Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomaswas a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; the 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City. By...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 October 1914
CitySwansea, Wales
Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.
Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.
I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave.
It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.
I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.
Oh, I'm a martyr to music.
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.
the closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults....
Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.