THE THEME OF NATURE

There are very few of Thomas's poems which do not offer a meditation on nature. Many can be called poems about nature. As I have been showing, some consider art and nature, with equal or unequal emphasis. More rarely, some are about love and nature.

In “The force that through the green fuse” and “Fern Hill,” Thomas is meditating on art and nature at one and the same time. Neither subject is subordinate, and both are imaginatively ingrained in the language, music, and form. The poems are Janus-faced, looking evenly in two directions. They are flexible forms, like those outlines shaped one way like a face, the other like a vase. They are poems which almost succeed in crossing the threshold from human nature to nonhuman nature, which attempt to assert—and demonstrate—that such a threshold does not exist. But each good poem is an individual entity, and each poem makes its imaginative statement—perhaps “essay” is a better word—in a different way.

These two big poems are both occupied with greenness, in its many meanings. I believe that Thomas is a green poet, who fully understands the politics of greenness, anticipating our present wishes and efforts to care for the globe, our polluted environment, and to displace the human animal from a still prevailing arrogant centrality.

Thomas fills his poetry with greenness, and admired earlier poets, like Traherne and Blake, who shared his celebratory and re-creative sense of sensuous and symbolic significances of green. In his twinned “Nurse's Songs,” one bitter, sterile and jealous, the other liberated, fresh and enabling, Blake provides a model for comprehending and expressing the sense of greenness. Thomas follows this model, explicitly or implicitly, in “The force that through the green fuse” and he wrote “I am in the path of Blake” (CL [see abbreviations list at the end of this essay], p. 79, quoted in CP, p. 183.) But long before his English models, the medieval Welsh poets, Dafydd ap Gwilym and his contemporary and friend Gruffydd ap Adda, colored their nature and love lyrics with many shades of green, and Iolo Morgannwg, four centuries later, wrote “The Poet's Arbour in the Birch-wood,” almost as green as “Fern Hill” or “The force that through the green fuse.”

“The force that through the green fuse” names the natural force as green, then in a leap of metaphor both new and traditional, immediately includes the human life, “my green age,” in which the old use of green, as in the “green judgment” of Cleopatra's salad days and the common sense of “silly-ignorant-innocent,” is transmuted by association with the plant's stem, and becomes a welcome hybrid, meaning young and fresh. “Drives my green age”: the poem proves, or demonstrates, in the way poems do prove, or demonstrate, what it says. It does so by a forceful impassioned repetition of the word, and by the cunning intrication of a set of associations which initiate or make a language change. Green is made new, and since it is itself the sign and symptom of nature made new, there is a special wit, liveliness, and freshness about its renewals. Green is, of course, in politics as in poetry, wrenched from literal meanings for the purposes of metaphor, belonging as it does, chiefly though not exclusively, to the least regarded, vegetable, part of creation. There are green birds and insects and reptiles, but one of the puzzles of science is the absence of green mammals, the so-called green monkey not being an exception. So the human adoption of the color for the raised ecological consciousness is both especially ironic and especially appropriate. This choice of a nonhuman color to symbolize ecological justice offers a semantic apology for anthropocentrism.

The epithet “green,” shared by human and nonhuman nature, here makes a statement about the identity, or intimacy, of both, and starts off the sequence of statements about a natural unity—what Coleridge called the unity of being—which does not depend at all on greenness, as the poet turns to rocks, water, wind, clay, lime, sheets, and bodies. (As in recent political usage, Thomas's green is both taken literally and knowingly deployed as metaphor for nature.) As I have said, he imagines nature as a force, but the word “force” is too conceptual, so it is animated but not anthropomorphized, magnified, and bodied, with organs: “The mouthing streams” and “the hand that whirls the water in the pool.” Sensation and abstraction are made to cross and kiss, (to double-cross, in Thomas's own pun) and to conceive a new creature, as Joyce creates a physical but also mythological Finnegan in the fluidity and fragmentariness of his last novel's process, a form of necessary chaos out of which to bring order. Thomas's short poem isn't as chaotic, but it is dynamic, fast, teeming, rushing and swirling in movement, and filled with images of rushing, swirling, streaming, pressing, and propulsion, explosion, sap rise, growth, water flow, wind, erection, tumescence, chemical cycle—and also breakdown, execution, decay, dissolution, detumescence.

“Fern Hill” is about his green age, and is both like and unlike “The force that through the green fuse” in its playful and serious insistence on greenness. Its many greens compose the greenness of the first world, in the lyric which is Thomas's “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.” It tells, like Milton's first epic, and as a narrative inset, the story of creation. I have already emphasized Thomas's imagery of art—the play, the games, the dreams, the songs, the stories—and these, like the green age in the sonnet, are colored by the green of the natural world in which they are located, with which they play, and which they praise.

It is a Rhapsody in Green, repeating and permuting the green images. Its green goes back to the “Green as beginning” in the final poem of the earlier sonnet sequence “Altarwise by owl-light.” Greenness begins in the title, Fern Hill, a place-name title which remembers but slightly though significantly changes the name of his first green place, rechristening his aunt's farm, Fernhill, as Fern Hill, formalizing, analyzing, carefully enunciating, separating its syllables and words, emphasizing the two natural elements of vegetation and earth, making a title, referring to a hill as well as a man-made farm, appropriately renaming the experience he is recalling and resurrecting.

There is green in each of its six, flowing, occasionally rhyming, highly assonantal and alliterative stanzas. (This was first pointed out, as far as I know, by Henry Treece, though he does little beyond making the observation.) The repeated greens are linked and varied, emerging as themes but also working like notes and chords in music, and shifted from literal to metaphorical meanings, as images in poetry.

In the first stanza the speaker was “happy as the grass was green” in his young days, naturally, freshly, and brightly happy, now using a new comparison for which there are familiar analogues, especially “happy as the day was long.” There is a conversion to greenness. The second stanza is the only one in which “green” appears twice, as if to reinforce the beginning and show the key image, but in both appearances the color becomes metaphorical: “as I was green and carefree” and “And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman”; the first perhaps a touch more abstract, the second made more sensuous by that companionable “golden” and the suggestion of the huntsman and herdsman in green fields and woods. In the third stanza the word returns to color, but startlingly, “fire green as grass” reminding us that fire can burn green but at the same time turning up an unexpected variation, in a comparison which begins by sounding traditional, like the two earlier “greens,” and of course contains a traditional comparison, but ends by amazing sense and mind. In the fourth stanza we have what is perhaps the strangest of all these greens, when the first horses are imagined “walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable.” And in the fifth and last stanza we go back to the early tradition-hallowed metaphors of green meaning young and silly and ignorant and innocent, but here defamiliarized by its new collocation, “green and dying.” This suggests both the early beginning of dying and the youthfulness and silliness and ignorance and innocence of all ages.

Green is dominant, but it is not the only color, though we get a favored palette rather than a complete spectrum. Green is qualified by the slightly less frequently used “golden,” which is like green both a color word and an old traditional metaphor. It appears once in the first stanza, twice in the second, and once in the fifth, but twice in a prominent position at the beginning of lines with parallel syntax, “Golden in the heydays of his eyes” and “Golden in the mercy of his means.” We have only one “white,” a wanderer white and the dew,” one dark, “flashing into the dark,” and one vivid metaphorical, new and old, blue, “at my sky blue trades.” Here the blue associates the boy's “horn” with Little Boy Blue, coincides with Wallace Stevens's emblematic color for art (as in “The Blue Guitar” which must play the green world), and in a brilliant intuition chooses the perfect color for the innocent joys of childhood. Like the two greens in “The force that through the green fuse,” the colors identify and join the human and nonhuman natural world, all its creatures and elements made new and strange.

Art and nature are inextricably fused in the poet's new creation story, which remakes Milton and uses the child's wild and brave imagination to present the bizarre image of those horses “walking warm.” It brings together the extremes of creativity, the great English poet's epic, and the child's-play dream: both are creative, and also re-creative, as they remake the Bible story. It also brings together the extremes of unprofessional creativity, in memory and dream. And of course the modern poet binds the epic, the play, the dream, and the memory together, in a lyric which rings with the joy of knowing nature and art.

The horses are warm, because they are newborn, just out of the wet womb, because they are walking into the heat of the first light, and because horses always feel warm to human touch. They are walking out of a green stable not just because they are a child's horses, or because a poet can make a stable green, as Stephen Dedalus made a rose green, but also because, though stables aren't green, this one is brand-new. It is the very first stable for the very first horses and the poet gives it an appropriately original color. Thomas, like the Green politicians and parties, uses the color sign of that least privileged part of nature, vegetation, which all of us, even vegetarians, destroy. And he uses it in a way which brings out the reason and the strangeness of its signature. Violently yet quietly unsettling man's centrality, “green” is made to stand for the basic fundamental creative principle or life force.

“On to the fields of praise”—where else, in a poem about wondering at wonderful creation, and restoring the innocent excited playful eye, touch, and imagination of childhood most properly, in order to wonder? Thomas gave a broadcast on the “Poems of Wonder” (TB, pp. 63-73), and though he didn't mention the color green, most of the poets he read in that talk imagine greenness—Vaughan, Marvell, Traherne, Blake, de la Mare, and John Crowe Ransom. Like them, and also like Milton and Lawrence, both powerful influences on his work, Thomas himself wrote a poetry which peels habit from vision to make the stale and tired reader wake up to wonder. A century and a half apart, the romantic Coleridge¹ and the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky in various discussions of ostranenie² insist that art makes things strange. There can be few better twentieth-century proofs of art's creative defamiliarizing than this poem.

In a now familiar letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, who like Vernon Watkins, but earlier, stimulated Thomas by ideas and poetry, he criticized her for attempting to write poems about the unity of being without showing the relationship of parts of nonhuman nature not only to the human creature, but to each other. As soon as he formulates his ideal you see that it is a hard thing to write because it is a hard thing to imagine:

Though you talk all through of the relationship of yourself to other things, there is no relationship at all between the things you example. If you are one with the swallow and one with the rose, then the rose is one with the swallow. Link together these things you speak of; show, in your words & images, how your flesh covers the tree & the tree's flesh covers you.

(CL, p. 79)

So how does Dylan Thomas do what he advises, link and show the link? The linking and the showing are matters of imagination, not willed craft, and his imaginative linkings are various. One way is through transformative imagery, as in the new hybrid epithet “green,” half-literal color and half-metaphorical quality, and the old hybrids of the parsed permuted “mouth” which are first shown to cover human and vegetable life, then human and mineral life. Another way is through the embodiment and individuation of a placed and imagined passionate vision, the madman's, the god's, or the child's, which merges and mingles parts in a new-made whole, like the animated asylum, or the freshly imaged stable matrix.

These are complex and elaborate transformations and characterizations, extending over lengths of language, but Thomas is also very good at jamming together and uniting differences and disparates briefly, in a compound word. One example, from “Poem on his Birthday,” is “mustardseed sun,” a brilliantly plural joining through unlikenesses: one object is vegetable and one a star, one very small and one very large, one graspable and everyday, one remote and not wholly known, one a culinary aid, the other essential to life; and through the likenesses: both are natural objects, both are dense bright yellow, both round, and both provide intense heat. The result is the kind of thing which happens in the ancient Japanese form of haiku, which may in small compass collate two experiences, neither of which is made a subordinate or vehicle for the other. This is a compressed way of showing the things in the nonhuman world related to each other, and such images are characteristic original imprints of juxtaposition or comparison which relate without the hierarchy implicit in the making of metaphor. It is a form of rhetoric perfected for a decentering of the human vision.

There are other powerful examples in this magnificent poem: for instance, the “sandgrain day,” “thunderclap spring,” “ramshackle sea,” and the “thistledown fall.” These are all images like the mustardseed sun which bring together natural objects from different categories, forming compounds which refuse to subordinate either element, and refuse or resist separation into the conventional rhetorical components of tenor (subject signified) and vehicle (carrier or signifier of subject). The day is like the sand grain in being small, one amongst many, uncountable, light and bright, but the conjunction tells us as much about the sand grain as the day. The thunderclap coexists with the spring, rather than simply illustrating its explosive bursts of arrival. Thistledown does almost as much for the fall, of which it is a part, as the fall does for the thistledown, the phrase rejecting the instrumental element at work in most synecdoche as in metaphor and simile. The sea makes the shackled ram more rough, turbulent, dangerous, violent, and wild, drawing them both closer to the human being in his shore lookout. But the bucking ram makes the tusk-curved waves and tides more uninhibited, sexual, dangerous and intransigent as they obey the necessities of their regulation and rhythm. This metaphor also takes us back, like so many of Hopkins's images, to etymology, to discover that the dictionary does not give what I assumed to be the origin of the word and image, but merely guesses—with an O.E.D. [Oxford English Dictionary] “perhaps”—at possible derivations, none of which seem as plausible as the one suggested by Thomas's component-conscious compound. Thomas invents—or perhaps reinvents and discovers—the etymology, by placing an existing compound in an inventive context which makes it strange and makes us analytic. This poem's image set (noticeably but not uniquely) brings together parts of nature as equalities, so that the two syllables of ramshackle, whatever its origin, are joined and re-created as a hobbled strong sexual creature.

As I have said, these compounds work like haiku. The sea is compared with a shackled animal, the day with a grain of sand, the spring with a thunderclap, the fall with thistledown, and we accept and admire the aptness, which does the work of a precise detailed substantiation, which is not Thomas's way with nature. But there is companionship not subordination, demonstrating—or rather dramatizing—that relationship between aspects of the natural world which Thomas explained to Pamela Hansford Johnson. There is reciprocity, as in haiku. Though several Thomas critics convincingly interpret Thomas's vision of natural unity as religious, sometimes pantheistic, sometimes Christian, it may also be read as an agnostic poetry, a physical rather than a metaphysical vision, an acceptance of the human being's place in what Wordsworth called the very world in which we live, without invoking the supernatural—which after all involves hierarchy and hegemony—except as metaphor, “fabulous, dear God,” who seems to be invoked as Wallace Stevens—great postmetaphysical poet of the green world—recognized the necessary angel of our human imagination.

Thomas also joins the poetry of nature with love poetry, which he writes more rarely than most poets. One of his best love poems is the extraordinary “Into her lying down head,” which he describes as a “poem about modern love” (CL, p. 455). It is like some of the other poems I have mentioned—“Where once the waters of your face,” for instance—in presenting an ambiguous balance and relationship of tenor and vehicle, so that at first it is possible to read it—perhaps impossible not to read it—as offering two faces: is it a love poem in which the natural world is a metaphor, or a poem about nature in which human love is a metaphor? If we conclude, as I did after many readings, that the first is the most plausible reading, this is backed by Thomas's exegesis, offered to Vernon Watkins in the letter I have just quoted.

It turns out to be a poem about jealousy, but the extensive metaphors of mineral and bird make it also a proving and a linking, another poem about the unity of being. The display of unity is moving in itself but also makes the human pair, and their needs, desires and severance, larger, more intense, and more powerful. This is seen most clearly in the last section, where Thomas's favored images of sand and bird come together, linked with each other as well as linked with the human loving—and hating:

                    Two sand grains together in bed,
                    Head to heaven-circling head,
          Singly lie with the whole wide shore,
The covering sea their nightfall with no names;
And out of every domed and soil-based shell
                    One voice in chains declaims
          The female, deadly, and male
          Libidinous betrayal,
Golden dissolving under the water veil.

Sand and water here form a remarkable image both of married love and promiscuity, and though they may eventually be seen as metaphors of a human situation, so neatly apt but weirdly unlike, so particularized is the image of coupled sand grains, close and compact as sleeping or coupled lovers, the wide expanse of beach, and the appearance of soft yellow sand in water, that the images offer a statement in themselves, suggestive of sexual love but also of a companionable proximity of mineral items. The natural world appears to create a sense of huge collective extension, and amorphous fluidity, shape taking and shape losing. The shell also takes its place in this drama, the dome suggesting amplitude and space, the “soil-based” position a tethering. Sand and sea and shell story are followed by an equivalent bird version, with similar suggestions of texture and companionably fitting bodies but with its own impression of joy: the sand grains were content, perfectly fitted, but the bird is ecstatic, welcoming both bliss and destruction, which the speechless sand grains merely suffer:

                    A she bird sleeping brittle by
Her lover's wings that fold tomorrow's flight,
                    Within the nested treefork
                    Sings to the treading hawk
Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk.

The last movement doubles images of grass and stone, not suggesting a pairing but with a scrupulous accuracy, solitude and anonymity for the stone, but company and membership for the grass blade:

                    A blade of grass longs with the meadow,
A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill.

We finally return to the human creatures, in a total and profound presentation of two points of view, the amoral view of nature, and the human sexual and social suffering which can't reach that larger natural view as it suffers. Humanity is presented in a series of compressed images which are sensuous but need intellectual unpacking: nakedness, implying companionship with the unclothed, so unprotected and undecorated air; innocence but only “between wars”; lust, secret, and uninhibited in the cause of life-force fertility, but also the private and social dimension of jealousy, solitude, and enmity. But we return to the larger viewpoint as the “severers,” the deaths, obliterate the personal moralities and passions. The last image of faithless sleep makes another scrupulously accurate observation:

Open as to the air to the naked shadow
          O she lies alone and still,
          Innocent between two wars,
With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds to
          perpetuate the stars,
          A man torn up mourns in the sole night.
And the second comers, the severers, the enemies from the deep
Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their dead in
          their faithless sleep.

In such a reticently and obscurely narrated love story, rendering the emotions of desire and jealousy and anger, the natural world stands out in a vivid particularity. (It is a little like the way in which an organ or object, displaced in cubist painting, may stand out in relief and new close-up.) But what is impressive about that particularity is its convincing characterization of the sand, water, bird, grass, stone and hill as live, individual, active participants. For instance, as I've said, the grass blade is allowed to long—to have a form or purpose and a belonging—while the stone is locked, imprisoned but also companioned. Sometimes the recognition of a natural object is registered simply through a precise image: for instance, “brittle” is just right for the light-boned bird, and the nonhuman amorality of the slung together “carrion, paradise,” perfectly apt. The nonhuman phenomena can only be described, as scrupulously as possible, by the human creature standing on the threshold of their existence, doing his best to invent a language for his empathy, allowing them to refuse to be subordinates, instruments, and symbols.

Nature is wonderingly and wonderfully imagined, as nature, and even when human emotional and ethical language is used, as in “libidinous,” “love,” “longs,” and “lost,” it is not farfetched or inappropriate. The nonhuman identities and relations are never romanticized in this poem which is both a highly original, strange, love lyric and one of Thomas's best nature poems.

It is a poem which has always reminded me of one of Lawrence's best, but not especially typical, love poems, “The Ballad of a Second Ophelia,” whose bright yolk and interdevastation of human, animal, fruit and blossom Thomas's piece echoes, so I was delighted to find Thomas quoting three stanzas of Lawrence's poem as one he admired (CL, p. 558). (He had already written this poem, but wasn't reading Lawrence for the first time.) Its ejaculatory and ecstatic eroticism is also like the tone and feeling of Lawrence's poem. “Chirrup my bright yolk” compounds celebration of the egg, distress for its spilling, and the endearment of a bird's little language, and like the language composed for the unborn child in “If my head hurt a hair's foot,” this scrap of idiolect is piercingly live and vibrant, another new language, freshly minted for a mother bird, though like Lawrence's “Cluck, my yellow darlings!”—included in Thomas's quotation—using traditional little-language bird words too.

Like many seaside children, Thomas passed time lounging and watching, as well as playing and exploring, on the sands. He knows the soft, fine, gritty feel of it: his sand imagery is textural—in “From Love's First Fever” the sand spits—as well as visually evocative of the varied flat sand and dunes of the Gower peninsula. He knows the sound of sand too, and in the meditative and joyous “We lying by seasand,” there is no particular seascape invoked, but we are brought close to what they all have in common, sand and sea.

The heavenly music over the sand
Sounds with the grains as they hurry
Hiding the golden mountains and mansions
Of the grave, gay, seaside land.

This seems like a composite seascape, dune country recalled in those golden mountains, the gay seaside land, the populated Swansea beach or South Gower beaches, the more isolated feel of rock and tide watch in the remoter Rhossilli or North Gower country. The scurry of sand is there too.

But the poem's sensuous nature imagery is a vehicle for feeling. The poem utters an unusually simple cry, in a laconic clipped language which Thomas probably learned from Auden, whom he disparages at times but admired:

We lying by seasand, watching yellow
And the grave sea …
Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away
The strata of the shore and down red rock;
But wishes breed not, neither
Can we fend off rock arrival,
Lie watching yellow until the golden weather
Breaks, oh my heart's blood, like a heart and hill.

He uses the silence and stillness and beauty of the scene as a sounding board for the heart's longing. “Yellow” resonates like green in other poems, and like green is wonderfully substantiated, in the substantive of the two key watching lines. It has its own assonant mellow melody, like a hollow shell, like Billie Holiday singing “Sweet and Mellow.” That short move from the metaphorical heart's-blood to the simile “like a heart” is simple but daring, breaking and starting up within short compass in a way expressive of the heartbreak it describes but doesn't quite name. The final collocation of heart and hill manages to feel for the broken hill as well as the broken heart, establishing both as strong but vulnerable objects of care.

Though less strikingly than “Into her lying down head,” this is another one of many examples of the poet's love poetry for nature. This is often written—and imagined—without the detailed particularizations of nature poets like Dorothy Wordsworth or Hopkins. Blake pulls off the same trick of convincingly embracing objects in an abstract, rather than an individualized, apostrophe. His blade of grass, his grains of sand, his robin redbreast, and his pebble are very like similar natural objects in Thomas's animations.

Some of Thomas's early poems are written, as Yeats said of his own much more romantically desirous, but less erotic, early love poems, in desire and longing. But here too the imagining of the natural world often powerfully displaces the human center, and pushes itself sturdily and individually forward. This is what happens in “A grief ago,” where the desolations and pleasures of love are done in substantial nature imagery. In “She who was who I hold, the fats and flower,” for instance, the bodily “fats” and the metaphorical flower, linked as so often by a pun—the cooking pun—make a strong image, new and traditional, for woman's flesh and beauty, while “a chrysalis unwrinkling in the iron” is a literal example of birth and an adroit, unusually subtle, phallic symbol.

“From Love's First Fever” is another green poem (with some yellow) which particularizes the growth of a human creature through natural images:

Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The poem's images are particular and complex, and sometimes synaesthetic, joining the mineral and animal in that wonderful spitting image, which is sandily dry, wet, and stinging. In that personal and radical revision of Yeats's singing school, the green singing house, there is a fusion of what is literally animal and vegetable and metaphorically human. As the sand grains spit life into each other, as I've mentioned, they sting sharply and grittily like actual sand, and they are also given an imaginary method of reproduction animistic but also physically apt, thoroughly felt.

Once more the metaphorical vehicle for the human story and situation is unsubdued, and here it is not only strongly particularized by being realized through sensations of look and feel, but is itself complicated by being imagined in animating human terms—“spat life into its fellow”—so that the vehicle in its turn becomes tenor. Like the ambiguous narrative of “Where once the waters of your face,” this cellular compounding of metaphor makes a love poem a nature poem too.

Something similar happens in “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” which I described in the last chapter as holding together the subjects of art and death. It also presents itself as a nature poem, and contains a powerful rejection of anthropocentricity:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn.

This poem whose apocalyptic metaphors blend Christian and Jewish temples in easy companionship begins by equalizing mankind and the rest of nature, in that wonderfully dignified beginning vision—in which there shall be no more sea, as well as no more land—where those principles of power, “making” and humbling, stand strongly together, to act out the stated unity of being. This is a part of the poem's curious action of occupatio, through which the speaker refuses to mourn for what is a tragic wasted young life and death because he is unwilling to separate death from life, and insists on celebrating the natural circulation and recycling of nature. (How could anyone with this kind of accepting and enabling imagination sympathize with nationalism?) It would be a mistake to think his position was apolitical. As I have said, Thomas was a good untheoretical caring grassroots Socialist, who said on at least one occasion that the poet had a global responsibility, and should be in touch with what was happening on this planet.

Thomas's imagination leaps to generalize, and abstract, the human condition. Sometimes he does so while sympathizing with the individual—and poetically individualized—creature, like the hunchback, Ann Jones, and Raymond's dying brother; sometimes, most extraordinarily, without individualizing human features and feelings at all, as in the speech of the unsexed fetus, or in the feeling for sap driven through stem, or in this elegy for a dead child and all the dead, human, vegetable, and mineral. (Thomas, like Blake, has a soft spot for stones.)

Without creating hard-and-fast categories and compartments, I think it important to distinguish between the handful of character poems, which are always lyrical, but are also narrative poems, and more “purely” and concentratedly lyrical poems like “The force that through the green fuse,” and “A Refusal to Mourn,” which avoid, fragment, or reduce narrative and character, to dwell intensely on sensation and feeling.

These highly emotional poems present the human element by generalization and abstraction, but because they are lyrically impassioned, what is made general and abstract is also made fresh, lively, and particular. In “The force that through the green fuse” and “A Refusal to Mourn,” the human element is generalized and abstracted because Thomas is taking, in a tremendous imaginative essay, the vertiginous viewpoint and remarkably long perspective from which human nature is grasped as part of nature. He manages to assimilate the human element, as he believes the life force assimilates it, to rocks and stones and trees, or to substitute some of his favorite nonhuman images for those of the less green, and more hesitant, conservative, romantic, and compromised pantheist Wordsworth, to ferns, foxes, stems, sand grains, air, water, herons and hawks. The human being, especially the poet using his language as personally and passionately and particularly as poets can, cannot exactly comprehend or imagine the nonhuman phenomenal world which he contemplates, but this is what Thomas seems to achieve. It is perhaps that touch of genius which makes his very early poems so brilliant, depending as they do not on what is learned but on what is imagined in sensuous and emotional contact—the germinal experience. It seems odd that someone who was so nurtured and extroverted to participate in social culture could create or inhabit this interiority of kinship with the green world.

Two final comments. Dylan Thomas's articulated sense of natural unity makes any suggestion of provincial self-consciousness seem irrelevant, certainly for the understanding and appreciation of his poems and stories. More importantly, it explains why he could go on mining these adolescent poems for so long, revising their language, often expanding their action and scene, but keeping the germinal experience, intuitive and imaginative. Thomas is sometimes judgmentally described as immature or infantile, but I'd like to turn this analysis round and propose that he is Wordsworth's best philosopher, that lost visionary child who felt itself in easy relationship with the rest of creation, that past creative self the mature Wordsworth labored unceasingly to recall and restore. Like Wordsworth, but without the sense of loss through growth, Thomas articulated a preserved sense of the childhood intimacy with the natural world, the freedom and excitement of playing in nature, the vision of, the fusion with, “the splendor in the grass, the glory in the flower.”

In much of his splendid poetry he found a language, rooted in the adolescent writing, for presenting that sense of unity, a unity of the observer with what is observed. When he writes the poem which begins “I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,” he is speaking Cartesianly about the ghost-laying poet, “the brassy orator” containing the ghost who holds “hard in death's corridor,” but he also discovers a language for natural unity, a poetry like that of the great classical haiku poets, Bashō and Buson, who imagine images, narratives, and patterns without metaphorical subordinations, for expressing union and equality.

Thomas's intricate image in which he strides on two levels is an original vision of the human animal as language maker, companioned by the nonhuman animal, vegetable, and mineral phenomena, which only the human language maker is empowered to identify and to articulate, easily, frustratedly, joyfully, and bitterly. The politics and the aesthetics of this poetry are profound, and its art rare.

Notes

1. [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, [London: J. M. Dent, 1991], chap. 13.

2. See, for instance, Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917). reprinted in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

List of Abbreviations

CL Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris. London: J. M. Dent, 1985.

CP Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems, 1934-1953, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. London: J. M. Dent, 1996.

CP52 Dylan Thomas: Collected Poems, 1934-1952. London: J. M. Dent, 1952.

CS Dylan Thomas: The Collected Stories. London: J. M. Dent, 1983.

EPW Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies. London: J. M. Dent, 1971.

FS Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, ed. John Ackerman. London: J. M. Dent, 1995.

JA A Dylan Thomas Companion, by John Ackerman. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991.

NP Dylan Thomas: The Notebook Poems, 1930-1934, ed. Ralph Maud. London: J. M. Dent, 1989.

PAYD Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, by Dylan Thomas. Introduced by Aeronwy Thomas. London: Everyman, J. M. Dent, 1993.

QEOM Quite Early One Morning, ed. Aneirin Talfan Davies. London: J. M. Dent, 1954.

TB Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, ed. Ralph Maud. London: J. M. Dent, 1991.

TP Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. Daniel Jones. London: J. M. Dent, 1971.

TR Dylan Thomas: Dog among the Fairies, by Henry Treece, London: Ernest Benn, 1947. Rev. 1956.

UMW Under Milk Wood, ed. Daniel Jones. London: J. M. Dent, 1954. Rev. ed. 1974.

Unless otherwise stated, references for the poems are to CP and for the stories to PAYD.