Status Updates From Collected Poems, 1934-1953

I, in a wind of fire, from green Adam’s cradle,
No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,

Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

A quarrel of weather and trees in the windy spiral.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,

Regard the moon, it hangs above the lawn;
Regard the lawn, it lies beneath the moon

…
Hence the speakers, hesitation, court between an awareness of the need to advance, and the knowledge that childhood is not quite over.

The answer given is conventional; to answer the quickening pulse of desire by speeding up his ‘actions’ and ‘defying time’, so advancing more rapidly to maturity. Yet the terms in which this is presented – suggestive of Einstein’s description of the way the universe appears as one approaches the speed of light – suggests relativity, not certainty;
…

I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.

I have been taught to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been taught to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace

Should lantern shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind) the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over) the cemented skin,
The actions’ end.

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,

Some let me make you = ‘ some (poems) let me make (for) you’. The speaker wants to register the language of the outer world as strongly as his verbal in a life.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
[tower of words = the poets body, with the heart in it; the poet in the house where he writes; language as a tower imprisoning the writer is a common conceit in Thomas; mark = remark, mentally; mark on paper, write down; pun on mark (gospel)]

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the waters’s speeches.

My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

…This dies upon them, and they must die in darkness; die in the night and move to eternal fields of darkness. Foster the light, and God be with you.’

[letter between Trevor Hughes and Thomas, inspiration for “Foster the light” poem] Hughes’s reply concluded: ‘How shall a man die if he has never lived, or seen the beauty of the stars through the lenses of his own darkness? For so many God has never lived, the faint glimmer within them the glimmer of their own mean ego. ..

O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift

Standouts:
• Love in the Asylum (119)
• This Side of the Truth (116)
• Poem in October (115) — (required reading for turning 30)

“And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
through the parables
of sun light
and the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told field of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.”