Tag Archives: Dylan Thomas

(R)udderless

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There is an equivalence between the word, rudderless – and udderless. At least for me. You too?

A good-enough mother is, according to Donald Winnicott, necessary to bring an infant across in to the material world. Maternal reverie – the wondering loving reflection of mother to child – helps us to bear the pain of separation. Allows us to feel our new formed human edges and face this life’s loneliness.

Without this service from someone we would be lost – as those Romanian orphans. Remember those agonising images? Of the children abandoned by Ceaucescu’s communist state?

Anyway. I have been lucky to be one of those to have had a good-enough mother. She blessed me with a taste of the love that drives the universe – Dylan Thomas’ “green fuse”. It’s surely up to me and others to try to pass that on. (It is my ego that trips me up)

The Void, life and all that

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When I was a small blonde child I had a nightmare about the void. Utter non existence. Dylan Thomas’ poem about his fathers death, “..rage against the dying of the light” holds that place for and to me.

In February this year, sixty years later I had a cycle accident. The “I”, that is to say – me.. well, it just blinked out. I was rebooted in an ambulance some hours later. I remember nothing of the time or even how the accident happened. Where did I go? Was I meanwhile in that void? I believe my ego simply ceased – being a confection of the brain. But that something – an essence continued. (As do our atoms and our effect also). It seems to me that we fade to white, not to black. That we rejoin our real life which is co-rooted in some different way, place and dimension. This after the separations loneliness and pains of this materialistic world. Indeed that this, here and now is the nightmare, not the return beyond death to our intermingling.

Something like “Life’s a bitch but then you die”.

The purpose of this moment of lonely and fragmented consciousness? Maybe simply to witness the glory of the universe in some way – then to help bring the whole to consciousness of the love the underlies all that is.

My answer to Dylan Thomas’ poem about death? ..

Rather than “ Do not go gentle into that good night..” it should be

“Let us go gentle into that good light, Old age should turn to brave the close of day; Courage guag’d against the flighting of its wight”

Poem in October

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Dylan Thomas

For reading click here .. poem in october – dylan thomas

“the mussel pooled and heron Priested shore”

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Fern Hill

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Dylan Thomas

.. click here to hear reading fern hill

“The night above the dingle starry”

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

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.

The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie’s farm:

In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoralmetaphors and allusion to Eden. 

By the end, the poet’s older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:

The poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the effect of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but “his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence..”

Fern Hill

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Dylan Thomas

.. click link below to hear reading

fern hill

The poem starts as a straightforward evocation of his childhood visits to his Aunt Annie’s farm:

In the middle section, the idyllic scene is expanded upon, reinforced by the lilting rhythm of the poem, the dreamlike, pastoralmetaphors and allusion to Eden. 

By the end, the poet’s older voice has taken over, mourning his lost youth with echoes of the opening:

The poem uses internal half rhyme and full rhyme as well as end rhyme. Thomas was very conscious of the effect of spoken or intoned verse and explored the potentialities of sound and rhythm, in a manner reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He always denied having conscious knowledge of Welsh, but “his lines chime with internal consonantal correspondence..”