Poetry of Dylan Thomas sanctification of sexual union. Tois is vividly shown in "A Winter's Tale," where the religious element is expressed not only in the music and flight of a By Parker Tyler bird (paradigm of the Holy Ghost) but Is an Editor of View Magazine also in imagery which, although the URS is a day in which criticism of poetry runs to the empirical and the docu- scene is a farmyard and countryside, O accounts for his integral qualities of obliquely suggests cathedrals and vari- mentary; the scholarly crossbred with the informative ideals of journalism. precipitation, turbulence, hypercondensa- ous sacred properties, and where once Critics are trained in all manner of means to trap the poetic unicorn. For the tion, ellipsis, and extreme sensuousness. 14-odd pages of the introduction to The Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas (The more the poet is "brought low / Burning in the bride red of love, in the whirl / Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas. With an introduction by John L. Sweeney. New PROMISCUITY is a possible coefficient Pool at the wanting center That York: New Directions. 184 pages. $3.50.) John L. Sweeney is seen juggling with Thomas' sexual ecstasy is not pure, as the up-to-date critical instruments, taking a hint from the Marxist critics, bowing to of encyclopaedism. The peril of which was Donne's, or absolute, as is Cum- the "historical" approach, managing with a surprising degree of grace to avoid one is constantly aware in Thomas' mings', is verified with a striking clue tangling with what E. E. Cummings called "the duck-billed platitude." But the unicorn poems is a partly spiritual, partly from the above-quoted prose statement escapes; the platitude turns up in the net. psychological element belonging to states Only a fashion of literary criticism, engendered by Auden's dubious criticism~ by the poet, using the war/peace of vertigo and falling, a general be- metaphor for his poetry. He calls the within-poetry, could have induced Mr. Sweeney to delineate Thomas' position thus: wilderment in spatial orientation. It is above-mentioned "wanting center" the "his interest in the reconstruction of the individual contrasted sharply with their needless to identify flight and falling "womb of war" from which issues the interest (Auden's, Day Lewis', etc.) in with sex: birds, for instance, are "momentary peace of a poem." the reconstruction of society." It is no familiar symbols in these poems, being just amends for him to go on to re- interchangeably woman and the penis. phrase Thomas' interest as "spiritual In this "promiscuous" sort of geography A fourteen, in the as yet unpub- regeneration of the individual," or to lies the bare integument of Thomas' lished material of a notebook, Thomas add: "That individual was himself." esthetics. The telescoping evident in wrote verses on the incestuous love of This is a clue to the fact that lurking metaphors arranged to ellipsize the Isis and Osiris, The thème of incest, behind Mr. Sweeney's exposition is the three factors of sex, birth, and death, as well as rivalry with and fear of the assumption that Thomas is a super sort constantly recurrent in Thomas, is of father, receives constant amplification of solipsist, a poet whose writings are an "encyclopaedic" character. In the act in Thomas' work. One of these very to be approached as though paradoxical of subjecting the separate experiences early poems states: versions of the plainer incunabula of of sex, birth, and death to such high Donne, Marvell, and Herbert. To put it the style of the St. James Version not pressure as the poet does to fuse them, I see you boys of summer in your as succinctly as Mr. Sweeney: "Thomas ruin through word-repetition and phrase- he arrives at a speed, altitude, and eye may seem to be rolling in an ex- styling but by alliteration and assonance, spatial graph that invites vertigo. The I am the man your father was. travagant frenzy, but he never loses to which he gave the dimensions of mastery of the machine of the poem is, We are the sons of flint and pitch. sight of his responsibility to poetic tradi- church music. These are the last lines therefore, the sensational tour-de-force o see the poles are kissing as they tion." As though inspiration were op- of a poem by Thomas: Thomas pulls off whenever he requires cross. posed to "responsibility"! Now shown and mostly bare I would it of himself. At the same time, the The last line clinches the content of Can Thomas or any poet be branded, duration of his emotion involves both lie down, the poem as another sadistic pattern, even if gingerly, with the neo-Kantian Lie down, lie down and live peril and promiscuity; a peril of promis- this time mingling filial affection and strait-jacket of solipsist? The introduc- As quiet as a bone. cuity, one might say; or in a term, hatred. The elegiac fatality of the poem tion refers to Thomas' "record of his sexual guilt. They sound like a transcription of a seems secretly to celebrate the destruc- individual struggle" as "strikingly Bach Mass as sung. A more accurate tion of natural power and to elide three Freudian in its paradoxes and leaps, in Hopkinsian note is in THE man in "Vision and Prayer," generations, a synthesis which in its its synthesis of unconscious experience." My paid-for saved-for own too late who listens at the wall of the room from curious fluidity invokes once more the The critical burden is neatly shifted to In love torn breeches and blistered which emanate sounds of his wife giving ghostly partner of the Trinity. the broad back of the Vienna maestro. jacket birth to a son, identifies himself with Fear of some "cosmic death" ("Who Patently, Mr. Sweeney would nominate Joseph beside Mary's accouchement. But kills my history ? saw time murder Thomas as a self-analyst exploring his These lines suggest by their content a me") alternates with the vicarious own "inner darkness." Now, if poetry progenitor of Thomas not alluded to by no reader can miss, despite the poem's for Thomas may be considered an agent flawless technique, the brute passion death-fear that appears in the story of Mr. Sweeney: Rimbaud. Although an apostle of that "derangement of the that infuses every lucent, elegant line, boyhood, "The Peaches," wherein the freeing him as an individual from the narrator, having been informed that his solipsistic self and supposedly reuniting senses" of which Thomas' work is a not only as though (demonstrably) Joseph identifies himself with Jesus and uncle has robbed a sow of a pig, imagines him with society (cf. John Dewey), this garden-variety climax, Rimbaud with anticipates the agony of the Cross, but the man "holding the writhing pig in particular process for Thomas is auto- his French intellect was an esthetic his two hairy hands, sinking his teeth matic and not, as Sweeney adds, a philosopher, which Thomas is not. Truly, also as though the metaphoric. Joseph in its thigh, crunching its trotters up." Thomas accepts certain mythical out- were undergoing the savage's ordeal of "consciously composed record." Poetry The uncle is a displacement of the lines, the chief being Christ's myth of courade. Of this primitive custom, we is not record but direct experience. We father, and the pig of the child stolen birth, death, and resurrection, with the know from Theodor Reik's excellent in- can indeed cite "the reconstruction of by the voracious father from the pro- the individual," but conversely it is corollary worship of the Virgin. This vestigation in his book, Ritual: Psycho- tecting mother. acceptance of certain imaginative sys- analytic Studies, that it is not merely Auden and his followers, not Thomas imitative and displacing (the savage There can be no doubt that, as mod- and his followers, whose work reflects tems (among others are the Druidic interest in a quasi-clinical conception of and the Egyptian) accounts for much father tries to transfer his wife's child- ern readers, we easily divine in the work of the poet's metaphoric structure, but bed pain to himself) but also sadistic: of this poet those constellations of im- the individual as conscious member of he revels in his wife's suffering and pulse having come to be known as society. Auden, by the way, has been not, of course, for the style that utilizes magically increases it. Thus if Thomas "Freudian" and stemming as a matter "analyzed," and not only-one might that structure. Despite such quasi-devo- say-in the psychoanalytic clinic but in tional poems as "Vision and Prayer" is not authentically religious like Herb- of fact from the most ancient myths, the "religious" and "political" clinics (one of Thomas' masterpieces, similar ert, Eliot, and Donne, all of whom both savage and pagan; the eating of even in physical pattern to Herbert's he equals in metaphysical sensibility, it the young by the father, so shocking to (we cannot forget his old ally, the Com- "Easter Wings"), Thomas cannot be is because he is also magical and takes unprepared modern sensibilities, is as munist Party). Thomas' relations to sex a magical view of religion. commonplace (metaphorically) in Thom- and religion are asserted through pure- called a religious poet., He cannot, for dialectical, not Freudian or theological a reason related to his encyclopaedism This element 01 magical as opposed as as it is in Apollodorus, chronicles above referred to. to religious illumination is nowhere more of the creation of the world accord- paradox. This is proven by a statement evident than in the story, "The Burning ing to the Greeks. Yet an insurgent of the poet innocently quoted by Mr. What Mr. Sweeney naively fails to Baby," echoing as it does Druidic rite tenderness, purely spiritual and as mod- Sweeney: "Out of the inevitable conflict notice in his analogy of a stanza of Marvell's with one by Thomas is the and primitive sacrifice. Another story, ern as the seventeenth-century meta- of images-inevitable, recreative, de- "The Mouse and the Woman," seems physicals, dictates many of Thomas' structive and contradictory nature of crucial difference of tone which has oddly a parable of sacred and profane moods; not only the stained-glass mag- the motivating center, the womb of war effected an alien usage of Marvell's love as symptomatic in Joseph's rela- nificence of "Vision and Prayer" but try to make that momentary peace devices of the dove (the Holy Ghost) tions with Mary. The implicit pro- also the half-speaking, half-listening which is a poem." The formal quality and the miracle of the manna. Sweeney tagonist seems to be Jesus. The evident poemj called "Conversation of Prayers." of his dialectic is demonstrated by the flatly says: "Here Thomas has reworked protagonist is an inmate of an insane Here the eavesdropping poet seems to be nature of the war/peace opposition as the sensual and spiritual color of asylum who hallucinates a woman and acquainting his heart with methaphor. Poetically, the opposition is Marvell's imagery." The fact is that makes love to her, only to kill her; here between activity and quietus, sound and Thomas is not a poetic refurbisher, as The conversation of prayers about to again the sadistic pattern of love-hate. silence, birth and death, sex and this observation indicates, but an be said The lunatic has killed his dog following transcendence of sex. original poet, and his central experience By the child going to bed and the man the woman's "materialization." The dog as an individual is distinct from on the stairs as a symbol of the author himself ap- Marvell's. The deep perspective of Who climbs to his dying love in her pears significantly in the title of one of Thomas' experience accounts for his high room. Auden has encyclopaedized the in- his books, parodying Joyce: Portrait of tellectual intelligence of his era, Thomas distinction among poets, for to it adhere the Artist as a Young Dog. Thus the In a typical metamorphosis, the end has just as certainly encyclopaedized all those virtuoso performances of poetic lunatic "kills" his gross immaturity and finds the roles of child and man re- its sensual intelligence. Thomas is trope that are apt to elicit under-the- walls up the hole used by the mouse, versed; the child's prayer "shall drown closer, for example, to Cummings than breath huzzas from even seasoned read- evidently a symbol of the penis-that is, in a grief as deep as a made grave he is to the older, more "intellectual" ers of Thomas. If, despite his feeling of animal, or profane, sex. Does not the / Dragging him up the stairs to one men, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, and for supernaturalist ritual, Thomas can- loved woman then seem like the Virgin? who lies dead." Thomas has assumed Pound. But if his lyrical sensuousness not be called a religious poet, it is be- A difficult and ambiguous mariolatry the Promethean task of reconciling the is related in quality to Cummings' less cause modern knowledge (psychological runs throughout Thomas' work. It is "meat-eating sun" (whose dreadful de- accented poetry and less dense love, a and anthropological) has created a per- interesting to note that the Biblical sire the poet himself reflects) with the certain massiveness of movement in his spective too promiscuous for strict Joseph, a carpenter, is said to have con- tenor, effortless religiosity of his birth- verse is as meticulously administered as religious belief in an individual so pro- structed mouse-traps. day piece, "A Poem in October." We in the similarly constructed lines of foundly emotional and sensual as this often applaud the dazzling performance, John Donne and Marianne Moore. More poet. Abundant evidence exists in this but it is a question of style as well as elusive is Thomas' Hopkinsian verbal volume, which includes six of the NUMEROUS poems of Thomas, in- technique, assurance as well as success. texture and a metric that is sometimes author's stories, that a primary sexual variably carrying the sensual burden of Thomas' equipment lacks only one thing: close to the Scriptural tonalities of experience stands at the back of all vertigral suspense, attest to a sexual the angelic equipoise that always shone Hopkins. The latter's device was to echo Thomas' work, and that this experience anguish reaching intuitively for a from one of his masters, Donne. MARCH 8. 1947 13