HUX 543 - THE AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL
After the Funeral (1938) - (In memory of Ann Jones)
This poem is an elegy, reflecting, once again, Dylan Thomas’ concern with tombs. Abandoning most of the conventional matter of the elegy, the poet here is self-consciously absorbed with writing about his subject and comments on the appropriate way of memorializing his aunt, who was the mistress of Fern Hill. His awareness that the poem may be a monument disproportionate with the natural life of the real woman is at the living center of the poem.
Shaped by the phrases beginning "After," the first twenty lines fall into two parts: lines one through nine treat the feelings of the "desolate boy" at funeral time; lines ten through twenty are in the voice of "I," who will, in line twenty-one, announce himself as bard. The "mule praises" of line one insist on the presence of a real mule with ears like sails shaking in the wind, an animal likely to be watched closely by a young boy. The wooden peg tapped "in the thick/Graves’ foot" is the first official marker of the grave and thus an inspiration for the poet to carve "this skyward statue" in verse, the true monument. First, as a boy, in the early part of the poem, he comes to terms with the death and his feelings about it. The images of her lids, her teeth, her eyes so sunken that they resemble an expectoration, the puddle-like sleeve folds, in conjunction with the sleep-tormenting smack of the spade, are desolating. He imagines himself in the coffin shedding dry leaves, but the poetic outcome of this grief is minimal, although perhaps very real: "one bone to light with a judgment clout."
The wake, the "tear-stuffed time" held on the farm before burial, provided images from which the true verse memorial could be elicited. The "stuffed fox," "stale fern" and dowager’s hump were facts about the aunt and they lead the poet to significant metaphor - the "hooded, fountain heart" with the poet’s concomitant crisis of consciousness. The real woman would not have approved of his being immersed in the hyperbolic metaphor of her known compassion. Literally, "her death was still a drop" too tiny for poetic magnification, but the druid poet must create the fiction of her monument in words. In conflict with himself, he has written what might be "a monstrous image blindly/Magnified out of praise."
Yet the very size suggested by "Magnified" is a key to the monument described in the lines beginning with twenty-one: it is a "skyward statue" with a "giant skull," and there is a "monumental/argument."
Lines twenty-one through twenty-six are the most joyful, creating the sound of religious music. Her "wood-tongued virtue" makes her a primitive goddess of the forest, a suitable icon for a "brown chapel." The "Babble like a bellbuoy" has always, however, seemed (to this writer) to be a precious line, its alliterations too easy to suggest the universal praises of the seas and the choir.
The "ferned and foxy woods" is a transformation of the fox and fern (line eleven) of the living room on the farm. The sign of grace for her spirit is the cross made by the four birds flying from the four directions.
In lines twenty-seven through forty the bard is the maker of a tombstone. Although her flesh was "meek as milk," the statue with "wild breast and blessed and giant skull" is appropriate because it is carved from a magnified image of her. Viewed through a wet window "in a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year," she is perceived as marble-like, monumental. The dead woman and the sculpted image come together in the last lines. Nowhere has Thomas better depicted the joining of mortality with immortal art. Her "scrubbed and sour humble hands" become "These cloud-sopped, marble hands," "her threadbare/Whisper in a damp word" becomes "this monumental/Argument of the hewn voice." And the two conditions join, as well, in one tremendously powerful line, "And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone." The conclusion returns to the images that inspired the monument. It will whelm the poet until "The stuffed lung of the fox twitch.../And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill."
Reading a half-dozen poems by Dylan Thomas arouses specific expectations; we anticipate the imagery of grave and tomb, heart and blood. These expectations are not disappointed by "Poem in October," where lines seven and eight of the last stanza recur to the blood and heart, yet the appearance of these representative images in this context is an aesthetic surprise. The expected motif has turned back on itself and is now embedded in an epiphanic context of light and song. The birthday poems that were written earlier, "Twenty-four Years" in 1938 and "Especially When the October Wind" in 1934, are "red-veined" and "dark-vowelled." "Poem in October" ends not with a descent but with a transcension. Although the "town below {is} leaved with October blood," the "heart’s truth" of the poet is being sung on a high hill. At the beginning of the thirtieth year of his nativity, the poet rediscovers the glory and the dream of his childhood.
There may have been literary inspirations for "Poem in October." Nobody could read it without being struck by the similarities with Wordsworth’s great "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," a poem Dylan Thomas must have read. Wordsworth elevates the image of the child to the level of visionary insight. The babe comes from God "trailing clouds of glory"; the children "sport upon the shore" of "that immortal sea" and "Hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." Both Wordsworth’s "babe {that} leaps up on his Mother’s arm" and Thomas’ child walking with his mother through the parables and legends (stanza five) enjoy transcendent experience; they appear in a context of light metaphors and religious diction. And there are similarities in technique as well: Thomas’ irregularly shaped but carefully controlled stanzas follow the model of Wordsworth’s justifiably famous verse. The tone of Thomas’ opening lines, a bardic voice, echoes Wordsworth’s oracular utterance.
Another literary predecessor for "Poem in October" is Henry Vaughn’s "the Retreate," long recognized as an anticipation of Wordsworth’s more famous ode. In this poem, Vaughn walks abroad in the morning to encounter two places and two weathers, as Thomas does in his own poem.
Making a beginning in a world already replete with sound and movement is the effect of stanza one. Awakening is the beginning that opens the stanza and starting a pedestrian tour the one that closes it. In between, the fully realized world of sounds beckons, drawing the poet from sleep into a rainy October birthday. In characteristic, ambiguous grammar, "to heaven" suggests both toward and offered to heaven. Both of these are consistent with the movement of the entire poem towards the ultimate beatific recovery expressed in the final stanzas. We find Thomas appearing to spring the lines less abruptly than in other poems. Although "thirtieth year to heaven/Wake to my hearing" is by no means prosaic grammar, it has the effect of greater relaxation than often is the case with similar usages in Thomas’ verse. A comparison of the first stanza of "Poem in October" with the first stanza of, for example, "Today, this Insect," uncovers a similar number of telescoped, seemingly ungrammatical and abrupt constructions, yet the stylistic effect in "Poem in October" is one of greater concord. The rhythm of association, we conclude, is a function of the total vision of the poem and not an isolated stylistic trait. From the very first stanza, "Poem in October" moves toward a unified vision.
Internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration create the harmonies of stanza one. This religious music is from the world of nature; the herons, as in "Over St. John’s Hill," are priests and there is praying water. The poet is seeking a private covenant with nature; intercourse in the world of men will not suffice since it is a "still sleeping town" from which he begins his walk.
In stanza two, the poet’s name is figured in a sky pouring the bath of rebirth. The birds from "winged trees" join waterfowl to fly the name "above the farms." This upward moving imagery marks the stanza as an imaginative tour through the familiar landscape. The trees are "winged" because the poet sees his own ascension through them. He meets the "rainy autumn" on its own level, the alliteration of r’s suggesting his eager participation in a "shower of all my days." If there is renaming along with the recovery of self, the water imagery of this stanza has pertinence beyond the obvious Jungian significance. Dylan Thomas’ given name, more unusual in his time even than in ours, refers to the water. It comes from a Welsh tale in which Math, the son of a magician king, Mathonwy, magically induced the virgin birth of a child named Dylan Eil Ton, Sea Son of the Wave. Thomas’ father, educated beyond his grammar school instructorship, and with sensibilities refined by loving acquaintance with literature, gave his son this name in order both to distinguish him from the common herd of Welsh boys and to mark him, nevertheless, as heir of the old culture. Thus, the "high tide" into which the heron dives in line seventeen is symbolically analogous to the name flying above the trees in line eleven.
Taking the road over the border (stanza two), is a figure for positive growth and change in Thomas. During the early thirties, before he had gained recognition as a poet, he wished to cross the border to emancipation in London. Still living with his parents, filling his spare hours with roles in Swansea drama groups - these accompanied wit some bouts of serious drinking - he fell in love with Pamela Hansford Johnson, the promising young London poet with whom he corresponded; his spirit was already on the other side of the border. And in 1944 when "Poem in October" was written, now married and famous, his domestic life so very unsettled, his wife and infant in the countryside safe from German bombs, he lived at no fewer than four locations: at a Manresea Road studio where he was employed in the film industry, with his friends Bill and Helen McAlpine, at an uncomfortable cottage at Bosham, Sussex, and in a bungalow at New Quay in Cardiganshire. In stanza two he takes the road over the border with a sense of certainty and security that at the time must have been absent from his personal life.
In stanza three, the poet experiences an astonishing doubleness of experience. The gates of the busy town now closed behind him, situated at the top of a hill, he finds himself in fair weather that is overpouring with birdsong and "Summery" light. It s a "fond" climate "suddenly/Come," sharply distinguished in the poetic ordering from the "rain wringing/Wind... In the wood faraway under me." The stanza takes its force from the juxtaposition of contrasting sounds. The music of summer is chiming with i’s, liquid with l’s and humming with m’s, whereas the winter weather (neither of which individual words appears) is wrenching with w’s and dark o’s. The first part of the poem ends in the last line of this stanza which is rhythmically and rhetorically parallel with the measured distancing expressed in the last line of the first two stanzas.
In order to state a new theme, stanza four repeats the vision by reversing it. The poet begins to discover not only a second kind of weather but a second place in time as well. From his vantage point on the hill he has a view of the harbour, church and castle. The predominant imagery is of wetness; the predominant sound is the assonance of "pale," "snail" and "castle." The rain is once again juxtaposed with the fanciful "spring and summer {now} blooming."
Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (1951)
This is one of the best known poems by Dylan Thomas, second in popular appeal only to "Fern Hill." And it is one of his most powerful, gaining much of its impact from repetition and variation. It is written in one of the most strict poetic forms, a villanelle: five three-line stanzas (tercets) followed by a four-line stanza (quatrain) with refrains and two rhymes. Note that each new context gives the repeated line a slightly different coloring.
The theme is paradoxical, a contradiction in literal terms yet a profound poetic truth. Live your life while you are actually dying, Thomas says. Do not accept death passively but, instead, he insists, live intensely and resist death passionately. The rhyme of "night" and "light" expresses this theme which is then varied in the following tercets.
It is widely believed that Thomas wrote this poem while his father was ill, perhaps during 1945, although it was not published until after his parents’ death. Dylan Thomas’ love for his father deepened in the poet’s mature years. There was a certain professional sympathy between them, for the elder Thomas was an English teacher.
How are we to read the phrase "that good night"? The night of death is the terminal point in a natural process and is, in this sense, "good." Is there an echo of "good-bye" in it? And what is the effect of the demonstrative "that"? Does it do more than isolate this "good night" from other good nights and therefore distinguish death from sleep?
In the following tercets, Thomas gives examples of men who meet death differently yet alike. The first are "wise men," perhaps philosophers. They know "dark is right" because they know what to look for at the end of life. In spite of their wisdom, however, they "do not go gentle" because their words "had forked no lightning." This phrase has the force of a symbol suggesting that wise men had lacked the ultimate power of nature. We are reminded of the creation myth: "in the beginning was the word...let there be light." Yet "lightning" plays an even more special role in the line we are examining, for it is the grammatical object of the verb had forked. Often in Thomas’ poetry "to fork" or "forking" refers to a subtle language ability, that of making ambiguity. Thomas therefore seems to be saying that the wise men were not wise enough, that their words created no ultimate linguistic reality.
The good men of the third tercet permitted life to pass them by. The festive imagery of "bright/...might have danced in a green bay," evokes a wonderworld of joyful activities in contrast with the "frail deeds." Why, we wonder, do the good men regret the past just as the last wave goes by?
The grave men are blind - or perhaps only partially sighted - yet they have the ultimate vision. This is the climactic treatment of light in the poem. It implies the blindness of the poet’s father, the archetypal blindness of ancient poet-priests as well as the blindness of such poets as Milton and Joyce. Do you hear a double meaning in "grave men"? Are they both serious and of the tomb? In most of his poetry Thomas links together these ultimate places of life, womb and tomb. The "grave men" are concerned with life essentially.
The final stanza, a quatrain, reiterates the theme and gives the feeling of formal closure: the imagery of religion, the language and tone of prayer solemnize the obligatory rage.