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

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

The world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke

Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First character characters of birth and death.

Man in his maggots barren = Man is merely food for worms

Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;

As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads