In this article I am tempting to understand in a minor degree the double edged personality of Dylan Thomas through a book of verse entitled Wales in His Arms edited by Ralph Maud in which the rehearsals, reading lectures and broadcasts of Dylan Thomas’ choice of Welsh poetry are collected.

Young Dylan had an ignorant, though warm hearted mother, and a well-educated father who spoke hardly ever in Welsh to his son. Despite this fact, Thomas felt the rhythm, motives and phrasings, used the “odd matching of words” that he inherited as a Welshman. From his early childhood, Thomas was brought up according to opposing standards, on the one hand that of his father’s, who strongly denied his Welshness in order to be more decent than his fellow countrymen, on the other hand was his mother’s influence of keeping to the norms of the farm. This is how Dylan could have a “totally unformulated love of God” deriving from his mother’s “chapel-going heart and the conscious atheism” of his father. Dylan’s character also involved a certain sense of hypocrisy, yet he was never able to escape from Swansea, his birthplace, in the literal sense of the word1:

“This sea-town was my world; outside a strange Wales, coalpitted, mountained, river run, full so far as I knew, of choirs and football teams and sheep and story-book tall black hats and red flannel petticoats, moved about its business which was none of mine …. And the park itself was a world within the world of the sea-town.” – as he remembers in the ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’.

The opposing sides to Dylan’s character show in the choices he made as an editor. It is apparent at first glimpse at Wales in His Arms that many of the poems are written near or about the sea. The sea is most of the time described like Gaia, the Earth’s mother’s character in Greek mythology, someone sheltering and guiding humanity, responsible, almost divine:

“O the seagulls are crying, the seagulls scream
That the sea is cruel and blue and green
But to-day the waters are white with spray
And hark in the boats what the fishermen say:
‘It’s a rough grey day with the tide coming in
And a haul of herring’s a slippery skin
For the waters are deep and the nets are thin.
It’s a rough grey day with the tide coming in.’”
(Vernon Watkins: Ballad of The Rough Sea)

Besides, in W. H. Davies‘ poem entitled Dreams Of The Sea we read in the following extract of the undeniable driving force that leads one to yearn for the sea again and again despite its deadly character:

“I know not why I yearn for thee again,
To sail once more upon the fickle flood;
I’ll hear thy waves wash under my death-bed,
Thy salt is lodged for ever in my blood.
…
And I have seen thy gentle breeze as soft
As summer’s, when it makes the cornfields run;
And I have seen thy rude and lusty gale
Make ships show half their bellies to the sun.”

Examining the choice of poems Dylan made in his reading lectures or when he was broadcasting on the radio, we can easily point out different patterns - or colours of life I should call them – regarding the subject or theme of the pieces. The most striking of all those being the representation of beauty in nature and its description. Since Thomas lived most of his life beside the sea and by the river Taf in a Boat House at Laugharne, it is natural that the majority of the poems that won his liking hint at the feeling of the salty air and the sandy shores of his youth. In the stanza cited below darkness and death prevail, sea represents an overall bliss for the dead. (If I may allow a personal note, The Child on The Cliffs by Edward Thomas is my favourite of the collection.)

“Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.
I should like to be lying under that foam,
Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,
and certain that you would often come
And rest, listening happily.
I should be happy if that could be.”

As I have mentioned earlier, Thomas’ mother was a believer in God, while his father was a rather materialistic thinker. Nevertheless, reading through the poems, Dylan’s search for God proves evident. He never chose blasphemous lines on religion or God’s essence, rather the figure of a God and Son closely related to the individual, omnipresent and omnipotent. The Night by Henry Vaughan is perhaps the best example for a longing heart in search of the Primary Mover:

“Were all my loud, evil days
Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent,
Whose peace but by some angel’s wing or voice
Is seldom rent;
Then I in heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.
…
There is in God, some say,
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that Night! where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim!

In an interview to New Verse (1934), Thomas described the essence of his poetry as follows: “My poetry is, or should be, useful to me for one reason: it is the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light … should be useful to others for its individual recording of that same struggle with which they are necessarily acquainted.” Supposedly, the frequent mention of the notion of darkness and blur was due to the never ending financial problems and uncertainty that the Thomas family had to bear constantly.

Dylan from his early childhood believed himself to be the Prince of Darkness. His father’s choice of names for his son (Dylan and Marlais) is rather interesting, since both names are from the bardic tradition, pre-Christian, dealing with magic and myth having to do “with the mystery of water, the big seas and the rivers of dreams that were to haunt Dylan’s imagining.”2

Darkness and death prevail in love poems as well. Oddly enough, the lover is either mourning over the death of his lover, or calling out to the lost beloved. These poems have not bright pictures shining with joy, there are no cheerful laughter and immense kisses mentioned, only lamenting and sadness dominate the tone.
The majority of Thomas’ own writings are elegiac, they have a warm tone yearning for the past that could never come again.3

In W. H. Davies’ poem Body And Spirit, only the ghost of the dead lover is present, a transparent spirit that the poet tries to cuddle.

“Who stands before me on the stairs:
Ah, is it you, my love?
My candle-light burns through your arm,
and still thou dost not move;
Thy body’s dead, this is not you –
It is thy ghost my light burns through.”

Thomas himself did not always get on well with his wife, since the triumph that he felt when conquering an attractive woman meant a primary urging force for his work as an artist. In fact, continuous financial problems, and the fact that most of the time Dylan was either drunk or getting drunk gave a bitter feeling to the relationship between Thomas and Caitlin.4 Perhaps this might have been a reason for why Thomas primarily chose those love poems that communicate the darker side of “happiness.”

Talking about family relations, I believe it important to mention the role that Thomas’ father held in his life. He continuously urged him to be different, to arrive in the higher class of society that could mean opening up to the world. Thomas’ greatest struggle from his early youth was that of emigrating to America. He was most happy when he could go on lecturing tours in New York and Texas. He and Caitlin have travelled to Italy, even though Dylan found staying in Florence rather dull and disappointing. Thomas had the spirit of the ancient wanderer, the Celtic bard who immersed in nature chants the songs of his Wales to the strangers in America. The figure of the father who urged him appears in William Morgan’s Childhood:

“My father would say brusquely, Boy, remember
When the sun shines all hands keep moving,
The warm days were not given us for loving
But to prepare for the death in winter.
…
Returning through the fields when day was dead
From worship and the chapel father said,
Between God and the cattle there is no time for reading.”

The majority of the poems in this collection are formulated of stanzas well rhyming, rhythmical. It is in fact a pleasure to read these finely composed pieces. If I may allow myself a personal note, I should say the most convincing pieces I found to be those of W. H. Davies. The Inquest is a moment’s encounter with a dead body, a child’s remains, that in an instant’s time is the account of an outstretched murder and its consequences.

“One eye, that had a yellow lid,
Was shut – so was the mouth, that smiled;
The left eye open, shining bright –
It seemed a knowing little child.
…
And I could see that child’s one eye
Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
‘What caused my death you’ll never know –
Perhaps my mother murdered me.’”

“Much of the flat, abstract poetry of the present has no narrative movement, no movement at all, and is consequently dead. There must be a progressive line, or theme, of movement in every poem.”5 -as Thomas explains in the same interview mentioned earlier. In fact, all of the poems in the collection testify Dylan’s urge to present sometimes even a whole arch of life in one single stanza.

As a conclusion, Dylan Thomas as an editor was rather consequent in his choice of poems to constitute this collection to present the same principles and patterns that he in his art used to enrich his works with, namely the pictures of nature, darkness, love, and the dubious idea of God and his creation that occupied his mind from the beginnings, as he would put it: The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God. (Poetic Manifesto 1951)

Footnotes

1 A. Sinclair, Dylan Thomas, Poet of His People (Michael Joseph, 1975), pp. 17-8.
2 Ibid., passim.
3 Ibid., p. 146.
4 Ibid., passim
5 Ibid., p. 219.

Bibliography

Primary Source
Maud, Ralph. ed. Wales In His Arms Dylan Thomas’s choice of Welsh poetry. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1994.

Secondary Source
Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan Thomas, Poet of His People. London: Michael Joseph, 1975.

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