Study Guide to the Major Poems by Dylan Thomas

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Aides à l'étude
• Subtopic: Guides d'étude

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Dylan Thomas, popular Welsh poet in the twentieth- century. Titles in this study guide include The Map of Love, Once Below A Time, In Country Sleep, and Death and Entrances. As a poet of the modernist movement, Thomas' work included themes of religion, innocence, and the human awareness of experience. Moreover, he utilized literary devices to captivate his audience, such as alliteration, internal rhyme, sprung rhythm, and was even noted as a skilled writer of prose poetry. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Thomas' classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO DYLAN THOMAS

DYLAN THOMAS’ LIFE

Youth (1914-1936). Dylan Marlais Thomas first screamed at the light of life in Swansea, Wales, on October 22, 1914, the son of a teacher of English in a grammar school. He attended the Swansea Grammar School from 1925 to 1931, which was the only formal education he had except the liberty to read whatever he wanted in his father’s library. He was an editor of the Swansea Grammar School Magazine for his last two years of school and published in it twenty-seven poems, two short stories, two essays, and various parodies and notes. His early schoolboy poems also appeared in the Western Mail and the Boys Own Paper. After graduation he worked on the staff of the South Wales Daily Post for a year. During the first four years of the 1930’s he continued to write verse, keeping them in notebooks which are now in the Lockwood Library of the University of Buffalo. Dylan Thomas gave up hack journalism in January, 1933, and in February won the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Competition with “The Romantic Isle,” a poem which is no longer extant. May 18th saw the first London publication of one of his poems, “And death shall have no dominion,” in the New English Weekly. He also published verse between 1933 and 1934 in Adelphi, Sunday Referee, Listener, and New Verse. In November, 1934, he moved to London to learn the poet’s craft, beginning his “bohemian” life against the tyranny of respectability and propriety.

On December 18, 1934, when Thomas was twenty years old, 18 Poems was published in London by the Sunday Referee and the Parton Bookshop, where it caused a great deal of excitement because of its obscurity and violent imagery. Included in this volume were “I See the Boys of Summer,” “If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love,” “Especially When the October Wind.” These eighteen poems concern personal problems - sexual and poetic creation - and the ubiquitous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Between December of 1935 and the following February, Thomas was back in Swansea, preparing the manuscript for his Twenty-five Poems, which was published in London by J. M. Dent and Son on September 10, 1936. This volume brought him more fame and enthusiastic praise from Edith Sitwell. Among the poems published in this volume were “Should Lanterns Shine,” “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” and the “Altar-wise By Owl-Light” sonnets. In these two volumes a multiplicity of ideas and emotions are put forth with a small vocabulary. Obscurity results, however, because words are repeated in a variety of nuances of sense and meaning, and because of the originality of his imagery and technique. From this period Thomas began to approach a religious feeling which would become more dominant in his later poetry.

Middle Period And War Years (1937-1946). Dylan Thomas married the beautiful Caitlin Macnamara in July, 1937, living mainly at Ringwood, Hants, until April, 1938. By July they settled in Laugharne, a small fishing village in South Wales. During this period Thomas was revising his early poetry and publishing verse and stories in several magazines. His first son, Llewelyn, was born in January, 1939, and Dylan’s themes expanded to reflect a feeling for others, the threat of war, and his family. On August 24, J. M. Dent and Son published his The Map of Love, containing sixteen poems and several stories. The stories are semi-surrealistic, his prose fleurs du mal, of little artistic value, but he subsequently abandoned the symbolic prose of his early stories and began to write stories of human beings living as he remembered as a child. Afterward, Thomas collected several stories and published them on April 4, 1940, in the comic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. During the war years he resided mostly in Wales, coming to London occasionally, writing poetry, short fiction and film scripts, and performing on the BBC as either an actor or a reader. On February 27, 1946 Deaths and Entrances was published by Dent. This edition contained twenty-four poems, mostly from 1939-1945, but included revisions of “The Hunchback in the Park” and “On the Marriage of a Virgin,” written in 1932 and 1933, respectively. In these later poems the symbolism has given place to metaphor. Much of his poetry became more straightforward and clear, his movement toward the light was accompanied by a simplification in style and loss of obscurity (for the most part). His themes expanded to include religious statements, childhood innocence, and a mature human awareness of experience.

Maturity (1947-1953). Thomas remained in London after the war, continuing his BBC Home Broadcasts, several of which were published in Quite Early One Morning (1955). During the summer of 1947 the Thomases went to Italy, returning to South Leigh, Oxford, in September. During this period Thomas wrote the film script, The Beach at Falesa. In April, 1949, they returned to Laugharne. Because of financial need, Dylan Thomas visited the United States three times on reading tours during the early 1950’s. Here he discovered Third Avenue and drank whiskey instead of his customary beer. After he returned from his first trip in May, 1951, he wrote “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” “Poem On His Birthday,” “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and “Lament,” which were published on February 28, 1952 in the book, In Country Sleep. In 1952 he wrote the “Author’s Prologue” to his preparation of the Collected Poems, which included all the poems that he wished to leave to the world. The Collected Poems was published by Dent on November 10, 1952, in the new order that Thomas had arranged and with his “Note” stating that the poems were written for the love of man and in praise of God. He returned to the United States in the spring of 1953 for the first performance of Under Milk Wood and again in the fall of the year. Thomas died suddenly in New York on November 9, 1953, from an attack of the delirium tremens brought on by his excessive drinking and bohemian way of life.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY

The Georgians (ca. 1912-1920’s) were a group of poets including John Drinkwater (1882-1937) and Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), who reacted against the affectations of late-Victorian poetry and attempted to make it more masculine. They followed A. E. Houseman’s bucolic return to nature and uncritically followed the spirit of Wordsworth’s lyrics. They echoed Wordsworth’s assurance in natural beauty and extended his confidence in the benign power of the country, ignoring and avoiding its uglier implications.

The War Poets, especially Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), a Welshman, were originally in the Georgian camp but later were influenced by the harsh realities of the Great War. Their poetry was pungent and biting, and Owens was fond of assonance and versatile in rhythm.

The Imagists (1915-1920’s) were contemporaneous with the Georgian movement, but they were primarily experimentalists. They were influenced by the critic, T. E. Hulme, who tried to apply to poetry Henri Bergson’s concept of time as a flow in the mind. An imagist poem was, therefore, an attempt to express the flow of experience in concrete terms. The imagists did away with decorative statements and used the language of common speech. They desired to present an “image” which evoked sensations that had a foundation in experience. Some important poets of this movement were Amy Lowell (1874-1925), Richard Aldington (1892-1962), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and Hilda Doolittle, “H. D.” (1886-1961).

T. S. Eliot (1888-1964) tried to fuse feeling and thought in his poetry. As a young man he put himself under the influence of the French Symbolists (late 19th century) and the English Metaphysical poets, correctly perceiving that the Metaphysical poets merged thought and feeling but not realizing that the French Symbolists abhorred the intellect in poetry and stressed feeling and sensuality. The younger poets of the day admired and imitated, not Eliot’s content and philosophy, but his technique. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) was a description of outward scenes which serve as symbols to illustrate the vacuity and frustration of our moribund civilization. “The Waste Land” (1922) was a diagnosis of the ills of society and a realization of the need for regeneration.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973) began publishing poetry characterized by disgust, cynicism and radicalism in the late 1920’s and 1930’s, in which he diagnosed modern life in terms of Freud and Marx. After World War II his poetry became more exuberant and contained, at times, religious hope, that is, he had a more religious view of personal responsibility and traditional values. Auden took his poetic “wit” and irony from Eliot, and his metrical and verbal techniques he learned from Hopkins and Owen. He was continually experimenting in combinations of a colloquial tone and technical formality, alternating the serious and the flippant.

DYLAN THOMAS’ STYLE

Language. Dylan Thomas’ poetic language is rich and resonant, powerfully compelling and convincing the reader by its sound before he can comprehend its meaning. He achieves this effect by the verbal play of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and the emphatic vocabulary of active, ordinary words. Thomas loved the sound of words, perhaps too greatly, and he continuously re-used words, but in new contexts and with new connotations. He would use ordinary words, expressions and phrases, change them subtly, and present a fresh, strong image requiring, however, careful analysis in order to realize its derivation and purpose. Professor Clark Emery (The World of Dylan Thomas) has examined Dylan Thomas’ language and found that Thomas has a working-vocabulary of about 3,600 words, most of them monosyllabic or short, relating to sense experience, and concerning the “areas of normal experience.”

Meter. Thomas’ meter is generally based on the number of stresses in a line rather than a sequence of stresses and slacks, although traditional meter can be found in Thomas. In the late Victorian period Gerard Manley Hopkins revived the use of “sprung rhythm” in poetry because he felt that the reader would receive more of the emotional charge of the poem by counting only the stresses instead of scanning a line according to stress and slack combinations.

INFLUENCES ON DYLAN THOMAS

Almost every critic has proclaimed at least one source for Dylan Thomas’ poetry, others naming so many that Thomas’ scholarship would have required more time than his creating poetry. The 18 Poems volume was acclaimed because it was something new, original, and full of life. Any alleged source for Thomas’ poetry is never a satisfactory answer for the pedant’s researches in the dry-as-dust graves of libraries. The closest one can come to tracing influences on Dylan Thomas is to observe certain superficial parallels which his poetry has (whether consciously or unconsciously) with other writings. Thomas did not, of course, write in a vacuum. He certainly knew what had been done before him, but he was the continuator of a progress and not a rehasher of poetic predecessors.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is often proclaimed as Thomas’ instructor in the techniques of Welsh poetry. Hopkins was interested in Welsh poetry and copied its techniques; he was interested in the flexibility of sprung rhythm and the general rising and falling movement it gave to a line; he saw natural beauty as a reflection of God; he used familiar words in startling contexts and combinations; and Hopkins was concerned with the theme of birth-death. All of these characteristics are also found in Thomas, but it is not likely that they derived from a close study of Hopkins. It is more probable that Thomas observed them in Hopkins and worked out the principles by himself.

James Joyce’s “influence” can be chiefly observed in Thomas’ short stories and in his obsession with portraits of the artist. Joyce’s verbal play and insight into a cyclic process in life was probably obtained by reading a few pages of “Work in Progress” as it appeared in transition (sic) magazine.

Freud. The average student of literature is apt to lump all sexual imagery under the catch-phrase “Freudian.” Freud’s interpretation of the sexual nature of dreams, however, is a realization of the suppressed desires of the conscious being worked out in the subconscious. The poet, on the other hand, is concerned with actively and consciously collecting, evaluating and creating images in a way that goes beyond the Freudian boundaries. A poem is a conscious and deliberate arrangement of words, and any “Freudian” elements in it are elements that have transcended Freud’s narrow preoccupations. Sexual symbolism and imagery were known and deliberately used as such thousands of years before Freud investigated sexual repressions. In addition, we have Thomas’ own statement in “Replies to an Enquiry” that he went beyond Freud’s limited hypothesis to achieve something deliberately poetic, howbeit sexual. But we are grateful to Freud for labelling what has been known and done since a thousand years before the Christian era.

DYLAN THOMAS AS A RELIGIOUS POET

In his “Note” to the Collected Poems Thomas wrote that his poems were written for the love of Man and in praise of God; he did not wish to be classified with the Biblical fool who says in his heart that there is no God. His vocation as a poet-creator was further identified as a concern for man and God in his poetry - a “justification of the ways of God to man,” in the Miltonic phrase. Yet his life and legend, his conversations and bohemian poses have made it difficult to consider Thomas as a religious poet.

Thomas’ father was an agnostic, and Thomas’ own Christianity, after compulsory Presbyterian Sunday School and chapel as a child, was neither orthodox nor reverent. Thomas broke away from organized Christianity, but his poetry progressed increasingly toward a personal treatment and concern for God in relation to Man. Thomas reacted against the conventions of Welsh bourgeois morality, yet for all the sexuality in his poems he remained basically puritan.

It is through his function, or “vocation,” as poet that Thomas can be considered a religious poet. “Should Lanterns Shine” (1932, rev. 1935) is an illustration of the emptiness and uselessness of a religious belief which can not withstand the light of reason. “I Have Longed to Move Away” (1933, rev. 1935) declares that Thomas desires to renounce the empty and ritualistic Christian religion, but he is afraid; yet, he does not wish to die hypocritically following a convention.

“This Bread I Break” (1933, rev. 1936) indicates that sacramental bread and wine were once part of nature. The flesh and blood of the Christ which are symbolized in the eucharist were once living members of nature. By destroying them, man participates in the sacramental communion of God, man and nature. In “Incarnate Devil” (1933, rev. 1936) Thomas attacks a weak and ineffectual God who has condemned sex as devilish and praised abstinence as divine. The “Altarwise By Owl-light” sonnets (1935) illustrate a movement from religious confusion to religious prophecy and apocalypse.

“The Spire Cranes” (1931, rev. 1937) attacks the dogmatism of organized religion which imprisons the free spirit, but the sound of church bells is able to escape the restraint of the steeple. “There Was a Saviour” (1940) is an attack on those who follow the form and letter of Christianity without following the spirit. The “Ballad of the Long-legged Bait” (1941) depicts the epic vanquishment of sinful lust by man’s own powers to sublimate his lust to a higher love. “Vision and Prayer” (1944) is a record of Thomas’ movement from lost darkness to found light, culminating in a prayer that he be absorbed into the wound of the Crucifixion. In “The Conversation of Prayer” (1945) the sincere, conversational type of prayer is granted but the ritualistic formula is not.

“In Country Sleep” (1947) proclaims that faith in a holy Nature will conquer the fears of childhood’s fantasies and of Death. “Over Sir John’s hill” (1948) praises the life and death process of Nature. “Poem On His Birthday” (1950) indicates that Thomas is arriving at a triumphant faith in the holiness of Nature and natural process. In the “Author’s Prologue” (1952) the poet, because of his love for man and God, desires to save all Nature from the flood of fear and rage by constructing poetical arks of love.

Dylan Thomas was not a holy priest or a saint but an earthy man in love with life and nature. He saw beyond the physical limits of existence to a personal relationship of poet and man with a Divine Creator. As a poet, Thomas was also a creator, and so he shared with God something beyond the domain of ordinary ...