POETRY OF DYLAN THOMAS
Tyler, Parker
Poetry of Dylan Thomas By Parker Tyler Is an Editor of View Magazine OURS U » day in which criticism of poetry runs to the empirical and tho documentary; the scholarly crossbred with the...
...We are the sons of flint and pilch...
...a peril of promiscuity, one might say...
...He calls the above-mentioned "wanting center" the "womb of war" from which issues the "momentary peace of a poem...
...We often applaud the daisllng performance, but it is a question of style as well as technique, assurance as well as success...
...Promiscuity is a possible coefficient of encyclopaedism...
...here again the sadistic pattern of love-hate...
...This is proven by a statement of the poet innocently quoted by Mr...
...The last line clinches the content of the poem as another sadistic pattern, this time mingling filial affection and hatred...
...This acceptance of certain imaginative systems (among others are the Dniidic a.ill the Egyptian) accounts for much of the poet's metaphoric structure, but not, of course, for the style that utilizes that structure...
...Thomas is closer, for eaample, to Cummings thsn he Is to the older, more "intellectual" men, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, and Pound...
...If, despite his feeling for supernaturalist ritusl, Thorns- cannot be called a religious poet, it is because modern knowledge (psychologies...
...Sweeney would nominate Thomas as a self-analyst exploring his own "inner darkness...
...Sweeney naively fails to notice in his analogy ol a stanza of Marvell's with one by Thomas is the crucial difference of tone which has effected an alien usage of Marvell's devices of the dove (the Holy Ghost) and the miracle of the manna...
...Does not the loved woman then seem like the Virgin...
...Only a fashion ot, literary criticism, engendered by Auden's dubious criticismwithin-poetry, could have induced Mr...
...The critical burden is neatly shifted to the broad back of the Vienna maestro...
...The theme of incest, as well as rivalry with and fear ot the father, receives constant amplification in Thomas' work...
...In the act of subjecting the separate experiences of sex, birth, and death to such high pressure as the poet does to fuse them, he arrives at a speed, altitude, and spatial graph that invites vertigo...
...Thus if Thomas is not authentically religious like Herbert, Kliot, and Donne, all of whom he equals in metaphysical sensibility, it is because he is also magical and takes a magical view of religion...
...Yet an insurgent tenderness, purely spiritual and as modern as the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, dictates many of Thomas' moods...
...Sweeney to delineate Thomas' position thus: e'bis interest in the reconstruction of the individual contrasted sharply with their interest (Auden's, Day Lewis', etc...
...Thus the lunatic "kills" his gross immaturity and walls up the hole used by the mouse, evidently a symbol of the penis—that is, of animal, or profane, sex...
...This element 01 magical as opposed t i religious illumination is nowhere more evident than in the story, "The Burning Haby," echoing as it does Druidic rite and primitive sacrifice...
...of which one is constantly aware in Thomas' poems is a partly spiritusl, partly psychological element belonging to states of vertigo and falling, a general bewilderment in spatial orientation...
...Joseph identities himself with Jesus and anticipates the agony of the Cross, but also as though the metaphoric Joseph were undergoing the savage's ordeal of rmtiadc...
...There can be no doubt that, as modern leaders, we easily divine in the work of this poet those constellations of impulse having come to be known as "Freudian" and stemming as a matter of fact from the most ancient myths, both savage and pagan...
...the angelic equipoise that always shone from one of his masters, Donne...
...Sweeney: "Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable, recreative, «le-x structive and contradictory nature of the motivating center, the womb of war — I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem...
...it is no just amends for him to go on to rephrase Thomas', interest as "spiritual regeneration of the individual," or to add: "That individual was himself...
...The telescoping evident in metaphors arranged to ellipsize the three factors of sex, birth, snd death, constantly recurrent in Thomas, is of an "encyclopaedic" character...
...In a typical metamorphosis, the end finds the roles of child and man reversed...
...Patently, Mr...
...The implicit protagonist seems to be Jesus...
...We ran indeed cite "the reconstruction of the individual," but conversely it is Auden and his followers, not Thomas end his followers, whose work reflects interest in a quasi-clinical conception of the individual as conscious member of society...
...One of these very early poems states: / >it you bnyt of lummer in your >uin...
...Of this primitive custom, we know from Theodor Reik's excellent investigation in hie book, Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies, that it is not merely imitative and displacing (the savage father tries to transfer his wife's childbed pain to himself) but also sadistic: he revels in his wife's suffering and magically increases it...
...But the unicorn escapes...
...Sweeney flatly says: "Here Thomas has reworked the sensual and spiritual color of Marvell's imagery...
...ThK man in "Vision and Prayer," who listens at the wall of the room from which emanate sounds of his wife giving birth to a son, identifies himself with Joseph beside Mary's accouchement...
...Poetry in not record but direct experience...
...Thomas' equipment leeks only one thing...
...What Mr...
...A more accurate Hopkinsian note is in My paid-for saved-for oiru too lole In love torn breeches nnd blistered jacket These lines suggest by their content a progenitor of Thomas not alluded to by Mr...
...The pert...
...This is a clue to the fact that lurking behind Mr...
...More elusive is Thomas' Hopkinslan verbal feature and a metric that Is sometimes close to the Scriptural tonalities of Hopkins...
...the platitude turns up in the net...
...These are the last lines of a poem by Thomas: Sow shown and mostly bine I would lie down...
...The formal quality of his dialectic is demonstrated by the nature of the war/peace opposition as methaphor...
...The deep perspective of Thomas' experience accounts for his distinction among poets, for to it adhere all those virtuoso performances of poetic trope that are apt to elicit under thebreath huzzaa from even seasoned readers of Thomas...
...O see the poles are kissing as they cross...
...Poetically, the opposition is between activity and quietus, sound and silence, birth and death, sex and transcendence of sex...
...A difficult and ambiguous mariolatry runs throughout Thomas' work...
...I a in the man your father was...
...birds, for instsnce, are familiar symbols in these poems, being interchangeably woman and the penis...
...But if his lyrical sensuousnras Is related in quality to Cummings' less accented poetry and less dense love, a certain massiveness of movement in his verse is ea meticulously administered ss in the similarly constructed lines of John Donne and Marianne Moore...
...not only the stained-glass magnificence of "Vision snd Prayer" but also the half-speaking, half-listening poem: called "Conversation of Prayers...
...Truly, Thomas accepts certain mythical outlines, the chief being Christ's myth of birth, death, and resurrection, with the corollary worship of the Virgin...
...It is needless to identify flight and falling with sex...
...The fact is that Thomas is not a poetic refurbisher, as this observstion indicates, hut an original poet, and his central experience as an individual is distinct from Marvell's...
...New York: New Directions...
...Despite such quasi-devotional poems as "Vision and Prayer" (one of- Thomas' masterpieces, similar even in physical pattern to Herbert's "Faster Wings"), Thomas cannot be called a religious poet, lie cannot, for a reason related to his enryrlopaeilisrn above referred to...
...John L. Sweeney is seen juggling with (he up-to-date critical instruments, taking a hint from the Marxist critics, bowing to the ••historical" approach, managing with a surprising degree pf grace to avoid tangling with what E. E. Cummings called "the duck-billed platitude...
...James Version not through word-repetition and phrasestyling but by alliteration and assonance, to which he gave the dimensions of church music...
...To put it ss succinctly as Mr...
...The introduction refers to Thomas' "record of his individual struggle" as "strikingly Freudian in its paradoxes and leaps, in its synthesis of unconscious experience...
...The letter's device was to echo the style of the St...
...Here the eavesdropping poet seems to be acquainting his heart with The conversation of prayeis about to In said Ity the child going to bed and the man on the stairs Who climbs to his dying love in her 'high room...
...or in a term, s»xual guilt...
...snd anthropological) has created a perspective too promiscuous for strict religious belief in an individual so profoundly emotional and sensual as this poet...
...Lie down, lie down and lire As quiet as a bone...
...Auden, by the way, has been "analyzed,'" and not only—one might say —in the psychoanalytic clinic but in the "religions" and "political" clinics (we cannot forget his old ally, the Communist Party...
...Another story, "The Mouse and the Woman," seems oddly a parable of sacred and profane love as symptomatic in Joseph's relations with Mary...
...But ni reader ran miss, despite the poem's flawless technique, the brute passion that infuses every lucent, elegant line, not only as though (demonstrably...
...Can Thomas or any poet be branded, even if gingerly, with the neo-Kantian strait-jacket of solipsist...
...184 psges...
...its sensual intelligence...
...Thomas' relations to sex and religion are asserted through puredialectical, not Freudian or theological paradox...
...John Dewey), this particular process for Thomas is automatic and not, as Sweeney adds, a "consciously composed record...
...Sweeney: Rimbaud...
...the child's praysr "shsll drown in a grief as deep as a made grave / Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead...
...Now, if poetry for Thomas may be considered an agent freeing him as an individual from the solipsistic self and supposedly reuniting him with society (cf...
...Fear of some "cosmic death" ("Who kills my history...
...Sweeney: "Thomas' eye may seem to be rolling in an extravagant frenzy, but he never- loses sight ol his responsibility to poetic tradition.'' As though* inspiration were opposed to "responsibility...
...The lunatic has killed his dog following the woman's "materialization...
...For the 14-odd pages of the introduction to The Selected rVritingt of Dylan Thomas (The Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas...
...the scholarly crossbred with the informative ideals of journalism...
...The mastery of the machine of the poem is, therefore, the sensational tour-de-force Thomas pulls off whenever he requires it of himself...
...The evident protagonist is an inmate of an insane asylum who hallucinates a woman and makes love to her, only to kill her...
...At fourteen, in the as yet unpublished material of a notebook, Thomas wrote verses on the incestuous love of Isis and Osiris...
...At the same time, the duration of his emotion involves both peril and promiscuity...
...I saw time murder me") alternates with the vicarious death-tear that appears in the story of boyhood, "The Peaches," wherein the nanator, having been informed that his uncle has robbed a sow of a pig, imagines the man "holding the writhing pig in his two hairy hands, sinking his teeth -in its thigh, crunching its trotters up," The uncle is a displacement of the father, and the pig of the child stolen by the voracious father from the protecting mother...
...In this "promiscuous" sort of geography lies the bare integument of Thomas' esthetics...
...Abundant evidence exists in this volume, which includes six of the suthor's stories, that a primary sexual (xperience stands at the bsrk of sll Thomas' work, and that thla experience accounts for his integral qualities of precipitation, turbulence, hypercondensation, ellipsis, and extreme sensuousness...
...If Auden has encyclopaedia!' the intellectual intelligence of his era, Thomas has just as certainly encyclopaedia...
...in the reconstruction of society...
...The dog as a symbol of the author himself appears significantly in the title of one of his books, parodying Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog...
...That Thomas' sexual ecstasy is not pure, as was Donne's, or absolute, as is Cummings', is verified with a striking clue from the above-quoted prose statement by the poet, using the war/peace metaphor for his poetry...
...Thomas has assumed the Promethean task of reconciling the "meat-eating sun" (whose dreadful desire the poet himself reflects) with tne tenor, effortless religiosity of his birthday piece, "A Poem in October...
...the eating of the young by the father, so shocking to unprepared modern sensibilities, is as commonplace (metaphorically) in Thomas as it is in Apollodorus, chronicles of the creation of the world according to the Greeks...
...Critics are trained in aH manner of means to trap the poetic unicorn...
...13.60...
...Although an apostle of that "derangement ol the senses" of which Thomas' work is a garden-variety climax, Rimbaud with his French intellect was an esthetic philosopher, which Thomas is not...
...The elegiac fatality of the poem seems secretly to celebrate the destruction of natural power and to elide three generations, a synthesis which in its curious fluidity invokes once more the ghostly partner of the Holy Trinity...
...Nu MEROUS poems of Thomss, invariably carrying the sensual burden of vertigral suspense, attest to a sexual anguish reaching intuitively for • sanctiflcation of sexual union, lute is vividly shown in "A Winter's Tale," where the religious element is expressed not only in the music and flight of a bird (paradigm of the Holy Ghost) but also in imagery which, although the scene is a farmyard and countryside, obliquely suggests cathedrals and various sacred properties, and where once more the poet is "brought low / Burning ia the bride bed of love, in the whirl / Pool at the wanting center...
...It is interesting to note that the Biblical Jrssph, a carpenter, is said to bars constructed mouse-traps...
...Sweeney's exposition is the assumption that Thomas is a super sort of solipsist, a poet whose writings are to be approached as though paradoxical versions of the plainer incunabula of Donne, Marvell, and Herbert...
...With an introduction by John L. Sweeney...
...They sound like a transcription of a Bach Mass as sung...
Vol. 30 • March 1947 • No. 10
