Dylan Marlais Thomas.

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.

This poem was written in October 1933, close to the time when Thomas made his famous quote linking himself to nature saying that; ‘that the blood in my lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree’, this idea is continued in the second stanza:

The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

Throughout the poem Thomas lays a strong emphasis on the process of creation, relating it to the creation of his own body (Ackerman p67). In the last lines of these stanza’s Thomas express his pain in the fact that he can’t communicate to the natural world that he feels such a strong connection to it; his own blood and its link to the ‘mouthing streams’, his ageing to the natural ageing of ‘the roots of trees’.  

Here my point of; Thomas’s strong connection to the natural world is further proven by the analysis of John Ackerman on ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’: “It is not surprising that the relationship of his own body to the world of nature is a major preoccupation. While the first verse uses natural imagery of flowers and trees, the second of rocks and streams, the third begins with the imagery of water but moves to imagery of earth (‘quicksand’ while evoking life in ‘quick’, evokes death as in ‘sands of time’, and ‘clay’ is the bodies final identity) and wind. The dynamic ‘force’ that drives man and nature is now spoken of as ‘the hand’ that controls (‘ropes’) both the wind that blows about the world and the ship of death, so to speak, that the poet sails (‘my shroud sail’) in his mortality.”(John Ackerman p.79)

The hand that whirls the water in the pool

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man

How of my clay is made the hangman's lime

In the poem ‘Especially When The October Wind’ we see again the ties that Thomas had with man and the natural world, also intertwined in the themes of childhood innocence and sexuality. In this poem Thomas glorifies the life that he observes in Swansea with images of children playing in the park with their present innocence; “star-gestured children”, while also saying that they will not be innocent for long; “Of many thorny shire tell your notes”.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees

The wordy shapes of women, and the rows

Of the star-gestured children in the park.

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,

Some of the oaken voices, from the roots

Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,

Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

This theme of fading childhood innocence is also seen in the poem ‘Fern Hill’, where in the beginning line it sates:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

Using the biblical symbol of the apple to show innocence, and then in the last stanza stating that ageing is naturally breaking free of the ‘chains’ of innocence:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

          Time held me green and dying

     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Back to ‘Especially When The October Wind’ where Thomas refers to his heart as feminine, drawing out an underlying sexual subtext:

My busy heart who shudders as she talks

Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Here we see the influence of the religion on Thomas, as we see a biblical reference to sexuality being a sin, while at the same time calling it natural:

Behind a post of ferns the wagging clock

Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning

Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning

And tells the windy weather in the cock.

Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;

The signal grass that tells me all I know

Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.

Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

In September 1933 while the work for 18 Poems was being written, Thomas was starting to correspond with a woman by the name of Pamela Hansford Johnson, who had contacted him after reading some of his work in the London newspaper The Sunday Referee. Frequent letters between the two made them feel quite close, and when they finally did meet in February 1934, they spent a night together drinking at Ms. Johnson’s house, feeling instantly comfortable around each other. Thomas and Johnson held a steady relationship with one another for two years (inspiring the sexual references often found the 18 Poems) until it finally ended when Johnson became tired of the thoughtless and unreliable side of Thomas. Thomas was now living in London pursuing publishers, when in December 1934, 18 Poems was finally published.

Sexuality is a major theme that is explored by Dylan Thomas throughout his works. We see this theme emerge in such works as: ‘If I Were Tickled By The Rub Of Love’, ‘My Hero Bares His Nerves’, ‘Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines’, ‘early notebooks’, and ‘Twenty-four Years’. Many of Thomas’s early poems revolve around sexual themes, either in a romantic sense or directly sexual. An early poem entitled ‘Cabaret’ written when Thomas was just sixteen years old shows the romantic sexuality of Thomas’s writing:

I poor romantic, held her heel

Upon the island of my palm,

And saw towards her tiny face

Going her glistering calves that minute.

There was a purpose in her pointed foot;

Her thighs and underclothes were sweet,

And drew my spiral breath…

The band was playing on the balcony.

In this poem we see the romantic sexuality of Dylan Thomas, where he is with a girl and he is explaining the experience and feeling that he sees in her pleasure. He is focused on her feelings, rather than of his own as seen in ‘My Hero Bares His Nerves’:

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rules from wrist to shoulder,

Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

Leans on my mortal ruler,

The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

This is a poem taken from 18 Poems; at first glance it is about internal growth and confidence, or so I thought. Until I was corrected by the literary criticism of John Ackerman where he states: “Initially a more obscure poem, until we realize its theme is masturbation, perhaps not a surprising preoccupation in a sexually and poetically precocious adolescent boy, for the themes of sexual love and poetic inspiration from the subtext that emerges in the second stanza”.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper

I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

That utters all love hunger

And tells the page the empty ill.

The poem goes from his own body (masturbation), to his fantasy of love, although natural to the human body, Thomas feels alone; as in religion, sexuality is seen as a sin.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread; like a naked Venus,

The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

Stripping my loin of promise,

He promises a secret heart.

My point is further proven through Ackerman where he writes: “In the final stanza the phallus is referred to as ‘wire’, a more commonplace term than ‘hero’; celebrating the sexual activity with physical and religious ambiguities (two ‘knaves of thieves’ clearly referring both to the testicles and the two thieves crucified alongside Christ – who came to redeem man from death, the ‘mortal error’). (John Ackerman p73)

Another poem that shows a sexual theme in a religious shadow is ‘If I Were Tickled By The Rub Of Love’. This poem is a blatantly a sexual one, its underlying meaning though is one of religious conscience. In the opening stanza Thomas says that he could believe in sexual love and not fear the religious morality revolving around it:

If I were tickled by the rub of love,

A rooking girl who stole me for her side,

Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,

If the red tickle as the cattle calve

Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,

I would not fear the apple nor the flood

Nor the bad blood of spring.

        In these lines Thomas talks about taking a girls virginity; ‘Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string/ If the red tickle as the cattle calve’. He goes onto say that he would discard the religious morality to enjoy himself and to indulge in a world of sexual intimacy; ‘Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung/ I would not fear the apple nor the flood’. Thomas was raised in a religious house, being taught at a young age that sexual desires were sins along with anything that had to do with them; this is why Thomas writes about the subject like he does. As seen in the third stanza when he refers to ‘the devil in the loin’:

I would not fear the muscling-in of love

If I were tickled by the urchin hungers

Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.

I would not fear the devil in the loin

Nor the outspoken grave.

        Here Thomas talks about masturbation ‘the devil in the loin’, referring to his penis, and how his connection to nature is stronger than his connection with religion (because he is not afraid). “The phrase ‘the devil in the loin’, again associates the ideas of sex and sin, while ‘the outspoken grave’, everywhere announcing its victory”(John Ackerman p89)

        Thomas’s sexual thought is surrounded by the guilt of religion as seen in the previous poems, here in the poem called ‘Twenty-four Years’ we see the introduction of a new weariness of sexuality; death. “Thomas immerses himself in the ‘Freudian’ theme of the all-pervasive sexuality of existence and the implacable death drive that is the maggot within it.”(encyclopedia of poetic analysis)

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.

(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)

In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor

Sewing a shroud for a journey

By the light of the meat-eating sun.

Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

With my red veins full of money,

In the final direction of the elementary town

I advance as long as forever is.

In this short but powerful poem, Thomas puts forth to the reader the thought that birth is just the beginning of death. The character in the poem is twenty-four and is reflecting back on his birthday, seeing it not as a celebration but as a murderous act; ‘Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour’, this line talks of life as nothing but a ‘walk to the grave’.  The thought that when one is born they walk through life awaiting to die at any moment, and life is nothing but this, one can see evidence of this in the lines;  ‘Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun’ and ‘I advance as long as forever is’.

        As one can see from reading the poems of Dylan Thomas he was, one could say ‘obsessed’ with death. Death along with nature were intertwined themes reflecting each other throughout his works. “Thomas places birth and death at the poles of his vision. His viewpoint is at once individual and universal – ‘I’ is also, and without transition, ‘man’ and man is microcosmic. The individual birth, therefore, abuts immediately upon the cosmic genesis death, upon cosmic catastrophe. Seen thus absolutely, however, birth and death are instantaneous; time is, equally, timeless; so that human life is mortal and immortal, flesh has its ghostly counterpart; though the relationship of each in enigmatic” (encyclopedia of poetic analysis).

        In April of 1936 Thomas met a girl by the name of Caitlin Macnamara, the two began living together after five consecutive days drinking companionship, and within a year the two were married. The couples first child; Llewelyn Edouard, was born on January 30th, 1939, and during this time Thomas had started to record radio broadcasts over the BBC which got him recognized as a highly acclaimed poet in the United States. In 1946 Thomas published ‘Deaths and Entrances’, this book exploded Thomas’s national popularity, leading to his first tour to the US in 1950.    

The intertwined relationship between birth and death is seen heavily in the poem ‘Twenty-Four Years’ where the phenomenon of life is celebrated through sexuality. Furthermore this relationship is seen in the poem ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, which was published in 1936, in 25 Poems, where liberation from death is not through religion, since ‘Faith in their hands shall snap in two’, but through nature (Ackerman 89).

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

In this passage we see Thomas’s strong belief in man being unified with nature. In these lines we understand that though people may seem to be dead ‘though they sink through the sea’ they will ‘rise again’ meaning that they will live on through their original womb; the earth. Also the reference to spirit being separate from the body ‘though lovers be lost love shall not’ is seen in this line where the reader is to understand that eternal life exists in all of us and death is just the continuation of mortal life through nature, as seen in the last stanza of the poem ‘light Breaks Where No Sun Shines’ where we see poetic symbolism of spirit living on through nature:

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics die,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

        On the contrary, the poem ‘Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night’ written in 1951 for his dieing father, shows Thomas’s anger toward death:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In the first line of the poem Thomas is protesting death saying that one should ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, fight to stay alive until the very end, this interpretation taken from the title/first line of the poem where the phrase ‘good night’ is used as a symbol for death.

        The death of his father was a traumatizing experience for Thomas, and when an already heavy drinker took even more comfort with his lips to the bottle. Thomas eventually died of this comfort when on November 9th, 1953, Thomas died of an alcohol-induced coma at the age of 39.