Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952 (New Directions, 1971), third and final selection

Today's the day I depart for the Dylan Thomas Centre to give a workshop using Thomas's notebooks and a reading. I finished rereading the Collected Poems just in time--though I think I may have drawn the reading out for the sake of making it last. Here's the last round of splendid passages.


My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.

*

Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
Quiet as a bone.

from "Once Below a Time"

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,

I drew the white sheet over the islands

And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

last lines of "When I Woke"

O keep his bones away from that common cart,

The morning is flying on the wings of his age

And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

last lines of "Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid

Was a Man Aged a Hundred"

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening

To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound

And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing

The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

from "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed"

...the wall thin as a wren's bone

*

...the splashed mothering maiden

Who bore him with a bonfire in

His mouth and rocked him like a storm....

*

For I was lost who have come

To dumbfounding haven

And the finding one

And the high noon

Of his wound

Blinds my

Cry.

*

The world winding home!

And the whole pain

Flows open

And I

Die.

from "Vision and Prayer"

And he who taught their lips to sing

Weeps like the risen sun among

The liquid choirs of his tribes.

from "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait"

        Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means

*

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....

*

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.

from "Fern Hill"

(which I would have liked to copy entire)

Sanctum santorum the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling.

*

                                              All tell, this night, of him
Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

from "In Country Sleep"

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave....

*

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

from "Lament"

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

last line of "In the White Giant's Thigh"

You can buy Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems from Foyle's Books for a mere £7.49 here.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), second selection

More splendid passages from Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems:


Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

*

I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town,
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown....

*

Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.

from "I Make This in a Warring Absence"

If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house. 

from "'If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot'"

...the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

*

After the first death, there is no other.

from "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, 

by Fire, of a Child in London"

I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

*

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

from "Poem in October"

Unluckily for a death 

Waiting with the phoenix under

The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days....

opening lines of "Unluckily for a Death"

The colossal intimacies of silent

           Once seen strangers or shades on a stair

from "Into Her Lying Down Head"

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.

from "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

*

                                     ...the long gone glistening

Parish of snow.

*

In that far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

                        And the bird descended.

from "A Winter's Tale"

Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

*

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

from "There Was a Saviour"

(Imagine all of "In My Craft or Sullen Art" here. I want to memorize it.)

Begin

With singing

Sing

Darkness kindled back into beginning

When the caught tongue nodded blind,

A star was broken

Into the centuries of the child

Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

*

And the dust shall sing like a bird

As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

*

Love is the last light spoken.

from "Ceremony after a Fire Raid"

A copy of Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books.

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (New Directions, 1971), first selection

Some favourite passages as I reread the Collected Poems in preparation for my workshop and reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre in late June....
 

At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,

*

O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,

*

(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)

from "Author's Prologue"

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

*

Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.

from "I See the Boys of Summer"

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb.

*

...and the womb

Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye

Is half its light; the fathomed sea

Breaks on unangled land. 

from "A Process in the Weather of the Heart"

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 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.

opening and closing lines of "The Force That Through 

the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

from "If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love"

By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

last line of "Especially When the October Wind"

Joy is the knock of dust....

from "When, Like a Running Grave"

I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,

In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,

Hearing the weather fall.

*

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

*

I, in a wind on fire,....

from "I, in My Intricate Image"

...dusk is crowded with the children's ghosts....

from "Why East Wind Chills"

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

last stanza of "Should Lanterns Shine"

Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

last line of "Because the Pleasure-Bird Whistles"

At the time of posting, Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems is available for a mere £7.49 from Foyle's Books--just click this link.