Dylan Thomas: Druid

Part 2 in a series

In a strange and marvelous way, Thomas’s poetry blends the mysteries of the “two books,” that of nature and that of scripture. There is ample poetic precedent in that, with roots deep into the imaginal and mythic past, as voiced in “The Song of Amergin”:

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of a lance in battle,
I am the God who creates in the head the fire.
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountains?
Who announces the age of the moon?
Who reaches the place where couches the sun? 

Like Amergin, Thomas’s poetry might be described as an attempt “to harmonise and unite the spiritual soul of man with the spiritual Presence in Nature.”[1] This sensibility also appears in Thomas’s poetry and in that of his countryman, the Metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).

Henry Vaughan was a bit of an outlier among the poets of his time. Unlike his contemporaries, the role of nature in his poetry is that of both potency and potential to reveal the divine, which is why many critics have seen in him a kind of proto-Romanticism. Like Thomas, he combines the two books in a third book—his poetry. One could almost open his Silex Scintillans (part one published in 1650, part two in 1655) to a random page for an example, so much is this method a part of his poetry, but the opening stanza of “Cock-crowing” is sufficient to make the point:

Father of lights! what Sunnie seed,
What glance of day hast thou confin’d
Into this bird? To all the breed
This busie Ray thou hast assign’d;
       Their magnetissme works all night,
       And dreams of Paradise and light. 

In these few lines, Vaughan moves from scriptural citation (“Father of lights!” is a direct quote from James 1:17) to hermetic meditation on light—and we must think of this as the light of the first day of Creation, and not the fourth—and how this mystical light informs even the lowly rooster with the revelation of Christ as the light of the world.

Vaughan, an Anglican and Royalist, like his older contemporary, the jovially irascible Robert Herrick, was in part responding to the rise of the political dominance of Puritan killjoys and their morose and dark embrace of a Christianity devoid of joy, carnival, and even dancing (not to mention their cancelling of Christmas). For these reasons and more, Vaughan has some harsh words for Oliver Cromwell in his poem “The World”:

The darksome States-man hung with weights and woe
Like a thick midnight-fog mov’s there so slow
	He did not stay nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad Ecclipses) scowl
	Upon his soul.
And Clouds of crying witnesses without
     Pursued him with one shout.
Yet dig’d the Mole, and lest his ways be found
	Workt under ground.
Where he did Clutch his prey, but one did see
	That policie,
Churches and altars fed him, Perjuries
	Were gnats and flies,
It rain’d about him bloud and tears, but he
	Drank them as free.

As Kathleen Raine observes,

“Iconoclastic Protestantism largely destroyed, in England, the images which had always been, and must normally be, the natural language of spiritual knowledge; and one hears that religious symbols have ‘lost their meaning’; but since the only meaning symbols can be said to possess lies in their power to evoke, all symbols, ancient or modern, religious or poetic, must be equally meaningless in a climate of positivism.”[2]

This was, in part, the war Henry Vaughan was fighting; and the positivism Raine calls out here was in the seventeenth century but in its seed form, not only in the iconoclasm of Parliamentarians but in the Scientific Revolution then getting underway. By the twentieth century, this movement was in full mechanical flower. It was then left to the unforeseen Dylan Marlais Thomas, born into both a Protestant religious environment of austere and somber imagination and a positivist educational and cultural milieu, to reimagine both poetic language and religious iconography in a way that rewilded both.

Some critics locate Thomas’s alleged “Christian turn” with his composition of “Altarwise by owl-light,” a kind of sonnet sequence (they’re not technically sonnets) alluding, for all its obscurity, to a deeper engagement with matters of faith. Nevertheless, the poem collides images from disparate symbolic and mythic environments in a way that suggests that the poem is not necessarily to be understood conceptually but that it conveys its meaning allusively and intuitively, like a dream, as in these first lines:

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abbadon in the hangnail cracked from Adam, 
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
But out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.

A British maxim says “Take care of the pounds, and the cents with will take care of themselves.” Lewis Carroll, that master of (il)logic and surrealist thought, parodies that: “Take care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself,”[3] words that go far in describing Thomas’s approach in the poem. The challenge of “Altarwise” resides in the genuine agon the reader undertakes with the poet, relinquishing the control promised by rationality and surrendering to the dream itself. As Daniel Jones comments, “Altarwise by owl-light” might be considered

“‘absolute poetry’. . . a pattern of images and words, held together not by ordinary logic, but by the logic of a common relationship of those images and words with certain allied subjects: sex, birth, death, Christian and pagan religion and ritual. In other words, the poem, in spite of its length, sustains a single metaphor, and it would be vain to seek in it logic, narration or message in the usual sense of these words, though they are all present metaphorically.”[2]

It also may be that Thomas’s obscurity in the poem is a gnomic confession of his growing attraction to the druidic Christian mystery:

Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,
A Bible-leaved of all the written words
Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,
Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,
And one light’s language in the book of trees.

Here Christ crucified becomes the scarecrow alphabet-word, the light of the first day and of language; he who illuminates all of poetry and nature.

As time went on, though his poetic output decreased in quantity, it increased in quality; and accompanying this inverse ratio, the Christian druid content of his verse flowered and fruited with abandon. All of nature speaks the languages of God to the poet, every bird and river carries with it a message, past becomes present, present past, as in these lines from “Poem in October”:

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
         Through the parables
              Of sun light

    And twice told tales of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
   These were the woods the river and sea
          Where a boy
        In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
      And the mystery
        Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

In a way, Thomas can be seen as a kind of Metaphysical poet in the tradition of not only Henry Vaughan but of John Donne and George Herbert as well. This is most evident in the very Herbertian poem “Vision and Prayer” with its attention to not only form but the shape on the page, inviting comparison to Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar.” The unmistakably religious implications of the poem further connect Thomas to the Metaphysical tradition, not to mention a linguistic pyrotechnics worthy of Donne himself.

Thomas’s Metaphysical audacity permeates his poetry, as in these lines from “Holy Spring”: “My arising prodigal / Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire” and in this passage from “A Winter’s Tale”:

     Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

     Of fields. . . .

Thomas’s poetry, though reduced in quantity over time grew in power in a kind of poetic homeopathy by which the reduced physicality of the poetry in terms of volume grew exponentially in spiritual power. This quality was brought to the fore in “A Winter’s Tale,” composed in early 1945 and even more in one of his most anthologized poems, “Fern Hill,” written in the same year.

“Fern Hill” is something of a virtuoso piece employing the syllabic verse form that Thomas more and more turned to over the course of his poetic career. The seven stanzas of the poem follow a strict pattern of syllable counts per line: 14, 14, 9, 6, 9, 15, 14, 7, 9. Within this structure, Thomas employs an exhilarating array of rhythms, sounds, and figures to evoke both the nostalgia and loss of the poem’s central theme and the mythic/folkloric backdrop that images forth the very Welsh, very druidic, very Christian bardo state of the world children inhabit early after birth and before their awareness of death makes its ominous entrance. This is the world to which Thomas Traherne bids us return, but which, tragically, Dylan Thomas could never fully enter.

Rudolf Steiner notes how the transition from childhood to adolescence is fundamentally a transition in awareness. The very young child, like the one Thomas recalls in “Fern Hill,” is for Steiner a being who is essentially religious: “Our earliest attitude to life is a religious one; we face nature as nature-like religious creatures, given up to our environment.”[4] Because of this, Steiner recommends that “in this period, the first third of the time between change of teeth and puberty, we must bring everything to the child by way of fairy-tales or legends, so that in everything that the child sees he finds something that is not separated from him but is a continuation of his own being.”[5] In addition, Steiner observes that in the ninth/tenth year, the awareness of uncertainty, of time, and of mortality starts to dawn on children, which can initiate much in the way of anxiety (one wonders how many children are currently placed on melatonin or other psychoactive drugs around this age). As an antidote, Steiner stresses the importance of the teacher being a moral and grounded individual, in whose authority the child can rest in security and trust. He also prescribes the Old Testament stories, especially of the Fall, as homeopathic medicines for the soul as they mirror the child’s own fall from innocence and grace. This is the imaginative world of “Fern Hill.” As Thomas describes it:

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new moon and happy as the heart was long,
    In the sun born over and over,
        I ran my heedless ways,
    My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
    Before the children green and golden
        Follow him out of grace

His use of alliteration here (“foxes and pheasants”; “house high hay”; “tuneful turning”; “green and golden. . . . grace”) and throughout the poem, as well as his mastery of assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, off-rhyme, and the exuberance of his rhythms not only contribute to the evocation of childhood language games but also work their incantatory magic on the reader, who is transported, even translated (in the magical sense) into another world, another state of consciousness.

The world of “Fern Hill” is one in which “the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams.” Thomas also employs allusion to biblical and children’s stories as he weaves his nostalgic spell of childhood:

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
    Shining, it was Adam and maiden
        The sky gathered again
    And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
    Out of the whinnying green stable
        On to the fields of praise.

The conjunction of children’s literature (the farm with the “cock on his shoulder” a dream image of Long John Silver with his parrot) and The Book of Genesis grounds the reader in the liminal childhood space where every story and all of nature coalesce. As Traherne so accurately encapsulates this state of awareness, “How Bright are all Things here!”

The poem, like the story of the Fall, is ultimately a fall from grace in which the poet wakes “to the farm forever fled from the childless land,” a rhetorical move, like “once below a time,” wherein Thomas inverts rational or conventional understandings and phrases to shake the reader from the laziness of expectation. Talk about magic. But the poem is, finally, a tragedy, though it ends with a gesture defiant of (yet resolved to) impending doom:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
        Time held me green and dying
    Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

“Fern Hill,” like “A Winter’s Tale” and “Holy Spring,” shows Thomas at his world-building best, a mythopoesis at once Wales and not-Wales, participating, as it does, in the Otherworld. More and more his poetry amassed strength of imagination, even as his output slowed to a trickle, though a mighty one. In “Poem on His Birthday,” one of the last works he completed, Thomas’s druidic-Christian mantle is in full force as he steps into the role of prophet:

Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
    And druid herons’ vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
    Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
    Count my blessings aloud:

    Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
    Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
    And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
    Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
    And this last blessing most,

    That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
    The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.

This is even more the case with the project Thomas envisioned and was working to realize before his untimely death in 1953 just after his thirty-ninth birthday, and to which I will return in the next and last installment of this series.

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[1] Aurobindo, the Future Poetry, 111.

[2] Raine, Defending Ancient Springs, 118.

[3] Ventriloquized through the Ugly Duchess. See Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), 121.

[4] Note 103, in The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 263.

[5] Rudolf Steiner, The Essentials of Education, revised ed. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982), 44.

[6] Rudolf Steiner, The Roots of Education (1968; reprt. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982), 81.