SOURCE: “Stories and Plays,” in Dylan Thomas, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965, pp. 154-82.

I

Thomas was as prolific a writer of prose as of verse. He published the first of his short stories, “After the Fair,” in March, 1934, less than a year after his earliest poems had appeared; and he continued to write prose until his death. In addition to his numerous short stories, the uncompleted novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, three prose dramas, the radio play, Under Milk Wood, and the two film scripts, The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesá, he wrote a number of book reviews, radio talks, and descriptive essays, many of them collected in the posthumous volume, Quite Early One Morning.¹

Thomas' fiction may be divided sharply into two classifications: vigorous fantasies in poetic style, a genre he discontinued after 1939; and straightforward, objective narratives. Until 1939 he seems to have thought of the short prose narrative as an alternate poetic form—as a vehicle for recording the action of the imagination in reshaping objective reality according to private desire. Almost every story of this period (the exceptions being “After the Fair” and “The Tree”) perceives actuality through the screen of an irrational mind. The main characters are madmen, simpletons, fanatics, lechers, and poets in love: people enslaved by the dictates of feeling. Their stories are narrated in a heavily poetic prose reflecting the confusion of actual and imaginary experiences which constitutes their reality, so that the material and psychological intersect without a joint, forming a strange new area of being. For example, as Mr. Davies, the deluded rector of “The Holy Six,” is washing the feet of his six colleagues, believing that he is performing a holy deed, we are told that “light brought the inner world to pass,” that his misconception was transformed into actuality. Some of the stories seem transitional in style, enabling the reader to witness these transformations as an outsider. In “The Dress,” the fleeing madman, who yearns for a chance to sleep, thinks of sleep as personified by another object of desire—a girl. When he breaks into the cottage where the young housewife is sitting, he follows the logic of his delusion, mistakes her for sleep, and puts his head in her lap.

The setting of most of these stories is the seaside Welsh town wickedly called Llareggub (to be read backwards), also the scene of Under Milk Wood, with its neighboring countryside, including a valley named after Jarvis, a lecherous nineteenth-century landlord, some farms, and a mountain called Cader Peak. Among the inhabitants of this region are young men obsessed by unfulfilled love, as in “The Mouse and the Woman” and “The Orchards”; clergymen crazed by lust, as in “The Holy Six” and “The Burning Baby”; wise men or women who teach some cabalistic magic art, as in “The Tree,” “The Map of Love,” “The School for Witches,” and “The Lemon”; and enigmatic girls who rise from the sea or the soil as in “The Mouse and the Woman” and “A Prospect of the Sea.” The fancies of these people, narrated in a manner rendering them indistinguishable from objective reality, fill the town and the countryside with visions, supernatural forces, and fantastic episodes recalling the world of fairy tale and of folklore. People and objects are whisked into new shapes, small and intimate experiences are magnified until they embody fundamental realities—“creation screaming in the steam of the kettle”—and the order of nature is constantly subject to disruption. In this milieu the anomalous is the ordinary; at the end of “Prologue to an Adventure,” for example, the barroom where the two friends are standing runs down the drains of the town into the sea.

In one of his letters to Vernon Watkins, Thomas observes that the reader of verse needs an occasional rest but that the poet ought not to give it to him; this sustained intensity is more natural to poetry than to prose. In applying this principle to his stories, Thomas produced complex, involuted narratives with rich surfaces of language and imagery. At first impression they have no depths; but analysis shows that the order of imagination operating in them is the one which produced Thomas' poetry. His stories, unlike his earliest poems, deal with recognizable people and places; but they invest them with the same mythic atmosphere found in the poems. As we have already observed, there are numerous and detailed affinities between the poems and these early, fantastic stories. Common themes, the burning of a child, the “falling” of time, the unity of life, and the verbal capacities of nature provide subjects for both, and are also reflected in rhetorical details. But the most general resemblance is an awareness of the cosmic import of small events, a tendency to develop the significance of experiences by referring them to the absolute limits of the continuum of which they are a part. The lust of Rhys Rhys in “The Burning Baby” culminates in incest and in the murder of his child; the desire of the poet in “The Mouse and the Woman” raises a beautiful woman for him on the seashore; the vision of heaven the boy sees from the top of his ladder in “A Prospect of the Sea” is an endless Eden stretching to meet itself above and below.

II

In “The Tree,” which first appeared in the Adelphi in December, 1934, within a week of the publication of 18 Poems, the style typical of Thomas' fantastic stories is still at an early stage of its development, so that it is possible to distinguish actual events from the delusions going on in the minds of the characters. The story also provides a convenient dramatization of the creative process at work in these stories. The gardener transmits his obsession to the boy; the boy, at the end of the story, tries to transform it into actuality. In writing his fantastic stories, Thomas, the narrator, acted the part of the boy. Borrowing delusions from his characters, Thomas produced in the narrative itself a version of reality corresponding to the delusions.

The gardener in the story is a naïve religious who, by one of those primitive metaphorical associations familiar to us from Thomas' poems, takes all trees as counterparts of the “tree” of the cross. As he tells the boy the story of Jesus, the child fixes on the elder tree in the garden as the scene of the crucifixion. When he is let into the locked tower as a Christmas gift, the boy is bitterly disappointed to find it empty; but he associates the Jarvis hills, which are visible through the window, with Bethlehem; for they, like Bethlehem, are toward the east. The idiot standing under the tree in the garden, exposed to the wind and rain, has already had Christlike intimations of his destiny when the boy finds him in the morning. And when the boy learns that he has come from the eastern hills that he has mistaken for Bethlehem, he fits the tree, the hills, and the idiot into the pattern described by the gardener, and sets about making the story of Jesus a reality. As the story closes, he has put the idiot against the tree and is crucifying him on it. The ultimate point of the story is the idiot's acceptance of his suffering; in the final scene the ignorant piety of the gardener is being transformed, through the imagination of the child and the love and humility of the idiot, into a reality.

The narrative style blending actual and imagined worlds appears for the first time in “The Visitor,” whose main character, as he approaches death, perceives the continuity between the living and dead aspects of the cosmos. Because we know the actual world which is the background of his delusion, we can see that the first part of the narrative has a double structure; and we can easily separate Peter's delusions from external reality. His idea that the sheets are shrouds, that his heart is a clock ticking, and that he lacks feelings because he is dead are simply misinterpretations of sensory clues. Only occasionally does his mind drift into clear hallucination, as when he thinks he is looking down at his own dead face in the coffin. Otherwise his thoughts are perfectly intelligible; he recalls that his first wife died seven years earlier in childbirth, and the guilt he experiences is expressed in a remarkable metaphor: “He felt his body turn to vapour, and men who had been light as air walked, metal-hooved, through and beyond him.”

In the second part of the story, however, we enter fully into Peter's dying delirium and the basis of fact offered by the external world fades away. In a region of pure fantasy, we are unable, like Peter himself, to distinguish the imaginary from the real or even to detect the moment of division between life and death. In his delirium, Callaghan, the visitor Peter has been expecting, comes and carries him away into a realm of essential being where the pulsations of alternate growth and destruction are perfectly visible in a stripped, transparent landscape. Here a new prose style, the one Thomas adopts as a means of objectifying mystical perception, presents itself. More descriptive than narrative, it is full of grotesque, clearly realized images. Sometimes rhapsodic, sometimes strangely matter of fact, it seeks to capture the disruption imposed upon nature by hallucinatory vision. As in the poems, metaphor ceases to compare, and equates instead, so that “the flowers shot out of the dead,” and “the light of the moon … pulled the moles and badgers out of their winter.”

The journey ends when Peter, suddenly returned to his sickbed again, feels restored to his body and speaks to his wife. But she does not hear him, and he does not realize he is dead until she pulls the sheet over his face. Just as he had the delusion, when he was living, that he was dead, so at the end Peter has the delusion, when he is dead, that he is alive. The division between the two states is slight, and disembodied vitality persists so powerfully that moving from the aspect of being we call life to the one we call death hardly matters to it. As one of the poems concludes, “The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.”

In “The Visitor,” Peter experiences actual and imaginary realms at different times; the two meet only at the boundary between them, where their edges are not clear. But in the further development of his narrative style, Thomas presented situations where imagined and actual events are superimposed upon one another as single experiences. Two closely related short stories published in 1936, “The Orchards” and “The Mouse and the Woman,” illustrate this. Both have the same theme as “The Hunchback in the Park”: the creation of an imaginary woman by a mind obsessed by the need for love. And both are tragedies of delusion, for they show that the dreamer is pitifully exposed to the demands of the actual world.

The woman loved by Marlais, the poet of “The Orchards,” comes to him in a dream in the form of a scarecrow who stands, with her sister, in a landscape of burning orchards. When he wakes up, the memory of this dream persists and distracts him from his writing. Oppressed by the disparity between the passion of his dream thoughts and the dullness of the town outside his window, Marlais makes an effort of the imagination which leads him to mystic perception. What follows is perhaps Thomas' most complete description of mystic vision. The distinction between objective and subjective is canceled: “There was dust in his eyes; there were eyes in the grains of dust. …” Individual things seem part of greater wholes, saturated with absolute significance: “His hand before him was five-fingered life.” Opposites are reconciled: “It is all one, the loud voice and the still voice striking a common silence. …” Intoxicated with the feeling that he commands both spiritual and actual realms, so that he is “man among ghosts, and ghost in clover,” Marlais now “moved for the last answer.”

A second sleep shows him that the landscape of his dream and the woman he loves are still there; and when he wakes he goes out of the town to find it. The second half of the story, like that of “The Visitor,” is the journey of a mental traveler; but Marlais travels on the ground, not in the air, as Peter does. And his imagined world is spread over the real countryside, whose objective features emerge, like peaks rising out of the clouds of his thoughts. The Whippet valley, a part of the real countryside which has been destroyed by mining, is succeeded by a wood whose trees are said to spring from the legend of the Fall. As his walk continues, Marlais enters the realm of myth and becomes a myth himself; when he has penetrated into this imaginary world, he finds the orchards of his dream and the girl in it. An objective observer would probably say that Marlais had been invited to have a picnic tea with an ordinary girl; for the tablecloth, cups, and bread she produces are real enough. But, as Marlais views the scene, the conditions of his dream impose themselves upon this objective reality, and the scene is transformed to correspond with it. The orchards break into fire; the girl is changed into a scarecrow and calls up her sister, as in the dream; and Marlais has his desire.

But we have been warned at the beginning that Marlais' passion was “a story more terrible than the stories of the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub,” and the conclusion tells us why. The fires of Marlais' dream are put out by “the real world's wind,” and it becomes a fact, not a dream. The imaginative tide of his obsession recedes, leaving him stranded in actuality, kissing a scarecrow, and exposing his madness.

“The Mouse and the Woman” is a more elaborate treatment of the same theme: the betrayal of a poet by his obsession with love. In this story, as in “The Orchards,” the hero creates a dream woman, and he shuttles back and forth between a dream world and a waking world that seem equally real. But Thomas has added to the situation a moral aspect represented by the mouse. The story opens with a remarkable description of the madman in the lunatic asylum, and it then moves back in his memory to trace the steps of his alienation. As in “The Orchards,” the woman comes to him in a dream, and her memory persists when he is awake until he is caught between reality and delusion; he does not know whether to believe in her existence or not. He creates her by writing about her, “… it was upon the block of paper that she was made absolute,” thus surrendering to imagination; he then goes out on the beach to find her and bring her to his cottage. This begins the part of the story where hallucination is perfectly superimposed upon actuality. The girl is, of course, pure imagination; but the mouse, which is associated with evil, and the mousehole the hero nails up to keep it away seem representative of objective actuality. Oddly, within this waking dream the hero has nocturnal dreams containing frightening enigmatic symbols. When he strips the girl and becomes her lover, two related events follow: the mouse emerges from its hole; and the notion of original sin enters the consciousness of the lovers as the man tells the girl the story of the Fall. She realizes that he has felt evil in their relationship.

The mouse and what it represents are the seed of destruction in his euphoric delusion; for the woman leaves him. Though he pursues her, she will not have him back. Her rejection of him is marvelously conveyed in the fairy tale episode where he lights upon her hand, like an insect, pleads with her, and is crushed as she closes her hand over him. Since he has created her by thought, he can kill her by thought. He writes “The woman died” on his writing pad, and we are told that “There was dignity in such a murder.” He sees her dead body lying on the beach. But the knowledge that “he had failed … to hold his miracle” is too much for him, and he becomes the madman who appears at the beginning of the story.

The story goes a step further than “The Orchards,” for it explains why the certainty offered by delusion should disappear. The poet's sense of guilt, emerging from within his mind as the mouse emerges from the walls of the house, poisons his dream. His derangements are no longer orderly and joyful, but confused: “The secret of that alchemy that had turned a little revolution of the unsteady senses into a golden moment was lost as a key is lost in the undergrowth.” He has regained some contact with the objective world, but he wants to kill the woman. And, in order to do this, he must return to the world of imagination where she exists. In killing her, he also kills the dream she dominates, on which his happiness depends. The mouse, now fully in possession of the kitchen, silently presides over the grief he feels at this self-destruction. Trapped between two systems of reality and unable to commit himself to either, the poet can only howl at life from behind the bars of the asylum.

In four stories published in 1937 and 1938, the hallucinatory technique advances so far that it is no longer possible—or desirable—to disentangle imagined from actual episodes. External reality responds flexibly to the thoughts and feelings of the characters, so that the narrative amounts to a psychological allegory. This genre, it will be recalled, is the one to which “Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait” belongs, and two of the four stories now under discussion are so closely related to this poem that they seem to be prose sketches for it. The member of this group closest to the earlier stories is “A Prospect of the Sea.” It has the same elements as “The Orchards” and “The Mouse and the Woman”: a girl who is encountered at the seashore, and who disappears, and a delirious shuttling back and forth between different orders of reality.

In “A Prospect of the Sea,” the boy begins by enjoying the summer day and then makes up a story about a drowned princess; but this level of thought is intersected by another—the appearance of a country girl who confronts him in the actual landscape. This siren figure both tempts and terrifies him, for she has the power to make the world swell and shrink. His fantasies of death and disfigurement alternate with the actual events of her erotic advances. As evening comes, he yields himself to another daydream, a mystic's vision of power, piercing sight, and multiplied Edens. But the girl calls him into an actual world that is now strangely insubstantial: “… she could make a long crystal of each tree, and turn the house wood into gauze.” She leads him on a race through a mystically disrupted realm; and then, in the morning, in spite of his agonized protests, she walks into the sea and disappears. As he turns to walk inland, he confronts the elements of the Noah story: an old man building a boat, the beginning of rainfall, and a stream of animals entering the door. Apparently, then, the episodes of the story belong to the corrupt time God had determined to end by means of the Flood.

But “A Prospect of the Sea” is an innocent pastoral in comparison with “Prologue to an Adventure,” a chronicle of town sin, a subject that offers a far richer opportunity for Thomas' grotesque metaphoric energies than the country scenes of the earlier stories. There is little action. The speaker wanders through the streets and, with an acquaintance named Daniel Dom (a variant of the name “Domdaniel” appearing in one of Thomas' unpublished poems),² visits two bars; then, as in “A Prospect of the Sea,” destructive water comes as the scene is immersed by waves.

The interest of this story lies in the remarkable play of scenes and imagery conveying the feverish atmosphere of a night on the town. “Now in the shape of a bald girl smiling, a wailing wanton with handcuffs for earrings, or the lean girls that live on pickings, now in ragged women with a muckrake curtseying in the slime, the tempter of angels whispered over my shoulder.” As the speaker says, there is “more than man's meaning” in this torrent of fearsome, Hieronymus Boschlike visions, for holiness is caught up and debased in it. “I have the God of Israel in the image of a painted boy, and Lucifer, in a woman's shirt, pisses from a window in Damaroid Alley.”

The two scenes in the bars are incoherent jumbles of fleeing images, glimpses of transcendental visions, and striking expressionistic effects. They look backward in technique and subject to the Circe scene of Joyce's Ulysses and forward to Thomas' Doctor and the Devils for their atmosphere of pinched debauchery. The speaker and his friend aspire for a moment to reach out of this welter of temptresses, oppressed children, and indifferent city streets to some heavenly goal, but they come instead to a new bar where, after joining the corrupt festivities, they turn to the window and witness the coming of the deluge. There are no alternate realms of reality in this story. It is all an inescapable mental reality, consisting entirely of representations of the desires, fears, suspicions, and other emotions of the narrator; for, as his visions tell him, “We are all metaphors of the sound of shape, of the shape of sound, break us we take another shape.”

“In the Direction of the Beginning” and “An Adventure from a Work in Progress” are mythlike tales written in a hallucinatory style. The first, a short account of the creation, tells of the appearance of figures resembling Adam and Eve. Its enchanted, visionary prose presents a dizzying succession of images referring fleetingly to various seasons, ages, and episodes of history and legend. There is almost no physical action; the Fall is suggested as the man becomes entrapped by the woman's siren spell and as his obsession with her is projected through imagery showing that he feels her to be personified in every detail of the universe. The same obsession appears in “An Adventure from a Work in Progress,” an account of a man pursuing a shadowy woman through a strangely active archipelago where awesome cataclysms endanger him. At the climax of the story the woman merges with the mountain, just as the Eve in “In the Direction of the Beginning” merges with the soil. When the hero ultimately catches her, she undergoes a series of startling metamorphoses and shrinks to a tiny monster in the palm of his hand. After being thus betrayed by his obsession, like the lovers in “The Orchards” and “The Mouse and the Woman,” the hero returns from the imaginary world to the actual one, and sails away on “the common sea.”

The “revolving islands and elastic hills” of this story show that it takes place in the realm that is more fully described in “The Map of Love.” In the latter, the stages of sexual initiation are represented by a bewitched landscape; a curious animated map or model of this region exhibits its vital sexual properties, so that the children to whom it is being displayed blush at “the copulation in the second mud.” The libido-charged land-scape represented by the map is the world as it presents itself to the heroes of the last two stories, who find the women they love embodied in cliffs, seas, and mountains. The children in “The Map of Love” are guided by Sam Rib, who is named for the origin of love, and are encouraged by the spirit of their lecherous Great-Uncle Jarvis, who speaks to them from the fields where he has lain with ten different mistresses. But they never succeed in swimming up the river to the island of the first beasts of love. Apparently, they are too shy, too lacking in lust; mere “synthetic prodigals” of Sam Rib's laboratory, they are unable to share the dangerous vitality of nature.

Four of the stories of this period form a separate subgroup; “The Enemies,” “The Holy Six,” “The Burning Baby,” and “The School for Witches” are all about the fictional town of Llareggub, and all are told in a narrative style that presents much objective material. Thomas has created a distinctive comic world in these stories, a world of lecherous, hypocritical clergymen and of submissive girls tumbling over an enchanted Welsh landscape into situations appropriate to myths and fairy tales. In “The Enemies,” Mr. Davies, the doddering rector of Llareggub, wanders onto the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Owen. The farmer and his wife are a strong pagan pair in tune with the fertility of the soil; and they feel pity for the poor rector who comes to them tired and bleeding, having been betrayed by the countryside where he has been lost. As they eat dinner in the pantheistic atmosphere of the Owen farm, Mr. Davies is suddenly struck by the inadequacy of his own faith, and he falls to his knees to pray in fear. The story ends: “He stared and he prayed, like an old god beset by his enemies.” Thomas is distinguishing between the religion he saw represented in the churches of Wales and the one he saw embodied in “the copulation in the tree … the living grease in the soil.”

In “The Holy Six,” a sequel to “The Enemies,” Mr. Davies' adventure is turned into channels that are both comic and more deeply religious. Six of his colleagues receive a letter from Mrs. Owen informing them of Mr. Davies' plight. These six are confirmed lechers. “The holy life was a constant erection to these six gentlemen.” Much of the story consists of uproarious descriptions of the visions their evil minds project upon actuality. (An allusion to Peter, the poet of “The Visitor,” who lives in the Jarvis valley where the Owen farm is, suggests that Thomas thought of all the Llareggub stories as interrelated, though he makes little effort to establish links among them.) When the Six arrive at the Jarvis valley, they find the countryside alien to them, just as Mr. Davies did; and the opposition between their hypocritical faith and that of the Owen couple is developed as Mrs. Owen sees the truth of things in her crystal ball.

Mr. Davies is brought forward, strangely transformed. He has apparently learned the lesson of the fertile soil, but his newly discovered passions have merged with his religious habits of mind to form a grotesque compound of lust and devotion: “his ghost who laboured … leapt out to marry Mary; all-sexed and nothing, intangible hermaphrodite riding the neuter dead, the minister of God in a grey image mounted dead Mary.” He performs the service of washing the feet of his colleagues, while the thoughts of each are described, forming a series of remarkable surrealist fantasies. When he has finished this task, Mr. Davies cryptically claims the paternity of the child in Mrs. Owen's womb. Though Mr. Owen smiles at this, it is clear that Mr. Davies is right, for their “ghosts” have consummated a spiritual love in a realm different from that of the love of husband and wife.

Religious hypocrisy and repression are condemned in “The Holy Six” and in “The Enemies” mainly by comic means. But “The Burning Baby” treats this theme with a tragic force approaching grandeur. The spectacle of a child consumed by fire, as we know from his poems, impressed Thomas as the formulation of an ultimate question, for it involved the greatest imaginable suffering inflicted on the greatest imaginable innocence. Rhys Rhys, the vicar, who has been driven to seduce his daughter by an obsessive lust, burns the baby resulting from this union in an expurgatory ritual. The baby, like the devil, he considers “poor flesh,” and he burns it to rid the earth of the fruit of the “foul womb” and of the evidence of his own sin. But Thomas, speaking in his own voice, corrects Rhys Rhys' view and insists upon the spiritual symmetry of nature: “The fruit of the flesh falls with the worm from the tree. Conceiving the worm, the bark crumbles. There lay the poor star of flesh that had dropped, like the bead of a woman's milk, through the nipples of a wormy tree.” Though the child is dead, the flames awaken him to a shriek of protest which is significantly taken up by the landscape that witnesses his immolation.

“The Burning Baby” is probably the best-sustained and most carefully constructed of Thomas' early stories. Though it is about derangement, its style, with a few exceptions, is disciplined and objective. The moments when the emotions of the characters take over the story and shape the narration are clearly marked. For example, when Rhys Rhys is delivering his usual sermon, but thinking of his desire for his daughter, he thinks: “… the good flesh, the mean flesh, flesh of his daughter, flesh, flesh, the flesh of the voice of thunder howling before the death of man.” At the moment of the incestuous union, the disruption of the normal order of feelings is reflected by a disruption of the normal conditions of external reality: “The lashes of her fingers lifted. He saw the ball under the nail.” Minor events predict what is to come. Rhys Rhys' son, who he thinks is a changeling, brings in a dead rabbit, cradling it like a baby. The scene arouses Rhys Rhys' terrors, and he takes the dead rabbit away, thus appropriating death. But the changeling witnesses the seduction and the sacrifice of the baby, and he insanely re-enacts them after the others are dead.

“The School for Witches” is another story having a baby as the victim of worship, but this worship is not Christianity, but witchcraft. The cut accidentally inflicted on the black woman's baby at the moment of its birth is a warning that it is entering the “wicked world” of the school for witches where the black arts are taught. Most of the story is devoted to descriptions of the rituals, dances, and covens of the witches, the formalized evil that has risen from the cursed and bedeviled countryside. The doctor, the only lucid character, has bleak meditations as he and the midwife carry the baby back to his house: “What purpose there was in the shape of Cader Peak, in the bouldered breast of the hill and the craters poxing the green-black flesh, was no more than the wind's purpose that willy nilly blew from all corners the odd turfs and stones of an unmoulded world. The grassy rags and bones of the steep hill were … whirled together out of the bins of chaos by a winter wind.” The baby's cry confirms this sadness, and rouses Mr. Griffiths, who thinks the sound is the scream of a mandrake being uprooted and goes out to investigate. When he finds the baby, it is dead, lying neglected at the door of the house where all the other characters in the story are whirling in the mad dance of the witches' coven.

The regional folklore exploited in “The School for Witches” appears in subtler forms in the other fantastic tales. The fairy lady, the changeling, the devil rolling in a ball on the ground (as the lecherous clergymen do in “The Holy Six”), and the spontaneous metamorphoses of scenes and people all belong to the atmosphere of Welsh mythology. The plot of “The Orchards” and of “The Mouse and the Woman,” involving a man who meets and loses a fairy woman, is common in these myths. “The Burning Baby” begins in the manner of a folktale, for the story is offered as a heuristic explanation of the sudden bursting into flame of dry bushes. The presence of these borrowings in the stories suggests that there is a similar element in the poems Thomas was writing at this period. The poems contain a few references to folklore, such as the beliefs concerning the vampire and the mandrake. Thomas' interest in this subject raises the possibility that the mythic awareness we have observed in the poems has its ultimate roots in the legends of Wales.

The poems, it will be recalled, encompass two conceptions of time: the unmoving time of mysticism and the conventional notion of time as a power that changes and destroys. Time is also an important theme in at least four of the imaginative stories, for mystic insights, or disruptions of the natural order, psychological or otherwise, are sometimes announced as disruptions of time. The derangement of the poet in “The Mouse and the Woman” takes the form of a decision that winter must be prevented from spoiling the beauty of the woman who has left him and maddened him with jealousy. He attacks “the old effigy” of time, flinging himself into a chaos of irrational images. There is a similar effect in “The Horse's Ha.” When the undertaker drinks the magic brew intended to resurrect the dead, the movements of the sun and moon are disturbed, and the days pass with mysterious rapidity. One of the dreams of the boy in “A Prospect of the Sea” is a sweeping mystic vision in which he sees through time, relating remote things in a single historic unity. Finally, in “An Adventure from a Work in Progress,” the man's capture of the first woman he sees on the islands is accompanied by a phenomenon Thomas calls the falling of time. This event is echoed in “Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait”; it involves a reversal of the development of living things; intense disturbances, including a windstorm, fires, earthquakes; and, in fact, all the elements of chaos. Clearly, the timelessness of the poems is inappropriate to the world of the stories. The reason may be that the stories, unlike the early poems, are about human beings living their earthly lives and that the standard of conventional time is indispensable to them. When mortals seek to evade time, as do the boys in “I see the boys of summer,” in order to make love endure or to avoid death, chaos results.

III

Thomas was still working on the last of his fantastic narratives in 1938 when he began to write the realistic stories which were collected in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. In March, 1938, he wrote to Watkins that the first of “a series of short, straightforward stories about Swansea” had already been published. This statement must refer to “A Visit to Grandpa's,” which appeared in the New English Weekly on March 10, 1938. The change in narrative style between these two groups of stories is, of course, a radical one; moreover, it paralleled the much more subtle change in Thomas' poetic style that was going on at about the same time. Many of the casual details of these stories are drawn without change from Thomas' Swansea days, and some of the characters are based on actual people: the aunt in “The Peaches” is Ann Jones, and Dan Jenkyns in “The Fight” is Daniel Jones. In his “Poetic Manifesto,” Thomas declared that the title he assigned to the collection was a variant, not of Joyce's title, but of one often given by painters to self-portraits. He admitted that the general influence of Dubliners might be felt in his stories, but he added that this was an influence no good writer of short stories could avoid.³

The protagonist in all the stories is clearly Thomas himself, though the stories are narrated indifferently in first and third persons and though each presents him at a different age. They are about ordinary experiences: visits with relatives, excursions to the country, adventures with gangs of children, explorations of the town. In some of them the plot is so slight that the story approaches a reminiscence or cluster of impressions. Obviously written with only a loose unity in mind, they have no common theme; but taken as a group, they seem to trace the child's emergence from his domain of imagination and secret pleasures into an adult world where he observes suffering, pathos, and dignity.

Most of the stories are about an observer or witness, one whose experience consists of awakening to the experiences of others. The events are presented in sharp, well-selected impressions. When he is observing a general scene, such as a boy's room or a crowded street, Thomas proceeds by piling up a lively list of the quintessential details or characteristic people. Sometimes his attitude toward people, places, and episodes is affectionate or amused; sometimes he finds grotesque nightmare evocations in them. But he encounters his strongest emotions in moments of solitude when he can hug his general impressions of the external world to himself as personal possessions—while walking down a street late at night, wandering in moody isolation on a noisy beach, or enjoying the atmosphere of an expensive bar.

The first three stories—“The Peaches,” “A Visit to Grandpa's” and “Patricia, Edith and Arnold”—set the idyllic existence of a child side by side with the trials of adults. As the grownups suffer, the child remains indifferent or cruel; yet it appears at the end that he has understood and sympathized more than he knew, thus anticipating the ultimate union of the childish and adult points of view. “The Peaches” may be said to have “separateness” as an identifiable theme. Mrs. Williams, who brings her son for a holiday at the farm, is too superior to stay a moment longer than necessary, and refuses the precious canned peaches that have been saved for her visit. Jim curses her snobbery, but he cannot keep himself from drinking up the profits of the farm and distressing his wife. Gwilym, the son, who closely resembles the religious gardener in “The Tree,” is occupied with a vision of himself as a preacher, and makes the barn a church for his pretended sermons. To these mutually uncommunicating attitudes toward life is added that of the boys who are busy with their games of wild Indian and indifferent to the concerns of the adults. But even here a division occurs when Jack Williams betrays his playmate by telling his mother an incriminating mixture of truth and falsehood about his treatment at the farm, and is taken away. At the end of “The Peaches,” the boy waves his handkerchief at his departing betrayer, innocent that any wrong has been done to him, or to his aunt and uncle.

But in “Patricia, Edith and Arnold,” the child, at first cruelly indifferent to the pain felt by the two maidservants who have learned that the same young man has been walking out with both of them, gains some insight into adult sorrows. The story begins with a chaos of irreconcilable interests: the absorption of the girls in their love triangle, and the rambunctious joy of the child who is all-conquering in his imaginary play world. But as the painful comedy of Arnold's entrapment is played out, the boy, uncomfortably cold and wet, feels his own distress and unconsciously comes to sympathize with Patricia. Returning to the shelter to retrieve his cap, he sees Arnold reading the letters he has written to the other girl, but he mercifully spares Patricia this knowledge. And his own experience of pain, a minor counterpart of the adult pain Paticia has suffered, comes when he thaws his cold hands at the fire. Patricia's final remark, “Now we've all had a good cry today,” formulates both the similarity of their trials and their capacity to endure them.

Cruel jokes, of the sort that life has played on Arnold, occur in some of the other stories. In “Just Like Little Dogs,” the brothers exchange partners with each other in the middle of an evening of casual love. As a result, when the women become pregnant, it is not clear which brother is the father of their respective children. The two forced but loveless marriages take place, and now the two fathers spend their evenings in the street, standing hopelessly in the cold night air. In “Old Garbo,” the neighbors take up a collection for Mrs. Prothero, whose daughter is supposed to have died in childbirth; after Mrs. Prothero has drunk up the money, it is learned that the daughter has survived. The mother, ashamed at having taken the money under false pretenses, jumps into the river.

It is significant that in each of these stories the anecdotal nucleus is subordinated to the vehicle which conveys it. The impressive element of “Just Like Little Dogs” is the spectacle of the young men sheltering aimlessly from the night under the railway arch; they have no place more interesting to go and nothing more interesting to do. “Old Garbo” is, in reality, a story of initiation; the young reporter, eager to share the knowledge and maturity of the older one, follows him into the haunts where Mrs. Prothero's comic tragedy occurs. In this way he exchanges the boyish pastimes of the cinema and the novelty shop in the first part of the story for the more serious experience in the slum pub. He is not a qualified observer, for he becomes drunk, sick, and helpless; and the older reporter tells him, in an odd conclusion, that the story which has just been narrated has certain confused details; but he is still naïvely determined to put all the things the older reporter has shown him into a story.

Some of the stories have a note of personal futility and inadequacy which conspires with their prevailing comic tone to produce penetrating irony. The inferior boy who is the hero of “Extraordinary Little Cough” is bullied and mocked. But he turns his shy habit of running away when girls appear into a feat; for, while the other boys are idling with the girls and yielding to romantic illusions, he runs the five miles of beach. As he falls to the ground exhausted at the end of the story, it is clear that he has risen nobly to a challenge while the others have ended in frustration and petty animosities. The two boys who go for a country hike in “Who Do You Wish Was With Us?” feel they are escaping their town lives in the freedom of the country and the beach. But Ray, whose life has been full of terrible family misfortunes, is overtaken by sorrow for his dead brother in the middle of his holiday. The sea turns cold and threatening, and both boys feel that they cannot really escape the life they have fled.

The most powerful story about escape, and the most impressive one in the volume is the last, “One Warm Saturday.” Having rejected invitations to join his friends, the young man wanders despondently among the crowds on the beach, finding solace only in the face of a girl whom he flees shyly at first. Ultimately, he again meets the girl, Lou; and, as the two become involved in an oddly mixed group of drinkers, she promises him that his love for her will be fulfilled when they are alone. The party moves from the pub where it began to Lou's room in a huge ramshackle tenement. The young man's anxiety and Lou's demonstrations of affection are intensified, but the others show no signs of leaving. A grotesque frustration occurs when the young man goes out to the lavatory. He is unable to find his way back to Lou's room to claim the night of love she has promised him. Instead, he loses himself in the squalid maze of the tenement and stumbles into the rooms of other lodgers. Ultimately, he gives up and wanders out into the street, having made the “discovery” during his search that all the obscure people of the town share his experience of loss.

Thomas' uncompleted novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade, may be considered a continuation of the quasi-autobiography loosely sketched in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, though it is more broadly comic in style than any of the stories. It takes up the narrative of a life much like Thomas' at the point where the last of the stories ends, and its protagonist, Samuel Bennet, is not inconsistent with the wandering, imaginative youths found in the earlier book, though he is much better defined. Thomas seems to have begun Adventures in 1940; and, though the first section was published in Folios of New Writing in 1941 under the title “A Fine Beginning” and though he was encouraged to continue with it, it remained a fragment at the time of his death.

It may be described as a farce based on the fact that Samuel Bennet and his world are excruciatingly uncomfortable with each other. On the night before he leaves his home town for London, Samuel prepares a number of surprises for his family by breaking his mother's china, tearing up his sister's crochetwork, and scribbling on the lessons that his father, a teacher, is correcting. But he does all this in tears, as if it were a painful necessity; and he says an affectionate farewell the next morning. On the other hand, he is not eager to see London; unwilling to make any decisions or to take any actions, he lingers in the station café until a friend forces him to leave.

The London in which Samuel finds himself is a damp, angular, crowded, eccentric world; and it is both surprising and significant that he likes it as well as he does. The chaos he encounters is well represented by his first stop, a warehouse full of furniture piled up in unlikely heaps which nevertheless serves as living quarters for a number of people. The general technique of Adventures is suggested by the locked bathroom with its bird cages where a strange girl makes an attempt on Samuel's virtue in a tub full of used bathwater after drugging him with a drink of cologne. In the book, as in this scene, violent imaginative force explodes in a narrow enclosure filled with ordinary objects and people, toppling them into ludicrous attitudes and combinations. A mundane paraphernalia of Bass bottles, umbrellas, rubber ducks, bootpolish, Worcestershire sauce, and CocaCola is juggled into patterns of uproarious private meaning, sometimes by Samuel's imagination, sometimes by the author's. Realism swims in a whirlpool of uninhibited fancy.

If the atmosphere of Adventure is found anywhere else, it is in Brinnin's accounts of the social events Thomas attended, where the poet, guided by some motivation of wit or self-dramatization, cunningly introduced chaos. Mr. Allingham observes that the Bass bottle which has become wedged on Samuel's little finger is an enigma. Samuel, noticing that a barmaid looks like a duchess riding a horse, makes the irrelevant reply of “Tantivy” to some remark. But the curious thing is that Samuel, in spite of the hostility and defiance with which he confronts the world, is completely unready for the world's retaliation. As he is pushed and prodded from one place to another, drugged, undressed, bullied, and thrown out of a bar, he experiences terror and confusion. Samuel is too innocent to absorb what he sees. A stumbling, swooning, dreaming source of confusion, he is himself confused, and he seems destined to remain a timid and withdrawn picaro among the sharp and knowing characters who take possession of him. According to Robert Pocock, who discussed Adventures with Thomas, the novel was to end with Samuel stripped naked (except, no doubt, for the Bass bottle clinging enigmatically to his little finger), and arrested in Paddington Station.⁴

IV

The two film scripts Thomas completed during the period he was writing for the media of popular entertainment—The Doctor and the Devils and The Beach at Falesá—are entirely unlike his other work. Both were based on données, and they were translations of a given story from one medium to another. They made few demands on Thomas' original gifts, but they did demonstrate that he had unexpected capacities for adapting himself to new forms and for controlling an extended work.

Of the two, The Doctor and the Devils is by far the more interesting and successful. The idea for filming the story of the murderers, Burke and Hare, who supplied the early anatomist, Robert Knox, with corpses for dissection, was that of Donald Taylor. Taylor, after some research, wrote a narrative of these episodes; and he commissioned Thomas, then an employee of his Strand Film Company, to write the script. This was the beginning of an odd history. Thomas' script, completed and put into proof by 1947, was not published until 1953. In 1961 Callum Mill rewrote it as a stage play, produced it in this form at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow in 1961, and played the role of Dr. Rock. The play was performed a second time at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1962, where Mill staged it for performance “in the round” at the Assembly Hall. The film itself has never been produced.

The effectiveness of Thomas' script is due largely to its accounts of the low haunts of Edinburgh (which is, however, never identified by name), the curious characters found there, and their deeds of violence. The stage directions are cast in a considered prose of far greater finish and vigor than is strictly necessary. Some of them seem to call for inappropriate emphasis, but others display a creative and original approach to photographic possibilities. It is clear that Thomas found the cinematic idiom of concrete imagery entirely congenial. He is both resourceful and subtle in devising visual counterparts for ideas of his own and for the thoughts of his characters. The murder of Jennie Bailey is predicted by a shot showing Fallon, her murderer, unconsciously letting the drink from his bottle pour over her skirt during a carouse. While a student is drawing her corpse, her hand, opening in a death twitch, drops two pennies to the floor. The scenes in the pubs and the parties in the lodging house kept by Fallon and Broom, where they trap and murder old derelicts for Dr. Rock's dissecting table, present a great deal of this specific and telling detail.

The chief character, Dr. Rock, is a figure who resembles Faust or Paracelsus: he is an intellectual devoted to his discipline who is indifferent to ordinary human values. The actual Dr. Knox gave Thomas some of the rudiments of Dr. Rock's character; he was an effective orator and a dandy, and the figure in Thomas' script retains these qualities. Rock defends his practice of accepting bodies obtained by “Resurrectionists” on the ground that the legal limitation of using only bodies from the gallows for dissection is too restrictive. One of his weaknesses as a character is his universal and unfailing contempt; he despises his colleagues, the poor, the government that ignores their needs, and nearly everyone to whom he speaks. Yet he proclaims that he is in the service of mankind; and, when the murders are discovered, the other doctors, whom he has bitterly criticized, unite to defend him.

Rock is the center of the script's moral conflict. Believing not only that any means are justified in the pursuit of his science but that the lives of the poor and immoral people upon whom Fallon and Broom prey are not worth living, he accepts the bodies silently, even though he knows they have been murdered. When the truth becomes known, he is ostracized; and for a few sequences Rock has the odd aspect of an inverted Dr. Stockmann of An Enemy of the People: he stands alone against society in defense of his moral indifference. But he is brought to a realization of his crime at the end, when a child is frightened at hearing his name; he then learns that he has become a figure of horror.

In his review, James Agee called The Doctor and the Devils the hack work of a man of genius; but the fact that he found much to praise in it showed that he intended to characterize and not to condemn it with this description. He thought that Thomas had made good use of some of the movie devices, that the dialogue was “playable,” and that the script showed that Thomas “could not work for money without also working with love.”

This observation is not, unfortunately, supported by The Beach at Falesá, a script far inferior to The Doctor and the Devils. The Beach was written in 1948 for Gainsborough Pictures; like the earlier one it was never produced, and it was not published until 1959, when it appeared in Harper's Bazaar. A filming of a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, it has to do with an island in the South Seas dominated by a merchant who exploits the superstition of the natives to interfere with the business of a rival trader. It offers some interesting local color and some humor drawn from the life of white men in the tropics. There is a good scene in which the English hero sets up housekeeping with his native wife and tries to explain how his new household differs from his own home; but he finally surrenders to her naïveté, gives up the attempt, and contents himself with amusing her. In general, however, the script aims at melodrama, violent physical action in the form of fist fights, and spookiness. There are few signs that Thomas tried to make anything serious or original of the assignment.

Thomas' last completed work, Under Milk Wood, had a long gestation, for he first thought of writing something like it in 1945, as an expansion of the subject of “Quite Early One Morning,” a description of a Welsh village he had read on the radio during one of his programs. The original plan, according to Daniel Jones, was to have the town full of queer individualists defend its sanity at a trial; but, upon hearing a description of a sane town from the prosecutor, the inhabitants decide instead to shut themselves off from the outside world. After writing about half of the play, calling it The Town Was Mad, Thomas changed his mind about this structure. In the summer of 1951 he read some parts of the play—then called Llareggub Hill—to Brinnin; and in 1952 he published a selection closely resembling the first half of the final version in Botteghe Oscure as Llareggub: A Piece for Radio Perhaps.

When Brinnin suggested in September of 1952 that the play might serve as a program for the series of American readings they were planning, Thomas was encouraged to complete it. It was listed in the program of the Poetry Center for performance in May, 1953; Thomas wrote in March that he would not be able to complete it before leaving for America but that he would bring the manuscript with him. He continued work on it up to the very day he first read it as a solo performance at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953. The reaction to this premiere was enthusiastic; according to Brinnin, it gave Thomas confidence in his ability to write drama. A first group reading was given at the Poetry Center on May 14; its effect was extraordinary, and there were fifteen curtain calls. Thomas continued to revise the play and to add to it through the ensuing performances, until the weeks just before his death. The play opened the Poetry Center's program in September, 1953, and was first performed in Britain as a broadcast on January 25, 1954.

In spite of its effectiveness, Under Milk Wood, like most of Thomas' writing about Wales, is essentially slight; its main assets are charm, exuberance, and mischievousness. Thomas took advantage of the radio-play form to give his work a reality that was as disembodied as possible; apart from the town itself and the well-marked progress of the day from morning to nightfall, there are few suggestions of time or place. There is no plot. The microphone simply makes a number of tours of the various inhabitants of the town at different hours of the day, guided on one occasion by the postman, to hear of their dreams, memories, and daily lives. There are no distinctions between the voices of characters and narrators, the speeches of the living and the dead; or among dreams, thought, and viva voce dialogue. In form—or, rather, in formlessness—its closest analogue is the Night-Town chapter of Joyce's Ulysses; but the nightmare violence and the horror of Joyce's chapter are supplanted by domestic comedy, cheerful lechery, and wistful memories of episodes of affection that are only incidentally sinful.

The comic vitality of Under Milk Wood suggests that Thomas, with his sense of humor, his eye for detail, and his love of humble people, might have done work reminiscent of Dickens. But the humor of Under Milk Wood is not an end in itself, but a means of emphasizing the theme, the sacredness of human attachments. Thomas advances a persuasive claim to respect for the sinful, eccentric, and even ludicrous loves that spring up in ordinary lives by investing them with comedy and pathos. This effect begins with the speeches of Captain Cat's drowned shipmates rehearsing the pleasures of their lives: “… we shared the same girl once. … come to a bad end, very enjoyable.” This irresistible style of defense for whatever human beings may come to care for is continued with the dreams of Miss Price, the dressmaker, and Mog Edwards, the draper, whose love for each other never progresses beyond correspondence; with the love between the rowdy Cherry Owen and his wife; with Captain Cat's memories of Rosie Probert; with the Reverend Eli Jenkins' paean to the town and Wales generally; and with Polly Garter's memory of Willy Wee, the one man among all her lovers for whom she cared the most. The more delusive and insubstantial these affections are, the more tenderly does Thomas treat them.

Under Milk Wood turns sharply away from anything resembling mysticism. It reflects the conclusion Thomas had reached in 1951 that “The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.”⁵ Thus, it can be seen as the last of Thomas' hymns of praise for the world of man's experience and its Creator. His early mystic poems had mingled the material world and its divine source in a dark, chaotic unity. In his later poems, the landscapes, animals, and people are treated as if they were taking part in a grave and radiant ceremonial; the sense of relation with divine energy has retreated, but its immanence is felt everywhere. In Under Milk Wood, with its loving depiction of people who would ordinarily be considered weak or foolish, Thomas continues to pursue this obscure joy.

V

Alfred Kazin has attributed the great popularity Thomas enjoyed in his lifetime to the fact that his resonant, passionate verse offered an alternative to the cool ironies of his contemporaries. Certainly the poets dominating the early 1930's, when 18 Poems and Twenty-Five Poems were published—W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender—differed from Thomas in two important respects. They were men who responded sensitively to social and historical conditions, and they were—with the exception of Spender—primarily poets of wit and intellect. They frequently dealt with themes related to the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the threat of World War II, and even their lyrics of personal disquiet are touched with an awareness of general conditions. As Auden wrote in his poem about the outbreak of the war, “September 1, 1939”:

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of earth,
Obsessing our private lives. …

Even in their pessimism, these poets usually maintained a tone of civilized urbanity and a sense of decorum. Although they often took up the cause of the outsider or the proletarian, they expressed themselves in verse of an aristocratic, intellectual, and ironic temper.

However, there were dissidents among the young writers of the time who, like Thomas, favored a return to some of the values of Romanticism. By the mid-1930's, Auden, whose first book of verse had been published in 1930, was regarded by some as cold, brittle, and superficial; new sources of feeling for poetry were being sought in myth, religion, and the subconscious. Tendencies resembling those of Thomas' poetry and early stories were found in Surrealism, which began to attract the attention of English writers and artists at this period. David Gascoyne, the only English poet fully committed to Surrealism, wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism in 1935, and in 1936 his book of Surrealist verse, Man's Life Is This Meat, was published by the Parton Bookshop, which had supported the publication of 18 Poems two years earlier. Thomas attended the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the Burlington Gallery in 1936, and entered far enough into the spirit of it to carry a cup of tea made of boiled string which he offered to passers-by. Although he was critical of Surrealist theory in the “Manifesto” of 1951, the fantastic stories collected in The World I Breathe (which were written in the 1930's) certainly share the Surrealist spirit. Thomas' mythic qualities and Romantic egoism also harmonize with the aims of a later literary movement of the 1930's, the New Apocalypse.

Thomas' poetry may legitimately be considered a manifestation of the Neo-romantic stirrings of his time, but it has older and more illuminating affinities as well. Critics writing on Thomas have had much to say about influences and parallels, and it has been shown that he has something in common with nearly every good poet, even those as different from him as Shakespeare and Pope. Thomas' own casual statement on the subject was that he was open to the influence of any writers he might be reading, and his purposely indiscriminate list reads: “Sir Thomas Browne, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon, and Shakespeare.”⁶ The most significant name on this list, as Thomas implicitly acknowledges, and as his critics have often pointed out, is that of Blake. Thomas shared with Blake a hallucinatory commitment to the concreteness of what he imagined, and the sort of cosmic awareness that generates myth. Though Thomas' cosmos is far more fragmentary than the one found in Blake's Prophetic Books, it has some of the same energies, gigantic deities, and above all, the same “fearful symmetry” of balanced patterns formed by opposing forces.

Much has been said, also, about the religious or visionary aspect of Thomas' poetry, the quality he shares with Vaughan, Hopkins, and Yeats, as well as with Blake. In general, the critics have adopted one of two opposing points of view. One group thinks of Thomas as a religious poet who wrote, as he said in his introductory note to the Collected Poems, “for the love of man and in praise of God.” T. H. Jones believes that the main poems of Deaths and Entrances clearly exhibit a Christianity that is disguised, but still detectable in the rhetoric of the earlier poems. G. S. Fraser finds in the “Altarwise …” sequence a “current of orthodox Christian feeling—feeling rather than thought” which became increasingly noticeable in Thomas' later work. W. S. Merwin's essay, “The Religious Poet” is probably the most cogent statement of this view. Merwin considers Thomas' work a “poetry of celebration,” whose universe originates in love and remains suffused with it. It is natural, adds Merwin, that Thomas should have proceeded from lyric to dramatic modes, for the faith developed in the introspections of the earlier poems is revealed, in the later ones, in the form of an increasingly inclusive sense of the orderliness of the external world.⁷

If Thomas said that he wrote “in praise of God,” he also said, at another time, that he meant to write “poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't believe in God.”⁸ This statement, which seems more careful than the one in the introduction to Collected Poems, also seems intended to strike a note of qualified faith. Many, perhaps most of Thomas' critics, feel that his poetry, in spite of its Biblical allusions, its use of Christian myth and symbolism, and its ardent declarations of faith is not, in the final analysis, expressive of religious belief. “It would be ridiculous,” wrote Francis Scarfe in one of the earliest analyses of the “Altarwise …” sequence, “to claim Thomas for any church.”⁹ And a recent critic, Ralph Maud, commenting on Thomas' allusions to God in “Over Sir John's hill” and the projected, but uncompleted “In Country Heaven,” observes: “Thomas' God does nothing to alleviate the absurdity of the position of rational man in an irrational universe; Thomas' God does nothing to explain death in terms of higher values. As the eternal sympathetic spectator, He simply weeps, offering none of the usual consolations.”¹⁰

The differences of opinion on this point among the critics are at least partly due to different notions of what is meant by “religion.” Thomas is certainly concerned with such religious problems as the nature of the creator, the relation of man to his universe, and, particularly, the enigma of death. Also, his verse depends upon mystic perception, intuitions about the cosmos, and even upon such specifically Christian doctrines as atonement, immortality, and salvation. But his ideas about these things are personal, naïve, and, as we have said earlier, primitive. In spite of his use of conventional religious terms and symbols, Thomas' subject is really the primordial world view of the savage. It includes miracle, anthropomorphism, and pantheism, but offers no morality, no doctrine, no communal feeling. Thomas' religious symbolism, says Giorgio Melchiori, “is only a metaphorical means of expression of the poet's personal thought; it contributes to the creation of that personal myth which seems to be the real aim of his poetry.”¹¹

Thomas is a craftsman of language as well as a visionary. Though he explicitly denied that Joyce had influenced him, he is properly seen as one of the line of verbal experimenters of which Joyce is the most prominent member. We have already examined Thomas' imaginative use of words, and it is interesting to recall that he enjoyed reading old copies of the magazine transition, that museum of exploration in language. What Thomas has in common with Lewis Carroll, Hopkins, Joyce, and Cummings is the urge to probe the disparity between conventional language and the fruits of perception. Thomas, like the others, devised more or less systematic means of entering the virgin ground between language and experience. He followed Hopkins' example in discovering new reserves of expression in the sound of language, and in coining neologisms to convey the truths of private anguish and joy in nature. And, like Joyce, he practiced the art of doubling or trebling thicknesses of meaning, so that language becomes startlingly germane to its subject.

Thomas is a striking figure, however, not because of the debt he owed to other poets, but because of his undeniable originality. As we have seen, his ideas were not exceptional. He took his intuitions as they came to him, without trying to refine or reshape them, but he spent great effort on the elaboration of rhetorical resources. There are styles of primitive art that display this combination of the simple and the intricate. They offer no defenses against tribal fears and passions, but instead express them in the tangled pattern of a woven shield or the carved involutions of a witch doctor's mask. Thomas' verse strangely resembles objects of this kind. It embodies elemental, unformed feelings that usually lie below the threshold of consciousness in a technique so practiced and accomplished that it gives the illusion of issuing from long, secure traditions foreign to impatient modern craftsmanship. The result is a unique impression of double remoteness, a union of barbaric subject with an arcane, sophisticated style that is perhaps the distinctive quality of Thomas' art.

Notes

1. Thomas' book reviews and miscellaneous journalism are listed in Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography by J. Alexander Rolph (London and New York, 1956). His unpublished prose work, scripts written for film documentaries, and unpublished pieces read on broadcasts are listed in Maud, Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry, Appendix I, “Chronology of Composition,” pp. 121-48.

2. “Fifty,” (July, 1933), in February, 1933, Notebook.

3. “Poetic Manifesto: A Manuscript,” pp. 4-5.

4. Robert Pocock, Adam International Review, No. 238, 1953, pp. 30-31.

5. “Poetic Manifesto,” p. 9.

6. “Poetic Manifesto,” p. 3.

7. The passages referred to in this paragraph are: T. H. Jones, Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh and London, 1963), pp. 66-67; Fraser, Vision and Rhetoric, p. 224; and Merwin's essay in Casebook, p. 60 and p. 64.

8. Quoted by Brinnin in Dylan Thomas in America, p. 128.

9. Scarfe, Auden and After, 1942. Reprinted in Casebook, p. 29.

10. Maud, Entrances to Dylan Thomas' Poetry, p. 112.

11. Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers (London, 1956), p. 231.