Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme
As poets do.
That verse was written by Edward Thomas, one of three poets last-named Thomas, not related to each other, not even associated culturally or politically, but admired as Welsh poets of the highest order. Please welcome Edward Thomas, R.S. (Ronald Stuart) Thomas and Dylan Thomas.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917), though born in England (an “accidentally Cockney nativity”) was of Welsh parentage and ancestry. He was for a number of years a writer of reviews and books about the English countryside only turning to poetry at age 36. Over the years he became hugely popular in part, especially in America, for a poem he didn’t write. It was composed for him and about him by his closest friend, Robert Frost. You’ll recognize these words:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost, who was living in England for a time, had convinced Edward that the prose he had been writing was actually poetry in cadence and word choices. And they shared such personal camaraderie that they considered taking their families and relocating to side-by-side dwellings in New Hampshire (the American Hampshire).
Frost said, “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had . . . I hadn’t a plan for the future that didn’t include him.” Here is Edward’s remembrance of their times together.
The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted
Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields. The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes
Could as well imagine the Crusades
Or Caesar’s battles. Everything
To faintness like those rumours fades—
Like the brook’s water glittering
Under the moonlight—like those walks
Now—like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silence—like memory’s sand
When the tide covers it late or soon,
And other men through other flowers
In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours.
When the war came in 1914, Frost’s poem about the road not taken had an unintended effect. Frost had written it about Edward, chiding him lightly for never making up his mind. Thomas took it as a serious rebuke, and in the process of deciding to enlist or not, decided to show his strength of will and joined the Army. Robert Frost said, “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had.” An artillery shell at the Battle of Arras took him away on Easter Monday 1917.
This predictive quatrain written by Thomas could serve as his own epitaph:
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
* * *
R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), the R.S. standing for Ronald Stuart, which he rarely used, was less well-known than his name-mates, but he was respected as both a clergyman and a poet. He wrote prose in Welsh, poetry in English. In 1996 he came within a Welsh whisker of winning the Nobel Prize.
Born in Cardiff, he wrote often of the Welsh countryside, of farming life and villages, not described for their pastoral quaintness, but as a backdrop for his honest descriptions of the hardships of rural existence. A fictional farmer named Prytherch appears in several of his poems, and the life-affirming finish to the following piece is typical. (New to me, a non-farmer, “mangels” are large coarse beets used as fodder.)
Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind —
So are his days spent, his spittled mirth
Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks
Of the gaunt sky perhaps once in a week.
And then at night see him fixed in his chair
Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.
There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.
His clothes, sour with years of sweat
And animal contact, shock the refined,
But affected, sense with their stark naturalness.
Yet this is your prototype, who, season by season
Against siege of rain and the wind’s attrition,
Preserves his stock, an impregnable fortress
Not to be stormed even in death’s confusion.
Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.
As our Washington Post noted: R.S. Thomas “made remarkable poetry out of the flinty and unforgiving hill country of Wales.” He deserves further reading.
* * *
On October 27, 1914 was born that most gifted of Welsh poets, Dylan Thomas. (Note: Exactly eighteen years later, that October 27 date would introduce the world to a gifted American poet, Sylvia Plath.)
The youthful Dylan was an indifferent student, but early on he was writing poetry of a quality beyond his years. He composed “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” while still a teenager. His subsequent growth as a writer of lyrical and imaginative verse was matched by his invention of a charming but irresponsible public persona.
With one breath he could say (and did) “Poetry is not the most important thing in life . . . I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.” Then in the next breath he could write this exquisite piece:
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Please note how brilliantly but effortlessly he places rages, stages, wages, pages and ages.
And consider these words welcoming readers to his Collected Works.
We will ride out alone then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they’ll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Hulloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer’s end
And the flood flowers now.
SIDEBAR. Some poets have become as well known for their vices as their verses, or at least for some level of public outrageousness. Lord Byron surely heads this list, but Dylan Thomas makes the final cut. Byron was said to be “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Dylan was considered to be “roistering, drunken and doomed,” and he was perfectly happy to endorse this description. When in New York, his regular evening haunt in Greenwich Village was the White Horse Tavern, and one night in November 1953 he claimed to have had eighteen whiskies there, a typical exaggeration, but drunkenness plus pneumonia put him in a coma. Several days later he died at St. Vincent’s Hospital, the same hospital that had once loaned its name to Edna St. Vincent Millay.
In sum, I think of Dylan as a Welsh bard with an ear for words that sing and a gift for spectacular wordplay. For him, sound was as important as sense, which explains why actors of substance love to give live performances of his poetry. His own readings were sell-outs, and in America he became rock-star famous, if sometimes for the wrong reasons. But his private life takes nothing away from his genius.
* * *
And now to our Video.
Whenever polls are taken in the UK about favorite poems, a brief piece by Edward Thomas always scores highly. It has an unusual name, “Adlestrop,” and a quaint back story. Thomas was taking a railway trip when his express train unexpectedly stopped at a small local station called Adlestrop. No explanation was given, but later Edward Thomas looked back and wrote this.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
In our video, see the abandoned station sign and hear the birds.
* * *
Our second video poem is by Dylan Thomas, and it has great resonance for me. In the winter of 1954 I was living in London, trying to make a mark as a composer (though just as often joining my chums for some decomposing.) Culturally, it was a period of Shakespearean glory days at the Old Vic theatre where as often as I could afford, I watched performances by such extraordinary actors as John Neville, Fay Compton, Laurence Hardy, Claire Bloom and, as Hamlet and Coriolanus, Richard Burton. On one Sunday evening, January 24th, when the theatre was dark, Burton assembled an all-Welsh cast and presented a one-time-only tribute performance of Dylan’s “Under Milkwood,” and I was fortunate enough to be there. I’d like to share with you the experience of hearing Burton deliver the marvelous opening lines of the piece, the description of the seaside town of Llareggub falling asleep. (And by the bye, Dylan Thomas would want you to read Llareggub backwards,)
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: THREE POETS NAMED THOMAS
