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Dylan Thomas, To Be Encompassed by the Brilliant Earth

08 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Dylan Thomas, Uncategorized

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Death, Dylan Thomas, Literature, Lust, poem, Poetry, Spider, To be encompassed by the brilliant earth

To be encompassed by the brilliant earth

Breathing on all sides pungently

Into her vegetation’s lapping mouths

Must feel like such encroachment

As edges off your nerves to mine,

The hemming contact that’s so trammelled

By love or look,

In death or out of death,

Glancing from the yellow nut,

Eyeing from the wax’s tower,

Or, white as milk, out of the seeping dark,

The drooping as you close me in

A world of webs

I touch and break,

I touch and break.             

This is a horrifying poem in many ways. Although written from a profoundly pagan point of view (that life is a sort of force which of its own runs through all living things and our life is ultimately impersonal and not our own), the moral of the poem is as critical of lust as the most passionate turn or burn preacher. 

The poem begins with a phrase which may be an imagining which may be a wish or a fear. 

To be encompassed by the brilliant earth.

I hope to be, I fear to be, I may be; I am fascinated by, or I am in terror of, this encompassing.  The use of the verb “encompassed” provides the ambiguity. For instance, if we change the verb to “buried” or “crushed,” we could easily see the negative. If we read “blanketed” of “cradled,” we could see this as a good. But encompassed denotes a state without providing a connotation to relieve the ambiguity.

Moreover, there is an ambiguity as to whether the poet considers his own, another’s, or the abstracted idea, of the state of encompassing. 

The phrase the brilliant earth is one of the paradoxical turns one finds in Dylan. The earth by nature is not “brilliant”: it does exhibit light. There are a few ways we could take this phrase.

The easiest way to “understand” the phrase would be to reject it as nonsense. If we were to find this phrase in a textbook on dirt we would have to think of the phrase as somehow in error. 

However, since we are reading a work of creative literature, and a poem by Dylan Thomas in particular, we charitably consider this as a deliberately paradoxical phrase; perhaps along the lines of a Zen koan. If this phrase is not to be taken as a deliberate contradiction nor a “literal” description of glowing dirt, what could Dylan’s point be?

It might be there is a sort of “brilliance” in the earth which is not immediately the subject of apprehension. It might be a metaphorical brilliance: The earth is living or active in some sense and exudes something which could be described as “brilliant”. It might be a reference to the effect upon the poet: somehow the earth has made in me the sensation that the earth is brilliant.

We could also conclude that “earth” has reference which is not precisely inert dirt in the field. What this reference could be is unclear at this point. 

Of course, the metaphorical use could entail both elements. 

And thus at the end of the first line, we are in a state of necessary ambivalence. 

The line scans as follows:

to BE encompassed [pause] by the BRILLiant EARTH

The two halves of the line are held together by the alliteration of “B” on either side of the pause: Be Brilliant

The second line

Breathing on all sides pungently

This line connects to the prior line as follows:

The “B” of “Breathing. This point is emphasized by the accent on the first syllable. 

The entire line also functions as an appositive to the “brilliant earth”: The “brilliant earth [is] breathing.”

The description of the earth “breathing” complicates the problem of the first line in describing earth. So we now know the earth is “brilliant” and “breathes”. How this could be so is not yet clear. But by the addition of “breathing” tells us that somehow the earth is alive. The brilliance is just glowing dirt: this living entity.

The prepositional phrase, “on all sides” complements “encompassing”. This does not answer who is encompassed by the earth (the poet or another).

Someone is now on all sides experiencing a living, breathing earth. Moreover, this experience is intimate: the earth is close enough, one can experience this “pungent” breathing.

Into her vegetation’s lapping mouths

Where does the vegetation have a mouth? Does the earth breathe into the roots or the leaves? 

This also changes the tenor of the adverb “pungently”. Rather than emphasizing the earth’s bad breath, it seems to emphasize the pointedness of the earth’s action. 

The vegetation is pictured as an animal lapping at the water: but here, rather than water it is the breathing earth.

At this point, the poem takes a dramatic turn:

Must feel like such encroachment

As edges off your nerves to mine,

The relationship between the mouths and the breathing earth is pictured as an “encroachment”: it is a forcible entrance, or a least an unwelcomed entrance. 

At this point, the metaphorical language of a brilliant, breathing earth becomes another step removed from experience: the earth and the plants mouths are not “your nerves to mine”. 

The first clause, “as edges off” modifies the “encroachment”. 

We have now moved from actual plants and earth to the poet and someone else. Precisely what is taking place here is not exactly clear, but the relationship between this poet and, we can presume at this point, a lover is extraordinarily intimate. 

This also raises a theme which runs through other poems by Thomas such as 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 

Drives my green age

This concept of there being a continuous correlation between the life of plants and nature and his own life. Because of this theme, it is perhaps wrong to understand the current poem (To be encompassed ….) is not using the language of earth and plants as merely a conceit: a metaphor to dress-up the relationship between the poet and lover, but rather to express something which Thomas contends is inherent in the relationship.

He is pointing out something which is intimate, but also (he sees) as impersonal. Walt Whitman makes a similar argument in Song of Myself:

Urge and urge and urge, 

Always the procreant urge of the world.

It is as if Thomas is speaking to her and removing the personal him and her from the equation and contending for a deeply impersonal intimacy. He even describes this intimacy as something which “love” or “look” (there knowledge and notice of one-another) as trammeling upon the intimacy:

The hemming contact that’s so trammelled

By love or look,

The contact is not profound, rather it is “hemmed.”  The intimacy of the two is the intimacy of plants in the soil. It is not even animalistic, but rather vegetable. It does not sound passionate or even desirable: breath is pungent, the intimacy an encroachment. The brilliant earth thus comes back not as a joyous brilliance but rather a description of energy: as if life were a thing like gravity which just acted without personality.

The trammeling is further explicated in these lines:

In death or out of death,

Glancing from the yellow nut,

Eyeing from the wax’s tower,

Or, white as milk, out of the seeping dark,

The exact references of these lines are unclear to me. The first line “In death or out of death” make sense, because this force is not something confined to persons, but a force which courses through nature with or without Thomas’s existence. 

I can’t make out the “yellow nut,” unless it is some reference to birth in the way that a wax tower which would melt with heat is a reference to death. That life-death-life movement would make sense of nut and wax, and then white seeping from dark: a force of life which moves through opposites and moves through people without any person being their own life.

USA, TX, Bandera Co.: Bandera Hill Country State Natural Area 9-iv-2016

The poem ends with this horrifying lines:

The drooping as you close me in

A world of webs

I touch and break,

I touch and break.

The lover’s closeness is “drooping” she closes in on him in a manner which he describes as “a world of webs”. This intimacy is no loving relationship, rather it is a black widow coming into the kill the male with whom she mates. This moment of procreation will he is death:

“I touch and break.” 

To touch her is to be destroyed. 

This moment of dispassionate lust, a lust which is independent of either the poet or the woman, results in profound disillusionment. It something forced upon them both, something which love or true intimacy can only ‘trammel’ upon. They are forced into this “encroachment” which overwhelms them. In the end, she comes to him as a spider who destroys him as soon as she touches him. 

Thomas decidedly does not call this lust “sin”: sin would be too volitional an understanding. But the result of this lust is certainly death. 

This then leads us back to the first line of the poem: On the first run through, one lover encompassing the other is the “brilliant earth”. The brilliant earth is the human being made of earth and animated by the “green force”. But here at the end, we return to the earth and now it is a tomb: he has been buried. The procreative act is also the entombing action. Life runs through the human, running the puppet from life to death to life and so on.

So I hated life

Because what is done under the sun is grievous to me

For all is vanity

And a striving after wind.

Eccl. 2:17

Some Notes on Written for a Personal Epitath, by Dylan Thomas

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Dylan Thomas, Literature, Uncategorized

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Dylan Thomas, poem, Poetry

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In his poem, Written for a Personal Epitath, Dylan Thomas begins his epitaph with the observation that he is “feeding the worm”. This is a commonplace, going back at least to Hamlet

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A
certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at
him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We
fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves
for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is
but variable service—two dishes but to one table.
That’s the end. (4.3.19-28)

Thomas avoids the obvious cliche but makes the point. He then turns to a question, “Who I blame”: blame for the fact of his death. He repeats the question in line 6, “Who do I blame?” He does state he has been “laid down/At last by time”. Again an allusion to Shakespeare: in Sonnet 19 he refers to “Devouring time”. In Sonnet 16, time is “bloody time”.

It is interesting how Thomas describes the place of death, “under the earth with girl and thief”: sex and violence.

So whom does Thomas blame?

 Mother I blame
     Whose loving crime
     Molded my form
     Within her womb,
Who gave me life and then the grave,
     Mother I blame.

Her love and effort gave birth to death:

     Here is her labour’s end,
     Dead limb and mind,
     All love and sweat
     Gone now to rot.

There is a very physical aspect to his creation, “love and sweat”. There was work and desire which brought forth the poet: and to what end? “Dead limb and mind.”

“Labour” is a useful pun: both effort and the time of giving birth.

One thing to note about these lines is the scansion: HERE is HER LABour’s END/DEAD LIMB and MIND/ALL LOVE and SWEAT/GONE NOW to ROT

The accumulation of accented syllables makes the going very slow, and with the subject matter, very solemn.

The poem then ends with an unrhymed couplet, which drags the reader into his despair:

I am man’s reply to every question,
His aim and destination.

This blank despair makes sense of Thomas’ famous poem, Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night. Death is a blank, pointless end. There is nothing beyond current existence. There is no basis for hope.  It is an interesting position, because Thomas also seems life as a power which works through all living things. Yet there is no merger of “life” with in his thought, as there often is in this often pagan pantheism. There is no god, thus, there is no perpetuation. There is a chemical process, called “life” which we have — and which we cling to (for some reason), but there is no point.

Some Notes on “Prologue” by Dylan Thomas

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Dylan Thomas, Literature

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Dylan Thomas, poem, Poetry, Prologue

Dylan Thomas’ “Prologue” is Thomas at his best. A recording of the poet reciting the poem can be found here:

He has a magic way of writing that very few even try to approximate. Consider these first lines:

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer’s end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood’s dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,

Consider how he creates these effects.

First, he simply avoids adjectives. He describes things, but he avoids limp adjectives. Many (poor) writers attempt to make their writing powerful by piling up emphatic adjectives — but that is like putting a repainting job an old car to make it drive faster. Use adjectives only when nothing else will do — and then only use the necessary adjectives.

(The same applies to unnecessary adverbs. Writing the word “clearly” at the beginning of a sentence makes nothing which follows “clear”. If the sentence is not clear, the adverb will not make the thought penetrable. If the sentence is clear, calling it “clear” is silly.)

Rather than rely primarily upon adjectives or adverbs, Thomas uses verbs. It is not merely “summer’s end” but it is “God speeded”. The summer is not coming to end an, God is forcing it forward.   The house is “sea shaken”, the rocks “breakneck” — you can feel the slippery slime and cold water beneath your feet as you work your way among the rocks.

Second, he cares for the sounds, “froth, flute, fin …” “scummed starfish sands”. The density of the alliteration & assonance require one to read slowly — provided one reads out loud (which one always should with Thomas).

Third, he draws images together in uncommon and arresting ways, “torrent salmon” — that makes some sense – but he adds a final, “sun”, “torrent salmon sun”. What is a “salmon sun”? Is it the color of the sun, the fish coming up the river in a torrent?

Consider these words

Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,

The geese are set to leave this world — but the human boys are stabbing — just like the herons; and the shells speak.

Fourth, the rhythm is insistent, coupled with short lines (six syllables) forces the sight forward. Yet this contrasts with the fact that nothing happens: he is merely looking out the window for his “sea shaken house” upon the “sunset nets” and “geese nearly in heaven”.

The first action which takes place is his singing

At poor peace I sing
To you strangers

Indeed, the poem is merely the poet singing on the shore. In drawing out this image, Thomas harkens back to the priest of Apollos wandering by the sea

The old man was terrified. He obeyed the order/turning, trailing away silence down the shore/where the roaring battle lines of breakers crash and drag. And moving off to a safe distance, over and over/the old priest prayed to the son of sleek-haired Leto,/lord Apollo, “Hear me Apollo …” (Fagels, which is the best English translation by far; you have not read the Iliad until you have read Fagels.)

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