sunday Referee (newspaper), 22, 79
150, 156, 161 Surrealist Exhibition, 1936, 22
'Reminiscence of childhood' (DT: Swansea: described, 3-4, 7-9;
broadcast talk), 216-18 cultural life, 12; bombed, 27-8,
Renan, Ernest, 143 217; in DT's short stories, 184,
'Return Journey' (DT: broadcast 187,191-5,231-2; DT's
talk), 19, 27, 216-7, 225-7 broadcasts on 217-18, 225
Rhossili, 17, 191-2 Swallsea Grammar School Magazi/w,
Index 307
57-8, 166 early reading, 6; and Welsh

Swansea Little Theatre, 13-14 nonconformity and puritism, 7,
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 31- 12, 20, 88-9, 95, 130-1, 175-6,
2,269,271 201, 227, 244, 253; TB symptoms,
9, 80, 174; schooling, 9-10; early
Talsarn (Cardiganshire), 29 writing, 9-10; acting, 10, 13-14;
Taylor, A. J. P., 33 works as reporter, 10-12, 178,
Taylor, Donald, 29 183; political sympathies and
Taylor, Margaret, 33-5, 155 views, 11-13, 15-16, 46-8;
Teheran, 46 hostility to Welsh Nationalism,
'This bread I break' (DT: poem), 70, 11-12; poetic craftsmanship, 12,
91-2, 95-6 19, 23, 40, 52-3, 63-4, 84, 124-5,
'This Side of the Truth' (DT: poem), 145; frequency pubs, 13-14, 30,
32 33, 36, 50, 195; relations with
Thomas, Aeronwy (DT's daughter), Pamela Hansford Johnson, 14-
29, 32, 51, 147-9, 158, 292 16; walks and excursions, 16-18;
Thomas, Caitlin (nee Macnamara; self-description, 19; on Wales,
DT's wife): on DT's father, 6; on 20-1,34, 113-15, 223-4,249;
DT's friendship with Bert Trick, first lives in London, 21-2;
11; DT meets and marries, 24-6, Vernon Watkins describes, 23;
178; children, 27, 29, 41; in rhyming lists and 'Doomsday
Chelsea, 30, 32, 269, 271; life in Book', 24; meets and marries
Laugharne, 36-9, 50, 241-2; on Caitlin, 24-6, 178; conversation,
DT's intuitive knowledge, 39; 24, 34; writing routine, 26, 50;
and Drs composing of poetry, children, 27, 29, 41; influence of
40; and DT in USA, 42, 48-50; war on, 27; sources of poetry, 28;
marriage tensions, 50-2; with DT sells Notebooks, 28, 106, 113;
in Llangollen, 51; and DT's works on documentary films, 28-
death, 53; on DT's view of poet as 9,208-15; in wartime Chelsea,
rebel, 68; on DT's puritanism, 88; 30-2, 266-71; in New Quay, 32-
DT's love poem to, 99; on DT's 3; drinking, 33-4, 44, 51;
need for West Wales, 113; on DT broadcasts, 33-4, 216-39, 234;
and Ivy Williams, 195; on DT'& fame, 34; visits Italy, 34; travels,
conventionality, 230; on DT's late 34, 47; settles at Boat House,
achievements, 236 Laugharne, 34-41, 178, 241-2;
Thomas, Colm (DT's son), 41 nostalgia, 34, 187-90; intuitive
Thomas, D. J. (DT's father): and knowledge, 39; composing, 40;
DT's name, 4; background and dislike of intellectualism, 41, 44;
career, 4-6; influence on DT, 6, 8; financial difficulties, 41, 51, 146;
retires to Bishopston, 21; and tours in USA, 41-5, 48-50, 53;
DT's marriage, 24; moves to reading of own works, 43-4, 49,
Blaen Cwm, 28; death, 53; throat 109-10; resists explication of
cancer, 80,132; DT writes 'Do not poems, 44-5; creativity, 50;
go gentle' for, 132; DT's letters, 50, 238-40; blackouts and
unfinished 'Elegy' for, 160-1 collapse, 50; marriage tensions,
Thomas, Dylan Marlais: Swansea 50-2; death, 53-4, 265; early
home, 3, 8-9; pantheism, 4, 50, influences on, 66-8, 71; concern
146, 162; born, 4; name, 4-5, 116, with death, 67-8, 71; themes, 70-
228; influence of father on, 6, 8; 1, 77; body consciousness and
308 Index
Thomas, Dylan Marlais - eonl. success and popularity, 52, 165,
meaning in poetry, 75-7; and 216-7, 245; humour and parody
senses, 84-5; religious imagery, in, 58; adjectival style, 107;
92-3; as civilian war poet, 106, publication, 165, 239; memory
109, 113, 156; on vision and and past time in, 177, 217, 256-7;
mysticism, 123-4; reads part of compassion in, 185, 189; and 'Old
Satan for BBC broadcast, 144, Garbo', 194; and The Doctor and
156, 216; and atomic warfare, the Devils, 209, 212; and
156-8, 265; autobiographical communal street life, 214;
elements in stories, 184-8; dramatic monologue in, 215, 246;
religious/sexual mixture in and OT's broadcasts, 227-9; and
stories, 189; parodies, 202; OT's letters, 238, 240; described,
conventionality, 230; and human 241-65; influenced by Spoon
condition, 265; see also individual Hiver Anthology, 246-8; language,
works under title 250-1; projected extension, 257-
Thomas, Edward, 4, 7, 12, 35, 224-5 8; use of song, 258-60; sexual
Thomas, Florence (DT's mother), frankness, 260-1; title, 261; love
6-7, 9, 25, 32, 54 in, 262-3; OT twice loses
Thomas, Llewelyn (DT's son), 27, manuscript, 264-5
99 United States of America: OT tours
Thomas, Nancy (OT's sister), 7 in, 41-4, 48-50, 53
Thomas, R. S., 94, 137, 154
Thomas, William ('Gwilym Vaughan, Henry, 117, 122,224
Maries'), 5 Vaughan Thomas, Wynford, 19
Thompson, Francis, 66-8 'Vision and Prayer' (OT: poem), 32,
Thomson, James: 'City of Dreadful 108
Night', 68 'Visit to America, A' (OT: broadcast
'Today, this insect' (DT: poem), 86 talk), 30-1, 42, 45, 50, 216
Traherne, Thomas, 122 'Visit to Grandpa'S, A' (OT: short·
'Tree, The' (OT: short story), 69, story), 17, 178, 180-4
166, 168, 171 'Visitor, The' (OT: short story),
Treece, Henry, 57, 66 170-1
Trick, Bert, 12, 19, 22, 69, 91
Turner, J. M. W., 270 Wales (journal), 25, 103, 178
Twelve Hours in the Streets (OT: Wales: OT on, 20-1, 34, 113-15,
projected: also known as 'A Book 223-4, 249; OT's projected book
of Streets'), 213-15, 267 on, 179
Twenty-five poems (OT', 63-4, 68-9, 'Wales and the Artist' COT:
71,75,91-8 broadcast talk), 223-4
'Twenty-four years' (OT: poem), Walters, Evan, 20
105,161 Watkins, Gwen, 27, 30, 207, 222
Twenty Years A-Growing (OT: film Watkins, Vernon: friendship with
script), 165, 208 OT, 12-13, 18-19,23,25-7;
describes OT, 23; poetic ideas,
Under Milk Wood (DT: radio drama): 23-4; and [Yf's marriage, 24; DT
New Quay in, 32; Laughame in, fails to attend wedding of, 25,
3~40,239,241-5,263-4;[Yf 239; in wartime London, 30; and
reads in USA, 44; writing and DT's home in New Quay, 32; and
revision of, 49, 51-2, 132, 236; OT's fame, 34; on Laugharne, 37,
Index 309
Watkins, Vernon - cont. face' (DT: poem), 70, 90

41; and DT's technical craft, 40, Whistler, James Abbot McNeill, 31,
52-3; visits DT in Laugharne, 269-71
52-3; and DT's Twenty-five 'Who Do You Wish With Us' (DT:
Poems, 63; on death and birth, 67; short story), 191
and DT's 'After the funeral', 103; 'Why east winds chill' (DT: poem),
and DT's adjectives, 107, and 69
DT's 'Poem in October', 115-16; Williams, Ivy, 130, 195, 242
on DT's 'Fern Hill', 119; and DT's Wilson, J. Dover, 214
wholeness, 123-4; parallels with 'Winter's Tale, A' (DT: poem), 32,
DT's lines, 134-5; and DT's 108, 125-8, 158
'Over Sir John's hill', 141; on Wordsworth, William, 117, 119,
DT's pantheism, 146; on DT's 124, 243; 'A slumber did my spirit
prose works, 207; 'Fidelity to the seal', 111-12
Living', 135; 'Grief of the Sea', 24; Worm's Head (Gower), 191
'Rhossili', 134-5; 'A True Picture 'Written for a Personal Epitaph'
Restored', 41; 'We lying by (DT: poem), 65-6
seasand', 69
Webster, John, 66, 211-12; The Yeats, William Butler: DT parodies,
Duchess of Malfi, 212 9; growing old, 28, 39, 133;)
Wednesday Story (BBC radio oratorical style, 43; and nature,
programme), 215 78; and 'sensual music', 86; on
Weekend Telegraph Magazine, 155 blasphemy, 92; on meaning by
Welsh Nationalism, 11-12 vision, 123; difficulty of, 217; on
'When all my five and country sex and the dead, 246; 'led a and
senses see' (DT: poem), 84-5 the Swan', 128; 'A Prayer for my
'When I Woke' (DT: poem), 73 Daughter', 147; 'Sailing to
'When, like a running grave' (DT: Byzantium', 135; 'The Second
poem),70 Coming', 160; 'The Tower', 133
'When once the twilight looks no 'Your breath was shed', (DT:
longer' (DT: poem), 70 poem),71-3
'Where once the waters of your

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A DYLAN THOMAS COMPANION

MACMILLAN LITERARY COMPANIONS

John Spencer Hill

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of

First edition 1991

ISBN 978-0-333-60703-9 ISBN 978-1-349-13373-4 (eBook)

A catalogue record for this book is available

Transferred to digital printing 2001

PART ONE DYLAN THOMAS'S LIFE 1

PART TWO THE POETRY ss

PART THREE THE PROSE 163

Maps and Manuscript Work Sheets

Select Bibliography 297

16a Dylan in his writing shed, 1953. (© Rollie McKenna)

J. M. Dent and the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas,

'This sea-town was my world d Dylan Thomas said of Swansea,

Climbing Cwmdonkin's dock-based hill,

Undoubtedly it was elements in his Welsh background that helped

Dylan Thomas himself commented on the source and pronuncia-

Dylan Thomas's Swansea home was No.5 Cwmdonkin Drive, a

Facing Thomas's home was Cwmdonkin Park 'and the park

A farmer's boy come up to me,

The most important element that characterizes our poetical

References to Thomas in the school magazine suggest a literary,

Swansea, gossiping and chatting with friends in pubs and cafes.

Bert Trick was a Communist who had thought his philosophy

Evidently Trick spurred Thomas's left-wing sympathies.

Dylan Thomas belonged at this time to Swansea Little Theatre,

I am playing in Noel Coward's 'Hay Fever' at the Little Theatre

From the first months of puberty girls and boys should be

On Armistice Day 1933, when he was just nineteen, Dylan Thomas

This is written on Armistice Day, 1933, when the war is no more

I often go down in the mornings to the furthest point of Gower -

There is one table of rock on the Worm's back that is covered

There were, too, childhood visits to the Carmarthenshire

Vividly, too, he describes his youthful feeling for nature, sponta-

On my haunches, eager and alone, casting an ebony shadow,

It was in Swansea that began the two most important friendships

They had come from the Place

May we not anticipate Dylanesque rhythms and images here

above medium height. Above medium height for Wales, I mean,

We made a tour of the pubs in the evening, drinking to the

Certainly Dylan Thomas mocked the narrow-mindedness he

I am a Welshman who does not live in his own country, mainly

In sharper and more personal vein he evokes the meeting he

Dylan writes here with a bitter and ironic humour worthy of

Regarded in England as a Welshman (and a waterer of England's

References to the traditional Welsh women's costume, the coracle

Dylan Thomas shared what he called 'one big boring beautiful

He was slight, shorter than I had expected, shy, rather flushed

That certainty of instinct had recently registered its own freshly

Certainly the relationship of lyric poetry to music, its reading as a

needed some one ... to provide that sheltered, secure, deadly

This is the vital truth regarding Dylan Thomas as a writer, though

Is it the gardens of Chelsea that you remember, gardens where

On a more serious and more personal note, below the picture of

the grey estuary, forever linked to me with poems done and to

The fishing village of Laugharne had always been popular with

These pages, I think, are wilting in the grey nearly permanent

In his broadcast talk on 'this unique, this waylaying, old, lost

In her first book Caitlin Thomas perceptively and trenchantly

So he was much better than me at contenting himself with the

More recently Caitlin has illuminatingly recalled how 'I used to go