DYLAN THOMAS

DYLAN THOMAS

Dylan Thomas is one of the best-known British poets of the mid-20^th century who was remembered for his highly original, obscure poems, his amusing prose tales and plays, and his turbulent, well-publicized personal life. He was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, a town in Southern Wales.

The poet attended the grammar School until 1931 and published his first poems and prose pie 646f58g ces in the school magazine. After school he was a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post but he left it at the end of 1932. a year later he published his first poem in London And Death Shall Have No Dominion. His moving to London was fallowed by the appearance of his first volume, 18 Poems, in December 1934. The second volume Twenty-Five Poems, appeared in 1936, was less enthusiastically reviewed than the first one. The next one was called The Map of Love (1939). During the wartime his poetical creation was reduced to elegies on death but in 1944 he returned to Wales and the sight of his narrative region increased his creative power. Poems like Poem in October and Fern Hill are representatives for the later phase of his creation in point of theme and of pastoral atmosphere. In 1946 Thomas's fourth volume of poetry, Death and Entrances, confirmed his reputation.

Dylan did not limit himself to poetry, he also wrote autobiographical short stories published as Portrait as the Artist as a Dog in 1939, a volume that was later completed with Adventures in the Skin Trade, a kind of "novel" covering the youth of the poet, published posthumously. He charmed his audience with a radio play, too, written in America and read at the Poetry Centre In New York; Under Milk Wood breathes the Welsh air of Laugharne. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 in America.

Dylan Thomas is considered a very difficult representative of post- modernist poetry. Most of his poems are inspired from his childhood and youth, his themes being limited and conventional. The most frequent themes are: love of his childhood and of common events connected to this period, some pre-natal themes which combine human body with the universe in a search for similarity and continuity, an interrelation between creation and destruction; death is seen as a part of a cycle, an obsessive concern with anatomy and sex, a sacramental feeling of nature.

Thomas's manipulation of language does not obey the English Syntax, his syntax is considered difficult, strange or simply different, a "Pseudo-syntax" in the terminology of the critic Donald Davie. The difficulty of his syntax consists in the fact that although correct it cannot "mime a movement of the mind". Starting from Ezra Pound's definition of an image as presenting "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" and from one of the principles of Imagism, formulated in 1912, which associates the image to a point of view, Thomas goes further in his poetry which is not a simple succession of images. With Dylan Thomas life is generally present through its opposite or complementary elements: pre-natal moments and death.

Fern Hill is a poem that marks the threshold of D. Thomas's career; it celebrates the glory and joy of life in spite of the inevitable death. Fern Hill was written in 1945, therefore included in the larger poems; yet it is a return to the poet's innocent childhood nostalgically presented in a familiar frame. A first reading of the poem fills the reader with a feeling of happiness, liveliness and colour, suggesting a continuous simultaneous through the frequency of "and". The poem in all its aspects creates the impression of a childish game. "The poem is riddle with 'and', suggesting a child's accumulative gusto in telling you what matters most."- Walford Davies

Fern Hill is a poem of memory whose writing does not allow the reader to establish a frontier between the adult and the child. It expresses a merging impression about a "mixing world". "Merging impression" refers to the fact that the images and the sensations perceived by a child are actually presented by an adult, and a second reading of the poem reveals the alternation of the perception.

The vocabulary used by Thomas is reduced if we take into account the length of the poem. Words like "happy", "lovely", "green", and "golden light" are repeated at least three times. However the lines are not as innocent as they seem since short hints to religion, death, birth and rebirth are scattered less in the first three stanzas, more in the last part of the poem. "Sabbath", "holly streams", "blessed among stables" propose another perspective. Towards the end the poem changes in tonality, it becomes stern and melancholic like a song for a lost thing, reminding us of the transience of human being:

"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."

If the previous poem proposes time perceived simultaneously by a child and an adult, Before I Knocked- a poem that illustrates the pre-natal theme- shows us how an individual being at the same time father and son perceives time. The consubstantiality father-son leads to the idea that the universal rhythm is that of a cycle never ending, a repeating experience which expresses the inherent conflict, and the essence of life.

Christian elements are also presented in this poem. The Christian myth tells us that there is a perfect identity between God and Christ, they are consubstantial. Dylan Thomas aims at their desecration by identifying man with Christ. When the poet spells Christ in small letters, he associates him to any human being in order to stress the idea that for humanity pain on the physical level is increased by pain on the spiritual level.

Dylan Thomas's poem shows us that the author's origin is reflected in his work. His belonging to two cultures, his oscillation between two languages- on "no man's land" made his poetry difficult and ambiguous having as central pillar simultaneity.