Dora’s Reviews > The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas > Status Update

There are no seacaves deeper than her eyes;
Day treads the trees and she the cavernous night.
...
Pity Electra loveless, she whose grief
Drowns and is drowned, who utters to the stars
Her syllables, and to the gods her love;
Pity the poor unpitied who are strange with tears. 💔

Lain with parched things; loved dogs and women;
I have desired the circle of the sun.
Tested by fire, double thumb to nose,
I’ve mocked the moving of the universe.
Where, what? There was commotion in the skies,
But no god rose. I have seen bad and worse,
Gibed the coitus of the stars. No god
Comes from my evil or my good. Mad, mad,
Feeling the pinpricks of the blood,I’ve said
The novel things. But it has been no good

Where, what’s my God? I have been mad, am mad,
Have searched for shells and signs on the sea shore,
Stuck straw and seven stars upon my hair,
And leant on stiles and on the golden bar,
I have ridden on gutter dung and cloud.
Under a hideous sea where coral men
Feed in the armpits of drowned girls. I’ve swum
And sunk; waved flags to every fife and drum;
Said all the usual things over and again;
->

Even among his own kin he is lost,
Is love a shadow on the wall,
Among all living men he is a sad ghost.
He is not man’s nor woman’s man,
Leper among a clean people
Walks with the hills for company,
And has the mad trees’ talk by heart.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.

Never is nightmare,
Never flows out from the wound of sleep
Staining the broken brain
With knowledge that no use and nothing worth
Still’s vain to argue after death;
No use to run your head against the wall
To find a sweet blankness in the blood and shell,
This pus runs deep.

Now could I raise
Her dead, dark body to my own
And hear the joyous rustle of her bone
And in her eyes see deathly blaze;

Now could I wake
To passion after death, and taste
The rapture of her hating, tear the waste
Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break