Dylan Thomas
A poet whose perception and generous encouragement have meant so much to younger writers in this country and in England, DR. EDITH SITWELLstood in a special relationship toward Dylan Thomas. She sprang to his defense when, a poet of twenty-two, he was under heavy attack by the London critics. They met and became friends that winter; and from the first she believed that he was one of the rarest and most gifted of our time. To support his wife and three children, Dylan Thomas made occasional ventures into broadcasting, scenario writing, and storytelling. But his Collector Poems, published by New Directions in 1953, is his enduring monument. We are grateful to Dr. Sitwell for this authoritative and affectionate appraisal of his work.
by EDITH SITWELL
ONE of the greatest poets of the present age, Dylan Thomas, died on November 9. He was but thirty-nine in October, his poetry was increasing in splendor. His loss to poetry and to his true friends is not to be borne.
In the year 1934, Mr. Mark Goulden (then managing editor of the Sunday Referee, now the managing director of Messrs. W. H. Allen) instituted in that paper a “Poets Corner” for the purpose of introducing and encouraging hitherto unknown poets. The feature was conducted by Mr. Victor Neuberg. Manuscript poems arrived from a boy of twenty, living in Swansea. These were already of such astonishing quality that Mr. Goulden and Mr. Neuberg invited the boy, Dylan Thomas, to London, and in due course he arrived at the Sunday Referee office. To these gentlemen we must ever be grateful.
They were indeed good friends to him. They published (in conjunction with the Parton Bookshop, owned by Mr. David Archer) the poet’s first book — Eighteen Poems. Mr. Goulden declares that though a certain number of copies were sent for review, not a solitary critic mentioned the book, as far as he can remember. I do not know exactly when Dylan Thomas’s poems appeared in Mr. Geoffrey Grigson’s magazine New Verse, but I do know that, valuable work was done by that magazine in publishing Dylan Thomas’s early work, as it published also the poems of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
But Dylan Thomas’s outward life ns a poet was not, at first, in spite of his (very few) champions, easy. Following the publication of his second book, a furious attack on him developed in letters addressed to one of the two principal London newspapers. It was my privilege and pride to give the attackers, during two months, more than as good as they gave. The air still seems to reverberate with the wooden sound of numskulls being soundly hit.
I have no memory, and keep no diary, and so, though the occasion was supremely important to me, I cannot remember the exact date of our first, meeting — knowing only that, it was before the attack. I had reviewed his second book, and had written to him; so when I arrived in London he came to see me. It seems to me now, though I am so much his senior, that he and his great poetry were always a part of my life.
Poetry is, to some degree, the etheric body of the poet (though to some degree only) — so I will try to describe him physically,
He was not tall, but was extremely broad, and gave an impression of extraordinary strength, sturdiness, and superabundant life. (His reddish-amber curls, strong as the curls on the brow of a young bull, his proud, but not despising, bearing, emphasized this.) Mr. Augustus John’s portrait of him is beautiful, but gives him a cherubic aspect, which, though pleasing, does not convey, to the present writer at least, Dylan’s look of archangelic power.
In full face he looked much as William Blake must have looked as a young man. He had full eyes — like those of Blake—giving at first the impression of being unseeing, but seeing all, looking over immeasurable distances.
I have never known anyone more capable of endearing himself to others. And this was not only the result of his great warmth, charm, and touching funniness. I have never known anyone with a more holy and childlike innocence of mind. The exuberance of his strong physique, of his strong physical life, never marred or blurred that. He loved humanity, and had contempt only for the cruel, the unkind (these are not always identical), and the mean. He was most generous in his enthusiasms and most loyal in his friendships. Alas, that some of the people who crowded round him were unworthy of that noble nature. Hut these I will leave to their shame. For he is dead. And there is nothing to be done.
When still very young, he married Caillin Maenamarn, the beautiful girl who was the love of his short life. Their mutual love was most touching and beautiful to see. Not long ago, having supper with me after a Poet’s Reading in London, he looked across the table at his young wife, with her light bright sparkling hair that seemed to hold all the color of a spring day, her wild-rose cheeks and dancing blue eyes, and exclaimed to me, “Isn’t she beautiful! Isn’t she beautiful! From the first moment I saw her, she has been the only one. There never has been, there never will be, anyone but her.” On another occasion, the last time I saw him before he died, he was going to America, and she was unhappy because he was going so far away. He said to me, “Tell her, when I am gone, how much I love her.” And so now, when he has gone very far away, I do. There was never anyone but her.
He had a speaking voice of the utmost magnificence, range, and beauty, and his speaking of poetry was as sublime as was his writing of poetry. The “Lions and fires of his flying breath,” to use a phrase of his own, were such that all pride, all light, walked in the lives that, speaking, he made his own. To hear him read Wake’s “The Tiger,” to hear him read his own poetry, was a revelation. It was a great pride to me to hear him read my own poetry.
I think it was Whitman who said that “even in religious fervor there is always a touch of animal heat.” Both religious fervor and animal heat were in his poetry, to the highest degree. His poetry was the “pure fire compressed into holy forms” of which one of Porphyry’s Oracles spoke. The generation of those poems was attended by “the great heat” that Aristotle said “attended the generation of lions.” To him, blood was spirit.
His was a language “fanned by the breath of Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates to grow.” (Whitman: Notebooks.) He strips from words their old, used, dulling sleepiness, and gives them a refreshed and awakened meaning, a new percussion.
As I said in my review of his Collected Poems, in the New York Herald Tribune (March 10, 1953), his voice resembles no other voice; the spirit is that of the beginning of created things; there is here no case of a separate imagination, of invention. From the depths of Being, from the roots of the world, a voice speaks. He might have been, indeed no doubt was, actually writing himself in the lines,
No man more magical.
To him, as to Boehme, “the sap in the tree denoteth pure Deity.” He loved and praised
the force that, through the green fuse drives the flower,
and the
On God’s rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beast hood!).
(Dylan saw the world as a rough tumbling ground, as a ground for joy and the holy wars of the Spirit.)
With him, all is prayer and praise. Poetry to him is prayer. “When we pray,” said the Curé d’Ars, “we should open our heart to God, like a fish when it sees the wave coming.” “I am so placed and submerged in his great love, that I seem as though in the sea entirely under water, and can on no side touch, see, or feel anything but water.” So said Saint Catherine of Genoa. And so might have spoken Dylan Thomas. But then, as I have said many times, the experiences of the saint and of the great poet are related.
His earliest poems are of great strangeness, containing such lines as
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
and
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
and
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(In many of these early poems, the awe-inspiring shadow of Death falls across our path, tall as the world.)
From the obscure beauty of those early poems, Dylan Thomas went to the miraculous concentration of meaning and expression of such lines as
A grief ago,
to the utter poignance of these lines from “In the
White Giant’s Thigh”: —
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
(Yes, I think that Dylan must always have known that he would die young.)
In William James’s Principles of Psychology, he quotes Condillac as saying “the first time we see light, we are it rather than see it.” In my Poet’s Notebook I have a quotation about a painter who paints a tree, becoming a tree. This condensation of essence, this power of “becoming a tree,” is one of the powers that make Dylan Thomas a great poet. His poems, at first sight, may appear strange. But if we heard a tree speak to us in Its own voice, would not that voice appear strange?
The dear and heavenly innocence that, was in his character shows in all his poems about youth, about
and about
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
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 singingbirds.
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
(“Poem in October”)
All his poems, those that are simple, those that are more difficult, arc of an extraordinary beauty, matched by an equal innocence and holiness.
The beauty ranges from that of
No answer to the children’s cry
Of echo’s answer and the man of frost
And ghostly comets over the raised fists.
to that of
Coo rooing the woods’ praise,
Who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
(How exquisite, how exact! You see the misty softness of the sweet dove’s feathers, you hear the misty soft ness of her cooing)
— or to the different, but miraculous beauty of “Fern Hill,” from which I will quote the first, two verses:—
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 I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
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 hill barked clear and cold.
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
Sometimes, with Dylan Thomas, as with certain other great poets, a phrase will mean two things — both equally true. When Shakespeare wrote
Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love
it is possible he may have meant both “Men have died, but not for love,” and “Worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
Take Dylan Thomas’s “We Lying by Seasand.” This, like many another poem, is all things to all men. It is not the poet’s possession only — it is ours to live in.
The poem moves on two levels, that of the day and that of eternity. All is transmuted, made beautiful— the red rivers of the blood, the “hollow alcove of words” and of echoes are stilled.
The two lovers lie, in a silence of love, between the image of life—the wandering, ever-changing sea — and the image of Death, “the strata of the shore”—(the lives, perhaps, of those who have gone before) — “the red rock,” and time, that is identified with the sand, —
Hiding the golden mountains and mansions
Of the grave, gay, seaside land.
These lovely lines have two significances: the grave one, that of the actual mountains and mansions, made golden to the young people by the light of the sun and of their love, and soon to be overwhelmed by the sands of Time; and the gay one, that, of the mountains and castles made by the children at the edge of the sea, and soon to be swept, away.
“The heavenly music over the sand” sighs to the young people of those yellow grains, and of the wandering faithless sea; but Time is no longer terrible to them.
The poem is of great beauty, both in image and sound. The phrase “the lunar silences” seems to hold the sea’s light in it. And the sound of the poem is like that of “the heavenly music over the sand.” It changes like the sea airs, moves with the beauty of waves. So the lovers
Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill.
Though he, as I think, felt, perhaps dreaded the conquering hand of Time, and knew that he must die young, he defied, always, death and the world’s dust: —
Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,
Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.
His pity for the outcast, his love for those who have received no mercy from life, are great.
In the androgynous dark,
His striped and noon maned tribe striding to holocaust,
The she mules bear their minotaurs,
(“Unluckily for a Death”)
He whose undying love for his wife and whose impetus to poetry were one and the same — he who had walked
With immortality at my side like Christ the sky
(Ibid.)
declared that
Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,
And the grave its daughters.
(Ibid.)
His was the warmth of the spring that loves and forgives mankind, that speaks of immortality. His was the warmth of the common heart: —
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft, or art.
In that great poem, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” with its dark, magnificent, proud movement, we see Death in its reality—as a return to the beginning of things, as a robing, a sacred investiture in those who have been our friends since the beginning of Time: —
(Earth, her mother.) Bird, beast, and flower have
their part in the making of mankind.
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn.
(The water drop is holy, the wheat ear a place of prayer.) The “fathering and all humbling darkness” itself is a begetting force. Even grief, even tears, are a begetting. “The stations of the breath” are the Stations of the Cross.
With what unalterable sadness, now, does one read these lines to his dying father: —
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Alas, that he who caught and sang the sun in flight, yet was the sun’s brother, and never grieved it on its way, should have left us with no good-by, good night .
I cannot believe that he is dead. It was not until I began this tribute of love to the ever-young, undying Dylan in his grave, that I began to realize that I shall never hear that golden speaking voice, that voice of the lion, the eagle, the dove, the sun, again. But I, too, must not
A poet, even the best, is the most meagerly rewarded of all modern writers. A Fund is note being raised in London and in America for Mr. Thomas’s widow and their three children. The Atlantic will be glad to forward the contributions of those readers who are in sympathy; checks should be made out to The Dylan Thomas Fund.