Paul Muldoon on Dylan Thomas

Dylan and Delayment: Introduction to The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
by Paul Muldoon
from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (Original Edition)

Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It's no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there's a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas's poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.

Oddly, one of the main obstacles to readers immediately reaching the speed of sound, maybe even of light, is Dylan Thomas's own tabloidian history. Like some of his poems, Dylan Thomas had a habit of putting some things off, be it getting a job or paying the rent. It was, however, his not postponing an eighteenth straight whiskey in the White Horse Tavern that would lead to his death on November 9, 1953 at the age of 39. Paradoxically, it confirmed his already legendary status as the artist as old dog, the poet as shaman-bard. One's reminded of Michael Drayton's notion, expressed in his Poly-Olbion, of the furor poeticus which he associates with the Welsh bards in their "sacred rage," singing to a harp accompaniment "with furie rapt."
That sense of the history of the Welsh bard was instilled from the start in Dylan Marlais Thomas, born on October 27, 1914 in Swansea. The "Marlais" was the name used by his great uncle, William Thomas, in his own bardic forays and means something like "great blue-green." It's a name shared by two Welsh rivers, and along with the meaning of Dylan itself ("son of the sea") might be thought of as predisposing the poet to an extraordinary combination of fluency and force. We read the last line of "Fern Hill" ("Though I sang in my chains like the sea") with quite a new attentiveness.

"Fern Hill" was written in 1945, when Dylan was at the height of his powers, and might be said to be typical of his "mature" style:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

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