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

…Thomas affirms the unity of creation in the hope that, if we can live in harmony with the machinery, the spirit may be able to imbue our elemental impulses with creative purpose and make life meaningful.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

I fled the Earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

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.