October 27: Dylan
Thomas was born on this day in 1914 in Swansea, South Wales. The family was
poor, but Thomas was no Welsh pit-boy: he had a poet-Uncle, a
schoolteacher-father with a full library, Shakespeare for his bedtime story,
and elocution lessons for his local accent. Because he was bronchial,
frail-boned, and unenthusiastic about school, he would often stay home with
real or faked illness, or be allowed to run his "heedless ways" on
his Aunt's tumble-down Fern Hill farm, "green and golden" and truant.
Thomas's mother recalled that he was always reading or
writing poetry—one, she remembers, about the kitchen sink, another about an
onion. Thomas remembered himself as "a bombastic adolescent provincial
Bohemian with a thick-knotted artist's tie made out of his sister's scarf...and
a cricket-shirt dyed bottlegreen." But he did more than dress the part of
the poet. In a three-year period starting at age sixteen-and-a-half, he wrote all
the poems for his first book of poetry, most for his second book, and early
versions of many of his later poems. "Three-quarters of his work as a
poet," writes one biographer, "dates in style, concept, and often in
composition from these three years." The darker view of Thomas's early
poetic development is that there was so little later. Some famous poems lay
ahead, but more than a few critics spot a stalled, repetitive tone in many
others.
The lines below are from "Poem in October,"
written in commemoration of Thomas's thirtieth birthday. In the early stanzas
he recalls earlier birthdays spent "in the twice-told fields of
infancy"—hearing "the birds of the winged trees flying my name /
Above the farms and the white horses," walking with his mother
"Through the parables / Of sunlight / And the legends of the green
chapels." But then the unstable October weather turns, and the child is
suddenly thirty-one:
…And there could I
marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead
child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood
there then in the summer noon
Though the town below
lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be
sung
On this high hill in a
year's turning.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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