Discovering Dylan Thomas

A Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems

John Goodby

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783169658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Discovering Dylan Thomas is a companion to Dylan Thomas's published and notebook poems. It includes hitherto-unseen material contained in the recently-discovered fifth notebook, alongside poems, drafts and critical material including summaries of the critical reception of individual poems. The introductory essay considers the task of editing and annotating Thomas, the reception of the Collected Poems and the state of the Dylan Thomas industry, and the nature of Thomas's reading, 'influences', allusions and intertextuality. It is followed by supplementary poems, including juvenilia and the notebook poems 'The Woman Speaks', original versions of 'Grief thief of time' and 'I fellowed sleep', and 'Jack of Christ', all of which were omitted from the Collected Poems. These are followed by annotations beginning with a discussion of Thomas's juvenilia, and the relationship between plagiarism and parody in his work; poem-by-poem entries offer glosses, new material from the fifth notebook, critical histories for each poem, and variants of poems such as 'Holy Spring' and 'On a Wedding Anniversary' (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of 'A Refusal to Mourn'). The closing appendices deal with text and publication details for the collections Thomas published in his lifetime, the provenance and contents of the fifth notebook, and errata for the hardback edition of the Collected Poems.

PART II

Annotations, versions and drafts

* Indicates a poem in the supplementary poems section

Juvenilia: a note on plagiarism, parody, and finding a style

In a draft of his radio talk ‘How to be a Poet’, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Dylan Thomas whimsically refers to ‘the career upon which I embarked at the age of seven and a half (writing, as I fail to recall, a quarrelsome poem with the title of They Are All Wrong).’ That first effort has not survived, but many pre-notebook poems have. The earliest are either comic verse or on conventional subjects: romantic and nature lyrics, elegies for the First World War dead. Evidence of a talent for versifying and mimicry, they say very little about the direction Thomas’s poetry was to take. At some stage – perhaps when he was thirteen or fourteen – he appears to have sent a batch of such poems to Robert Graves, who recalled, much later: ‘I wrote back that they were irreproachable, but that he would eventually learn to dislike them... Even experts would have been deceived by the virtuosity of Dylan Thomas’s conventional, and wholly artificial, early poems’ (Graves, 1955).

The young Dylan’s main outlet at this point was the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, which had published his ‘The Song of the Mischievous Dog’ in December 1925, at the end of his first school term. I have included in the Supplementary poems section two of the best poems he published there, ‘Forest picture’ and ‘Idyll of unforgetfulness’. Like many of his early poems, the second of these was set to music by his best friend of his school years, Daniel Jones, the ‘Dan’ of the short story, ‘The Fight’. A year older than him, and equally precocious, Jones was a crucial influence on Thomas’s poetry, broadening his grasp of modernist art and music as well as literature, and encouraging him to experiment. The two collaborated in musical-literary schemes, including radio ‘broadcasts’ at ‘Warmley’, the Jones family home, and wrote plays, songs, stories and poems together (Jones TP71). Three notebooks of these lyrics and an illustrated playlet ‘Bismuth’, known collectively as the ‘Walter Bram’ notebooks after a joke character invented by the pair (‘Bram’ is the Welsh for ‘fart’), are also held at Austin, along with numerous other items on individual sheets and scraps of paper.

The poems in the notebooks, in Jones’s handwriting, are in sub-imagistic, consciously precious styles, and might be considered the flipside to Thomas’s ‘public’ poems of the time, a reaction against conventional style producing another, more hermetic one. However, it is impossible to determine the extent of Thomas’s authorship, as opposed to Jones’s, in any of this material, and consequently I do not include any examples here. Among the loose items in the Austin archive there are also a number of very short pieces made up of disjunctive lines alternately supplied by the pair, suggestive of the surrealist cadavre exquis technique.

From around the time he met Daniel Jones, at the age of eleven, Thomas seems to have tried to develop a modern poetic style of his own – that is, before starting the first of the Buffalo notebooks in April 1930, which can be said to mark a formal commencement of this quest. For several years an imagist-modernist vein of work co-existed with the already-established one of conventional verse aimed at family and friends other than Jones. Thomas probably became increasingly exasperated by the latter, sometimes having to write it to order, even as he was unwilling to quite say farewell to it (his final contribution to the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, for example, came as late as 1931, after he had left school).

This behaviour, it seems to me, has some bearing on the plagiarism of which he was guilty in early adolescence. As we now know, several of the poems he wrote out, and at least two he either had published, or tried to publish, were not his own. ‘His Requiem’ appeared under Thomas’s name in the ‘Wales Day by Day’ column of the Western Mail on 14 January 1927, and is mentioned in ‘The Fight’. However, it was identified as being the work of Lillian Gard (who had published it in The Boys’ Own Paper in November 1923) when it was republished in The Poems in 1971, nearly fifty years later. The theft is an ‘act of stealth’ to which Thomas virtually confesses in the story itself (that ‘stolen quill’):

On my bedroom walls were pictures of Shakespeare, Walter de la Mare torn from my father’s Christmas Bookman, Robert Browning, Stacy Aumonier, Rupert Brooke, a bearded man who I had discovered was Whittier, Watt’s ‘Hope’, and a Sunday school certificate I was ashamed to want to pull down. A poem I had printed in the ‘Wales Day by Day’ column of the Western Mail was pasted on the mirror to make me blush, but the shame of the poem had died. Across the poem I had written, with a stolen quill and in flourishes: ‘Homer Nods’ (CS, 160–1).

Since then, it has also come to light that ‘Sometimes’, a poem Thomas tried to pass off on the school magazine, was rejected because its editor recognised it as being the work of a minor versifier, Thomas S. Jones. In the light of these revelations, it seems to me that two other poems published under his name in 1927, ‘The Second Best’, which appeared in The Boy’s Own Paper in February, and ‘If the Gods had but given’, published in the Western Mail in July 1927, with their stale language and trite sentiments, should also be considered suspect.

Other, unpublished, autograph poems in the Thomas archive at Austin have been shown to be by other poets, among them, as Jeff Towns notes, ‘It can be done’ and ‘The Secret Whisky Cure’ (Ellis, 2014). As in other cases, Thomas made small alterations to the poems to make detection more difficult. Another poem in the same Austin group, ‘La Danseuse’, transcribed in Florence Thomas’s handwriting, and with margin corrections by D. J. Thomas (suggesting that Thomas had at least convinced his parents it was his own work), was recently identified by Charles Mundye as the work of the minor Edwardian versifier James Allan Mackereth (Mundye, 2015).

What does this tell us? Only the very few who are pathologically determined to depict Thomas as a charlatan would claim that these youthful thefts cast a shadow over his poetic achievement. And yet, of course, like the reversion to notebook poems in the late 1930s, they do say something about him. The most obvious thing, of course, is the sheer urgency of his desire to write and be recognised. But more interestingly, the urgency can be said to point to Thomas’s liminal, outsider situation – Anglo-Welsh, between languages, rural and urban worlds, working- and lower-middle-classes, piety and atheism, and lacking a university education – and the tactics he adopted not so much to overcome these qualities (in the usual margins-to-centre way) but to make them advantages rather than disadvantages. In particular, we need to consider the role of subversion and provo-cation in his forging (both senses) of a writing self and style, and in shaping his dealings with literary authority. It is revealing that one of the most striking aspects of his ‘plagiarism’ is the sheer badness of the poems Thomas used – his own better poems of the time (such as ‘Forest picture’ and ‘Idyll of forgetfulness’) being more striking and original than those he purloined. Was he, then, playing a game of amusing himself by exposing the bad taste of authority, on the sly, and for his own purely personal satisfaction? Perhaps, though it is worth remembering that the conventional poems Thomas wrote in this period (1925–31) often read as pastiches or parodies – and, like the more sophisticated efforts in The Death of the King’s Canary, dating from around 1941, and ‘An old man or a young man’, written in the early nineteen fifties – it is difficult to tell whether they are homage or critique.

The fine line between original and copy is illustrated, however, by two poems of April 1930. In that month Thomas published the Yeats pastiche ‘In Borrowed Plumes’ in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine and entered a serious poem in his early Yeatsian manner, ‘Osiris, Come to Isis’, in the first of the Buffalo notebooks. In other words, it is not just that the equivocal response to a source reflects uncertainty towards the discourses of poetry and authorship; it is also that copying, imitating and creating go together. Each seems to have acted as a spur to the others – as if the mockery, pastiches and even thefts were a way Thomas had of stirring his own poetic activity while simultaneously negotiating with power, a youthful trickster’s registering of resistance, even as he strove for approbation, putting on a display to impress at the same time as he covertly cocked a snook at authority: parents, teachers, editors, writers, critics, publishers. The tongue-in-cheek denial of a knowledge of surrealism to Richard Church in 1936, for example, like the red herrings served up to naïve enquirers after the meanings of his poems throughout his life, seems like an adult continuation of this behaviour. More to the point, it is at least arguable that the tension between real and fake, and different notions of ‘sincerity’, is enacted in the teasingly indeterminate intertextuality of the process style by which he discovered his individual poetic ‘voice’ in 1933–4.

* Forest picture

Early 1928; published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, March 1928, p. 19, collected TP71. Occasional dated Romantic vocabulary (‘carven’, ‘Hark!’) and general mise-en-scène apart, this piece is impressive in the clarity of its description and argument, qualities enhanced by avoidance of end-rhyme, telling enjambement at l. 9 and the mature phrasing of l. 6.

* Idyll of unforgetfulness

Written, according to Daniel Jones, in February 1929; published Swansea Grammar School Magazine, March 1929, pp. 15–16. Collected in TP71, p. 221, with Jones’s note: ‘Musical setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra.’ ‘Idyll’ may have been written specifically for such a setting; it shows the influence of the Imagistes and Edwardian exoticists like Flecker, and owes something of its languorous mood and textures to Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. The verbal music is rich, and the handling of complex syntax and irregular line-length impressive for a fourteen year-old.

* In Borrowed Plumes; II. W. B. Yeats

Published in Swansea Grammar School Magazine, April 1930. Collected in Maud (1989), but not TP71. Maud notes: ‘This imitation of W. B. Yeats’ early style was the second of two parodies on the theme of “Little Miss Muffet”. The first told of the intrusion of the spider as Ella Wheeler Wilcox might have handled it’ (Maud, 1989, 233).

Poems from ‘The Fight’

First published in the short story ‘The Fight’, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), these three lyrics are collected by Maud (1989) in the ‘Early Rhymed Verse’ section of his edition of the first four notebooks, where they are dated ‘c. 1930’. The story is Thomas’s comic account of his first meeting with Daniel Jones, and details their early adolescent precocity. Like the other stories in the collection, however, it also has the serious purpose of critiquing the affectations of his younger self; as Maud rightly notes, ‘There is a slight tone of self-mockery in the way [the poems] are brought into the story, and we cannot be absolutely certain that the titles and the poems themselves were not made up later, expressly for the story.’ All three of the poems serve critique and ‘self-mockery’ in some way (‘Warp’, for example, describes ‘parhelions’ with portentous elaboration, picking on a thesaurus-word which we know to have been one of Thomas’s favourites as an adolescent).

In including these poems in CP14 I was fully aware that it was quite possible that the twenty-four-year-old Thomas tampered with the originals, assuming these to have existed. Their inclusion and placement seemed inappropriate, as a result, to one reviewer of CP14, but he missed the point that while these lyrics – unlike ‘Forest Picture’ and ‘Idyll of Forgetfulness’ – may be doctored, even faked, they represent perfectly the importance of hybridity and game-playing to Thomas’s work, then and subsequently, and thereby problematise the simplistic notions of originality, sincerity and self-expression by which discussions of it have been dogged.

To-day, this hour I breathe

As might be expected of the source for ‘To-day, this insect’ (1936), this is a poem about the act of writing and its paradoxes, the differences and similarities between space and time, the division between empirical sense-evidence and faith (‘sight and trust’), and the idea that certainty is uncertain (‘a fable’) – all major subjects in Thomas’s mature poetry. Paradox is symbolised by an aircraft that flies despite being made of ‘iron’ (Thomas may have been thinking of the famous ‘Spirit of St. Louis’, flown by Charles Lindbergh on the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, one of the first all-metal frame aircraf...