By Dr Adrian Osbourne
As World Poetry Day 2021 arrives, Dylan Thomas endures as one of the most famous names in the world of poetry. His position in the cultural consciousness of the general public is firmly entrenched, largely on the back of a small number of extremely popular poems and a ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood. This was the British public’s most popular non-musical choice in a special Desert Island Discs episode in 2011, when the selections were voted for by listeners. Thomas is also the writer most requested by the invited guests in the history of the show, with his poem ‘Fern Hill’ running a close second in popularity to Under Milk Wood.
Beyond the demographic of the BBC Radio 4 audience, Thomas’s work has featured on numerous mainstream television programmes, such as the Welsh-made Dr Who, as well as American series, including the animated show Family Guy and the supernatural drama The Vampire Diaries. These three television examples quote ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, as does Michael Caine in the film Interstellar. Hollywood heavyweights Sean Penn and George Clooney provided some literary gravitas respectively to The Weight of Water and Solaris by intoning ‘And death shall have no dominion’. As a result, you might think that three or four pieces by Thomas constitute his body of work.
The contemporary cultural focus on such a slight representation of Thomas’s writing threatens to overshadow the rest of his varied output. Thomas wrote hundreds of poems, around fifty short stories, over twenty film scripts, and half a novel. In addition to his writing, he was also an experienced broadcaster and a seminal figure in the birth of spoken-word recordings, thanks to the success of his albums with Caedmon. But what propelled Thomas into the position he now holds in the literary firmament, orbiting and affecting by his gravitational pull both the progress of Welsh Writing in English and poetry across the world, was his incredible, powerful, and striking appearance on the scene as a young man of 18 when “And death shall have no dominion” was published in The New English Weekly. The publication of “And death” in 1933 and “Do not go gentle” in 1951 provide two milestones between which the vast majority of Thomas’s work was created and published, but the years 1934-36 provided the bedrock for his career with the publication of his first two collections, the inspiringly titled 18 Poems and Twenty-five Poems. From these 43 poems emerged a unique voice that described and enacted a “process poetic”, in which all the universe from microcosm to macrocosm, from human to star, are simultaneously engaged in the same processes of life and death, destruction and creation, that form the endless dance of life. It is in this vein, he wrote:
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig
(“Light breaks where no sun shines”)
These lines go from the infertility of “no seed” to the fecundity of a fruit that “unwrinkles” and is “Bright as a fig”, and all the while this process is happening at galactic level, as if pre-empting the Star Child of Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Did I mention that Thomas was also a sci-fi poet? For all his reputation as a pastoral writer of poems that evoke idyllic childhood days, thanks largely to the popularity of “Fern Hill”, Thomas also gave us poetry such as:
My fuses are timed to charge his heart,
He blew like powder to the light
And held a little sabbath with the sun,
But when the stars, assuming shape,
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep
(“When once the twilight locks no longer”)
As this poem also mentions the “galactic sea”, it is clear that its image clusters and vocabulary attempt to bridge any gap between us down here and the great big up there. And after all, as we consider what one day in the year dedicated to poetry means to us, and what response it might have garnered from Thomas who dedicated every day of his life to finding the right words to put in the right order, is that not what poetry sets out to do – to bring a little bit of cosmic grandeur down to the human level of the heart? It is through and thanks to poetry that Thomas endeavoured to engage with the varied experiences of existence, to combine apparent opposites and universal extremes, to show how the “earth and sky were as one airy hill. / The sun and moon shed one white light.” What Thomas the poet sought to achieve was an assimilation, a synthesis between the heavens and the earth, between finite, mortal human and infinite, never-ending space, and that is worth considering the next time a Hollywood A-lister recites his poetry over a slow panning shot of a ship gliding through space. Happy World Poetry Day, and beyond.