DYLAN THOMAS
Block-10 Dylan Thomas
UNIT 48 DYLAN THOMAS
https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22230/1/Unit-48.pdf
Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914 -53) was born on 27th October. 1914 at Swansea South Wales where his father, D. J. Thomas was a teacher of English. Fern Hill and Poem in October. two of his famous poems- suggest that his childhood was happy.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flowers published in 1934, brought him instant fame.
In London life felt strange and he lived a Bohemian life. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara. They had no money, but were in complete happiness
The Poet and His Poetry Dylan Thomas, like T. S. Eliot, baffled his first readers. While Herbert Read. for example, thought that Dylan Thomas wrote "the most absolute poetry of our time". Geoffrey Grigson described Thomas's poetry as "a meaningless hot sprawl of mud". The poet described himself as "a painstaking conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words' '. He said further that lie used "everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction I want them to : old tricks, new tricks. puns, portmanteau words, paradox, allusion, slang, rhymes, vowel rhymes. sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will Poets have to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions are all part of the joy". His poetry, he believed, "is the record of my individual struggle From darkness towards some measure of light"
twenty years of his poetic life (1933-53) - He published the first three volumes of Verse in five years: 18 Poems (1 934). Twenty-five poems (1 936). and The Map of Love ( 1939).
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
Rhetorical devices like parallelism, metaphor, ambiguity, paradox. Refrain - And I am dumb.
Theme - is process natural and creative. Process is an enactment in the immediate present of the dynamic interplay of subject and object. Impersonal nature and man as a person is identified in a process or a cycle of creation and destruction. The process in time is lifted above and beyond-time in language and verse.
symbols in his poems as (conventional), (2) natural and (3) private. "wax ", a symbol for dead flesh, is a private symbol. Sores or wounds stand for the pain of life. The heart, the navel wound, the sexual parts and the sexual act, Christ, the effects of Time''.
'AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION'
Critics have observed that Thomas's range of subjects is extremely limited. Love and sex were inseparable in his imagination. As he grew older, sex became a nightmare and love remained a mere slogan. Death, the other important theme, of his poetry preoccupied his imagination from the beginning. The first line is repeated six times in this poem of three stanzas of nine lines each. The first and the last lines of each stanza are the same. It is a line adapted from St. Paul, Romans VI: 9: Death hath no more dominion. Biblical allusions abound in Dy lan Thomass's poems.
The theme of the poem is traditional John Donne, in a sonnet says:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Shakespeare too had said: And death once dead, there's no more dying then. The Christian myth of resurrection on the Last Day of Judgement is implicit in the poelns. Written by the poet at the age of 19. The poem is innovative in forni. Not a sonnet.
It is a poem of three nine -line stanzas,of traditional iambic tetrameters. Let us first consider the theme. Man for the poet is man from seed to grave. emphasis on the grave. The tone of the preacher is adopted or minlickcd in this pocm, The making of a poem is also the poet's making of himself. His concern with his ~individual world which he tries to express emotionally).. not with objective detachmel.tr is remarkable. His God is cosmic energy, not the Old Testament God of judgement. We look for consistency of ideas or thought. Thomas's poetry, wc shall be disappointed. How shall we reconcile "And Death shall have no dominion~'. with "After the first death, there is no other ".
He sounds conventional. but he is not serious, The latter line from "A Refusal to Mourn'' is characteristically ambiguous. The assertion "And death shall have no dominion" asks for the impossible, at least to a sceptic or agnostic reader. The irony and pathos is tragic. In the first stanza, the poet asserts that the dead will be recreated on the Judgement Day. They will.be joined to the wind and stars in a united Creation"
In the second stanza, the rise of the martyrs from the dead is described. They were tortured in their lifetime and might have lost faith ("Faith in their hands shall snap in two"). The world of the early poetry of Thomas was described by Elder Olson as tragic, not melodramatic. Is this poem serious enough to have a tragic tone?. The faith in resurrection may not be unwavering, but a line likc "brake in the sun till the sun breaks down" expresses it forcefully.
Poem in October
Notice
(1) That the poet celebrates his own birthday,
(2) That birth, life and death are simultaneously present in his imagination and
(3) that the urge to transcend time and defeat death in art or poetry is intense and paramount. The last line of this poem is memorable and passes Matthew Arnold's touchstone' method of test.
The other birthday poems by the poet were written
(1) on his twentieth birthday and
(2) on his thirty fifth. Thus, in chronological order, the poems are as follows:
1. Especially when The October Wind (20* birthday)
2. 'Twenty-Four Years Remind The Tears of My eyes",-(24'~ B'day)
3. "Poem in October" (30'~ B'Day)
4. "Poem On His Birthday" (35th B'Day)
Fern Hill
Fern Hill", the poem, derives its title from the name of a fann which was the home of the poet's aunt, Anne Jones, whose death he mourned in an earlier poein,h.After the Funeral". In "Fern Hill'' the poet remembers the happy holidays he spent there away from Swansea, and idealises the excitement and innocence of childhood. He succeeds in communicating the exhilaration which he fclt as a child.'
Bough - main branch of the tree
Lilt - a characteristic rising and falling of the voice when speaking; a pleasant gentle accent.
Dingle - deep wooded valley or dell.
Heyday - the period of a person's or thing's greatest success, popularity, activity, or vigour.
A windfall is a large, and many times unexpected, financial gain—often the result of an inheritance, lawsuit settlement, property sale, salary bonus, or even a winning lottery ticket.
Nightjars - any of a family (Caprimulgidae) of medium-sized long-winged crepuscular or nocturnal birds (such as the whip-poor-wills and nighthawks) having a short bill, short legs, and soft mottled plumage and feeding on insects which they catch on the wing.
Whinnying - (of a horse) make a whinny.
A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A CHILD IN LONDON
The poet is saying that never, until the end of the world and the final return of all things to their original elements, will distort the mourning of the child's death by mourning. One dies but once, and through that death, becomes reunited with the timeless unity of things.
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