The Christian Druid Art of Dylan Thomas

A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint’s cell / The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

First up: enrollment is now open for my course on William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, set to begin in March. You can read all about it here.

Thomas envisioned a grand project of druidic-Christian depth and scope, though he only finished three of the poems before he died. He discussed the project on a radio broadcast on 25 September 1950:

“The poem is to be called ‘In Country Heaven.’ The godhead, the author, the milky-way farmer, the first cause, architect, lamp-lighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the anthropomorphic bowler-out 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 Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and on creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow-men, who once were of the Earth, call 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 hairsbreadth of the mind, what they feel trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenic hearts, of that self-called place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, 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.”[1]

The only poems he completed for the sequence are among his finest: “In Country Sleep,” Over Sir John’s Hill,” and “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” not to mention the unfinished sketch of the titular poem.

The poems of “In Country Heaven” are, like much of Thomas’s work, alloyed of Christian and druid, folklore and fairytale, with elements of both the dangerous side of nursery rhymes and Frazerian fertility ritual. He taps into something primordial, even chthonic in the poems that renders them both strange and familiar, beautiful and unsettling, in language that entrances and lures the reader into the atmosphere of his imaginal world, an experience not so different from being captured by the faeries.

“In Country Sleep,” the first poem composed in the sequence (whether or not Thomas would have been placed it first is another matter) is the most ostensibly “Christian” of the poems. The setting is a dream-like Otherworld, as Thomas opens the poem:

Never and never, my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
					       My dear, my dear,
Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house of rosy wood.

The unspoken terror of “Little Red Riding Hood” reappears from childhood in an adult’s dream. But unlike the Grimms tale, no huntsman comes to the girl’s rescue. Instead, sophianic nature itself becomes savior:

A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint’s cell
The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays,
Sanctum sanctorum the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling. Fox and holt kneel before blood.

The Christian druidry of this passage is unmistakable. It is also unsettling. The blending of what we might take to be disparate images allows us to participate in the world of the poem’s strangeness—even though we might not entirely be sure of the meaning. Which, I think, is the point.

Prayer takes a central role in this poem in particular. Indeed, throughout his work (and not only in “Vision and Prayer”) Thomas turns again and again to prayer as poetic image. But it is prayer as implicit in the Creation that he explores here:

The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
					     Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace.

In the second section of “In Country Sleep” (it is the longest poem in the sequence), Thomas shows the Creation itself at prayer:

The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-
					     Heeled winds the rooks
Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books
Of birds!. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
					      The sermon 
Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen
					         To seraphim
Leaping! The gospel rooks![2]  All tell, this night, of him
Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

For Dylan Thomas, as for St. Paul, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22).

The poem ends in mood of assurance, as dawn approaches the sleeping girl of the first lines:

And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,
Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

The following poem, “Over Sir John’s Hill,” plunges more deeply into the mysteries of violence in nature, though not without acknowledging that even then grace abounds.

“Over Sir John’s Hill” is a tour-de-force performance and Thomas’s friend Vernon Watkins called it “perhaps the most perfect poem he wrote.”[3] The birds Thomas could see from the window of the boat house in which he wrote become in the poem a cipher for dark spiritual truths. Thomas loved birds; after he died, his family found dry bread crusts which he used to toss to the birds still in his coat pockets. His mother even swore that the herons still came looking for him.[4]

Violence—and the death that often accompanies it in nature—is evident from the poem’s first lines:

Over Sir John’s hill,
The hawk on fire hangs still;
In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws
And gallows, up the rays of his eyes, the small birds of the bay

The poem unfolds almost as an adult’s version of the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” As Martin Gardner points out in The Annotated Mother Goose, some critics have associated the nursery rhyme to a much older antecedent, the Norse myth of Balder the Beautiful, who is killed in a game due to the subterfuge of the god Loki, and whose death sets the gears turning toward Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.[1] It is uncertain whether Thomas knew of this connection, but it certainly would have delighted him, seeing that in “Over Sir John’s Hill” he is exploring serious matters of druidic-Christian mytho-apocalypse where “the fishing holy stalking heron / In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.”

The ritual slaughter of birds by the menacing hawk, nature “red in tooth and claw,” is not to be feared or shunned, but accepted as a fact of life, even as a sacrament. Those who eat kill, whether it be fruit or grain, fish or fowl, and the ritual sanctifies all, as the poet writes:

I open the leaves of the water at a passage
Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing

And read, in a shell, 
Death clear as a buoy’s bell:
All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung

We don’t like to think about the deaths we cause merely by living. Hunting, often called “blood sport,” may be the most obvious domain in which death of another being is actively pursued (“pursuit” is not really an aspect of raising livestock), but even vegetarians and vegans have blood on their hands. To come to terms with their role in the taking of a life to sustain life, humans have ritualized, especially, hunting, as can be seen in cave paintings, in the medieval practice (that still persists in some forms in Europe) of “honoring the game” at a feast, in Native American culture, and even in the very common practice of hunters thanking both God and the taken game with a prayer at its death. Thomas was not a hunter, but he instinctively understood the spiritual and material reality of the hunt and of death, by which, via poetic ritual, he makes offering to the numen:

We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,
The heron and I,
I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle
Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant

Crystal harbour vale
Where the sea cobbles sail,
And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.

“In the White Giant’s Thigh,” the only other poem of In Country Heaven to be completed, Thomas offers the reader a strange kind of fertility ritual…a fertility rite of the dead. Eros and Thanatos, as ever, are united in the poem, but in language simultaneously celebratory and mournful:

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

The dead women of the hill, barren in their deaths, “who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house,” lament like sirens and call to lovers who can neither hear them nor satisfy their need. “Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.” The eros of this poem, holy though it be, so rich in sexual and procreative imagery—“butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed, / Their breasts full of honey”—finds neither satisfaction nor resolution. Though life is said to arise from death, the dead conceive no life. The poet finds no recourse but to beg/lament: “Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved / Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed / Off by the sun.” Still, though frustrated, life calls even the dead, as Thomas rhymes in his denouement:

                                                                      . . . to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

The last poem of the sequence upon which Thomas worked was the title poem—and clearly meant to be the introit to his poetic liturgy. All he finished were six stanzas and a line of unfinished verse, but they hold the promise of a profound and sweeping saga, and, as he said in the broadcast, its telos is one of happiness. It begins

Always 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 in the canonized valley
    Where the dewfall stars sing gazing 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.

Not burdened by Welsh Methodist preaching culture, nor by Anglican or Catholic traditio, Thomas discovers a Liturgy of the Wild, an organic Christianity as alive as the sea and as old as stone. This is a liturgy of a God who weeps for all creatures in the warp and weft of time. For it only the Christian God who weeps. Not even fathering-forth Yahweh weeps.

Aurobindo was as serious a reader of poetry that one could ask for; and for him poetry had not yet realized its vocation, though some poets touched that vocation briefly. The telos for poetry, in Aurobindo’s eyes, is only achieved when poetic vision becomes mantra. As he explains:

“This highest intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual elements of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion, the appeal of beauty in the thing discovered and in its expression—for all great poetic inspiration is discovery,—rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration and pass into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are rare and come like brilliant accidents, angels’ visits; in the greater they are more frequent outbursts; but in the greatest they abound because they arise from a constant faculty of poetic vision and poetic speech which has its lesser and greater moments, but never entirely fails these supreme masters of the expressive word.”[1]

Dylan Thomas, as I have been arguing, despite his fallen nature, accidental druid that he was, is one of the rare poets of the modern world, surely among those writing in English, whose work achieves the mantra in that his vision is one of the discovery of spiritual truth. That is, his poetic vision opens into a druidic-Christian vision that is both organic and new, yet at the same time draws on something primordial and archaic. Like a Caedmon, he was a poet who sang the Creation, who sang of

Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales,
    And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
    And every soul His priest. 

Dylan Thomas, pray for us.

[1] Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning (1954; reprt., New York: New Directions, 1960), 114.

[2] I love the pun on “gospel books.”

[3] Ferris, Dylan Thomas, 225.

[4] Ibid., 224.

[5] Martin Gardner, The Annotated Mother Goose (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962), 37.

[6] Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, 31.