4 posts tagged “dylan thomas”
"The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook..."
- Dylan Thomas
I am a devoted admirer of seagulls. I find them humorous, charming, ridiculous, beautiful, clumsy, graceful and full of webbed aplomb.
I know that many people disagree with me. I remember visiting Hastings, an ancient town crowned with battlements, tumbling into the English Channel. Every morning I would join our group for breakfast, and inevitably the conversation would lead off with bitter complaints about the gulls' crying throughout the night. I had to disagree. I enjoy being reminded that the ocean is near; that if I were to open a window I would be embraced by the sea with a veil of salt, dappled with scales and starfish. I enjoy listening to their forlorn voices threading through the briny fog and sea clouds.
When they are grounded, their dignity is absurd. They stare intently into the horizon, looking for the forests that grow beneath the waves and the islands shrouded with maritime breath; for the pock-marked hides of whales; for rainbow-colored grottos. They sense the tides, they hear the currents. They gather in serious groups - an open invitation for children to invade and scatter their numbers.
And when that times comes, they run into space, taking a leap into its invisible rivers - swimming higher and higher. The wings extend so wide and fine, each feather ruffled by the airy fingers holding their host aloft. Then, like a kite flying itself, after much maneuvering, the seagull becomes a stationary ship on its sea of wind: staring down with benign interest on the curling waves and the stippled shore.
Sometimes I see their chevron-shaped shadows circling over the rocks and hillsides. Calm and leisured, they are messages drifting down from their madcap owners.
I occasionally see them in the city, several miles inlland. Now, I know that seagulls are opportunisitc feeders with a powerfully developed sense of smell, and that they can smell a rancid banana 50 miles away. But I always liked to think that they were there to remind me - as they did many years ago in southern England - of coastlines, patterned shells and creatures shining beneath the waves.
What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
My introduction to the works of Dylan Thomas was a peculiar and ironic one. It really has no place here; suffice it to say that I first read his poetry in junior high school, when I was 13. I was to write a report on him, so I set out to reading his poems. I almost wept. Not because of their depth and beauty, but because my tiny teenaged mind had NO IDEA what they meant. 'white giant's thigh'? 'Long-legged bait'? What the hell? I obviously needed more than 13 years on this earth to make sense out of those things.
But there was one poem that made sense. Clearly and wonderfully. It seemed to me then, as it does now (along with 'Ballad of the Long-legged Bait' and 'In the white giant's thigh' and all the others) quite marvelous and perfect.
It's a poem that celebrates childhood, its loss and eternal memory, along with things that are even more deep and vast. It's final two lines are inscribed under Dylan Thomas' name in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.
I have a recording of Thomas reading this poem; with his voice the lines become even more rolling, royal and rich. I didn't cut and paste it into my blog, I typed it - and it was as if I was reading and hearing and feeling it all at once.
FERN HILL
"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 honored 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 night-jars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing in the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his sholder: 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."
Read this...
"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find."
...and you have to believe that there is magic to be found in language, in literature, in childhood, in a genius' pure perception. And, yes, even in Christmas - all this coming from a person who stood in line for an hour at Ross Dress For Less (I wasn't going to give up a Bill Blass sweater for $7), losing the will to live with each drop of sweat.
These two paragraphs were written by Dylan Thomas (I was always sorry that his first and last initials were "DT") and taken from his semi-autobiographical story, "A Child's Christmas In Wales" - about as precious a jewel as can be found in any library.
Dylan Thomas just might be my favorite writer - he's written things which make my eyes spin from their sockets out of sheer joy.
Every holiday season, I read, watch and listen to 'ACCIW' - making my holidays a season for the senses: I read the book (first edition, babies!), I listen to Thomas himself reading the work, and I watch the adaption (they did a wonderous job):
I do this every year, and bid you do the same.
"'Go on to the Useless Presents.'
"'Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound...'"
Happy holidays - may they bring you many 'useless presents'!
It's a very fine line between acting languid and sounding sarcastic. But should you ever be able to straddle that line and so be able to embrace both characteristics, a) you would be very fortunate indeed, and b) you will be able to rattle off a fine line like this, without any trouble:
"I find you refreshing, (insert name here). You're not in the least witty, but you have a kind of obvious facetiousness which reminds me of the less exacting class of music-hall."
This was taken from "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club", by Dorothy Sayers, a book abounding with languidity. I always look to the Sayers mysteries whenever I feel that I need to brush up on my early 20th century upper-class slang.
I worship wit and words. I adore dialogue. I've heard it said that too much of an emphasis on cleverness and wit merely succeeds in cloaking the words' honesty. Not so. You'll get to the truth; only at a slower pace. What's the rush? You'll get there, and when you do you will not only be enlightened, but you will have also been entertained.
As Dylan Thomas once said, "Love the words."
