SOURCE: Thomas, Gareth. “A Freak User of Words.” In Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art, edited by Alan Bold, pp. 65-88. London, England: Vision Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Gareth Thomas explores Thomas's writings from a linguistic perspective.]

In a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, dated 9 May 1934, the precocious 19-year-old Dylan Thomas confessed his doubts and fears about his abilities as a poet:

My lines, all my lines, are of the tenth intensity. They are not the words that express what I want to express; they are the only words I can find that come near to expressing a half. And that's no good. I'm a freak user of words, not a poet. That's really the truth. No self-pity there. A freak user of words, not a poet. That's terribly true.¹

Such anguish over the impossibility of nailing down human experience with mere words is hardly uncommon, and particularly in the present century. Eliot's ‘intolerable wrestle with words’ is well understood by all writers, but especially by those modernists who have been intent on pushing language to its limits. For linguists, the work of such writers—a Hopkins, a Joyce, a Thomas—is of particular interest, exhibiting as it does the kinds of linguistic ‘deviancy’² which serve to illuminate the underlying structures that inform every level of language, and the degree to which these structures have been manipulated and extended.

Language is indeed malleable, and the creative artist engages in ‘wrestling’ with it; but at the same time language must retain its deeply embedded framework for the sake of mutual comprehension. And this very framework is a reminder that, as man only perceives what, in a sense, he is ‘programmed’ to see, so he can only express what his own, man-made structures allow him to express. Such a confinement can often appear ‘intolerable’, for the writer, like every other user of the language, is—as Thomas puts it in ‘Especially when the October wind’—‘shut, too, in a tower of words’.

Thomas's quite remarkable verbal virtuosity was from the beginning both a potential strength and weakness in him. A strength which could be demonstrated on all linguistic levels—phonological, grammatical and semantic—and which could dazzle, delight and move the reader or listener with its sheer freshness, inventiveness and audacity. But a potential weakness principally for the reason Thomas himself expressed at that bleak moment in the early letter quoted above—a fear that all the wordy frothiness concealed a lack of true substance underneath.

His doubts were compounded by a persistent sense of inferiority amongst the lions of the literary world, deriving in part from his Welshness (no Anglo-Welsh literary tradition that was in any way comparable to the Anglo-Irish had yet been established); from his provincialism (latter-day sentimentality can so easily ignore the reality of his harsh early letters, when he yearned ‘to get out of it all, out of narrowness and dirtiness. … I shall have to get out soon or there will be no need. I'm sick, and this bloody country's killing me³); and perhaps above all from his lack of a formal education beyond the age of 16.

On this last point, Thomas made some typically self-mocking remarks later in his life:

I could talk about my education—which, critics say, I have not got. And they are right, too. (But I do wish I had learned some other languages, apart from English, Third Programme and saloon. Then, perhaps, I could understand what people mean when they say I have been influenced by Rimbaud.) … only—usually—a subtle, or a humourless, or an honest writer says he was extremely good at school. Neither particularly subtle nor honest, I must say I was awful. Whether this was because of stupidity or arrogance I am still not asking myself.

Fitzgibbon may be right in claiming that ‘his almost total academic failure left a scar’,⁴ but the reverse side of this possible truth presents us with the positive energies of such an anarchic, ‘uneducated’ spirit. On the same subject of his education, Thomas could also reveal:

… my proper education consisted of the liberty to read whatever I cared to. I read indiscriminately and all the time with my eyes hanging out on stalks … words, words, words … each of which seemed alive forever in its own delight and glory and right.

There are many testimonies to Thomas's intense feel for and love of language. His close friend, Daniel Jones, has described the years of early adolescent precociousness at Warmley, which produced extravagant experiments in the coauthorship of epic poems where he and Thomas were ‘seriously playing with words’.⁵ It is interesting, as well as amusing, to note the example of one of his own poems from this time, which he quotes in the famous fictional account of his meeting with Dan Jones, the short story, ‘The Fight’. Commanded by the formidable little Reverend Bevan to provide a sample of his verse, he proceeds to recite a most lurid sexual fantasy, culminating with the necrophilia of the final stanza:

Now could I wake
To passion after death, and taste
The rapture of her hating, tear the waste
Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break.

The linguistic precociousness is more than matched by that of the content, but it is the former that the Reverend Bevan comments on:

Dan kicked my shins in the silence before Mr. Bevan said: ‘The influence is obvious, of course. “Break, break, break, on thy cold, grey stones, O sea.”’

‘Hubert knows Tennyson backwards,’ said Mrs. Bevan, ‘backwards.’

Looking back on his early childhood much later in life, Thomas remembers himself as one besotted with words:

I fell in love—that is the only expression I can think of—at once, and am still at the mercy of words. … There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable.⁶

Throughout his life he constantly insisted on the point that he wrote ‘out of’ or ‘from’ words, rather than ‘towards’ them.

And if the evidence from the poet himself, and from one of his closest friends, is not enough there is always the general (and, to put it mildly, rather vague) connection held to exist between his verbal gifts and his Welshness—what is loosely referred to as the ‘bardic’ quality in his writing. Ethnic enthusiasts have always to be reminded that Thomas spoke not a single word of Welsh—and the poet would have been among the first to remind them—but it is true that the Welsh language was only one generation away, and Fitzgibbon's claim that because of the bilingual influence ‘the recently anglicised “Celt” will examine his language with a very close attention’ may well be a valid one.

Many critics, too, have pointed to the public nature of the bardic tradition with its emphasis on declaiming poetry aloud, giving full effect to sound qualities and vivid imagery, hardly in the private, conversational tones of, say, a Larkin. Thomas, again with a typical sense of irony—his bardic platform is the ‘raised hearth’ in the front parlour of his Auntie Annie's home—imagines himself as inheritor of such a tradition on the day of her funeral⁷:

But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads. …

In the same poem he is very well aware of the dangers of over-blown rhetoric and of extravagant conceits, and this ‘false’ bardic hyperbole is countered by a quieter ‘truth’:

(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).

This verbal trickery, then, whatever its sources, can prove to be a double-edged sword. The very dexterity with which the language is manipulated has led many readers to suspect that Thomas is merely out to seduce by a wonderful display of verbal gymnastics. He is the Great Linguistic Showman, the man with ‘the lovely gift of the gab’⁸—and in this respect the Welshness may be a severe handicap, fuelling those deep suspicions of Celtic garrulousness, and associated superficiality—and even dishonesty. So much so that Walford Davies has reservations about the late poems because ‘if they illustrate any technical danger, it is that of too much verbal glamour.’⁹

And, ironically, a friend and fellow Anglo-Welsh writer, Glyn Jones, in intending to extol the virtues of Thomas's craft, gives further ammunition for such charges, and the much more serious accusation of sheer vacuousness. ‘For me,’ he writes, ‘the best of Dylan's poems are pure sensation, they have in fact achieved the condition of music.’¹⁰ Here we have a wholehearted acceptance of the truth of Pater's famous dictum, and of Mallarmé's similar, ‘Poems are made of words, not ideas.’ And the ultimate folly this can lead to is revealed as Glyn Jones pursues his theme:

If I were asked in the excitement of my first encounter with this poem [‘Light breaks where no sun shines’] what its meaning was, my answer would have been something like that of William Morris questioned, after a public meeting, on his interpretation of Marx's theory of surplus value: ‘I don't know what Marx meant by his theory of surplus value,’ Morris is reputed to have answered, ‘and I'm damned if I want to know.’

Are we to take this seriously? In other words: ‘I don't know what Thomas meant by his poem, “Light breaks where no sun shines”, and I'm damned if I want to know.’ Many students of literature with their backs to the wall, pinned down by a specific and subtle point of interpretation, have frustratedly repeated such a cry. Hence, the fact that a great work of literature is capable of holding many meanings becomes transformed by the baffled reader either into the irritable protest, ‘Why does a poem always have to mean something?’, or the defence of the wholly unsubstantiated subjective response, supported by a kind of universal moral principle: ‘I've got every right to think it means that if I want to. My opinion is as good as anyone else's.’ So much for the musicality of language taking over as our sole or major criterion for critical response; and so much for that restricted view of words in poetry as a collection of harmonious sounds.

The second, and even more damaging, criticism of the effects of Thomas's ‘lovely gift of the gab’ is that, when one does attempt to analyse meaning, one finds much of his work impenetrably obscure. That is to say, either the sounds of the words have taken over completely, at the expense of meaning, or Thomas has been so desperate to impress by his ingenuity that he has become lost in the labyrinth of his own making (and possibly could not tell us what he intended to mean in the first place). So, a critic like William T. Moynihan, who is certainly prepared to do his darnedest to unravel the meaning of the most obscure Thomas poem, if such a feat is at all humanly possible, has to admit defeat in some cases: ‘… in many instances of impenetrable imagery Thomas must have been carried away with the spirit of the poem (or the story perhaps) and become lost in the maze himself.’¹¹

Thomas became the favourite butt of those who held a general scorn for the obscurantist tendencies in modern verse. There is Robert Graves's famous challenge to anyone who could explain the meaning of the first stanza of ‘If my head hurt a hair's foot’, and his assertion that ‘he [Thomas] kept musical control of the reader without troubling about the sense.’ And, at a Foyle's Literary Luncheon in 1955, Lord Samuel railed against ‘this fashion of deliberate and perverse obscurity’ in modern verse. The poem he chose in order to illustrate his general condemnation was Thomas's, ‘A grief ago’.

But most people realize that, whatever their doubts about some individual poems, Thomas wrote a number of truly great poems. And most people realize, too, that they are in the presence of an extraordinary craftsman with words. We know of the pains he took in working at his writing, of the revisions, and revisions of revisions, of the hundred separate work-sheets for ‘Fern Hill’. The final effect may be one of a free flow of words, of multiple and unexpected meanings accumulating spontaneously, but in order for this to be achieved, the poet worked laboriously and painstakingly at his ‘sullen art’. Thomas, while possessing a marvellously inventive felicity with words, did not live with the Romantic illusion that—when the impromptu occasion demanded—great literature could appear with the turning on of a tap.

Hence we may take it that the linguistic deviancy was planned (which is not to imply, of course, that it was a fully conscious process), and his daring with the English language was a calculated risk. To begin with, one needs to note more precisely what are the characteristics of Thomas's verbal trickery; what are its linguistic components. And then, more importantly, one wants to ask why such manipulating of the language should be necessary for what he was attempting to say.

It is a fairly straightforward task to make a list of all the linguistic devices and, of course, no single item on the list is by any means unique to Thomas; it is the total, cumulative effect which strikes us. Also, some of these features are more obvious, and more often referred to, than others; and again, it is perhaps those more elusive characteristics which work on the reader at a deeper level. But linguistic deviancy, of all kinds, is to be found in even the most lighthearted of his writing. For example, in his satirical poem, ‘The Countryman's return’,¹² he describes some of the inhabitants of the London bars where he has spent so much of his ‘unwasteable time’ thus:

                                                            … walking pintables
With sprung and padded shoulders,
Tomorrow's drunk club majors
Growing their wounds already,
.....Old paint-stained tumblers riding
On stools to a one man show down,
Gasketted and sirensuited
Bored and viciously waiting
Nightingales of the casualty stations
In the afternoon wasters
White feathering the living.

All the familiar multi-layered ingredients are there and Thomas, in another satirical piece of verse, ‘A Letter to my Aunt Discussing the Correct Approach to Modern Poetry’, shows himself very well aware of the modishness of verbal trickery, adjuring his fictitious aunt to remember that

Perhaps it would be best if you
Created something very new,
A dirty novel done in Erse
Or written backwards in Welsh verse,
Do not forget that ‘limpet’ rhymes
With ‘strumpet’ in these troubled times

Nor, incidentally, does he neglect the issue of obscurity in this same poem:

Never be lucid, never state,
If you would be regarded great,
The simplest thought or sentiment,

(For thought, we know, is decadent)

It is perhaps at the phonological level—the level of verbal sound patterning—that Thomas's effects are most obvious and at the same time least innovatory, though of course they are not to be discounted for that reason. It is here, too, that the superficial influence of Hopkins is most evident, along with the persistent habit of word compounding. There is hardly a line or sentence of Thomas's where the sound harmonies created by alliteration, assonance, onomatopeia, rhythmic patterning and rhyme of all varieties are not exploited to the full. Such effects are often more extravagant in the prose than in the poetry—that is, in his less ‘serious’ writing: perhaps an indication of their more surface, if pleasing, character.

Here is the small boy's love of the very sounds of the words, as he notes the ‘silent hullabaloo of balloons’, the ‘dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards’, the ‘hissing of the butt-ends in the drains of the coffee-dashes and the tinkle and the gibble-gabble of the morning young lounge lizards’; and as, in Under Milk Wood, Mr. Mog Edwards proclaims his never-to-be-consummated love for Myfanwy Price:

I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world.

Rhythmically, Thomas works most typically on the listing effect of the accumulation of details, creating a crescendo which to many is suggestive of the revivalist Welsh sermon. But rhythm is intimately connected with syntactic structure, and in subtler pieces of writing it has a much more important function—a point I shall return to later.

In his poetry, Thomas experiments with a wide range of rhyming devices: in a poem like ‘The hand that signed the paper’ full rhymes appear side by side with half rhymes, while in the majority of his earlier poems half rhymes predominate; thus, for example, the rhyming ‘flower’, ‘destroyer’ and ‘fever’, and ‘trees’ and ‘rose’, in the opening stanza of ‘The force that through the green fuse’, are analogous to the ‘limpet’/‘strumpet’ parodied above. There are, too, more extravagant experiments, as in a poem like ‘I make this in a warring absence’ where in each stanza the half-rhymes focus on a different consonant—‘n’ in the first, second and fifth, ‘s’ in the third, fourth and ninth, ‘d’ in the sixth and seventh, and a mixture of all three in the eighth; or in the internal rhyme scheme of ‘The Conversation of Prayer’, where the rhyme does indeed carry a ‘structural’ significance, echoing as it does the theme of an interweaving dialogue, a duality; and, above all, the remarkably contrived device for the ‘Author's Prologue’ to the Collected Poems, where the rhymes move inwards from the opening line and the last line—line 102—to meet with the couplet ‘farms’ and ‘arms’ in lines fifty-one and fifty-two.

Commenting on this last example, Thomas himself said, ‘Why I acrosticked myself like this, don't ask me’, and certainly there must be doubt as to whether many of the aural effects referred to reveal the true depth of Thomas's art; indeed, the extreme examples are symptomatic of that inveterate word-meddler, entertaining as ever, who noted that ‘live’ was ‘evil’ spelt backwards, and perhaps more interesting still, ‘T. S. Eliot’ reversed almost spells ‘toilets’.

A more significant complexity is found in Thomas's handling of the substance of language—the meanings and grammatical functions of words. Here again he is always working hard for the unexpected: the multiple layers of meaning, the coinages, the twist to the clichéd and hackneyed expression, the new grammatical rôle any word may take on. Always, the rule seems to be, avoid the obvious, the single given meaning which is swallowed whole, unquestioningly by the gullible reader. And here the rule has a sounder basis than the playing with aural and visual patterns: if words are to remain fresh, they have to be recast each time they are used; and since, as Saussure reminds us, language is made up of differences, then it is the possible other meanings and functions of words that we need to be reminded of if the words are to remain fully alive for us.¹³

No kind of deviancy is forbidden, even at the most solemn moments. So we have the punning on ‘grave’ in,

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth

(from ‘A Refusal to Mourn’—note, too, the grammatical deviancy of ‘the mankind of her going’). Or the twisting of the clichéd ‘dressed to kill’ as the young man prepares to go out on the town:

Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is

(from ‘Twenty-four years’—and consider here the different possible meanings of ‘elementary’). Or, more lightheartedly, there are the multiple associations of ‘capsized’ in,

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing

(from ‘Once it was the colour of saying’), where the field on the steep slope looks as if it has capsized (it is in Swansea, near the sea, and there are other images of drowning in the poem); looks from a distance part of a patchwork, about the size and shape of a boy's cap; and happens to be a school playing-field, as we see in the following line. These examples I am taking are some of the more obvious ones from the better-known poems; a glance at Tindall's Reader's Guide will show the student coming new to Thomas that semantic and grammatical intricacies in the denser poems seem to be almost limitless.¹⁴

At all times poetry like Thomas's challenges our simplistic distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning. In truth, the more deeply we dig in language the less confidently can we assert any ‘literal’ meaning at all; we live through metaphors.¹⁵ Poetry has always reminded us of this, and Thomas's poetry does so more provocatively and powerfully than most. So much so that Christine Brooke-Rose, in a study which takes in Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Eliot and others, declares him to be ‘the most highly metaphoric of all the poets’ (and adds, amusingly, ‘sometimes irritatingly so’!).¹⁶

And if, semantically, the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning is so blurred that it almost ceases to exist, so too is the grammatical distinction between the form class (or part of speech) to which a particular word may or may not belong. In this respect Thomas moves well beyond current developments in English usage which might have been regarded as deviant a century ago, in terms of ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ language. For example, it is very common in some registers of modern English for nouns to be used as adjectives, as in phrases where a noun head-word is heavily pre-modified (for example, in the phrase, ‘construction industry machine tool operator foreman’, the five italicized words, normally nouns, function as adjectives, pre-modifying ‘foreman’). What is more unusual and deviant is for nouns to function as verbs—as in this passage from Under Milk Wood, where Mr. Pugh imagines the most unspeakable horrors to be suffered by his mean, thin-lipped wife after he has prepared for her a

venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam come screaming out of her navel.

That ‘viper’ as a verb pushes the description onto a level of manic venom, which is anarchically almost beyond words.

Subsequently, once a noun has been turned into a verb, it is possible, of course, for the present or past participle form to be used as an adjective as in, ‘Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches’ (‘Especially when the October wind’). This multiple functionality of most English words is a feature of the language most poets will naturally use from time to time, and some more daringly than others. (Take, for example, Shakespeare's,

                                                                                                                                  The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes.

Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV, Sc. xii

Here the compressed meaning is that Antony behaves like a little pet dog, trotting behind his mistress, Cleopatra, at her every behest.)

In Thomas's more tortuous poems it can often prove difficult to decide not only what is the precise semantic content that a word carries, in the particular context, but also which form class it is functioning as, in the particular grammatical environment—noun, verb or adjective. As a result, a word may hover, as it were, between one meaning and one grammatical function or another. Clearly there are limits in terms of comprehensibility, as I have already discussed, but it is the very indeterminacy of the language which is the central point here, and the point to which I shall return at the end of this essay.

The sounds, the multiple meanings and multiple functions of words have tended to attract most comment in the critical literature on Dylan Thomas; less has been said about his syntax. One particularly damning criticism, made by Donald Davie, refers to what he terms Thomas's ‘pseudo-syntax’ where, although formally correct, his syntax ‘cannot mime, as it offers to do, a movement of the mind.’¹⁷ What Davie is pointing to here is that a typical Thomas poem generates a cumulative effect in which image is added to image, phrase to phrase, clause to clause, each a re-statement of the one dominant theme. Indeed, it is a characteristic, and usually negative, criticism of Thomas's poems that they evince no progression of thought from first line to last, merely a series of reiterations.

What such criticism seems, naïvely, to assume is that such linear and developmental processes of thought are always possible; that is to say, that the poet's thought can move his emotions from point A to point B in the course of the poem, and take his reader along with him. In such cases the syntax would clearly ‘mime … a movement of the mind’. But what if the re-phrasings, the re-statements, the qualifications, the parentheses, the late additions (if the reader will excuse a poor attempt at a Thomas-like pun) are in fact accurately miming a movement of the mind—a mind often near to despair at the apparent impossibility of genuine communication (ironically, for such a wordy writer) about a human condition where pain seems to be suffered so casually and so separately?

A good example of how Thomas's syntax unwinds to make a statement about not being able to make a statement is found in ‘A Refusal to Mourn’. Here are the opening lines leading up to the first full-stop:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tell 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
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.

The semantic framework of the sentence is a very simple one: not until x happens will I do y. But we have to wait until the tenth line before that main verb arrives, and it comes after three subordinate clauses, containing themselves a complex series of noun, prepositional, adverbial and participial phrases, even though the negative that commands the main verb—‘never’—is the opening word of the poem; and then to follow the main verb we have a further series of additions and qualifications to the statement before the sentence is brought to a close—only to be immediately re-stated, of course, in the following sentence, though this time a little less tortuously, as if the emotional effort involved in declaring the refusal is draining him of words:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going …
Nor blaspheme …
With any further
Elegy of innocence and truth.

And, appropriately, the poem ends with the brevity of the one-line, simple sentence: ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ Here, surely, the syntax ‘mimes’ both emotion and thought, the ‘movement of the mind’. Another well-known poem of Thomas's, ‘After the funeral’, follows a similar pattern, where verbosity and complexity gradually give way to the simplest of utterances.

The question that lies behind all of these linguistic ‘idiosyncracies’ is, of course, why does Thomas exhibit them in such profusion? If he is not merely that ‘freak user of words’, then all his verbal ingenuity must have been employed for a purpose; the words must be as they are, because they constitute the only way of saying what he wants to say. Thomas said as much himself—in a typically self-deprecating and defensive manner:

I write in the only way I can write, and my warped, crabbed and cabbined stuff is not the result of theorising but of pure incapability to express my needless tortuities in any other way.¹⁸

As critics we attempt to dig deeper (we are the theorists), and we cannot accept Glyn Jones's implication that it is sufficient simply to take pleasure in the verbal music and not bother about meaning. Language, for the analyser, exists on the three levels of phonology, grammar and semantics, but ultimately it is the totality of meaning that must be the paramount concern; the poem's full meaning is its phonological, grammatical and semantic content. If we take the poem, ‘Over Sir John's hill’, as a particular example, we can observe how these three levels interact to create its complex meaning.

As with so much of Thomas's writing, the drama we are witnessing is the definitive drama of death in the midst of life; and as is also so often the case, it is the process of death in the universe that is being chronicled. But, more than this, the observers and chroniclers—two in this case: the heron, ‘… saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant / Crystal harbour vale’, and the poet himself, ‘I young Aesop fabling to the near night’—are an integral part of the poem. What are they to do or say as they observe this death process taking place before their very eyes? The answer, inevitably, is the potentially anguished one—nothing, except observe and, in the one case, record (i.e. write a poem) that death takes place and that there is nothing to do but observe and record that this is so.

One may argue, of course, as to whether the final effect on the reader is one of anguish, despair, stoical resignation, quiet acquiescence, calm acceptance, and so on. But that list is one of graspable attitudes, something that one has resolved—even if, for example, one has only ‘resolved’ that one feels anguish. The poem, on the other hand, consisting as it does of living, freshly created words, bears out in itself that very tension between the living and the dead, those who are killing and being killed, those who are actively involved and those who are looking on. And to re-live, as it were, this constantly changing drama, the words themselves have to be constantly changing, creating new patterns, evolving into new shapes. There is one thing about which every critic of Thomas has to agree: he is not the poet of considered intellectual argument; he is not the poet of abstract nouns.

The poem (like Hopkins's ‘The Windhover’, with parts of which it has some obvious similarities) is alive with onomatopoeic effects; as, for example, at the moment of climax when the hawk swoops for its prey and, in the perverse paradox that the poet creates, as the doomed birds fly, ‘gulled’ but also as if knowingly, to their doom:

Flash, and the plumes crack,
And a black cap of jack-
Daws Sir John's just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare
To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy's fins,
In a whack of wind.

This is a highly contrived poem in terms of sound patterning. Alliteration and assonance abound, with, in addition, a regular syllabic count, only one or two lines excepted, and a complex rhyme scheme (aabccbdeaedd) which uses a mixture of full and half rhymes, partly concealed by the fact that stanzas two, three and four run on into the succeeding stanzas. The effect is of a never-ending process within a tight, symmetrical framework.

The paradox we face in all Thomas's writing is the dynamism of his language in the face of the inertia of death. In the case of this poem, the dynamism of the two central metaphors—fire and hanging—generates creative word-play. The hawk which is ‘on fire’ and ‘hangs still’ in line 2 produces, some lines later, ‘fiery Tyburn’ as the location for the small birds' destruction; and again, in the third stanza, the same initial image creates, ‘his viperish fuse looped with flames under the brand wing’.

And the dynamism of nouns becoming verbs is generated throughout the poem. So we have ‘swansing’ (not even an idiomatic compound noun with such limited provenance is free from this ‘tampering’), ‘dusk’ (a verb of action created out of the dying of the day, and standing alongside the intense activity of ‘play’, ‘wars’ and ‘wrangling’) and ‘stilt’; and also ‘hollows’ used intransitively. If we add ‘fabling’ and ‘hymning’, both more commonly found as nouns, we see how much states of being are transformed into processes.

This particular force of Thomas's linguistic deviancy has been noted by linguists interested in literary stylistics, and specially in the way surface structure language differs from the underlying deep structures. In these Chomskyan terms, one and the same deep structure may produce a number of different surface structures (active versus passive, verbal versus nominal, affirmative versus negative, and so on), and when we analyse critically, we look for a coherence in the options which the writer has taken for his finished product—the ‘surface’ language.¹⁹

So with Thomas's poetry, Richard Ohmann observes that much of it

displays the world as process, as interacting forces and repeating cycles, in which human beings and human thought are indifferently caught up. I suggest that Thomas's syntactic irregularities often serve this vision of things.²⁰

For Ohmann, inanimate becoming animate and noun becoming verb are central to Thomas's way of describing the world.

Obviously, we can in addition point to Thomas's love of multiple meanings as an expression of the deep-rooted inter-connectedness of things, as he himself confessed early in his career: ‘I like “redeeming the contraries” with secretive images. I like contradicting my images, saying two things at once in one word, four in two and one in six.’²¹ In ‘Over Sir John's hill’ many of the puns revolve around judgement and guilt, mercy and innocence. Thus, in the lines,

It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John's elmed
Hill, tell-tale the knelled
Guilt
Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of
          whistles,
Have mercy on

we discover that Sir John, who has already been seen as Judge in the law-court passing the death penalty—donning his black cap (jackdaws encircling the top of the hill)—has received incriminating evidence from the heron and the poet, who ‘tells the tale’; and the innocent birds, who have been corrupted—‘led-astray’ (earlier they are the ‘gulled’ birds) are indeed guilty and need the mercy of God, for with their nursery-rhyme refrain, ‘… dilly, dilly, / Come let us die’, they have committed the sin of suicide, they have been accomplices to the murdering of themselves. So are we all, as we acquiesce in the process of things, all equally innocent, all equally guilty. There is no paradox deeper than that, metaphysical conceit though it might be.

And what of the typically long, unwinding sentences, running from line to line, from stanza to stanza? What part do they play in the process? If Thomas likes to refrain from the simple, single meaning in word or phrase, to suspend and defer our total understanding—if any such resolution can ever prove possible—so it is in his sentence structures. As he watches the scene over Sir John's hill and along the Towy estuary, the day declines, the light draws in, the process unfolds, and the meaning of it all is in the very movement, the slipping of one second into the next, of a life into a death and into a new life re-created. So the sentences unwind with all their parentheses and qualifications (surely one cannot agree with Donald Davie that this is a ‘pseudo syntax’, one that ‘cannot mime … a movement of the mind’):

There
Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles
In the pebbly dab-filled
Shallow and sedge, and ‘dilly, dilly’ calls the loft hawk,
‘Come and be killed,’
I open the leaves of the water at a passage
Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs
          prancing
And read, in a shell,
Death clear as a buoy's bell:
All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be
          sung,
When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under
          the brand
Wing, and blest shall
Young
Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, ‘dilly, dilly,
Come let us die.’

There are mixed attitudes towards some of Thomas's later poems, like ‘Over Sir John's hill’. Some critics welcome their ‘externalising’ tendency, and with it the natural imagery and, generally, greater clarity, as opposed to the intense physiological imagery of the ‘small, bonebound island’, of blood, bones and flesh and the ‘double-crossed’ womb, and the considerable semantic density of the earlier poems. Others consider, as we have already observed, that these poems contain ‘too much verbal glamour’, and perhaps achieve a too facile apparent acceptance of the nature of things—elegies in which the resolution is not totally convincing.

But despair and exultation are engaged in a cosmic dance throughout the work of a poet like Dylan Thomas. As has already been suggested, the energy of the language often belies the sombre message it is communicating. The reader comes to his or her own conclusion as to which of the two is stronger. For Louis Macneice it was the energy and the exultation that triumphed: ‘Many of his poems are concerned with death or the darker forces, yet they all have the joy of life in them.’²²

Yet, paradoxically, that joy of life is there both because of and in spite of Thomas's language. It is there because of the linguistic energy, inventiveness and dynamism—so that a poem whose message is that we are doomed to die is remembered by the metaphor of electric energy in its famous opening line: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’; but it is there also in spite of the semantic ambiguity and density and the syntactic convolutedness.

For there is a point in all successful communication, however complex its subject-matter might be, where meaning—or, rather meanings—must become accessible to the reader/listener so that he/she can absorb them and attach them to his/her own life experience. In other words, there is a subtle but vital difference here between the very necessity of ambiguity in the complex communication of a complex emotion or set of attitudes (and, indeed, often a positive delight in the recognition of this ambiguity), and on the other hand the clouding of meaning, which betrays either superficiality and looseness of thinking, or some deeper uncertainty and unease. The issue of obscurity undoubtedly is a valid and important one, even though it is so often the philistine's objection either to having to struggle with difficult ideas or to an assumed conceit on the part of the writer. In the case of Thomas, after all, it was the poet's own concern, expressed early in his life, which serves as the title to this essay. He was hardly a complacent word-spinner.

His fear that his obscurity betrayed the fact that he had little or nothing to say has already been discussed. It is argued that strong support for the truth of this view is to be found in the clear evidence that Thomas laboured over the writing of poems with ever-increasing difficulty as his life progressed. Indeed, the argument continues, the only logical, terrible conclusion for him was a form of suicide, which provided his escape from the stark fact that he no longer had anything worthwhile to say, or, even more frighteningly, he never had had anything to say: at last the total silence of death.

Paul Ferris chronicles such a decline clearly.²³ It seems a downhill story all the way after that tremendous late adolescent explosion of poetic creativity which filled so many notebooks in such a short time. But Ferris is aware that the reasons for this apparent state of affairs are indeed complex and difficult to analyse. Thus he notes that Thomas's lack of creativity in the 1940s could derive from a variety of causes, possibly of even the vaguest kind: ‘The war, or poverty, or some growing seed of unease, or a combination of them all, was reducing Thomas's capacity to write’ (my emphasis). And again, in referring to Thomas's introductions to his poetry readings in America:

The manner was self-deprecating: ‘I am,’ he would say, ‘the pig that roots for unconsidered troofles in the reeky wood of his past.’ His poems were ‘little lyrical cripples’, and he had forgotten the original impulse that produced his early work.

The common factor in all such comments that Ferris makes is the implication of some vague kind of underlying anxiety which plagued Thomas throughout his adult life. The link between this and the writing he produced is summed up as follows: ‘He lacked certainties and he wrote accordingly.’

The vital point is to make the connection between this ‘lack of certainty’ and the indeterminacy which has been noted in the linguistic characteristics of Thomas's writing. There is an obvious connection, too, with the near obsession in his poetry—either in whole poems or in individual lines and phrases—with the inadequacy of language, the lapsing into inarticulateness, the impossibility of ‘true’ communication, and even with the futility of making any attempt:

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose …

(‘The force that through the green fuse’)

My busy heart …
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words

(‘Especially when the October wind’)

I shall not
murder the mankind of her going with a grave truth

(‘A Refusal to Mourn’)

and so on.

The easiest way to explain all this is to employ pseudo-psychoanalysis, as has been done, in its most extreme form, by David Holbrook.²⁴ Here Thomas becomes a singular case-study: an immature adult evading, running away from the responsibilities which the rest of us struggle manfully to face up to, and seeking excuses for his behaviour by an appeal to his genius; except that, deep down, the fear persisted—there was no genius after all, he would be found out, and his inadequacies would be laid bare.

But his work, the best of his work, so clearly denies this. It is directly and honestly about the difficulty of accepting the horrors alongside the glories of life. It is about the difficulty of sharing this knowledge with other human beings, which is the great consolation that we as humans can provide for one another. It is about the desire to communicate honestly, and the anguish of not knowing to whom or for whom one is writing.

Thomas's later works²⁵ are, I believe, rightly seen by Walford Davies as an attempt—more or less consistent—to look outwards, away from the physiological obsessions and complexities of his early work, and to recapture a sense of community, of shared experience. The tragedy is, of course, that this appears to be possible only by looking backwards, to his childhood, and thus Thomas acknowledges, even as he recaptures the scene at Fern Hill in his childhood, that Time ‘… would take me / Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand’.

Under Milk Wood was another attempt, in this case by creating a fantasy of communal living, where no moral strictures prevail, where people exist side by side, with all their frailties, and are blessed by the very fact of their persistence in their shared endurance, in the human comedy. Once again, it is all too easy to point out that a play like this was unlikely to lead anywhere for Thomas; that it was a piece of dream-like unreality caught and frozen in just twenty-four hours of time.

But Thomas's anguish is hardly unique in a society like our own, fragmented and lacking coherence; for the anguish we are referring to is not that of the human condition, the transience of life—that is the deep anguish of mortality felt in whatever society; rather it is the anguish of not sharing, of being cut off. So, some sort of utopian ideal may exist in many forms (isn't Llaregyb a kind of Utopia?); for F. R. Leavis it was something he called the ‘organic community’, which was supposed to have existed some time, somewhere. The important living question always is: could that kind of community exist in a different set of circumstances?

Ironically, Dylan Thomas's sometimes astonishing linguistic acrobatics are in themselves a statement, for all their frequent bravura, of his tentative attempts to express clear human truths. From time to time a temporary confidence and certainty is gained, and it is not coincidental that at these moments his language is at its most transparently simple and direct. Thus, for example, in his elegy for his Auntie Annie (‘After the funeral’), the unassuming little wife of the gargantuan Uncle Jim at Fern Hill farm, he acknowledges at first the claims of a false bardic eloquence, a dishonestly hyperbolic paean, in which the poet's performance would be remembered at the expense of the dead woman:

She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body.

And it is only when he has worked through this that he can achieve a direct simplicity which will link the dead Ann Jones, himself and ourselves in a shared recognition of common humanity. The resulting lines of poetry achieve a memorability which derives from humility gained after much questioning of self:

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.

The complexity of Thomas's language signifies the enormous difficulty of communicating freshly and honestly in a society like our own. In order to avoid the banal, dishonest cliché, some adopt a Beckett-like austerity—almost an ‘anti-language’—and some, like Thomas, use the language freakishly. It is Thomas's achievement that, on a number of occasions, he triumphantly overcame all the obstacles.

Notes

1. Paul Ferris (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985), p. 130.

2. For a very good introductory discussion of the notion of linguistic deviancy see Raymond Chapman, Linguistics and Literature (London: Arnold, 1973).

3. Ferris (ed.), p. 30.

4. Constantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1965), p. 48.

5. Daniel Jones, My Friend Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1977), p. 28. The book provides a fascinating account of their friendship through adolescence, most of their time being spent at Jones's home. Later in his life Thomas wrote, yearningly, to Daniel Jones of their ‘Warmdandylanley-world’.

6. Fitzgibbon, p. 335. This is a small part of Thomas's response to questions asked him by an American student researching for his thesis. It is one of the few public statements made by Thomas on the writing of poetry.

7. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (London: Dent, 1952), p. 87.

8. Thomas's own phrase, used in his poem, ‘On no work of words’, Collected Poems, p. 94.

9. Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas (University of Wales Press, 1972), p. 82.

10. Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues (London: Dent, 1968), p. 184.

11. William T. Moynihan, The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 85.

12. This poem, together with ‘A Letter to my Aunt’, is to be found in Daniel Jones (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Poems (London: Dent, 1971).

13. See Jonathan Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana, 1976).

14. William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962).

15. For an extremely interesting linguistic approach to the status of metaphor in language, see G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors we Live by (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).

16. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958), p. 86.

17. Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 107.

18. Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, p. 134.

19. For a basic account of the notion of deep and surface structures see J. Lyons, Chomsky (London: Fontana, 1970).

20. Richard Ohmann, ‘Generative grammars and the concept of literary style’ in Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar, ed. M. Lester (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), p. 148.

21. Ferris, p. 182.

22. Tedlock, E. W. (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 85.

23. Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), pp. 246ff.

24. David Holbrook's Llarregub Revisited: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1962) and Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night (London: Athlone Press, 1972) constitute one of the most notorious cases of assault on a writer in the whole of modern ‘literary’ criticism. For a spirited rebuttal of the charges see Laurence Lerner's essay in Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays (London: Dent, 1972).

25. By later work I mean, roughly, from the publication of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (London: Dent, 1940) onwards.