Collected Poems, 1934-1952 by Dylan Thomas

First published: 1952

Type of work: Poetry

Time of work: 1952

Critical Evaluation:

When Dylan Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine he was, for a poet in this century, extraordinarily popular. His poetry had been read and admired for years; a paean of praise greeted his collected works, and still more appreciation was accorded him after his death. However, many reputable critics, fellow poets, and general readers have disliked, derided, and dismissed his work on the grounds that it is merely sibylline raving. These contradictory reactions are explained by the fact that Thomas was primarily a violently emotional poet. The strength of his feelings thus either forcibly attracts or repels his readers.

The poems make an emotional impact, on first reading, that subsequent analyses will not displace. With the exception of Ezra Pound, Thomas is probably the most obscure of the great poets of this century. Whether he is a major or a minor poet will be established only by the evaluation of critics in the future, as no contemporary can have the necessary perspective to place a poet accurately in such a hierarchy. Undeniably, Dylan Thomas’ poetry is great in kind; to what degree, posterity will decide.

A poet who is both very obscure and very popular is an anomaly, but Thomas is not in this position by virtue of belonging to a particular school of verse, nor by writing in a recognized poetic convention. Nor is he socially or politically committed. His poetry is an affirmation of life: “These poems are written for the love of man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.” The truth of this assertion in the introductory note to his volume of collected verse is shown in every successful poem that he wrote. His early poetry is egocentric; he was writing of his own private feelings in these poems of birth, death, and sex, and the glory he found in these themes was entirely personal. His later poems show a far wider human interest and an increasing concern for mankind.

Throughout his work a unity of vision is apparent. He sees death in birth and resurrection in death. He is aware of the hate in all love and of the power of love to transcend suffering. He comprehends the simultaneous glory and corruption in life, and the fact that all forms of life are interdependent and inseparable. “I see the boys of summer” is a dialogue between the young poet who sees the destruction of the future in the present, and the adolescent boys living their first passionate and confusing loves. The successive images of light and dark, heat and cold, throughout the poem emphasize this contrast. The poem is filled with pleasure and pain conjoined, and with gain and loss. The polarity of these emotions is explicitly stated in the final, joyful image:

O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

“If I were tickled by the rub of love” is a difficult poem, to be understood by remembering the comprehensiveness of Thomas’ idea of life. In the context of the poem, “tickled” appears to mean completely involved with, or wholly absorbed by, but the term necessarily retains the connotations of amusement and enjoyment. “Rub,” as well as having sensual implications, also means doubt, difficulty, or strain. The poet says that if he were “tickled by the rub of love,” he would not fear the fall from Eden or the flood; if he were “tickled” by the birth of a child, he would not fear death or war. Desire is spoken of as devilish and is provoked by

. . . the drug that’s smoking in a girl And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

This harsh image is followed by a statement of the poet’s consciousness that he carries his own old age and death already within him.

An old man’s shank one-marrowed withmy bone,And all the herrings smelling in thesea,I sit and watch the worm beneath mynailWearing the quick away.

The feeling of fear is strong, and neither love, sex, beauty, nor birth is the “rub”; the solution is in wholeness or unity:

I would be tickled by the love that is: Man be my metaphor.

Thomas’ poetical development is unusual in that the thought in his later poems is usually not at all obscure. These poems are also less clotted with material; there are fewer esoteric symbols; ideas are developed at greater length, and tension is relaxed. The close attention to rhythm and structure persists, and the evocative power of his language is enhanced. Thomas’ genius lay in the brilliant and highly personal use of the words with which his penetrating perception is communicated. The ambiguity of his language parallels the reciprocal nature of his images. He delights in punning and the various meanings of a word or image will often reverberate throughout an entire stanza.

“Poem on his birthday” is a good example of his method. The last poems are often, as this one is, set in the Welsh countryside. The heron is always in his poems a religious or priestly symbol. In the first stanza “herons spire and spear”; in the third, “herons walk in their shroud,” and in the ninth he writes of the “druid herons’ vows” and of his “tumbledown tongue”—this last a beautifully fused image of the action of the tongue of a pealing bell and the impetuous voice of the poet. In the tenth stanza he speaks of the “nimbus bell” which is a magical goal. By this use of compound images Thomas explores and thoroughly penetrates his subject. All aspects of the experience are involved, and pain, happiness, grief, and joy are equally present in this expression of unified sensibility.

This inclusive view of the universe is sometimes incoherent in his early poems, sometimes illuminating. One of the finest of his early poems is titled “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” The symbolism here is not obscure and the emotions are controlled by the form of the poem. The third line of each of the four five-line stanzas has only three or four words and is the main clause of the three-line sentence in which the theme of each stanza is stated. The last two lines of each stanza begin with the words “And I am dumb. . . .” After the dramatic first two lines the short solemn third lines ready the reader for the equally forceful antithesis. The poem ends with a rhyming couplet:

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb,How at my sheet goes the same crookedworm.

The theme of the poem is that the forces of nature are the same as those that drive man and that these forces both create and destroy. The careful structure of this poem is typical of Thomas’ craftsmanship. He has been called undisciplined. He is not, but his unfettered imagination can confuse his meaning and his symbolism remains, in spite of painstaking analysis, almost inexplicable.

The sonnet sequence, “Altarwise by owl-light,” is Thomas’ most difficult poetry. The sonnets contain lines and passages of great beauty, and the overall movement, from horror and suffering toward the idea of the redemption of man by the Resurrection of Christ after the Crucifixion, is clear. But the sequence as a whole remains too compressed and fragmentary to be successful. Thomas has failed mainly to communicate the bases of the intense suffering and hope that he so obviously felt.

In “After the funeral,” an elegy for a cousin, Ann Jones, Thomas expresses both his own grief and the character of the dead woman. It is, as the poet points out, written with a magniloquence that exceeds the subject’s,

Though this for her is a monstrousimage blindlyMagnified out of praise. . . .

This manner contrasts so sharply with the humble and suffering woman that the poignancy of the portrait is increased. His grief

Shakes a desolate boy who slit histhroatIn the dark of the coffin and sheds dryleaves.

The clear-sighted description of the woman after the expression of such grief is very moving:

I know her scrubbed and sour humblehandsLie with religion in their cramp, herthread-bareWhisper in a damp word, her witsdrilled hollow,Her fist of a face died clenched on around pain.

The sonnet sequence and the elegy give some indication of Thomas’ later themes, where religious faith and a concern for mankind are evident.

During the second world war Thomas spent several years in London, where he was deeply moved by German air raids on the city. This reaction is very clear in his fourth volume, DEATHS AND ENTRANCES. The well-known “A refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” is both an affirmation of Christian faith and an expression of cold fury at such a death. The poet feels that the event was too great for grief and that no elegy should be written for the child until the end of the world. Writing of grief at the time would be as if to murder her again:

I shall not murderThe mankind of her going with a gravetruth.

The child is representative of all mankind and of all London’s dead, a view which gives her a certain greatness:

Deep with the first dead lies London’sdaughter.

The last line of the poem is ambivalent; it communicates both the irrevocability, finality, and cruelty of death and the Christian belief of the deathlessness of the soul:

After the first death there is no other.

After the war Thomas was concerned to recapture in his poetry the world of his childhood. The rhythm of these poems is more relaxed and flowing than that of his early work, and the landscapes are glowing and full of color and wonder. These lyrics are poems in praise of the created world. Thomas’ skill with words and rhythm evokes the whole Welsh countryside, and his unique imaginative vision makes the places his own. He has here communicated his great reverence and love of life. The unified vision of life remains, and Thomas is still aware of the presence of death in life, although this is no longer a cause of anguish as it was in the early poems.

In “Fern Hill,” Thomas describes his youth on a farm. He has re-created youthful feeling that the whole world was his; there is an atmosphere of timelessness, a lulling of the consciousness of time’s destruction, which the poet in recapturing his youthful feeling has conveyed without negating his manhood’s knowledge.

Dylan Thomas was a highly emotional poet whose lyrics express a unified vision of life. His poetry contains many of the aspects of birth and death, fear, grief, joy, and beauty. From the violent, anguished poems of his youth, his power over his “craft or sullen art” increased until he was able to channel his special mode of feeling in ways which enabled him to speak for all men:

And you shall wake, from countrysleep, this dawn and each first dawn,Your faith as deathless as the outcry ofthe ruled sun.