Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > [(The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas)] [ By (author) Dylan Thomas, Edited by John Goodby ] [October, 2014] > Status Update

Beyond this island bound
By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast,
The land lies out of sound
And the hills out of mind.

Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone til the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?

‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,
And my heart is cracked across;
My face is haggard in the glass,
My lips are withered with a kiss,
My breasts are thin.
A merry girl took me for man,
I laid her down and told her sin,
And put beside her a ram rose.

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.

Pity the poor unpitied who are strange with tears.

Pity the living who are lost, alone;

There are no seacaves deeper than her eyes;
Day treads the trees and she the cavernous night.

The living sun laments the dying skies,
Lamenting falls.

All things are known: the stars’ advice
Calls some content to travel with the winds,
Though what the stars ask as they round
Time upon time the towers of the skies
Is heard but little till the stars go out.
I hear content, and ‘Be content’
Ring like a handbell through the corridors,
And ‘Know no answer’, and I know
No answer to the children’s cry

And green, sneers not at the old sky.
No man believes who does not wonder why.