Saturday, May 25, 2013

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.

  11. Poetry (including Drama):

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

  19. Collected Works:

  20. 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.

  21. Biography & Letters:

  22. Brinnin, John Malcolm. Dylan Thomas in America. 1956. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent, 1965.
  23. Thomas, Dylan. Letters to Vernon Watkins. Ed. Vernon Watkins. 1957. An Aldine Paperback. London: J. M. Dent & Faber, 1967.
  24. Tedlock, E. W. ed. Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet. A Symposium. 1960. London: Mercury Books, 1963.
  25. Ferris, Paul. Dylan Thomas. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
  26. Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Letters. Ed. Paul Ferris. 1985. London: Paladin, 1987.
  27. 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)]


4 comments:

Richard said...

I have always loved Dylan Thomas's poetry. Also Gerald Manley Hopkins.

But he was almost too popular so that while I used ideas of his when I started writing poetry (again ca 1988) I studied many other writers and tried to subsume that "boomy rhetoric" but as I studied him in 1968 we had the Caedman record of him reading the Child's Xmas etc (which is magical) and we also had T.S. Eliot reading and I liked that also! I also like Auden and his readings. So I seem (almost to like everything)...but I didn't know about Houseman until I heard someone compare him to R. A. K. Mason who (as teenager) I read obsessively over and over.

Later I became interested in many poets and the Language writers, Stein etc but I think it all harks back to those primary reading experiences for me included Charles Dickens, Hugo, Shakespeare, Keats and many others. Lewis Carol is one.

The poem you quoted is very moving. Like Dickens etc he has the true power - that of words - his use of words in wonderful combinations, resonations and sounds.

Auden of The Letter is the same but relies on what he leaves out somewhat and I also feel that and much of Auden's early poems are hauntingly beautiful. Eliot is perhaps the greater fabricator. It depends on what you associate (one can sometimes know too much about a writer)...

A month ago I sold a First of "The Doctor and the Devils" (quite cheaply, for about $6.00) as I didn't think his prose was very good. I only glanced at it. I had a chance to see Under Milk Wood but gave ticket to my daughter who as it was only went to please me as her main buzz is popular music. But I can sit through plays etc and I wasn't big on that work.

But a lot of his poetry is wonderful.

Richard said...

Here is a poem I studied in 1968. It is still one of my favourites:

In My Craft Or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
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.

Kendrick Smithyman asked the tutorial class:
"What is the singing light?"

No one knew. But he, having knocked about a bit, pointed out that Thomas was writing beside a kerosene lamps and they make kind of singing sound.

I cant recall hearing such a lamp (perhaps I have but memory fades with age I am afraid). But there you are - reality and imagination!

He also somewhat explicated (the structure of):

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

...and pointed out that his is the anger shown by a man who is so angry or sad that he strongly shouts; "I am not angry!" He used this point as starting point to "getting into" Dylan's poems.

These poems are among the great and most memorable in the human language.

Dr Jack Ross said...

I do think his prose is good (though probably not those potboiler screenplays such as The Doctor and the Devils) -- and the original recording of Under Milk Wood is fantastic (apparently somebody left a microphone in the middle of the stage and it more or less accidentally picked up the whole performance) ... Lovely to hear Kendrick's insights into Thomas, though. Thanks again Richard.

Richard said...

I must find that first recording. The idea of multiple voices was good. He was influenced by Eliot and Joyce and others.

I think we (and you and Scott Hamilton for example do) have to keep re-evaluating our preferences in writing. I was interested in your liking of De La Mare's stories so I read a few and they were good for sure and you interest in such as Powys and (Gene) Wolfe meant I kept some back from my shedding of libros...but I often find a writer that at one or even many readings is not my "cup of tea" seems slowly to grow on me. I found for example I started really "getting into" Tristram Shandy (which took me ages to read as it was, on first reading, rather tedious, so I read say 5 or 10 pages a night), but then it started to bewitch me and later "helped" when I read Barthelme's stories and even Joyce's Ulysses. Rabelais of course was much easier fare ( I stupidly gave my Heath Robinson illustrated of that to The Ant in moment of rare book-generosity!!

But the ticket I think is not to say - Thomas is bad while - some more understated or "dry" poet is better...as dry as some people find say Ron Silliman or Stein etc I recall reading his 'Paradise' and 'Tjanting' as well as Stein's 'Stanzas in Meditation' and kind of finding myself 'drawn in' to the writing (Hamish or Scott translated that into 'psychic ride' years ago when I wrote a thing called "Alan Loney and The Language Poets" (Laugh out loud...the good old days!) But it is a phenomena. The close attention to words & sounds rather than narrative meaning as such si something Bernstein talks about (among other things) in his critical book 'A Poetics'... he references Keats, Veronica Forrest-Thomspson (whose theoretical book 'poetic artifice' [did Perloff name her critical essay 'Radical Artifice ' thinkng of that?] I happened to have picked up by chance not knowing who she was), and even Swinburne amongst others.

Swinburne I haven't read much but I read a bio of him, and used words he had used in my 'Chains' (later I discovered John Ashbery had done much the same in one of his books). But it is the sound often, not the meaning. Or its the meaning-sound or what was Pound's definition of the image?

It seems limited to only be concentrated on language and or just the 'magic' (Smithyman synthesised the magic with complex thoughts, history, geography, ideas, birds, NZ versus other places... and much else).

Smithyman couldn't "stand" Hopkins but he read him and in his evaluation etc of him and others whose style he didn't like, he was helped to form his own style or stamp.

The Thomases are all different (except that many of that name are Welsh!).

In some ways the other Thomases - RS, Edward,and DM (haven't read his work apart from an autobiog.) are quieter and perhaps more subtle or soft, less "boomy". But they all, including Dylan contribute to the feast or the fest.