Dylan Thomas and Swinburne

Sir: Your correspondent ‘Atalanta’, not having read or heard Under Milk Wood, and having glanced at Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘In Country Sleep’ in a magazine somewhere, compares Dylan Thomas unfavourably with Swinburne. Setting aside Thomas’s own self-deprecatory remarks, what truth can be found in the comparison? Your correspondent speaks of a ‘similar facility for writing poetry.’ Vernon Watkins, Thomas’s friend, has told us that Thomas wrote at a ‘glacial’ speed. There are five hundred progressive drafts of that profound, lucid villanelle, ‘Do Not Go Gentle’. Your correspondent ‘got very little out of Dylan Thomas’s surge of words.’ I suggest that while we can read some poems as we read soap ads, there are other poems which we have to live with and grow with, often over years.

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And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,
This night and each vast night until the stem bell talks
In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls
Of the hearthstone tales my own lost love; and the soul walks
The water shorn.
This night and each night since the falling star you were born,
Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,

As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides
Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind –
Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands
Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged
Apple seed glides,
And falls, and flowers in the yawning round at our sides,
As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.

Who is the thief meek as the dew? Satan. Who is the ‘lost love’? A personal Eve. If we read this poem in the broad context of belief in the Fall of Man, it will open gradually to our touch and meditation, though the sense of abysses which occurs throughout Thomas’s work will remain. Can Swinburne give us anything comparable? Our hearts and eyes and ears open towards Thomas: they are never wide enough to hear the last of him. Towards Swinburne they close: we fall into a drugged sleep. Thomas mastered language; language mastered Swinburne. In the moment after birth and before death, in the gulf of our unquiet nature, Thomas stands with us, and ‘the soul walks the waters shorn.’ I, at least, read Thomas with joy and awe that so great a thing could happen in our time; Swinburne I read mostly for fun.

1956 (152)