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Dylan Thomas

Welsh poet and writer (1914-1953)

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer.

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Quotes

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Light breaks where no sun shines…
 
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides…
 
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain…
 
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick [...] But you're back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words.
 
The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.
 
A work of Thomas as a Leiden wall poem
  • Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
    From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
    Slides like a sea;
    Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
    Spout to the rod
    Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
    • Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 3
  • Light breaks on secret lots,
    On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
    When logics die,
    The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
    And blood jumps in the sun;
    Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
    • Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 5
  • The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
    Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
    Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
    These five kings did a king to death.
  • When all my five and country senses see,
    The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
    How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
    Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
    Love in the frost is pared and wintered by.
  • 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 I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
    Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
    Through the parables
    Of sunlight
    And the legends of the green chapels.
  • One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
  • It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
 
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
  • Not for the proud man apart
    From the raging moon I write
    On these spindrift pages
    Nor for the towering dead
    With their nightingales and psalms
  • Land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it!
  • What's never known is safest in this life.
    Under the skysigns they who have no arms
    have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
    Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
    • Was There A Time [2]

The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas

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Paul Ferris edition (1985)

  • Give me a sheet of paper & I can’t help filling it in. The result—more often than not—is good & bad, serious & comic, sincere & insincere, lucid or nonsensical by the turns of my whirligig mentality, started from the wrong end, a mentality that ran before it walked, & perhaps will never walk, that wanted to fly before it had the right even to think of wings.
    • Letter to Trevor Hughes, Feb 1933
  • None of us today want to read poems which we can understand as easily as the front page of the Express.
    • Letter to Glyn Jones, March 1934
  • You'll never, I'll never let you, grow wise, and I'll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we'll always be young and unwise together. There is, I suppose, in the eyes of the They, a sort of sweet madness about you and me, a sort of mad bewilderment and astonishment oblivious to the Nasties and the Meanies; you’re the only person, of course you’re the only person from here to Aldebaran and back, with whom I’m free entirely; and I think it’s because you’re as innocent as me. Oh I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.
  • Very much of my poetry is, I know an enquiry and a terror of fearful expectation, a discovery and facing of fear. I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow & upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.
    • Letter to Henry Treece, 16 May 1938

Fern Hill (1946)

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Full text online
 
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
 
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways.
  • 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 honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.
    • St. 1
  • In the sun that is young once only,
    Time let me play and be
    Golden in the mercy of his means.
    • St. 2
  • And the sabbath rang slowly
    In the pebbles of the holy streams.
    • St. 2
  • And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
    Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
    In the sun born over and over,
    I ran my heedless ways.
    • St. 5
  • Time held me green and dying
    Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
    • St. 6

Poetic Manifesto (1951)

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Written in 1951 and published in the Texas Quarterly, Volume IV, 1961

  • I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words.
  • The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant, was of very secondary importance.
  • I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their actions, made in my ears; I cared for the colours the words cast on my eyes.
  • I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of — at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.
  • You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes and rhythms, "Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship." But you're back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.
  • The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.


Disputed

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  • He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.
  • When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.


Misattributed

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  • Swansea is the graveyard of ambition
    • Commonly attributed to Thomas, but scholars at Swansea University claim there is "no evidence that he ever wrote or spoke those words"[1]
  • Ambition is critical
    • Written by David Hughes in 1992 and inscribed on Swansea railway station, commissioned by Swansea council. Misattributed to Thomas in a Plaid Cymru manifesto[1]

Quotes about Thomas

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Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the English disputes about Dylan Thomas's greatness ... He is a dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding. ~ Robert Lowell
  • Here in Israel, of course, every generation backs away from its parents. Rebels against the old. That has always been the case, and not here alone. Take, for example, Dylan Thomas, now largely ignored. You may be sure that in a few years some Yale professor will rediscover his genius.
  • Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the English disputes about Dylan Thomas's greatness ... He is a dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding.
  • In that way, I disagree with Dylan Thomas and what he said in his poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night..." When life is through with me, I want to say to it as you would say to a lover, or a friend, or a child: 'Goodbye! It's been a ball...truly. And thank you.'

References

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  1. ↑ a b "Plaid Cymru wrongly attributes Dylan Thomas quote". BBC News. 2011-04-12. Retrieved on 2022-11-21. 
  2. ↑ (4 March 2004)"A Terrible Thing, Thank God". London Review of Books 26 (5).
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