Since his tragically early death at the age of 39 Dylan Thomas has been treated rather shabbily as public property. Television, for example, has used him as the raw material for programmes illustrating the popular notion of the poet who has more sensuality than sense. Invariably Thomas is portrayed as an obstreperous drunk who just happened to write poetry in the few moments he spent away from the pub and the fiercely argumentative proximity of his wife. In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Hugh MacDiarmid said of Scotland's annually-celebrated bard:

No' wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is a'body's property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They'd be the last a kennin' haund to gi'e.

The same could be said of Thomas. He has become as mythical as Bacchus and almost as impossible. Moreover, it is not only television that has treated Thomas indifferently. Geoffrey Grigson, who glorifies in defending his title as ‘a Non-Dylanist’, delivered this denunciation:

Who cares if this poet sozzled, or made a public dive at parties for the more appetizingly outlined, if still virginal, breasts? … Thomas was a provincial of poetry, smoozing, if with the best hopes and intentions, a masticated old manner with a pop modernism. …¹

Similarly, Donald Davie made a negative value judgement:

[Thomas used his gifts] to achieve effects which are, though powerful, artistically coarse. A taste for them is a taste that cannot respond to the subtleties and delicacies of the best of Thomas's forerunners and contemporaries.²

The implications are obvious, and we are to believe that the likes of Grigson and Davie are sophisticates omniscient enough to see through poor coarsely provincial Dylan.

In fact, Thomas was an enormously disciplined poet who could not have functioned as he did if he was perpetually under the influence of alcohol or unaware of the technical possibilities of modern poetry. ‘Fern Hill’, one of the most revealing poems, is a good example of his artistry. It has six nine-line stanzas with an assonantal rhyme-scheme of abcdeabcd and a basic syllabic count of 14, 14, 9, 6, 9, 14, 14, 9, 9. Although the finished product seems effortlessly affirmative, there were more than 200 worksheets of ‘Fern Hill’ before Thomas was satisfied with it. In ‘Over Sir John's hill’ the first and second lines of each stanza rhyme with the middle of line five:

Over Sir John's hill,
The hawk on fire hangs still …
And the shrill child's play. …

While this is going on, Thomas is sustaining a rhyme scheme of aabccbdeaedd and a syllabic count of 5, 6, 14, 14, 5, 1, 14, 5, 14, 5, 14, 14. There is nothing accidental—nothing provincial or coarse—about such prosodic detail. Thomas's preference for the syllabic count instead of accentual verse enabled him to construct his poems with a scrupulous attention to their aural impact. He was, after all, unsurpassed as a reader of his own, and other poets', poems.

Thomas's dazzling technical skill was never an end in itself: not, at any rate, in his best poems, which concern us here. In his early work, admittedly, he could seem wilfully obscure simply because he put language under such intense pressure. Thomas's verse is extremely dense in metaphor, and in his early work the images draw on erotic connotations and physical functions. A letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson (November 1933) explained that ‘every idea, intuitive or intellectual, can be imaged and translated in terms of the body, its flesh, skin, blood, sinews, veins, glands, organs, cells or senses.’ Another letter (to Glyn Jones, March 1934) attributes his own obscurity to his obsession with ‘the cosmic significance of the human anatomy’. Consequently Thomas's early poems are disturbingly physical and organic, generally dwelling on sexual penetration as a universal force of nature:

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

In that extract, from ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ (first published, to a furious reader-response, in The Listener of 14 March 1934), Thomas uses para-rhyme (stirs/stars) and assonantal rhyme (age/hairs), and he was to adopt this practice increasingly in an attempt to avoid any predictability of rhyme in his poems.

Between leaving school in 1931 and leaving Swansea in 1934, Thomas produced more than 200 poems, including all the 18 Poems (1934), most of the Twenty-five Poems (1936), early versions of many later poems, and ideas that would later be realized in works like Under Milk Wood (1954). Perhaps because inspiration came so easily in his adolescence, the mature Thomas was (from 1944 onwards) suspicious of it. He wanted his work to be as durable as sculpture, a ‘monumental / Argument of the hewn voice’ as he put it in ‘After the funeral’. The early concentration on linguistic texture therefore gave way to a mature consideration of structure. In place of his morbid adolescent meditations on death came a rich theme that was to bring out the lyrical best in him. Thomas's mature poems deal with the annihilation of the ideal of innocence in the mind of the child and the possibility of repossessing that ideal imaginatively in adulthood. Basically the theme is a variant on the biblical story of the expulsion from Eden. As the inevitability of death slowly dawns on the child, he is bereft of his innate Edenic impulse. During the years 1944-52 this was Thomas's principal poetic interest.

It is not, of course, an original artistic concept to dwell on the expulsion from Eden. T. S. Eliot, in ‘Little Gidding’, nostalgically recalls ‘the children in the apple-tree’, Edwin Muir harks back to a place where ‘incorruptible the child plays still’ (‘The Transmutation’), MacDiarmid uses his native Langholm as an emblem of Eden. Literature abounds in references to childhood as a paradise subsequently lost. Writing about Roy Campbell, Peter Alexander observes:

Every childhood seems magical to the adult looking back on it; no wonder that, with such a childhood as this to recall, Campbell ever afterwards thought of the Africa of his youth as a Paradise Lost.³

Nicholas Mosley, in a memoir, reiterates the Edenic emotion:

We moved into Savehay Farm in the spring of 1927 and the best of my childhood seems to have been nurtured by this house: I can remember details of every room in it: I still sometimes dream that I have bought it back, and am living there. I suppose it represents some Garden of Eden.⁴

More philosophically, Northrop Frye examines the appeal of Eden:

The Bible begins with man in a paradisal state, where his relation to nature was of an idealized kind suggesting a relation of identity on equal terms. The imagery of the garden of Eden is an oasis imagery of trees and water. … This paradisal imagery overlaps to some degree, as it does all through later literature, with idealized pastoral imagery.⁵

Dylan Thomas's Eden—full of trees and water and a shining innocence—is rural Wales. He first expressed his Edenic vision successfully in ‘Poem in October’, completed in the summer of 1944 at a stone cottage owned by his mother's brother. This cottage at Blaen Cwm, Carmarthenshire, was associated with the poet's childhood, as Thomas had frequented the place since his earliest years. Across the Towy estuary from Blaen Cwm lies Laugharne, a village that promised peace for a poet who had lived through several years of war in London. Thomas's Wales, as observed in Laugharne and contemplated at Blaen Cwm, offered the possibility of a second childhood in the company of his children Llewelyn (born 1939) and Aeron (born 1943), who were themselves experiencing the childhood Eden. Whenever the prodigal returned to Wales he symbolically retraced his steps to Eden.

‘Poem in October’, Thomas's first great Edenic poem, is a shapely composition, visually as well as verbally satisfying. It has seven ten-line stanzas with a syllabic count of 9, 12, 9, 3, 5, 12, 12, 5, 3, 9. It uses assonantal rhyme (Summery/suddenly) and regular rhyme (apples/chapels) and is rich in alliteration (‘heaven … hearing … harbour … heron’). As Thomas's intention is a poetic repossession of Eden he reaches out, from the first line, to the spiritual ideal of heaven:

          It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
          And the mussel pooled and the heron
                              Priested shore
                    The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
          Myself to set foot
                    That second
          In the still sleeping town and set forth.

He is happily in Laugharne as a new birthday dawns on him. He watches, in the drizzle, the wildlife of the Towy estuary and is aware of the contours of Sir John's Hill and ‘the sun of October / Summery / On the hill's shoulder’. As Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 he is also a son of October, and the pun is characteristic of a poet whose style owes much to the prose of James Joyce. Although there is symbolism and much metaphysical conceit in the poem, the entire piece is founded on a physical sensation.

The Edenic aspects of Laugharne are exquisitely observed by Thomas who sees ‘birds of the winged trees’, ‘white horses’, ‘A springful of larks’, ‘whistling / Blackbirds’. As he looks up, actually and imaginatively, from the estuary, the man-made artefacts become like natural objects. The poet's church—nature—overwhelms man's arbitrary architecture, so that the ‘sea wet church’ shrinks to ‘the size of a snail / With its horns through mist’ and Laugharne Castle is, in a compact simile, ‘Brown as owls’. Before the poet's eyes Laugharne dissolves into a vision of the childhood Eden experienced in places like Fern Hill dairy farm in Carmarthenshire. As if enchanted by the poetic ideal of Eden ‘the weather turned round’ so that Thomas could appreciate his second childhood, his return to Eden:

                                                            and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
                    With apples
                    Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
                              Through the parables
                                        Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.

The metaphorical strength of the last three lines of that stanza illustrates Thomas's true church and expresses his faith that the natural world will always seem holy to the child—or to the adult able to achieve, poetically, a second childhood. Thomas is back in Eden with ‘the mystery’ of childhood. In this mystical mood ‘the long dead child’ that he was is reborn in the adult who has returned to Eden through the magical agency of poetry.

‘A Winter's Tale’, written at the beginning of 1945, is an ingenious variation on Thomas's Edenic theme. In the narrative (rhyming ababa) a man comes to terms with death by ascending to heaven—‘the folds / Of paradise’—in a passionate union. From the atmospheric opening of the poem the mood is pastoral—‘milkmaids / Gentle in their clogs’—and the setting is unmistakably Welsh in what sounds like another evocation of Fern Hill dairy farm:

And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Snow falls on the farm and looks like ‘white seed’, thus preparing the reader for the ritual of rebirth. In his Welsh farmhouse the man—‘Torn and alone’—faces the prospect of dying unloved. Isolated in his home he burns for love and the emotion generates its own warmth; the man is ‘In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow’. Outside there is the cold of a Welsh winter, above there is ‘a star of faith’. Kneeling on cold stones, the man prays and laments the ‘naked need’, the ‘nameless need’ that consumes him. Having established the man's predicament, Thomas sets up a story using instructions similar to those in Under Milk Wood: ‘Listen. The minstrels sing / In the departed villages. … Listen. … Look. And the dances move / On the departed, snow bushed green … Look.’

The man's salvation comes in the shape of a ‘she bird’ that is simultaneously angel and temptress, dove and Phoenix. The dove is a symbol of spiritual purity for in Matthew 3:16 Christ ‘saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove’. The Phoenix is a universal symbol of resurrection and immortality. It is associated with the rose in all Gardens of Paradise and, since the rose is also synonymous with female sexuality, the bird becomes a ‘bride’ tempting the man over a trans-human threshold: ‘In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide.’ He is subsequently ‘hymned and wedded’ in a heaven attainable ‘through the thighs of the engulfing bride’. The last stanza is packed with erotic allusions to the vagina (‘the wanting centre’, ‘the folds / Of paradise’, ‘the spun bud of the world’). Appropriately the poem closes on an astonishingly condensed line that brings together a complex of correspondences: the vagina as a rose, the concept of birth as a flowering, the suggestion of orgasmic melting taking the place of virginal frigidity. It is a magnificent example of Thomas's gift for rooting metaphysical conceits in sexual reality:

                                        he was brought low
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

Thomas's most ecstatic depiction of Eden occurs in ‘Fern Hill’, a poem written in the summer of 1945, probably at Blaen Cwm which is only a mile away from Fern Hill farm. As a child Thomas spent his summer holidays with his Aunt Ann Jones (commemorated in ‘After the funeral’) on her dairy farm. The location has been succinctly described by John Ackerman:

Fern Hill … stood on a rise that sloped down to a stream and wooded valley or dingle. The farmhouse was surrounded by tall fir trees, and the farm and its buildings formed three sides of a court. An orchard completed the setting. …⁶

As described in Genesis, Eden is not too dissimilar:

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. … And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food. … And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.

To a child like Thomas, familiar with the authorized version of the Garden of Eden, Fern Hill must have appeared as a sacred place made in the likeness of the biblical paradise. Commenting on the influence of the Bible on him, Thomas associated it entirely with his childhood: ‘the great rhythms had rolled over me from the Welsh pulpits. … All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood.’⁷ Thomas, in ‘Fern Hill’, draws freely on Genesis but is by no means tied to the authorized version. His Eden is both an ideal and an actual place; moreover, it is free from sin and temptation. There is no serpent in Fern Hill, though ‘Time’ is personified as a presence that first brings the gift of innocence then deprives the child of his elemental vision.

From the opening line of the poem Thomas depicts an egocentric Eden in which the whole world seems to exist solipsistically for the poet:

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, …

Thomas is the hero of the piece; he is ‘prince of the apple towns’, ‘lordly’, ‘famous among the barns’. Protected by ‘Time’ he is able to see the dairy farm as the earthly expression of his spiritual ideal of heaven. Fern Hill accordingly glows with the colours of the sun and the grass (representing heaven and earth): It is ‘… Golden … Golden … green and golden … green and golden.’ Every morning on the farm has a paradisal brilliance, a whiteness that rescues the child from the disturbing dark. When he wakes from sleep the farm is ‘like a wanderer white / With the dew’ and the days are ‘lamb white’. Every day that spins into the child's consciousness is determined by ‘Time’, though in the beginning ‘Time let me hail and climb. … Time let me play.’

As the poem so movingly shows, Thomas the child is happy in his own rural element—earth, implying the soil and the planet—and content to count the blessings of the other elements: ‘… it was air / And playing, lovely and watery / And fire green as grass.’ He seems as splendid as the first man and surrounded by an array of animals: ‘… the calves … the foxes … the owls … the nightjars … the horses’. He is, indeed, Adam before the fall and invokes ‘Adam and maiden’ along with the horses as emblems of the life-giving sun:

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
          Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathhered 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.

When Edwin Muir, another Edenic poet, imagined paradise, he also did so in terms of a farm—on Wyre in Orkney—with horses as symbols of ‘free servitude’. ‘The Horses’, from One Foot in Eden (1956), approaches the animals sympathetically:

                    And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came …
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.

Muir and Thomas share the equestrian imagery because the love of horses came naturally to them; the symbolism is substantial, not abstract.

Thomas's intention, to reclaim verbally his childhood Eden on the Welsh dairy farm, is executed in a poetry full of fluid rhythm and a diction that draws on popular idioms as in ‘once below a time’. The personified ‘Time’, in ‘Fern Hill’, begins by being kind to the child who is always aware of ‘the sun that is young once only’ (again, note the pun on ‘son’) then realizes that with the onset of adolescence he will lose his Edenic innocence. ‘Time’, which befriends the child, is an enemy to the adolescent. He comes in dreams and haunts the sleeper with thoughts of the inevitability of death. Whereas the sun provides light and life in the first five stanzas, the moon marks time in the dark of the closing stanza. At the end of the poem the moon lifts over the landscape, which thus becomes barren, ‘childless’:

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.

In April 1947, thanks to a travelling scholarship and financial assistance from friends, Thomas went to Italy for three months' holiday. After some weeks on the Italian Riviera he took a villa outside Florence and there wrote ‘In country sleep’, a poem intended as part of a sequence In country heaven. The plan for the extended poem was an ambitious one, as Thomas explained in a talk. Thematically the poem was to be full of the apocalyptic anguish that Thomas experienced after hearing the news of the atomic explosion over Hiroshima:

The poem is to be called In country heaven. … The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, those heavenly hedgerowmen who once were of the Earth call to one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hair's breadth of the mind, what they feel trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenie hearts, of that self-called place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance, and mysteries, all we know and do not know.

The poem is made of these tellings. And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness.⁸

Although Thomas was given to hyperbolic pronouncements, it is important to take this statement literally, for the poem recognizes death and destruction but opposes it with the insistence that happiness is possible, especially for the child. In all three of the In country heaven poems there is a struggle with death: the death of innocence in ‘In country sleep’, the death of the birds in ‘Over Sir John's hill’, the death of conception in ‘In the white giant's thigh’. It is fairly typical of the ignorance Thomas had to endure that when he responded with understandable emotion to an interpretation of the meaning of ‘In country sleep’, he was thought to be drunk or maudlin or both, as witness this anecdote told by Paul Ferris:

[‘In country sleep’] is written without complicated imagery, but it is not an easy poem to understand, despite various comments by Thomas to people in America. The critic William York Tindall told Thomas he thought it was about ‘how it feels to be a father’. Thomas is said to have wept at this remark—‘but whether from vexation, beer or sentimental agreement I could not tell’.⁹

The most obvious explanation is that Thomas was genuinely affected by the thought of a poem in which he had declared his love of, and concern for, his daughter Aeron.

Although ‘In country sleep’ was written in Italy, the landscape sounds, inevitably, like Fern Hill farm:

Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed
And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.
From the broomed witch's spume you are shielded by fern
And flower of the country sleep and the greenwood keep.

The poem unfolds in two sections; Section I contains nine seven-line stanzas rhyming abcbaac with a basic syllabic count of 12, 12, 12, 12, 4, 12, 12; Section II contains eight six-line stanzas rhyming abbcca with a basic syllabic count of 13, 13, 13, 4, 13, 13. The poem is a prayer for Aeron (born 3 March 1943, and 4 when the poem was completed) that she might retain a child's vision of the world, that timeless vision of Eden which Thomas had explored in ‘Fern Hill’. Thomas has read the child to sleep and imagines her dreaming of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty, etc. for allusions to these tales are woven into the first section of the poem. He tells her not to fear the frightening aspects of these tales; she is in a sacred place since ‘The country is holy’. This, the central proposition of the poem, is reminiscent of Blake's belief that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’. To show precisely how holy the country is Thomas accumulates sacramental images until the wood seems like a cathedral in which everything is blessed: ‘angel’, ‘saint's cell’, ‘nunneries and domes of leaves’, ‘three Marys’, ‘Sanctum sanctorum’, ‘the rain tellings its beads’, ‘the lord's-table’.

What the child has to dread is the Thief—the personified Time (from ‘Fern Hill’) that comes in the night, disturbs the child's dreams and destroys the childhood Eden by introducing thoughts of death. In particular he—Time, the Thief—takes away the child's perception of Christ as a gentle ‘saviour / Rarer than radium’ (‘There was a Saviour’) and dwells on the Christian agony, ‘the yawning wound at our sides’, a phrase that alarms the child, who consequently hears ‘the wound in her side go / Round the sun’. At its finale the poem is resolved as a contest between the Christ of the child's simple prayer and Time, the Thief. By reading the lines carefully, according to the punctuation supplied by line-endings, it is possible to grasp when ‘He’ is Christ and ‘he’ is the Thief who

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled
          hair,
But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer
                                                                                He comes to take
Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake
He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking
Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come
Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear
My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear
                                                                                Since you were born:
And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and
          each first dawn,
Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

The sense of these syntactically difficult lines is that he (i.e. Time, the Thief) comes to steal the child's faith (which is that Christ comes to her each night in prayer—‘He comes’) and to take away her faith (which is that Christ comes for his own, ‘unsacred’, sake to her) in order ‘to leave her in the lawless sun’—that is, leave her in a world without order. Time threatens the child's belief that everything is holy. Time introduces nightmare into the world of the sleeping child. Thomas, however, promises his daughter that Christ will come to her every night and will continue to do so, despite the Thief. If she accepts this paternal assurance then her faith will endure.

Thomas settled at the Boat House, Laugharne, in Spring 1949. The house was provided by the generosity of Margaret Taylor, and the poet told her ‘You have given me a life. And now I am going to live it.’¹⁰ Symbolically the return to Laugharne was a return to Eden, but the first poem Thomas wrote in the Boat House—‘Over Sir John's hill’, projected as part of In country heaven—is full of foreboding. It is a meditation on death suggested by the sights he could see in the estuary from his writing hut. During the poem it is the ‘led-astray birds’ who die, and Thomas, a singing bird who was often led astray, could readily empathize with these creatures. He imagines Sir John's Hill as a judge, with a ‘black cap of jack- / Daws’, pronouncing sentences of death on the birds. The ‘hawk on fire’ is the gallows where the birds are executed for

          blithely they squawk
To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until
The flash the noosed hawk
Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron
In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

As a judge the hill is ‘just’ because the birds have been ‘led-astray’, and the sentence is solemnly carried out. Yet the poet-as-witness and the heron-as-priest ask for mercy on account of the songs the birds produced from ‘their breast of whistles’. It is evident that the poem was written as a counterpoint to the prayer-like mood of ‘In country sleep’. Instead of the fairytale slumber wished on Aeron, there is ‘the shrill child's play’, although Thomas still brings images of forgiveness from his religion of nature:

I open the leaves of the water at a passage
Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs
                                                                                                                                  prancing. …

By the winter of 1949 Thomas was working on ‘In the white giant's thigh’, a composition that took him almost a year to complete. As part of the In country heaven sequence it is a lament for the lack of life on ‘this lump in the skies’. Impressively it uses a powerful pictorial source, namely

the white giant on the upper slopes of a high chalk hill, known appropriately as Giant Hill, overlooking the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas. This remarkable hill figure, cut in the turf, is thought to be of Romano-British origins, and is clearly a pagan fertility symbol. In his right hand the giant carries a cudgel, but more striking is the prodigiously erect penis. There is a local tradition that copulation on the grass within the phallus is a cure for barrenness in women. Significantly, too, the phallus points exactly to the spot where the sun would come over the crest of the hill on May Day.¹¹

‘In the white giant's thigh’ is an elegy for barren women, in fifteen regular quatrains (abab) irregularly arranged. Long-dead country women, childless in life, long in their death to conceive. To do justice to the subject Thomas conjures, from his technical repertoire, a sequence of intimately related images. For example, there is a ‘conceiving moon’ because of the menstrual cycle, but also because we learn that the women loved ‘in the after milking moonlight’. There is the information about the women ‘rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk / And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone’ which indicates that in their ecstasy the women were as soft as a lake that ripples like a harp as a stone enters it; the stone, of course, reminds the reader that the women are ‘barren as boulders’. Thomas's use of metaphor, in this work, is as carefully controlled as his manipulation of form. He speaks, for instance, of the women with their ‘breasts full of honey’, and four lines later their breasts are referred to as ‘the veined hives’. Simply to have used an image of ‘veined hives’ without preparing the reader would have been, to a poet of Thomas's excellence, irresponsible. Every line of the elegy evolves from a previous line so the theme is developed lyrically. The parenthesis containing the ‘veined hives’—

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)

—contains the tragic element. These women were as simple as characters in a child's tale—Mother Goose, associated with the ‘gooseskin winter’ of the twelfth line and ‘butter fat goosegirls’ of the thirty-seventh line—yet their cupboard was ‘barren and bare’ and like Jack's Jill they tumbled down but finished with an empty bucket. They bore no children, remained barren as ‘a boulder of wives’. Such references link up with the other poems in In country heaven, for there are ‘hearthstone tales’ in ‘In country sleep’ while ‘Over Sir John's hill’ incorporates the nursery rhyme

Crying, Dilly, dilly, dilly, dilly, come to be killed
For you must be stuffed, and my customers filled.

Some lines in ‘In the white giant's thigh’ could serve as a summation of the entire theme of In country heaven and show Thomas concerned with the survival of love in a reclaimed Eden, a found paradise:

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun, and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood; to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

It has been assumed by several commentators that in his last years Dylan Thomas was somewhat more than half in love with death; Paul Ferris suggests that ‘Death … appealed to him as a solution’.¹² Nevertheless, there is no textual evidence for that in his final poems which are optimistic in comparison to the morbid bone-and-blood creations of his adolescence. Thomas's mature poems are energetically opposed to the idea of death as a truly terminal condition. In 1951 he wrote three poems: ‘Lament’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and ‘Poem on his birthday’. Together they represent a triumph over death. ‘Lament’ is a dramatic monologue in five twelve-line stanzas (rhyming abcdabcdefef). An old man on his deathbed recalls his adolescence (first stanza), manhood (second stanza), maturity (third stanza), old age (fourth stanza), and finally bemoans the fact that he is dying amongst ‘all the deadly virtues’. Like ‘After the funeral’, the poem is critical of Welsh Nonconformist morality: ‘coal black’ becomes the colour of Welsh sin, or so Thomas would have us believe by using the epithet ‘coal black’ in every stanza. As the man finally succumbs to death, he does so with an ironical sense of humour that sends him to a chaste heaven

For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

On a more sombre note ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is Thomas's contemplation of the last days of his father who eventually died on 16 December 1952, aged 86, and whom Thomas was to survive by only one year. As early as 1934 D. J. Thomas had received treatment for throat cancer, a disease that transformed him from a dominant, awe-inspiring local figure (the Senior English Master in Swansea Grammar School) into a diffident old man waiting for the end. Thomas's poem, a villanelle, has a simple logic. The first stanza asserts that old men should not accept death but should ‘rage’ against it. Then in the next four stanzas, respectively, the poet gives the examples of ‘wise men’, ‘good men’, ‘Wild men’, ‘Grave men’ who ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. Therefore the conclusion, in the final stanza, reiterates the assertion:

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Given such determination, Thomas implies, the light of life will not disappear.

Although ‘Poem on his birthday’ was finished in the summer of 1951, when the poet was approaching his thirty-seventh birthday, it celebrates his biblically significant thirty-fifth birthday, his ‘midlife’. The poem alternates lines of six syllables with lines of nine syllables and is based on an assonantal rhyming pattern of ababcdcdc. As the descriptive opening indicates, the view from the Boat House is ethically ambivalent:

          In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
          Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
          And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
          He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
          Herons spire and spear.

Thomas, ‘the rhymer in the long tongued room’, watches the wildlife in the estuary and feels that fear of death is the serpent in his paradise—‘his crouched, eternal end / Under a serpent cloud’. Against this potential terror he sets ‘the unknown, famous light of great / And fabulous, dear God’. Midway through his life, apprehensive of the Dantean ‘brambled void’, he sees a way clear to his reclaimed Eden:

With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
          And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
          Be at cloud quaking peace

As he did in ‘Fern Hill’, Thomas hunts for an ‘air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild / As horses in the foam’; his eventual odyssey to death will therefore be a journey to ‘cool kingdom come’. His final flourish claims that Eden, as seen in Laugharne (or Fern Hill dairy farm or some other glorious part of rural Wales), is an eternal vision that will defeat death. Thomas knows that this spiritual life is a gift to sustain him as he embarks on the second stage of his life which can be a second childhood animated by the idea of Eden:

          I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
          Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
          More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
          Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
          As I sail out to die.

‘Author's Prologue’, the last poem completed by Thomas, was designed as a poetic preface to Collected Poems and was only delivered to the publisher two months before the book appeared on 10 November 1952. It has an elaborate rhyme-scheme whereby the first line rhymes with the last so both ends meet in the central couplet which matches ‘farms’ with ‘arms’. Thematically it is a variant on the biblical story of Noah who, according to Genesis, ‘found grace in the eyes of the Lord’, and saved the world by loading his ark with examples of ‘every living thing’. Thomas's ark is his imagination and he joyously fills it with a variety of creatures: ‘Gulls, pipers … men … Geese … boys … swans’. Through observation and affirmation he builds his ‘bellowing ark / To the best of my love’; gradually his imaginative ark swells to full flood, ready for the ‘Eternal waters’. The poet, the ‘Drinking Noah of the bay’, undertakes his poetic voyage ‘Under the stars of Wales’. He has gathered his Eden about him;

My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now.

That, and not the broken man dying in a New York hospital, should be the ultimate image of Dylan Thomas. His mature poems, as I hope I have shown, glow with vitality, pulsate with the rhythms of a great passion born of an Edenic childhood. Even his unfinished ‘Elegy’, written in memory of his father, praises ‘the light of the lording sky’ and promises D. J. Thomas a posthumous existence ‘Walking in the meadows of his son's eye’. If his initials suggest the D. T.s. Dylan Thomas's actual achievement is clear-sighted, sober, authentically spiritual. His later years may not have been so prolific, poetically, as those of his adolescence, but the mature poems I have examined are the ones that most eloquently express his vision. He said, in the Note to his Collected Poems, ‘These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.’ Thomas's critics have assumed that that statement was meant facetiously, but we'd be damn' fools if we didn't take him seriously.

Notes

1. Geoffrey Grigson, Blessings, Kicks and Curses (London: Alison and Busby, 1982), p. 16.

2. Donald Davie, Trying to Explain (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980), p. 65.

3. Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 8.

4. Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), p. 73.

5. Northrop Frye, The Great Code (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 142.

6. John Ackerman, Welsh Dylan (St. Albans: Granada Publishing, 1980), p. 67.

7. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Constantine FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1965), p. 370.

8. Dylan Thomas, quoted in FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas, p. 327.

9. Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 226.

10. Dylan Thomas, quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas, p. 239.

11. John Ackerman, Welsh Dylan, p. 105.

12. Paul Ferris, op. cit., p. 242.