I had not realized, before I started research for this blog post, the extent to which Dylan Thomas influenced modern rock music. A longstanding rumour, both supported and denied by Bob Dylan, has it that the rocker took his adopted last name because of his admiration for the Welsh poet. And Dylan’s image was among those included on the cover art for The Beatles’ eighth album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of music’s most iconic album covers. That’s an impressive amount of influence for a young writer from Swansea, born to a seamstress and schoolteacher of modest means, but there are aspects of his life story that have an obvious cross-cultural appeal: his youth (he was still a teenager when he came to the attention of T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender), his fatalism and his alcoholism, all of which were romanticized by his readers at his encouragement. His pop culture influence is even more puzzling in light of his poetic complexity; I don’t think it’s an accident that his small handful of most commonly anthologized poems are also his most coherent.
My edition of Thomas’ Collected Poems contains 150 pages of poetry – selected from his published material, omitting most of the poems he later requested be omitted from his corpus – and as many pages of notes, and these are vital to making sense of many of the poems, drawing, as they do, from his notebooks and letters. The notes give a sense of Thomas the man, and I’d wager only a handful of 20th century poets would benefit more from a biographical reading than Dylan Thomas. Whole poems are inspired by key events in his life, yes, but often lines, obscure in and of themselves, find meaning when the appropriate letter or journal entry is referenced. Above all, there’s a sense of Dylan’s mischievousness that comes across forcefully in the notes and letters, and that helps make sense of the tone of much of the poetry. When, for example, his editor held off on the publication of his first volume of poetry, 18 Poems, over concerns with some of the imagery, Thomas wrote to an intermediary:
Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, and in the rot in life. Tell him I am for all cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I’d prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and tumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit.
Do the poems of this first volume live up to such morbid expectations? A handful certainly exemplify his penchant for mischief. Here is “Before I Knocked,” rejected for publication by the pious T.S. Eliot:
Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.
The conceit is simple enough: the poetic speaker is Christ, and the poem takes the form of a complaint, or even an indictment, against God. We begin, scandalously, before Christ’s conception, before he “knocked” to be born, when he was “shapeless” as the waters of the river Jordan. The second stanza introduces his complaint: that before he was even born, before he could have experience in the world, he was doomed by fate and by God (“the leaden stars, the rainy hammer / Swung by my father from his dome”) to die. Consider, again, the fourth and fifth stanzas, remarkable for their daring:
As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.
To enter into the mind of the unborn (“ungotten”) Christ would have been ambitious for a poet twice Dylan’s age, but he was still just a teenager at the time of composition. And what is it that passes through Christ’s mind in the womb? Aware of his future fate, he feels himself to be cursed, the “rack” (a torture rack, on which victims were stretched until their limbs broke and their joints dislocated) of his dreams not breaking his physical flesh, but stamping his body with “gallow crosses” and brambles. To know thirst “before the structure / Of skin and vein” is to possess foreknowledge, and all foreknowledge is fatal to life.
The final stanza makes this indictment of God explicit, for He took his own son’s “flesh and bone for armour” and double-crossed the mother of his child. Dylan had no Christ-like pretensions, but it his characteristic of his fatalism that he would envision – and identify with – a Christ embittered by his fate. (Incidentally, there is a beautiful Richard Burton reading of this poem on YouTube.)
Two years after the appearance and favorable reception of 18 Poems, 25 Poems was published for the first time, containing one of his most famous and most anthologized works, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” (hear Thomas read it here), which functions as a beautiful companion poem to “Before I Knocked”:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man 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.
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.
Gone is the poetic I, replaced by the impersonal narration appropriate to the certain tone of the poem. The title comes from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 6:9: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.” Thus, though there is no explicit mention of Christ, his presence in the poem is implied. The poem itself is structured by the refrain, “And death shall have no dominion,” which bookends each stanza and might be viewed, in its initial appearances, as a kind of hypothesis given proof by the subsequent lines until it can be restated as a conclusion. The torture rack of the previous poem makes a second appearance, but here it is ineffectual – every evil and ill is ineffectual, for death.
“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” was written in a contest with a friend and fellow poet over who could write the best poem on immortality – a kind of anticlimactic genesis, given the poem’s beauty. But it is among the best poems Thomas ever wrote, and the most enduring, and a fitting exemplar of his remarkable talent.