by Dylan Thomas
More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.
LAMENT
When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Ninepin down on the donkeys’ common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings’ wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.
When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles’ pews,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling beds of the town cried, Quick!—
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.
When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood creeps cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!
When I was a half of the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarer’s life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman’s soul for a wife.
Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw—
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
IN THE WHITE GIANT’S THIGH
Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,
And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with anyone
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,
Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.
Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush
Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,
Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime
And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round—
(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)—
Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.
The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds’ boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love forever meridian through the courters’ trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.
ELEGY
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
On that darkest day. Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother’s breast
Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice
of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,
I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead
Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
[An old tormented man three-quarters blind,
I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,
Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.
The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.
Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go
Walking in the meadows of his son’s eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres’
Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.
O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.
Until I die he will not leave my side.]
_____________________
Vernon Watkins’ Note on “Elegy”
This unfinished Elegy of Dylan Thomas was given the title “Elegy” in the latest version of the poem after the provisional titles “The Darkest Way” or “Too Proud to Die” or “True Death” had been used in preparatory drafts. Among his papers he left sixty pages of manuscript work towards the poem, including this note:—
(1) Although he was too proud to die, he did die, blind, in the most agonizing way but he did not flinch from death & was brave in his pride.
(2) In his innocence, if thinking he was God-hating, he never knew that what he was was: an old kind man in his burning pride.
(3) Now he will not leave my side, though he is dead.
(4) His mother said that as a baby he never cried; nor did he, as an old man; he just cried to his secret wound if his blindness, never aloud.
The rest of the manuscript work consists of phrases, lines, couplets, and line-endings, and transcripts of the poem in various degrees of completeness. The two more complete versions, which are clearly the latest, are both rhymed in quatrains. One, with no title, has no division into verses, and the second, with the title “Elegy,” is divided into verses of three lines. This, to me, seems to be the latest version of all, and seems to hold the final form the poem was to take. The poem extends to the seventeenth line, ending “to the roots of the sea,” after which there is a line which is deleted.
The extension of the poem has been built up from the manuscript’s notes. The lines are all found there, except that two or three have been adjusted to fit the rhyming scheme. “Breath” was an isolated marginal word which I have used in line thirty-four; and “plain,” which ends line twenty-three, has been added to “was” without justification from the manuscript. In the third line I have chosen “narrow pride” as against “burning pride” although “burning” occurs more often than “narrow” in the transcripts; but it was “narrow” in that line he quoted to me from memory when I last saw him.
Of the added lines sixteen are exactly as Dylan Thomas wrote them, and the remainder are altered only to the extent of an inversion of one or two words. Their order might well have been different. The poem might also have been made much longer. It recalls the earlier poem, also written for his father: “Do not go gentle into that good night”; but it is clear that in this last poem Dylan Thomas was attempting something even more immediate and more difficult.
VERNON WATKINS, 1956
IN COUNTRY HEAVEN
Always when he, in country heaven,
(Whom my heart hears),
Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,
Humble in all his planets,
And weeps on the abasing hill,
Then in the delight and grove of beasts and birds
And the canonized valley
Where the dewfall stars sing grazing still
And the angels whirr like pheasants
Through naves of leaves,
Light and his tears glide down together
(O hand in hand)
From the country eyes, salt and sun, star and woe
Down the cheek bones and whinnying
Downs into the low browsing dark.
Housed in hamlets of heaven swing the loft lamps,
In the black buried spinneys
Bushes and owls blow out like candles,
And seraphic fields of shepherds
Fade with their rose–
White, God’s bright, flocks, the belled lambs leaping,
(His gentle kind);
The shooting star hawk statued blind in a cloud
Over the blackamoor shires
Hears the belfries and the cobbles
Of the twelve apostles’ towns ring in his night;
And the long fox like fire
Prowls flaming among the cockerels
In the farms of heaven’s keeping,
But they sleep sound.
For the fifth element is pity,
(Pity for death)….
_____________________
Daniel Jones’ note on “In Country Heaven”
In his radio broadcast of 25th September 1950 Thomas spoke of a long “poem in preparation.” Three sections of this had been completed with the titles: “In Country Sleep,” “Over Sir John’s Hill” and “In the White Giant’s Thigh.” The first two, dating from 1947 and 1949 had already been printed, while the last was still in manuscript. He disclosed the “grand and simple” plan of the long poem: “The poem is to be called “In Country Heaven.” The godhead, the author, the milkyway farmer, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the anthropomorphic bowlerout and blackballer, the stuff of all men, scapegoat, martyr, maker, woe-bearer—He, on top of a hill in heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And, when he weeps, Light and his tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the projected poem, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like candles. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges and, among themselves in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shordy and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, those heavenly hedgerow-men who once were of the Earth call to one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hair’s breadth of the mind, what they feel trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenie hearts, of that self-called place. They remember places, fears, loves, exaltation, misery, animal joy, ignorance, and mysteries, all we know and do not know. The poem is made of these tellings. And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth. It grows into a praise of what is and what could be on this lump in the skies. It is a poem about happiness.”
Thomas continued to work on the long poem, but did not liv
e to finish it. The fragments of “In Country Heaven” clearly form a part of the opening section; this is the title-poem, and, according to the design of the whole work, the beginning of it. Some lines had already been composed at the time of the broadcast: “Light and his tears glide down together … Bushes and owls blow out like candles.” But the assured tone of Thomas’s statements in his broadcast may be misleading. The idea of writing a long work of this kind did not begin with “In Country Sleep” (1947); it suggested itself gradually and was often abandoned. Thomas wished to share, with radio listeners or with friends, his enthusiasm for the planning of a long poem. No one now can tell how firmly he would have held to this purpose; no one can tell whether he privately believed his abilities to be of the kind to fulfill it successfully.
The version of “In Country Heaven” printed here is based on manuscripts in the Library of the University of Texas. Many other versions, of course, could be put together from the same material, and would be equally “authentic.” The greatest number of variants occur in the five lines beginning “Light and his tears glide down together,” where there are so many divergences that it is impossible to combine them in a readable text. Apart from this, the version printed here is solidly based down to the line “Pity for death.” Tentative or conjectural continuations of the poem after this line have been omitted.
DANIEL JONES, 1970
A CHRONOLOGY
1914
Dylan Mariais Thomas is born October 27 in Swansea, Wales, the second child of David John Thomas and Florence Hannah Williams.
1925
In September attends Swansea Grammar School where his father is senior English Master and where Thomas meets Daniel Jones for the first time.
1930
Starts his first “notebook poem” in April.
1931
Leaves Grammar School in August to be a reporter for the local South Wales Daily Post.
1933
In May, the London journal New English Weekly publishes “And death shall have no dominion,” and that summer Thomas visits London for the first time.
Sunday Referee publishes “That sanity be kept” in September and Thomas begins his correspondence with Pamela Hansford Johnson.