All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay2 declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction.'
It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,3
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran4 when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.5
It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags? whe n our hands are idle. cigarettes
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot? with a pot of pink geraniums. cottage It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
1. Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), famous the-social evening spent singing and storytelling. osophist whose ideas were popular in some quar-4. A measure of fresh herrings, about 750 fish. ters in 1930s Britain. The poem is set in The Scottish herring industry failed in the 1930s; Depression-era Scotland, before World War II. the Herring Board (line 25) was a government 2. New Year's Eve (Scots). attempt to provide direction. 3. A Scottish Gaelic word pronounced kaley for a 5. I.e., 'went on the county' (on relief)
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244 4 / DYLAN THOMAS
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Wor k your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. Th e glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
1937
Star-Gazer
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night And the westward train was empty and had no corridors So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks Ho w very far off they were, it seemed their light Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.
io And this remembering now I mark that what Light was leaving some of them at least then, Forty-two years ago, will never arrive In time for me to catch it, which light when It does get here may find that there is not
is Anyone left alive To run from side to side in a late night train Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.
Jan. 1963 1963
DYLAN THOMAS 1914-1953
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, and educated at Swansea Grammar School. After working for a time as a newspaper reporter, he was 'discovered' as a poet in 1933 through a poetry contest in a popular newspaper. The following year his Eighteen Poems caused considerable excitement because of their powerfully suggestive obscurity and the strange violence of their imagery. It looked as though a new kind of visionary Romanticism had been restored to English poetry after the deliberately muted ironic tones of T. S. Eliot and his followers. Over time it became clear that Thomas was also a master of poetic craft, not merely a shouting rhapsodist. His verbal panache played against strict verse forms, such as the villanelle ('Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night'). 'I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words,' he wrote in his 'Poetic Manifesto.' His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw the workings of biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and again and again in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate
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THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE / 2445
this unity ('The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age'). He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Hence each image engenders its opposite in what he called 'my dialectical method': 'Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction.' Thomas derives his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud. In his poems of reminiscence and autobiographical emotion, such as 'Poem in October,' he communicates more immediately through compelling use of lyrical feeling and simple natural images. His autobiographical work Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and his radio play Under Milk Wood (1954) reveal a vividness of observation and a combination of violence and tenderness in expression that show he could handle prose as excitingly as verse.
Thomas was a brilliant talker, an alcoholic, a reckless and impulsive man whose short life was packed with emotional ups and downs. His poetry readings in the United States between 1950 and 1953 were enormous successes, in spite of his sometimes reckless antics. He died suddenly in New York of what was diagnosed as 'an insult to the brain,' precipitated by alcohol. He played the part of the wild bohemian poet, and while some thought this behavior wonderful, others deplored it. He was a stirring reader of his own and others' poems, and many people
