The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

by Dylan Thomas

  Dry lover mine

  The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,

  Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,

  Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

  Now

  Say nay,

  Sir no say,

  Death to the yes,

  The yes to death, the yesman and the answer,

  Should he who split his children with a cure

  Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

  Now

  Say nay,

  No say sir

  Yea the dead stir,

  And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,

  He lying low with ruin in his ear,

  The cockerel’s tide upcasting from the fire.

  Now

  Say nay,

  So star fall,

  So the ball fail,

  So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,

  The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,

  The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

  Now

  Say nay

  A fig for

  The seal of fire,

  Death hairy-heeled, and the tapped ghost in wood,

  We make me mystic as the arm of air,

  The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

  WHY EAST WIND CHILLS

  Why east wind chills and south wind cools

  Shall not be known till windwell dries

  And west’s no longer drowned

  In winds that bring the fruit and rind

  Of many a hundred falls;

  Why silk is soft and the stone wounds

  The child shall question all his days,

  Why night-time rain and the breast’s blood

  Both quench his thirst he’ll have a black reply.

  When cometh Jack Frost? the children ask.

  Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?

  Not till, from high and low, their dust

  Sprinkles in children’s eyes a long-last sleep

  And dusk is crowded with the children’s ghosts,

  Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.

  All things are known: the stars’ advice

  Calls some content to travel with the winds,

  Though what the stars ask as they round

  Time upon time the towers of the skies

  Is heard but little till the stars go out.

  I hear content, and ‘Be content’

  Ring like a handbell through the corridors,

  And ‘Know no answer,’ and I know

  No answer to the children’s cry

  Of echo’s answer and the man of frost

  And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

  A GRIEF AGO

  A grief ago,

  She who was who I hold, the fats and flower,

  Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,

  Hell wind and sea,

  A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,

  Rose maid and male,

  Or, malted venus, through the paddler’s bowl

  Sailed up the sun;

  Who is my grief,

  A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,

  Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud

  Shot through the leaf,

  Was who was folded on the rod the aaron

  Rose cast to plague,

  The horn and ball of water on the frog

  Housed in the side.

  And she who lies,

  Like exodus a chapter from the garden,

  Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring,

  Tugged through the days

  Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,

  On field and sand

  The twelve triangles of the cherub wind

  Engraving going.

  Who then is she,

  She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,

  Drives out the father from the caesared camp;

  The dens of shape

  Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,

  That she I have,

  The country-handed grave boxed into love,

  Rise before dark.

  The night is near,

  A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;

  I tell her this: before the suncock cast

  Her bone to fire,

  Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid

  Draw in their seas,

  So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,

  And close her fist.

  HOW SOON THE SERVANT SUN

  How soon the servant sun

  (Sir morrow mark)

  Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone

  (Fog has a bone

  He’ll trumpet into meat)

  Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown

  And the naked egg stand straight,

  Sir morrow at his sponge,

  (The wound records)

  The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,

  (Fog by his spring

  Soaks up the sewing tides)

  Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange

  Man morrow blows through food.

  All nerves to serve the sun,

  The rite of light,

  A claw I question from the mouse’s bone,

  The long-tailed stone

  Trap I with coil and sheet,

  Let the soil squeal I am the biting man

  And the velvet dead inch out.

  How soon my level, lord,

  (Sir morrow stamps

  Two heels of water on the floor of seed)

  Shall raise a lamp

  Or spirit up a cloud,

  Erect a walking centre in the shroud,

  Invisible on the stump

  A leg as long as trees,

  This inward sir,

  Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,

  The womb-eyed, cries,

  And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour’s ear,

  Blasts back the trumpet voice.

  EARS IN THE TURRETS HEAR

  Ears in the turrets hear

  Hands grumble on the door,

  Eyes in the gables see

  The fingers at the locks.

  Shall I unbolt or stay

  Alone till the day I die

  Unseen by stranger-eyes

  In this white house?

  Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

  Beyond this island bound

  By a thin sea of flesh

  And a bone coast,

  The land lies out of sound

  And the hills out of mind.

  No bird or flying fish

  Disturbs this island’s rest.

  Ears in this island hear

  The wind pass like a fire,

  Eyes in this island see

  Ships anchor off the bay.

  Shall I run to the ships

  With the wind in my hair,

  Or stay till the day I die

  And welcome no sailor?

  Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

  Hands grumble on the door,

  Ships anchor off the bay,

  Rain beats the sand and slates.

  Shall I let in the stranger,

  Shall I welcome the sailor,

  Or stay till the day I die?

  Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,

  Hold you poison or grapes?

  FOSTER THE LIGHT

  Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,

  Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,

  But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;

  Master the night nor serve the snowman’s brain

  That shapes each bushy item of the air

  Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.

  Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel’s eggs,

  Nor hammer back a season in the figs,

  But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;

  Farmer in time of frost the burning
leagues,

  By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,

  In your young years the vegetable century.

  And father all nor fail the fly-lord’s acre,

  Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,

  But rail with your wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet;

  Of mortal voices to the ninnies’ choir,

  High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,

  And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.

  Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,

  O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift

  From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;

  Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift

  Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds

  Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.

  Who gave these seas their colour in a shape

  Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark

  In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;

  O who is glory in the shapeless maps,

  Now make the world of me as I have made

  A merry manshape of your walking circle.

  THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER

  The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

  Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

  Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country,

  These five kings did a king to death.

  The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

  The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

  A goose’s quill has put an end to murder

  That put an end to talk.

  The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

  And famine grew, and locusts came;

  Great is the hand that holds dominion over

  Man by a scribbled name.

  The five kings count the dead but do not soften

  The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;

  A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

  Hands have no tears to flow.

  SHOULD LANTERNS SHINE

  Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

  Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

  Would wither up, and any boy of love

  Look twice before he fell from grace.

  The features in their private dark

  Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come

  And from her lips the faded pigments fall,

  The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

  I have been told to reason by the heart,

  But heart, like head, leads helplessly;

  I have been told to reason by the pulse,

  And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace

  Till field and roof lie level and the same

  So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman

  Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

  I have heard many years of telling,

  And many years should see some change.

  The ball I threw while playing in the park

  Has not yet reached the ground.

  I HAVE LONGED TO MOVE AWAY

  I have longed to move away

  From the hissing of the spent lie

  And the old terrors’ continual cry

  Growing more terrible as the day

  Goes over the hill into the deep sea;

  I have longed to move away

  From the repetition of salutes,

  For there are ghosts in the air

  And ghostly echoes on paper,

  And the thunder of calls and notes.

  I have longed to move away but am afraid;

  Some life, yet unspent, might explode

  Out of the old lie burning on the ground,

  And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.

  Neither by night’s ancient fear,

  The parting of hat from hair,

  Pursed lips at the receiver,

  Shall I fall to death’s feather.

  By these I would not care to die,

  Half convention and half lie.

  FIND MEAT ON BONES

  ‘Find meat on bones that soon have none,

  And drink in the two milked crags,

  The merriest marrow and the dregs

  Before the ladies’ breasts are hags

  And the limbs are torn.

  Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,

  But when the ladies are cold as stone

  Then hang a ram rose over the rags.

  ‘Rebel against the binding moon

  And the parliament of sky,

  The kingcrafts of the wicked sea,

  Autocracy of night and day,

  Dictatorship of sun.

  Rebel against the flesh and bone,

  The word of the blood, the wily skin,

  And the maggot no man can slay.’

  ‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,

  And my heart is cracked across;

  My face is haggard in the glass,

  My lips are withered with a kiss,

  My breasts are thin.

  A merry girl took me for man,

  I laid her down and told her sin,

  And put beside her a ram rose.

  ‘The maggot that no man can kill

  And the man no rope can hang

  Rebel against my father’s dream

  That out of a bower of red swine

  Howls the foul fiend to heel.

  I cannot murder, like a fool,

  Season and sunshine, grace and girl,

  Nor can I smother the sweet waking.’

  Black night still ministers the moon,

  And the sky lays down her laws,

  The sea speaks in a kingly voice,

  Light and dark are no enemies

  But one companion.

  ‘War on the spider and the wren!

  War on the destiny of man!

  Doom on the sun!’

  Before death takes you, O take back this.

  GRIEF THIEF OF TIME

  Grief thief of time crawls off,

  The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,

  The knave of pain steals off

  The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,

  The old forget the cries,

  Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,

  Call back the castaways

  Riding the sea light on a sunken path,

  The old forget the grief,

  Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,

  Cast back the bone of youth

  And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies

  Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories

  And timelessly lies loving with the thief.

  Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,

  Death flashing from his sleeve,

  With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack

  Sneak down the stallion grave,

  Bull’s-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack

  And free the twin-boxed grief,

  No silver whistles chase him down the weeks’

  Dayed peaks to day to death,

  These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes

  And the undead eye-teeth,

  No third eye probe into a rainbow’s sex

  That bridged the human halves,

  All shall remain and on the graveward gulf

  Shape with my fathers’ thieves.

  AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Dead men naked they shall be one

  With the man in the wind and the west moon;

  When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

  They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

  Though they go mad they shall be sane,

  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

  Though lovers be lost love shall not;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  And death shall have no dominion.

&nb
sp; Under the windings of the sea

  They lying long shall not die windily;

  Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

  Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

  Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

  And the unicorn evils run them through;

  Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

  And death shall have no dominion.

  And death shall have no dominion.

  No more may gulls cry at their ears

  Or waves break loud on the seashores;

  Where blew a flower may a flower no more

  Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

  Though they be mad and dead as nails,

  Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

  Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

  And death shall have no dominion.

  THEN WAS MY NEOPHYTE

  Then was my neophyte,

  Child in white blood bent on its knees

  Under the bell of rocks,

  Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas

  The winder of the water-clocks

  Calls a green day and night.

  My sea hermaphrodite,

  Snail of man in His ship of fires

  That burn the bitten decks,

  Knew all His horrible desires

  The climber of the water sex

  Calls the green rock of light.

  Who in these labyrinths,

  This tidethread and the lane of scales,

  Twine in a moon-blown shell,

  Escapes to the flat cities’ sails

  Furled on the fishes’ house and hell,

  Nor falls to His green myths?

  Stretch the salt photographs,

  The landscape grief, love in His oils

  Mirror from man to whale

  That the green child see like a grail

  Through veil and fin and fire and coil

  Time on the canvas paths.

  He films my vanity.

  Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,

  Over the water come

  Children from homes and children’s parks

  Who speak on a finger and thumb,

  And the masked, headless boy.

  His reels and mystery

  The winder of the clockwise scene

  Wound like a ball of lakes

  Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen

  Love’s image till my heartbone breaks

  By a dramatic sea.

  Who kills my history?

  The year-hedged row is lame with flint,

  Blunt scythe and water blade.

  ‘Who could snap off the shapeless print

  From your tomorrow-treading shade

  With oracle for eye?’