Archive for Dylan Thomas

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A Poem for St David’s Day

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on March 1, 2010 by telescoper

Today is St David’s Day, and it seems apt to celebrate it with a poem by Dylan Thomas. I’ve loved this particular one since I first heard it when I was a student many years ago. I say “heard it” rather than “read it” because it was through buying a tape of the man himself reading his poems that got me hooked. Fern Hill reflects about the passage of time, the loss of childhood happiness and the inevitability of death but its mood is defiant rather than gloomy. It’s full of vibrant imagery, but it’s also written with a wonderful feeling for the natural rhythms and cadences of the English language. You can listen to Dylan Thomas reading this exactly as if it were music.

 Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
     About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
       The night above the dingle starry,
         Time let me hail and climb
       Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
     And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
     And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
         Trail with daisies and barley
       Down the rivers of the windfall light.

     And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
     About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
       In the sun that is young once only,
         Time let me play and be
       Golden in the mercy of his means,
     And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
     Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
         And the sabbath rang slowly
       In the pebbles of the holy streams.

     All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
     Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
       And playing, lovely and watery
         And fire green as grass.
       And nightly under the simple stars
     As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
     All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
       Flying with the ricks, and the horses
         Flashing into the dark.

     And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
     With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
       Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
         The sky gathered again
       And the sun grew round that very day.
     So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
     In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
       Out of the whinnying green stable
         On to the fields of praise.

     And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
     Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
       In the sun born over and over,
         I ran my heedless ways,
       My wishes raced through the house high hay
     And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
     In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
       Before the children green and golden
         Follow him out of grace.

     Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
     Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
       In the moon that is always rising,
         Nor that riding to sleep
       I should hear him fly with the high fields
     And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
     Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
         Time held me green and dying
       Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

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Poem in October

Posted in Poetry with tags , on October 2, 2009 by telescoper

 

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood   
      And the mussel pooled and the heron
                  Priested shore
            The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall   
            Myself to set foot
                  That second
      In the still sleeping town and set forth.

 

      My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name   
      Above the farms and the white horses
                  And I rose   
            In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
            Over the border
                  And the gates
      Of the town closed as the town awoke.

 

      A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling   
      Blackbirds and the sun of October
                  Summery
            On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly   
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened   
            To the rain wringing
                  Wind blow cold
      In the wood faraway under me.

 

      Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail   
      With its horns through mist and the castle   
                  Brown as owls
            But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales   
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.   
            There could I marvel
                  My birthday
      Away but the weather turned around.

 

      It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky   
      Streamed again a wonder of summer
                  With apples
            Pears and red currants
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 fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.   
      These were the woods the river and sea
                  Where a boy
            In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy   
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
            And the mystery
                  Sang alive
      Still in the water and singingbirds.

 

      And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true   
      Joy of the long dead child sang burning
                  In the sun.
            It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon   
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.   
            O may my heart’s truth
                  Still be sung
      On this high hill in a year’s turning.
 
 
(by Dylan Thomas).

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Along the bent and Devon-facing seashore

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on August 14, 2009 by telescoper

I’ve been off for a few days because my folks have been visiting from Newcastle. The good weather (on Tuesday, at least) gave us the opportunity to go for a drive around the Gower peninsula to the west of Swansea, seeing  some of the sights. I don’t think I’m very good at travelogues, but here are a few memories of the trip.

Along the north coast first: Penclawdd, Crofty and Llanrhidian. Weobley Castle stands decaying and forlorn, overlooking a salt marsh grazed by sheep and horses. In the distance, over the estuary, a nondescript town. Through binoculars I see they’re building a new Asda. What was there 700 years ago when they built the Castle?

Rossili Bay, at the western end of the peninsula. Beaches and dunes under cliffs. Caravans as far as the eye can see. Impatient surfers waiting in wet-suits for the tide to come in. Don’t they check the tide tables? The smell of Fish and Chips fails to lure us.

We drive south. White cottages shining bright in the sunshine, then down steep hills into cool dark tunnels formed by trees either side of the narrow roads, their leaves meeting overhead. I wonder what it’s like down here when it’s raining: the road must turn into a torrent. Then up on top again. Bright sunshine, a small airport and more caravans.

Driving south we come again to the jagged coast and see  Devon  along the horizon in front of us. I’m surprised it is so clear, as it must be at least 30 miles away. It’s dark and solid, a featureless granite wall. It reminds me of Dylan Thomas Reminiscences of Childhood ..

There was another world where with my friends I used to dawdle on half holidays along the bent and Devon-facing seashore…

I had always thought he just knew that Devon was there, not that he had actually seen it. I decide I like the word “dawdle”.

Port Eynon, at the southernmost tip of the Gower. A small beach between two headlands with a larger beach to one side. Fish and Chips and hot tea offer themselves. This time we accept. Inside the café (“The Captain’s Table”) an old newspaper in a frame on the wall tells stories of smuggling and wreck sales. Another, dated 1916, says that three lifeboat men had drowned while trying to rescue a ship that had foundered off the headland where the derelict oyster pans lie.

The sand dunes behind the beach are covered in wild flowers and they are covered in turn with vividly coloured beetles and butterflies. The tide is still out and it’s too far to walk over the rocks to get to the sea to have a paddle.  It’s not difficult to imagine a boat coming to grief in this place. There are flags all over warning about the dangers of the current. It must be a desolate place in the winter.

I think about retirement.

We pass a church with a memorial to the brave men who lost their lives that day in 1916. The lifeboat station was moved in 1919 because the place was too dangerous. Stopping to read the inscription, I’m almost run over on the narrow road by a big van carrying surfers and their gear. I wonder why they’re in such a hurry when the tide is out.

We try to avoid getting snarled up in traffic in Swansea on the way home. We fail.

As an afterthought, we head for The Mumbles, park the car and walk. Ambling along the curved promenade in the evening sunshine, a large and lumpy lady waddles towards us with sweat running down  pale pink arms;  her voluminous black dress conceals a hefty bosom that makes me think of two sacks of Tyne coal. It turns out The Mumbles is named after the French Mamelles – meaning breasts – although it takes its name from the shape of two small islands off Mumbles Head rather than from some distant ancestor of the lady I’ve just seen.

The long promenade sweeps along the side of Swansea bay to the pier and a lighthouse. The tide is still out. It seems miles to the sea, over nasty rocks that look like cinder. No beach. On the esplanade dozens of boats lie stranded, like befuddled whales that have run aground to their doom.

Dogs carry sticks and people carry ice-creams.

It’s evening now and I wonder why the tide seems to have been out everywhere we’ve been since morning.

On the inland side of the Mumbles there is a hotch-potch of closed-down pubs  and up-market bistros, next door to one another, an amusement hall and, next to it, tennis courts. The inevitable Fish and Chips. Nearer the pier  there’s an open-air Café called Verdi’s. It’s packed and doing a roaring trade in ice-creams. The waiters are very handsome but I’m not convinced they are Italian. A man sings “Just one Cornetto” and laughs loudly, but nobody else does.

Back to the car, through the centre of Swansea, and then home in less than an hour. Pimms and Lemonade in the garden before going to the pub for dinner.

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Starless and Bible Black

Posted in Jazz, Literature, Poetry with tags , , , , , on March 7, 2009 by telescoper

A few weeks ago in my bit about the great jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk, I mentioned another great musician, Stan Tracey. He was Ronnie Scott’s house pianist for many years, as well as being a composer and leader of his own band. It’s only the fact that he stayed all his life in England that prevented him from gaining wider recognition. No less a musician than Sonny Rollins asked (of British Jazz fans)

Does anyone here realise how good he is?

Well, I think they do but he remains relatively unknown outside these shores.

Amongst the collection of old LPs that I am gradually making into CDs using the USB turntable I got for Christmas is one of the greatest British jazz albums, Under Milk Wood, which was written by Stan Tracey and recorded by his band in 1965.

Living in Wales, I’m somewhat ashamed that I didn’t do this one before because it is of course inspired by the “play for voices” with the same name by Dylan Thomas. The music is brilliant throughout, vividly evoking the atmosphere of various episodes in the play, but my favourite track is about the very first lines. Stan Tracey’s piano and Bobby Wellins‘ saxophone hauntingly evoke the atmosphere of the opening of Under Milk Wood which, if you’ll forgive me for quoting a rather lengthy extract, shows Dylan Thomas extraordinarily imaginative use of language, superb control of rhythm even in a prose setting. His poems are wonderful to listen to as well as to read, especially when read by the poet himself with his sonorous yet lilting voice; if you want a short example try this example, steeped in a sense of nocturnal melancholy

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Anyway, the play Under Milk Wood‘s famous opening goes along these lines:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter’s-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’
weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yard; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.

Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.

And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Here are Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins with Stan Tracey’s meditation on that piece, Starless and Bible Black, played in a way that’s as moving and ethereal as the sound of time passing….

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