Dylan Thomas: Elegy
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother’s breast
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’
Too proud to cry, too trail to check the tears.
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.
On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.
This unfinished Elegy of Dylan Thomas was given the title “Elegy” in the latest version of the poem after the provisional titles “The Darkest Way or Poo Proud to Die" or “True Death had been used in preparatory drafts. Among his papers he left sixty pages of manuscript work towards the poem, including this note:—
(1) Although he was too proud to die, he did die, blind, in the most agonizing way but he did not flinch from death & was brave in his pride.
(2) In his innocence, & thinking he was God-hating, he never knew that what he was was: an old kind man in his burning pride.
(3) Now he will not leave my side, though he is dead.
(4) His mother said that as a baby he never cried; nor did he, as an old man; he just cried to his secret wound his blindness, never aloud.
The rest of the manuscript work consists of phrases, lines, couplets, and line-endings, and transcripts of the poem in various degrees of completeness. The two most complete versions, which are clearly the latest, are both rhymed in quatrains. One, with no title, has no division into verses, and the second, with the title “Elegy,” is divided into verses of three lines. This, to me, seems to be the latest version of all, and seems to hold the final form the poem was to take. The poem extends to the seventeenth line, ending “to the roots of the sea,” after which there is a line which is deleted.
The extension of the poem has been built up from the manuscript notes. The lines are all found there, except that two or three have been adjusted to fit the rhyming scheme. “Breath" was an isolated marginal word which I have used in line thirty-four; and “plain, which ends line twenty-three, has been added to “was” without justification from the manuscript. In the third line I have chosen “narrow pride" as against “burning pride” although “burning” occurs more often than “narrow” in the transcripts; but it was “narrow” in that line that he quoted to me from memory when I last saw him.
Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are altered only to the extent of an inversion of one or two words. Their order might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer. It recalls the earlier poem, also written for his father: “Do not go gentle into that good night”; but it is clear that in this last poem Dylan Thomas was attempting something even more immediate and more difficult.
VERNON WATKINS