Doubting Thomases (2): Dylan Thomas

[Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)]

I've always had rather an uneasy relationship with Dylan Thomas's poetry. On the one hand, it's certainly full of memorable, resonant phrases: "I see the boys of summer in their ruin" - "Do not go gentle into that good night" - "The hunchback in the park, a solitary mister" ... On the other hand, it's pretty difficult to construe it into sense much of the time.

I've always had a bias towards the plain and understated. My favourite poets when I was a kid were A. E. Housman and W. H. Auden. My brother Ken, by contrast, preferred Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas ...

[Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection (2002)]

I did undergo a partial conversion when I bought a copy of the complete Caedmon recordings of his work a few years ago:

Thomas, Dylan. The Caedmon Collection. Read by the Author. 1952-53. Set of 11 CDs (complete). Introduced by Billy Collins. London: HarperCollins, 2002.

1. from Dylan Thomas Reading A Child's Christmas in Wales and Five Poems / from Dylan Thomas Reading Over Sir John's Hill and Other Poems / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [12 poems]
2. from Dylan Thomas Reading Poem on His Birthday, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Lament and Other Poems Volume 2 / from Dylan Thomas Reading Complete Recorded Poetry / from Dylan Thomas Reading Over Sir John's Hill and Other Poems [20 poems]
3. from Dylan Thomas Reading Quite Early One Morning and Other Memories / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [5 stories]
4. from Dylan Thomas: In Country Heaven - The Evolution of a Poem / from Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell Read and Discuss Her Poetry [5 poems / 7 ES poems]
5. from Dylan Thomas Reading A Visit to America and Poems / from An Evening with Dylan Thomas [3 poems / 25 poems by other authors]
6. from Dylan Thomas Reads the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Others / from Dylan Thomas Reading from His Works [18 poems by other authors]
7. from Dylan Thomas Reads: A Personal Anthology / from Dylan Thomas: Return Journey to Swansea [22 poems by other authors]
8. from Dylan Thomas Reading from King Lear and the Duchess of Malfi / from Dylan Thomas Reads: A Personal Anthology / from Dylan Thomas Reads the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Others [17 excerpts by other authors]
9. from Under Milk Wood [parts 1-3]
10. from Under Milk Wood [part 4] / from Dylan Thomas: Return Journey to Swansea / from An Evening with Dylan Thomas / from Adventures in the Skin Trade [5 poems / 2 talks]
11. from Dylan Thomas Reads from His Adventures in the Skin Trade and Two Poems [chapters I-II]

I have to say that his prose, in particular, was a revelation to me. It was so funny, so witty and unpretentious, so lacking in the portentous solemnity of much of his poetry. Possibly this is the best way to experience it, though - through its own author's readings.

Another attraction of this series is a full recording of the original version of Under Milk Wood, recorded almost by accident one evening in New York shortly before Thomas's death, with the Welsh wizard himself in the cast.

[Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems 1934-1953 (1998)]

More recently, though, I bit the bullet and bought the latest edition of the collected poems, with full annotations and quite a few additions, subtractions and revisions to the canon. In particular, the last poem of all was scarcely recognizable to me in its new version.

Here is his unfinished poem "Elegy," as edited by fellow-poet Vernon Watkins, from the later reprints of Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952:

Too proud to die, broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day. Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)

Watkins remarks of his favourite among the two "most complete" surviving drafts of the poem that it "extends to the seventeenth line, ending 'to the roots of the sea,' after which there is a line which is deleted." Of the rest of the reconstructed poem (the part in parentheses) he explains: "The lines are all found there, except that two or three have been adjusted to fit the rhyming scheme ... Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are only altered to the extent of an inversion of one or two words. He ends, rather disarmingly:

Their order might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer. [pp.171-72].

Somewhat predictably, the casual nature of this reconstruction has not been allowed to stand unchallenged in the new edition, Collected Poems 1934-1953 (1998), edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. Their text reads as follows:

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

On that darkest day. 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, 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.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed.
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. 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.
Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told

The air that drew away from him.

At first sight the main difference between these two different versions of "Elegy" is simply their length. Davies and Maud have not extended the poem beyond the end of the surviving manuscript version they reprint. Nor have they made unauthorised alterations to its wording. In order to assess the full effect of Watkin's revisions and additions, though, it's probably necessary to conflate the two texts, as I've done below (italicised words and lines are Watkins' revisions to Thomas's ms. text):

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 [narrow] pride

On that darkest day. Oh, forever may
He live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love, [and there grow / Young]

Among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the [numberless] days of his death, though above
[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.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed.
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

[Veined] Moved in his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his faded [unseeing] eyes to the roots of the sea.
[Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told

The air that drew away from him.]

[(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)]

Poetically, I guess there's quite a lot to be said for dumping the 23 extra lines Watkins has added to Thomas's surviving nineteen (he also cut a couple of the end of the poem as it stands). It's also a little difficult to understand why he thought it necessary to change "burning" to "narrow" pride in line three. He himself explains:

... '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.

Against such testimony it's hard to argue. He was there; we weren't (and neither were Davies and Maud). What does fascinate me about the whole thing is how a poet's text - even one as obsessively attentive to detail as Dylan Thomas - can still be morphing and changing fifty years after his death. As for the immense expansions of the canon in Daniel Jones' 1971 edition of The Poems,they now appear to be in disfavour. All that we are now encouraged to read of his uncollected verse are the early Notebook Poems (1930-34), available in two quite different versions, both edited by Ralph Maud: the more "scholarly" text of 1967 and the more "readerly" one of 1989.

All in all, there appear to be quite a few different Dylan Thomases to choose from. It may seem absurd to own so many books by and about him, including overlapping editions of the same poems, stories and broadcasts, but it's very difficult otherwise to feel confident exactly which version of his texts one is reading. That's not to say that the stories over, either. There are lots more books out there to collect before I can regard the question of just what should and what shouldn't be included in his canon as in any way settled:

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953)

Prose (including Screenplays & Broadcasts):


1. Thomas, Dylan. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. 1940. London: Guild Books, 1956.
2. Thomas, Dylan. The Doctor and the Devils: From the Story by Donald Taylor. 1953. London: J. M. Dent, 1969.
3. Thomas, Dylan. Quite Early One Morning: Broadcasts. Preface by Aneirin Talfan Davies. 1954. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1968.
4. Thomas, Dylan. Adventures in the Skin Trade. 1955. London: Ace Books, 1961.
5. Thomas, Dylan. A Prospect of the Sea and Other Stories and Prose Poems. Ed. Daniel Jones. 1955. London: J. M. Dent, 1957.
6. Thomas, Dylan. The Beach of Falesá: Based on a Story by Robert Louis Stevenson. 1964. London: Panther, 1966.
7. Thomas, Dylan. Two Tales: Me and My Bike, Rebecca's Daughters. Ed. Sydney Box. Illustrations by Rebecca Box. 1965 & 1965. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1968.
8. Thomas, Dylan. Early Prose Writings. Ed. Walford Davies. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1971.
9. Thomas, Dylan, & John Davenport. The Death of the King’s Canary. Introduction by Constantine FitzGibbon. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
10. Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Stories. Foreword by Leslie Norris. Everyman Fiction. London: J. M. Dent, 1983.

Poetry (including Drama):


11. Thomas, Dylan. Deaths and Entrances: Poems. 1946. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1947.
12. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934-1952. 1952. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1974.
13. Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. Preface by Daniel Jones. 1954. London: J. M. Dent, 1954.
14. Maud, Ralph, ed. Poet in the Making: the Notebooks of Dylan Thomas. 1967. London: J. M. Dent, 1968.
15. Thomas, Dylan. The Poems. Ed. Daniel Jones. 1971. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1978.
16. Thomas, Dylan. The Notebook Poems: 1930-1934. Ed. Ralph Maud. 1989. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent, 1990.
17. Thomas, Dylan. Collected Poems 1934-1953. Ed. Walford Davies & Ralph Maud. 1998. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2000.

Collected Works:


18. Thomas, Dylan. The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Poems, Stories and Broadcasts. Ed. Walford Davies & Ralph Maud. A Phoenix Giant Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1995.

Biography & Letters:


19. Brinnin, John Malcolm. Dylan Thomas in America. 1956. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
20. Thomas, Dylan. Letters to Vernon Watkins. Ed. Vernon Watkins. 1957. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent & Faber, 1967.
21. Tedlock, E. W. ed. Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet. A Symposium. 1960. London: Mercury Books, 1963.
22. Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
23. Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Letters. Ed. Paul Ferris. 1985. London: Paladin, 1987.
24. Ackerman, John. A Dylan Thomas Companion: Life, Poetry and Prose. 1991. Macmillan. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1994.

Please let me know if you see something obvious there that I've missed. There must have been a time in the 50s and 60s when virtually any book - broadcasts, old film scripts, anthologies - with the name "Dylan Thomas" on the cover was assured of a ready sale.

[Richard Knights: Dylan Thomas's writing shed (Laugharne, Wales)]

Doubting Thomases (1): Edward Thomas

[Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France (2011)]

I've just been reading a fascinating new biography of Edward Thomas entitled Now All Roads Lead to France, by a certain Matthew Hollis. It's really the first book I've ever come across which seems to do justice to this strangest and most solitary of poets.

[Clifford Harper: Strange Meetings]

What was he, after all? Not really a war poet, although he's often grouped with Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. None of his poems is exactly about the war, though it's looming at the back of almost all of them.

[Sir Edward Marsh, ed.: Georgian Poetry (1911-12)]

Not a Georgian, either. He didn't appear in any of Eddie Marsh's five bi-annual anthologies, and - while he knew and was close to many of the contributors - even his nature poetry was somehow in a different vein from theirs: more urgent, embattled, harsh ...

[Port Talbot]

For that matter, he wasn't really English. He always felt like a foreigner there. But then he wasn't exactly Welsh either. For all his sentimental attachment to the country of his ancestors, he was born in London and it was the countryside of the Home Counties that he knew best, and which he celebrated in some of his greatest poems ...

[William Roberts: The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (1962)]

He certainly wasn't an Imagist, or a Vorticist, or a member of any of those early Modernist movements promoted by Ezra Pound and his friends in those heady days just before the war (though he did know Pound, and even reviewed him favourably - on occasion).

[Matthew Spencer, ed.: Elected Friends (2004)]

He's often seen, instead, as a member of a group of two, consisting of himself and Robert Frost. It was Frost, after all, who coined that phrase about the "sound of sense" which was supposed to characterise the lyrics and blank verse in early books such as North of Boston or Mountain Interval.

Without Frost, and his friendship and encouragement, it's quite possible that there would have been no poems at all by Edward Thomas, but - despite that - the two still don't sound all that similar. "The Road Not Taken," beautiful though it is, has a kind of cracker-barrel common-sensical tone to it which does not characterise Thomas poems such as "This is no case of petty right or wrong" or "As the team's head-brass" ...

Here are a few stanzas (the most famous ones) from his long poem "Roads" (1916):

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

They're not really startlingly well-written. He was never entirely easy in his relationship to rhyme. As a prose-writer with over a decade's experience before he turned to writing prose, blank verse was a far more natural idiom for him. But, like Hardy and Melville before him, somehow this slight clumsiness seems to turn to his advantage.

One never feels that Edward Thomas is saying something for the rhyme, or because the ease of idiom has lured him on. Again and again, it's that slight roughness in the voice that catches the attention, that explain why this body of poetry written between 1913 and 1917 continues to live when other, more facile voices have faded away almost entirely.

[Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]

Philip Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Prose:


1. Thomas, Edward. The Heart of England. 1906. Foreword and Wood-Engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish. The Open-Air Library. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1932.
2. Thomas, Edward. Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work. 1909. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.
3. Thomas, Edward. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
4. Gant, Roland, ed. The Prose of Edward Thomas. Introduction by Helen Thomas. London: The Falcon Press Limited, 1948.
5. Thomas, Edward. Selected Poems and Prose. Ed. David Wright. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

Poetry:


6. Thomas, Edward. Poems and Last Poems (Arranged in Chronological Order of Composition). Ed. Edna Longley. 1917 & 1918. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London & Glasgow: Collins Publishers, 1973.
7. Thomas, Edward. Collected Poems. Foreword by Walter de la Mare. 1920. London & Boston: Faber, 1979.
8. Thomas, Edward. The Collected Poems. Ed. R. George Thomas. 1978. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
9. Thomas, Edward. The Annotated Collected Poems. Ed. Edna Longley. 2008. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2011.

Secondary:


10. Thomas, Helen, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm’s Wing: As It Was, World without End &c. 1926, 1931 & 1988. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
11. Farjeon, Eleanor. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years. 1958. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
12. Hollis, Matthew. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. 2011. London: Faber, 2012.

I love his poetry. I've loved it ever since I first bought a copy of Edna Longley's annotated edition of Poems & Last Poems sometime back in the early 80s. Most people come to Thomas through the Collected Poems, I suspect, with its slightly carping (and sentimental) preface by Walter de la Mare - and its rather odd ordering of the poems.

The advantage of Longley's edition (now available, in greatly expanded and revised form, as the Annotated Collected Poems) was its chronological arrangement. One could see where Thomas began and where he ended. The disadvantage was that she couldn't include the extra poems not included in either of those two books, which meant that his very first substantial poem, for instance ("Up in the Wind"), had to be excluded.

It did include one of my very favourite poems, though - "The Gallows":

There was a weasel lived in the sun
With all his family,
Till a keeper shot him with his gun
And hung him up on a tree,
Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.

What price The Wind in the Willows now? There's something distinctly unsentimental, knowledgeable about Thomas's view of gamekeepers. He and Frost had a run-in with one once which sayed in his mind for a long time afterwards. He somehow persuaded himself that Frost, by offering to fight the man, had acted the hero, while he, by trying to calm the situation down, had proved his own cowardice. Hollis sees this as one of the motivations that drove him to enlist as a soldier.

There was a crow who was no sleeper,
But a thief and a murderer
Till a very late hour; and this keeper
Made him one of the things that were,
To hang and flap in rain and wind,
In the sun and in the snow.
There are no more sins to be sinned
On the dead oak tree bough.

"Made him one of the things that were." Do you see what I mean about that slight clumsiness, that catch in the throat that makes him phrases stick in your mind whether you like it or not. It's not clear if he admires the crow or not, but he certainly knows him. "There are no more sins to be sinned / On the dead oak tree bough": have you ever come across a more brutally reductionist view of the afterlife than that?

There was a magpie, too,
Had a long tongue and a long tail;
He could both talk and do -
But what did that avail?
He, too, flaps in the wind and rain
Alongside weasel and crow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.

Here I think Thomas makes a brief appearance in his own poem: "He could both talk and do - / But what did that avail?" What better summary of the first decade of his adult life? The endless string of books, articles, reviews, each bringing in a pittance - the terrible grinding poverty of his married life, the hungry children, the need he had to retreat from them periodically in order to "spare them" from his black moods.

One day he took a revolver (or a bottle of poison: it isn't clear) and went out in the woods to kill himself. He was interrupted before he could do it, but ever afterwards he made sure to have the "means" close to hand - he couldn't rest otherwise. He wrote a short story about it, but there's little doubt that it's a real experience he's writing about.

And many other beasts
And birds, skin, bone, and feather,
Have been taken from their feasts
And hung up there together,
To swing and have endless leisure
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pain, without pleasure,
On the dead oak tree bough.

Thomas, an artilleryman, was killed by a German shell which went so close to him that it literally sucked the life out of him (he'd narrowly escaped being blown up the day before by one which proved to be a dud - they'd all been celebrating his narrow escape just hours before).

He kept a diary in the trenches, and there are even a few lines of verse in it. He had a lot more to say, a lot more development to live through. it's hard to avoid the impression, at times, though, that for him this solitary death was a blessed release.

Whatever the truth of that, his poetry repays study. He's not one of those writers you can "quite like" - with Edward Thomas, you either love him or are indifferent to him. I find his lines, some of them, sounding in my head almost every day.

Funnily enough, though he wrote so much in such a short time, the literary critical battles continue over the best way to present his texts. R. George Thomas's 1978 edition of the Collected Poems superseded both the existing Faber text and Edna Longley's annotated edition. Thirty years later, though, her Annotated Collected Poems restores a number of the titles given the poems by Thomas's first post-war editors, rather than the first-line titles preferred by the 1978 editor.

Who can say who's right? The matter is a complex one, but one which rouses strong passions in his admirers. It seems somehow characteristic of this contrary, complicated man that a stable text of his poems can never really be established for certain.

I prefer to see it as a series of Thomases, each subtly different, looking up at me from each of the settings which have been contrived for his poems. Hollis has given us one more, but a particularly fascinating and well-informed one.

Thinking about him got me to thinking about some other "Thomas' poets, though. Coincidentally, I happen to have bought books by all three of them in the past few weeks, so it seemed a good excuse to do a spot of comparing. All Welsh - though in very different ways - all obsessed with death - though, again, quite dissimilarly ...

[Stanley Spencer: The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928-29)]