Happy birthday, Dylan Thomas!

This Friday, October 27, would have been Dylan Thomas’ 109th birthday, and although the Welsh poet lived barely 39 of those years, his words and spirit changed my life. I was not even born when he died in New York in November 1953 under mysterious circumstances. He’s still with me, such as in the Spring when the trees and flowers come to life, and these words emerge:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Rock-god popularity

I emerged from my education without knowing who I was or what I wanted to do. But I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas. He was on all the syllabuses of modern English poetry courses. Still, he enjoyed a kind of Rock God popularity in his day wherever he went. Everyone knew him as the author of a handful of well-loved poems quoted from to this day:

His poems were rich, musical, suffused with nature, and sometimes morose. They were invigorating, even though many escaped my understanding. I memorized several, sang them to myself at night, recited them to girlfriends, bellowed them out at the pub.

I wrote Thomas-styled poems, which, if ever unearthed from history, would provoke gales of laughter, crushing embarrassment from me.

My craft or sullen art

I didn’t really want to be Dylan Thomas. Still, I fancied myself some bard-genius in his image, misunderstood by society, under-confident, unappreciated, and yet utterly committed to “my craft or sullen art.”

Not knowing what to do with myself, I took jobs driving taxi, working in the circulation department of the Vancouver Province, tried and fumbled my way into the world of freelance magazine writing.

I wrote a feature article for a local newspaper about Dylan Thomas’ two trips to Vancouver in 1950 and 1952. It took me ages to write; it involved a lot of original research, tracking down the people he stayed with and places where he read his poetry. I even corresponded with one of his biographers, John Malcolm Brinnin, and received a kind note from Earle Birney (footnote), One of Canada’s greatest poets, novelists and winner of two Governor General’s Awards(/footnote), saying he could remember little of his interactions with Mr. Thomas.

A handsome hell-hole

Thomas’ trips here were just a few days each, short stops on cross-country reading tours. He did not like the city, calling it provincial, stuffy British. Thomas wrote to his wife, Caitlin, that Vancouver was a “handsome hell-hole.” He did not hear his muse there, obviously.

When my article appeared in the paper, it had been drastically edited. I wondered why the newspaper had run the article at all. The editor, formerly a sports reporter, had clearly not appreciated the significance of Thomas’ visit to Vancouver, one of the great literary icons of the language, to Vancouver.

The city at the time was indeed provincial, and the local press were more interested in his legendary boozing exploits than in his poetry.

Legendary boozing exploits

There were readings at the University of British Columbia and CBC recordings at the Hotel Vancouver, such as “The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait,” a superb example of his evocative sing-song voice.

He met with local writers and artists, including Malcolm Lowry, the great English novelist and author of Under the Volcano. 1.

The article that finally appeared did not have my “byline,” but I was still paid the $50 I had contracted for. I was disappointed and knew I had laboured too long over the sketchy details. I tried to make too much out of the poet’s couple of uneventful visits to the city.

Nor was the editor fond of the poetic references I scattered throughout the piece. He was more interested in touchdowns and Hail Mary passes. My editor might have been impressed if Thomas had made debauched pub crawls through Vancouver’s underbelly. But there was nothing there.

Despondent in the graveyard

Two years later, I took my first wife, Anne, to Swansea, where Thomas grew up. We took the train to Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, on the south coast of Wales, the little village where the adult Dylan Thomas lived with his wife and three children.

There is a picture of Anne sitting in the Laugharne graveyard where Thomas is buried. She looks pretty despondent beside the simple white cross that marks his grave. On the train back to London, Anne put her foot down. No more graveyards or Medieval churches, she said. Instead, more pubs, more fun, more cities, more shopping.

She majored in English but was done with Dylan Thomas, John Keats, Westminster Abbey, the trail of William Wordsworth and the Lake District. The whole thing!

Her words flew

In Anne’s clearest moments, she was a truth-teller. And her words flew as the train wound its way through Bristol and the Oxfordshire countryside. She was right, of course, that there was more to life than dead poets and graveyards. And I had been living too much among them, their immortal lines of poetry flying around my head like airplane banners.

I’d been too eager to see England/Scotland/Wales’ long history instead of the rich here and now. Anne had been indulging me, and she wanted us to move on. She may not have intended to make it an indictment of my “poetic soul,” but that is what I heard. And before we’d pulled into Waterloo Station, I’d decided I wouldn’t think so much about being a bard-genius anymore.

What was I going to think about instead? That was the next long journey!

A quiet estuary

Standing next to the little writing shed in Laugharne where Thomas wrote some of his great poems, I could see the house where he, Caitlin and their three children lived. It’s built over a quiet estuary and teeming with wildlife: herons, cormorants, gulls, hawks and otters.

One of my favourite Thomas poems describes this beautiful landscape from the shed. It weaves into his description one of his most common themes: the interplay of life and death. It was written for his 35th birthday.

(If you wish, you can listen to Thomas’ own sonorous voice read “Poem on His Birthday” while following the words appearing below.)

Poem on His Birthday

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river’s robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked.
Steered by the falling stars.
And tomorrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true.
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the wood
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars’ seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold
Be at cloud quaking peace.

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketting wind will blow
The bones out of ihe hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons’ vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
Towards death, rough through the sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults,
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle the wild world then
With more triumphant faith
Than ever was since the world was said
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands. Oh,
Holier then their eyes
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.

From Dylan Thomas: The Poems, published by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1971
Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1956, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1971, 1977 The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas.

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