Dylan Thomas' 'The Force that though the green fuse drives the flower'

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. Naturally, this discovery had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! That opening!

I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape.

The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were immediately attractive, And Death shall have no Dominion, Do not go gentle into that good night, (both read on the Poetry Voice) but most of the poems baffled my desire for a prose sense.

Your response to Thomas’s poems is always going to reveal a lot about what you appreciate in a poem. If you like sound, they are magnificent. It’s very difficult not to read 'The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ without launching into an imitation of an ecstatic revivalist preacher pounding the pulpit. It took me several takes to escape from it.

If you are looking for prose sense you may be disappointed. If you’re looking for original ideas you will be looking in the wrong place.

The idea in the poem, all living things are linked, is hardly new. But that in no way detracts from the drive of the syntax. This poem is a good antidote to those who confuse poetry and philosophy. If you want rationally argued philosophy or theology stop being lazy and read the philosophers and the theologians.

And if you pay too much attention this poem also seems to be in two halves. The first two quatrains are magnificent, but then the force of the repeated ‘the force that’….is dissipated. If you think too long about the statements in the rest of the poem you might start to ask the wrong questions and undermine the rhetorical flourish. You might even wonder if Thomas, young as he was when he wrote this, found himself with eight magnificent lines and had no real idea what to do with them.

Or you might just sit back and go with the marvellous surge of the verse.

Dylan Thomas' 'Do not go gentle into that good night'

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Form became a fetish in some kingdoms of poetry world in the later twentieth century. Creative writing students practised Sestinas and Villanelles, and some of them produced technically proficient examples. Most of them were immediately forgettable, and if you enjoy trivial pursuits a good question is 'Name three great villanelles written in the twentieth century'.

What the festishists ignored, forgot or didn’t know what that form is never the whole story. Simply being formal doesn’t you make your poem any better than sprawling free verse. You can teach an 11 year old to write a technically flawless sonnet but your chances of it being memorable are almost non-existent.

This is a great poem, regardless of Thomas’ choice of form. You can always criticise him for being excessive with the adjectives, and he obviously didn’t care for Bunting’s ‘Cut out every word you dare’. But there are few poets who are so enjoyable to read aloud. Even when sense is slipping out the back door for a quiet pint in the pub while the music rolls on.

And don’t be fooled by the music of it. This is very clever in a subtle and unobtrusive way. As someone said, there is no true repetition in poetry….Good night is both a night that is a good, a euphemism for death, and a parting statement. You can exhort someone to rage, or they can rage.

This is taken from a very tatty, yellowing Aldine Paperback ‘Collected Poems 1934-1952’ which I bought in a bookshop in Bala in April 1976

Dylan Thomas' 'Lament'.

Does anyone still read Dylan Thomas? Other than ‘Do not go gentle into that good night?’ He was a significant literary figure when I was growing up. His collected poems was the first book of poems I bought, in 1976. Perhaps he was an antidote to the spare understated poetry that was so ubiquitous. And then like a lot of things that were important in adolescence he was left behind.

Today the alliterating, three adjectives to every noun and no verb without an adverb tub thumbing pulpit pounding style can seem overloaded, tortuous, and teter on the edge of meaninglessness, but, often as in this poem, his style is still a pleasure to read aloud.