Dylan Thomas Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

To begin at a beginning, in the tricksterish address that Dylan Thomas made to his “readers, the strangers[,]” in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1952 edition of the Collected Poems, he wrote, “I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked... more

To begin at a beginning, in the tricksterish address that Dylan Thomas made to his “readers, the strangers[,]” in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1952 edition of the Collected Poems, he wrote, “I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from inside tiny fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flock, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.” It could be argued that this parabolic anecdote, written late in Thomas’s short, tragic, career suggests a distorted and distorting vision of his Collected Poems. In its invocation of the emblematic figure of the pastoral tradition; its conjuring of an incantatory, twilit rurality; and its apparent apology for the unrefined, rustic quality of its imperfect paeans of love and praise to humanity and a personal creator, it seems to present to the “strangers” an oeuvre that appears to have more in common with the late-Romanticism of the Celtic Twilight than with a late modernism of the 1940s and the early 1950s. Insofar as the generative site for the lexis of the more expansive and lyrical poems that Thomas wrote from 1944 onwards is the natural world, rather than the world of the body, it is perhaps understandable that these late “statements made on the way to the grave[‘]” as Thomas described them, might be regarded as a retreat from the densely textured and obscure modernist expression of the 1930s’ poems into the clarity of a mature, late- or neo-Romantic lyricism that is rooted in the landscape of rural Carmarthenshire. Rather than interpreting this lyrical turn towards the natural world as a rejection of modernism as a formal means of negotiating the sublime, terrifying and traumatic reality of modernity, in favour of a realist, confessional poetry of place that proffers the consolation of a pantheistic mode of vision, this paper explores how the poems that Thomas composed in the midst and in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ‘Fern Hill’ in particular, actually demonstrate a modernist appropriation, enactment and performance of a pastoralism that is as perfectly and tragically forlorn as it is textually unstable and incomplete.