Dylan Thomas (10/27/1914 to 11/9/1953)
When the world is too much with me, I like to retreat into what’s left of my spiritual cocoon, poetry, there to mend myself, before I go out into our collapsing nation again. No better day for that than today on what would have been Dylan Thomas’s 107th birthday. What makes this day’s selection for reprint most appropriate is that the poet seems almost obsessed with his birthdays, and this one, celebrating his 30th, is one I particularly like.
Thomas is not my favorite poet. (Yeats and Hopkins contend for that.) But the Welsh bard must be heard for his original theatrical voice and lyric evocations of our lost innocence. And, as both his admirers and detractors will affirm, you can listen to his full-lunged readings on more than one surviving LP record. Some call the readings beautiful, some call them bombast. Why not call them beautiful bombast and enjoy? (And yes, America’s own Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, was influenced by Thomas’s poetry in his surname change.)
Poem In October
Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder.
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Com e in the morning where I wandered
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
Andover the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed 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
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheek sand 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 singingbirds.
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.