The Unintelligible Haze of Daftness

      As some of you may have heard, some of the love letters from Dylan Thomas to Caitlin, his wife of thirteen years, are being auctioned tomorrow at Sotheby's. It's rather sad reading some of the excerpts from the letters, for a number of reasons but not least of which is the plaintiveness of his desperation, and I can't help but think Thomas wouldn't want such letters being gavelled off for whatever reasons. (That Caitlin herself sold them decades ago strikes me as discomforting, too.) Still, there's something of the typical Thomasian innocence and charging in lines like these:

You'll never, I'll never let you, grow wise, and I'll never, you shall never let me, grow wise and we'll always be young and unwise together . . . I love you so much, I'll never be able to tell you; I'm frightened to tell you.

Yes, it's juvenile, it's prostrating, it's even a bit pathetic. But it's also indicative of the talent Thomas had, and the depth of his feeling (as much as I hate to invoke such terms). No wonder he turned to the sauce. What did Bertrand Russell say? "Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness." Can't say I'd agree with that entirely, but it certainly seems to agree with Thomas. ^~~Oh, Mr. Thomas, let us feel whatever we're supposed to feel....^~~

      That said, it's worth remembering some of Thomas' poems, or, better yet, rereading them:

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.


Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

And then there's the old chestnut of a villanelle that we all seem to know by rote, if only because of high-school English classes and Dead Poets' Society (or Rodney Dangerfield's Back To School, or Michelle Pfeiffer's Dangerous Minds or....):

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (hear it here: requires Real Audio)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And then there's this one, perhaps a bit closer to the themes of the letters:

The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

There's a strong Whitmanesque sense to the rhythms of the last, particularly in the peculiar syntactical arrangements (the first line, indeed, sounds like it's echoing "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd"). Note too the tendency for Thomas to end lines and sentences with nouns and verbs, rather than adjectives or adverbs; there's a kind of concreteness of fact and action that seems to refuse the tapering tendence of modification and qualification, a concreteness of elementarity reinforced, I think, by his ending of most lines with monosyllablic words.

      All this reminds me of a poem a tried to write (and never completed) years ago about Dylan, but also based on my own revisioning of the image below of Sir Alec Guinness from the Broadway production Dylan in the 1960s. For some reason, the image will always seem to me to sum up Dylan, not so much for the alcohol involved, but for the curious care and brilliant madness of stacking shots so carefully on top of one another.




      I don't know. For reasons quite beyond my immediate explanation, I love this image. Anyway, let us think of Mr. Thomas today and tomorrow as the testaments of his love are sold off and their original intimacy is reduced to a few thousand pounds from collectors. (And, yes, I think Caitlin was a bitch for selling the damn things off in the first place.) In the words of Robin Williamson:

With the usual ceremonial you were crowned one night
King of the field where doctors nail the cows
To make of the cock's quill the rights of language
And the pricking heart a sword against the hours
...
Ah, Mr. Thomas let us ramble through the midnight fair
Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel
Let us paint library on the library let us raid the moonlight
Let us steal whatever we are supposed to steal...

And let us drink to the unintelligible haze of daftness. Cheers, you "wild Welsh Rimbaud."