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Dylan Thomas and The “Biblical Rhythm”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William T. Moynihan
William T. Moynihan*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, Storrs
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Extract

Despite its appearance as a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, Dylan Thomas' poetry is a closely unified body of work. Poetic unity customarily reveals itself in cohesive imagery (what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic equations”), and in the repetition and development of related themes. Thomas' Collected Poems possesses such imagistic and thematic coherence, and these images and themes, furthermore, have as their subsuming source the Bible.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 631 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 For a general discussion of the Bible in Thomas' prose and poetry see Clara Lander, “With Welsh and Reverent Rook: The Biblical Element in Dylan Thomas,” Queen's Quart., lxv (Autumn 1958), 437–447.

2 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J., 1957), pp. 205, 315–326.

3 Anatomy, p. 324. Numerous articles and seven book-length studies have given little attention to the unity of the poetry. Elder Olson's The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (Chicago, 1954) is standard. While recognizing that the poetry moves through successive concerns, from the “worm beneath my nail” to the objective world and finally to an “exultant expression of faith and love,” Olson does not fully develop such insights. He points out numerous connections between images, but he is reluctant to pursue these connections to their symbolic and, as I shall try to show, mythic implications. “There is always a danger,” Olson says, “when a poet's work exhibits some kind of rounding-out and development, that we may tend to treat his poems merely as parts of one long poem. I should like to avoid that danger” (p. 20). Collected Poems is obviously not “one long poem,” but Thomas himself admitted in his famous letter to Henry Treece—Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog Among the Fairies‘ (London, 1956), p. 37—“that each of my earlier poems might appear to constitute a section from one long poem; that is because I was not successful in making a momentary peace with my images ...; images were left dangling over the formal limits, and dragged the poem into another.” The images continued to “dangle over the formal limits” throughout his poetry.

William York Tindall, in A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas (New York, 1962), says, “Thomas developed in theme and method from the dark early poems ... to the sunny poems of childhood and Laugharne, but conclusions about development must be cautious; for he took one step backward for every step forward—and one step sideways” (p. 20). Though Tindall sometimes implies an imagistic unity in Collected Poems his main purpose is to explicate each of Thomas' poems, and his results in this respect are certainly the most successful to date.

4 Ralph Maud, in “Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems: Chronology of Composition,” PMLA, lxxvi (June 1961), 292–297, cautions against conclusions based on the sequence of Collected Poems. However, as Maud would seem to agree (see his fn. 3, p. 292), general statements about the sequence may still be valid. Furthermore, where there is a lapse of years between the first draft and its publication, the published version is seldom the “same” poem. Generally speaking, 18 Poems develops images and themes of creation, Twenty-Five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939) develop notions of the fallen world. Deaths and Entrances (1946) and In Country Sleep (1952) provide the fullest development of the regeneration concept. But the recognition of a successive rhythmic movement is not contingent upon any precise consideration of chronology.

5 All page references to Thomas' poems refer to Collected Poems (New York, 1953, 1957).

6 To name three concurrent levels of interpretation is not to exclude other innumerable lines of suggestiveness. But it would be both confusing and unrewarding to explore all possible reverberations of meaning in this study. I have, wherever possible, tried to indicate relationships between levels of meaning; at other times I have had to settle for what I consider the subsuming level of meaning.

7 “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York, 1957), p. 155. All Blake references are to this volume.

8 Reader's Guide, p. 8.

9 Quite Early One Morning (New York, 1954), pp. 178–179.

10 I am indebted to John Malcolm Brinnin for access to this manuscript which is in his possession.

11 Mnetha is a character that Thomas derived from his reading of Blake. S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston, 1924), p. 72, says: Mnetha is a “woman aged but strong ... protectress of arts.” See also Olson, p. 99. For a possible Blakean echo in the worm reference compare Blake's “Gate of Paradise” (Plate 16): “I have said to the Worm thou / Art my mother and my father.”

12 “Without contraries there is no progression,” says Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and goes on: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” Keynes, p. 149.

13 “The En-Soph creates by means of numbers and letters. The thirty-two ‘instruments of God’ are the ten primordial numbers to which all numbers can be reduced and the twenty-two fundamental letters of the Hebrew alphabet to which all words can be reduced.” John Senior, The Way Down and Out (Ithaca, N. Y., 1959), p. 25.

14 Senior says the pyramid “was a means of ascension. The word for ‘pyramid’ is derived from a set of hieroglyphics meaning 'place of ascension,' and the glyph for 'ascension' could represent a kind of pyramid. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the pyramid was an Egyptian ziggurat, a tower that stretched to heaven.” This idea casts light on Thomas' other pyramid imagery (“my proud pyramid,” p. 88), and also connects it to his tower and turret clusters.

15 Some idea of the antiquity and universality of the “wound” image may be gathered from Tertullian's reference to the wound of Christ which he calls a figure of the Church and also of mankind. Cited in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Meridian, N.Y., 1959), p. 30.

16 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, N. J., 1947), p. 380.

17 Though this interpretation may appear similar to Tindall's (Reader's Guide, pp. 126–143), it differs in many particulars and is much less Freudian in emphasis. It is interesting to note that Tindall himself says, “I used to think Thomas more of a Freudian than he was. ... But now I think Freud one of the lesser elements, useful for adding a dimension to the Bible” (pp. 9–10).

18 These lines may have a specific relationship to Thomas' own working methods. Vernon Watkins describes the manuscript of one of Thomas' stories, “The Orchards.” “The whole story was written in minute handwriting on the inside cover of a cardboard box. He told me that it helped him to see the whole story in one place as he wrote it, and pages were less good for this than box-covers.” Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins (London, 1957), p. 14.

19 Richard Condon, “Thomas' BALLAD OF THE LONG-LEGGED BAIT,” Expl., xvi (March 1958), 37.

20 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (Meridian, N.Y., 1955), p. 146.

21 S⊘ren Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York; Anchor, 1954), p. 170, refers to this in his discussion of possibility: “Fairy tales and legends so often relate that a knight suddenly perceived a rare bird, which he continues to run after, since at the beginning it seemed as if it were so very near—but then it flies off again, until at last night falls, and he has become separated from his companions.”

22 Quite Early One Morning, pp. 178–179.

23 Ibid., p. 179.

24 Ibid., p. 180.

25 Ibid., p. 177.

26 See n. 10.

27 One critic has suggested that the “white giant” is the locale of some Welsh legend and marks the spot from which a group of young women leaped to their deaths rather than be taken away from their husbands (Marlene Chambers, “Thomas' IN THE WHITE GIANT'S THIGH,” Expl., xix, March 1961, 39). However, Thomas himself said that he had “never seen the White Giant and had no idea of its location, if any,” but he understood that “barren girls” came to the Giant as a place of fertility and that there boys were waiting to oblige—without success (Reader's Guide, p. 293).