Debonair,
He leant against the bar till his cigarette
Became one stream of ash sustained in air
— Louis MacNeice, Autumn Sequel
There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.
— Dylan Thomas, “Wales and the Artist”
Dylan Thomas once said of his preoccupation with birth and death that he was a “womb-tomb poet”. Seventy years ago this week, aged 39, he crossed that hyphen in a hospital in New York.
He is almost certainly the only poet to have a plaque put up to him by a record company. Caedmon Records was started by two friends, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, who recorded Thomas reading in New York in 1952. The vinyl LPs of his sumptuous voice sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
One of the many friends who mourned Thomas was Louis MacNeice, who had begun his long poem Autumn Sequel in the autumn of 1963 (see last week’s post). Thomas becomes “Gwilym” in the book, and MacNeice attends his funeral in Wales, wearing the same shoes that he bought to go to W.B. Yeats’ funeral in the company of Thomas. Here are his reflections as he walks from the grave to the wake:
And here are two of the great Tâf estuary poems that MacNeice is thinking of: Poem in October / Over St. John’s Hill
I suspect it would be hard to find a mid-to-late twentieth-century Anglophone poet who wasn’t influenced by Thomas, even if that influence was eventually forgotten or disavowed. I once suggested that the late R.F. Langley’s wonderful poem “After the Funeral” was an allusion to Thomas’ poem of the same name, underlining the quietness of his elegy for his aunt Pauline (“Nothing slabbered about Pauline's death. Some / details will rustle about”) compared to the priestly boom of Thomas’s grief for his aunt Ann Jones (“I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all / The seas to service”). Langley read the review and told me that he hadn’t had Thomas in mind — but I have since read unpublished early Langley poems which show that Thomas was once formative for him, as for so many others. As Denise Riley says
One inescapable and deeply disconcerting effect of writing is such unwanted intrusions. Your own automatic “intertextuality” […] drives you spare.
One of the most illuminating tributes that I know to Thomas by a contemporary poet is Paul Muldoon’s introductory essay to the 2010 New Directions reprint of The Collected Poems, “Dylan and Delayment”. It dissects the first stanza of “Fern Hill” (1945), a poem about the happy time Thomas spent as a child on Ann Jones’ farm:
Muldoon comments:
A kind of technical delayment, or witholding, […] is at the heart of Dylan Thomas’s formal method.
[An] example of this may be found in the term “heydays” in stanza 1, which anticipates the days spent making “hay”, both the subjects of stanzas 3 and 5. Such punning, which is itself another form of delayment […] where one meaning of a word intervenes before another, may be found in a word like “lilting”, which rather neatly combines the sense of a house in which one might hear someone “sing cheerfully and merrily” (OED) as well as a house that is “tilting”. A more conventional form of punning is available in the word “down,” which extends to both the senses of “descending direction” and “any substance of a feathery or fluffy nature” such as that one might find on barley, the word with which it is violently enjambed.
And perhaps there is a third meaning haunting the word “Down” as it appears at the end of this first stanza too: “a gently rolling hill”. “Barley Down” and “Fern Hill” might both be places on a map of imagined farmland.
Memories of Thomas as a talker and performer often emphasise how funny he was. A young Philip Larkin, reporting on a reading at the Oxford University English Club in 1941, remembered
a hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices
— including one of Stephen Spender, “which had people rolling on the floor”.
I have a feeling that a parody of Stephen Spender is less likely to amuse these days. But here is something that did make me smile: Thomas introducing some of his last poems on BBC radio, with a mocking eye for the pomposity of fine press editions:
“In Country Sleep” appeared […] in a limited edition, ten copies of which are on vellum, available only to the rich who should be spending what is left of their time slimming for the eye of the needle.
[…]
“In the White Giant’s Thigh” is in manuscript, waiting for someone who prints strikingly few copies, at impossible prices, on fine soft Cashmere goat’s hair.
The last poem in Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems is an unfinished elegy for his father. Thomas’ friend, the poet Vernon Watkins, ingeniously attempted to reconstruct a longer version of it by using the terza rima rhyme scheme (aba bcb etc — the same form as MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel) to slot together unused lines from Thomas’ drafts. Here, instead, I give the unpolished text as printed in the centenary edition of The Collected Poems (2014), edited by John Goodby. The imperfect rhyme scheme, the muted images and diction, the subtle “delayment” (to use Muldoon’s term) of “saw / unseeing / sea” in the final tercet are all moving features of this deathbed poem, which deserves to be better known.
NOTES
You can read my post on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel and terza rima here: