The Developing Dylan Thomas

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 4

The Developing Dylan Thomas

dteelewett bv r.A.1.) Poet In The Making. The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas. Edited by Ralph Maud. Dent 364 pp. This book contains the text of four manuscript exercise books into which Dylan Thomas copied his poems as he completed them between 1930 and 1934, when he was between 15 and 19 years old. The earliest notebook was started while Thomas was still a schoolboy; the latest was completed a few months before the momentous appearance of his first book,

“Eighteen Poems" (1934). Always desperately short of money, Thomas sold the notebooks to a dealer in 1941, by which time his reputation was sufficient to raise money on. In this book the notebooks are presented with the full scholarly apparatus of introduction, notes and appendices by Ralph Maud, a leading expert on Thomas’s work. Thomas’s notebooks are of enormous interest and importance and can be recommended strongly to the general reader; to the student of the poet the book will be indispensable. As the title implies, the notebooks are a detailed record of Thomas’s poetic production* during the most crucial years of Ms development The first notebook is the work of a brilliantly-gift-ed schoolboy but without as yet particular distinction; by tie last two notebooks the fully mature style of one of

the century’s most original writers has emerged. The earliest poems are in some ways most remarkaMe in how little they resemble the mature style, though the technical skill and imitative facility hold promise of a major talent Typical of the free lucid style of the early poems is this passage from a poem dated June, 1930: Mv love It deep night Caught from the top* of tower*. A pomp of dellciout light Snared under the tip of each etalk. Dew balanced to perfection On the grata delicate beyond water.

Rapid advancement is apparent in the poems of the second notebook (193032) towards Thomas’s characteristic mannerisms and preoccupations, but it is in the third and fourth notebooks, which record the efforts of just over a single extraordinary year, 1933-34, during which Thomas turned 19, that the most spectacular development occurs. Rapidly the fluent free verse disappears as he develops intensively towards the tighter structures and the densely metaphorical style of his mature poems. One of the earliest pieces in which the authentic Thomas note is sounded is “And Death Shall Have no Dominion” dated April, 1934: And death (hall bar* no dominion. Man, with ioul naked, shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon, With the harmoniou* thunder of the sun; When his bones are picked clean and the elean bones gone. Be shall have tiara at elbow and foot; Though he fall mad he shall be sane. And though he drown he shall rise up again; Though lover* be lost, love shall not: And death shall have no dominion. During the months which followed, Thomas’s style underwent more dramatic and

intensive development than many poets achieve In a lifetime. Certainly in the 20 years of life that remained to him, Thomas never again went through a period of such prodigious creativity. Thomas drew heavily on the notebooks of this year, not only for his first collection but also for Ms two subsequent collections in 1936 and 1939. In fact, as late as 1941, be published a revised version of one ef the notebook poems. In all, over 40 poems from the notebooks eventually found their way into Thomas’s collections. When it is considered that Thomas’s “Collected Poems” contain less than a hundred poems the full significance of this “annus mirabilis” becomes apparent. Not since Keats’s marvellous year, 1819, had an English poet achieved so much in such short time. A popular belief about Dylan Thomas's development is that his most formidably difficult and obscure poems were his earliest (the contorted offspring of adolescence as It were) and that the direction of his development was towards greater clarity and simplicity. The notebooks reveal that during the most important period of his development, he changed in precisely the opposite direction; the notebook poems became progressively more complex and dense.

This misconception has been encouraged by the peculiarities of Thomas's habits of publication. For in the collections of the thirties as well as publishing his newest poems he also ineluded revisions of eld notebook poems, which in every successive collection were taken from earlier and earlier in tiie notebooks and were thus increasingly different from Ms maturing style. This is the explanation for

the radical discontinuity of style in the collections of this period. The poems in “The Map of Love” (1939), for instance. were written during two distinct periods separated by about five years. A study of the notebooks enable the reader to sort out a more rational order of composition than the “Collected Poems.” The position is of course complicated by revision which generally speaking was more radical the longer a poem was left unpublished. Some of the revision* make fascinating study in themselves, especially those poems which have been substantially altered, for example, “The Hunchback In The Park” and “After The Funeral.” Even minor alterations can be revealing, as when a cancelled version of the first stanza of “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” makes explicit the poet’s debt to Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” a a debt which on tiie evidence of the published version could only have been conjectured. The fragments of Dylan Thomas’s writings published since his death, radio and film scripts and so on, have been largely disappointing to readers primarily interested in Thomas as a poet These notebooks, however, are an exciting addition to Thomas’s works and afford more insights into Ms “craft and sullen art” than a shelf of critical studies.

A. H. and A W. Reed have published a seventh edition of the New Zealand Garden Dictionary, by J. W. and Barbara Mathews. The book is for the average gardener who wants a quick reference to the plants he intends to grow, or whose well being he wants to preserve. The new edition has been extensively revised, and la very well illustrated.