Poem on His Birthday (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Dylan Thomas
- First Published: 1952
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Nature, God, Spiritual life or spirituality, Death or dying, Holidays, Sea or seafaring life, Afterlife, Birds, Life, philosophy of, Life and death, Beaches or seashores, Fishes
The Poem
“Poem on His Birthday” is composed of twelve stanzas of nine lines each. It was written to mark Dylan Thomas’s thirty-fifth birthday, and is the fourth and last of Thomas’s birthday poems. In the first four stanzas, the poet looks out at the real and imagined scene from his house overlooking the bay on his thirty-fifth birthday. As he gazes at the river and sea illumined by an October sun, he “celebrates” but also “spurns” his birthday, likening the passage of his life to “driftwood.”
The first stanzas abound with images of sea birds and...
[The entire page is 1616 words long]
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