In My Craft Or Sullen Art (2)

How can a list of favourite poems not include one by Dylan Thomas? For many years I used to sell Dylan's poetry books, so I feel a close connection with this flawed angel of a man, this charismatic genius with feet of clay. Some, Kingsley Amis for example, have criticised Thomas's poems for being all sound and fury, for elevating rhetoric over meaning. I can't agree. Sure, one is not always in the mood for his intense romanticism and apocalyptic gravity, but, for me, life would be infinitely less rich without the existence of those two lyrical masterpieces, Fern Hill and Poem in October.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

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.

DYLAN THOMAS

Sky Blue Trades And Heedless Ways

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

DYLAN THOMAS

This is the best evocation of a country childhood that I know.

The Dying Of The Light

And you, my father, there on the sad height,/Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears... DYLAN THOMAS Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

In August 1987 my 29 year old sister died of a cerebral haemorrhage caused by a tumour on the brain. My mother died in November 2004, aged 82, after suffering from progressive Alzheimer's disease for 5 years.

3 days ago my father died. He was 90 years old. He was admitted to hospital just before Christmas with gastroenteritis. He never returned home again. Gradually he became thinner and weaker. He slept more and more, and, when awake, often rambled and was confused. He became seriously dehydrated. Finally he died of acute renal failure. Towards the end he said several things to me which showed me that he knew he was dying and that he wanted to die. At one point my voice seemed to cut through to him, to the distant mental place he was inhabiting, and he came to, opened his eyes wide and looked directly at me. "Oh, I do love you, Robert", he said. All his raging had gone completely, and he slipped peacefully away.

Oh the tree of life is growing/Where the spirit never dies/And the bright light of salvation shines/In dark and empty skies BOB DYLAN Death Is Not The End

Heron Priest

The mention of herons in my poem yesterday set me thinking generally about herons in poetry. Immediately Dylan Thomas came to mind. Herons haunt several of his poems, but I suppose his most famous heron name check is in the heartstoppingly felicitous phrase mussel pooled and heron priested shore from one of his finest poems, Poem in October.

Next I thought of Denise Levertov and her 2 poems Heron (I) and Heron (II) from Evening Train. In one of these poems she describes the heron's legato arabesque of the neck. I know there are many other poems about herons or which reference herons in passing - and I'd love to hear from anyone who knows an especially beautiful heron poem. I myself once wrote a couple of yang and yin-type heron haiku, though I wouldn't single them out as of any particular literary merit:

heron priest
with pointed beak
penetrates fish hearts

but heron priestess
plumbs their souls
with piercing eyes

However what all this has been leading up to is a heron poem by the very fine Scottish lyrical-political-nature poet Sorley MacLean (1911-1996), who deserves to be much better known in England - and in the rest of the world. It's true that he wrote in Gaelic by choice, which could make him slightly inaccessible you might think - but I'm fairly sure that almost all his poems have been translated by himself very beautifully into English. Certainly his book of Collected Poems O Choille Gu Bearradh (From Wood To Ridge) - which I bought from a petrol station near Portree on the Isle of Skye a few years ago - has dual texts in both Gaelic and English side by side.

MacLean was born in 1911 off the coast of Skye on the small island of Raasay, where Gaelic was his first language. He went to the University of Edinburgh in 1929 and was wounded 3 times serving for the British Army in North Africa during WWII. Having rejected the teachings of Scottish Presbyterianism, he turned to the politics of the far left. One of the first poems he ever wrote was called A' Chorra-Ghridheach (The Heron). These are the last 3 stanzas:

What is my thought above the heron's?
The loveliness of the moon and the restless sea,
food and sleep and dream,
brain and flesh and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season without stint,
without sorrow, but with one delight,
the straight, unbending law of herons.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the glitter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.

What a wonderful, absolutely on-the-nail contrast between the instinctive, unreflecting, untroubled animal world and the opposite human domain. And remember, this is a translation, so much of its original, poetic glory is lost...

In conclusion I'd like to end with some of my favourite Sorley MacLean lines, the final 2 verses of his magnificent poem Coilltean Ratharsai (The Woods Of Raasay):

There is no knowledge of the course
of the crooked veering of the heart,
and there is no knowledge of the damage
to which its aim unwittingly comes.

There is no knowledge, no knowledge,
of the final end of each pursuit,
nor of the subtlety of the bends
with which it loses its course.

Many thanks to Loren Webster for letting me use his superb heron photo.

A Dog Among The Fairies

During my week in Wales my thoughts naturally turned to the 2 great Welsh poets R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas. As readers of this blog will know, R. S. is one of my favourite poets, and I've written about him and quoted some of his poetry on several occasions. But I don't think I've mentioned Dylan yet.

I have a special affinity with Dylan. In a previous existence I used to sell his books all over the Midlands and Wales, calling on bookshops, wholesalers and even on a small grocery store in Laugharne (Pembrokeshire) where he lived for a large part of his life and is buried. You could find there rare, out-of-print volumes on Dylan lurking among the turnips and tins of baked beans. And Japanese Professors of Literature popping up among the packets of instant potato. The characters in Dylan's captivating work Under Milk Wood, originally a play for radio, were not-so-loosely based on the villagers of Laugharne - which pleased them not a bit. Laugharne became Llareggub in the play. (Try reading this backwards!)

However, this play (and his wonderful short stories) aside, I've always been a little divided about his poetry. Sure, there are some matchless poems (Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and Fern Hill are masterpieces) - but there are many others which I like in parts but which, taken as a whole, are just too verbally dazzling, too flamboyant, just too - over the top. Dylan has certainly had his critics, notoriously Kingsley Amis who criticized his poems for being all sound and no meaning. Amis has a point - but only up to a point. And I don't want to defend Amis particularly, for his opinions became more and more reactionary and curmudgeonly as he grew older. It's just that I do like a bit of meaning, philosophy, content in my poetry - rather than it being pure sound and fury. Meaningful content seamlessly wrapped in metaphoric form would be the ideal.

Anyway, since the posts of some of my blogfrères and blogsoeurs have been somewhat owl-haunted lately, here are 2 Dylan quotes continuing the same theme:

To Wales in my arms.

Hoo, there, in castle keep,

You king singsong owls, who moonbeam

The flickering runs and dive

The dingle furred deer dead!

Huloo, on plumbed bryns,

O my ruffled ring dove

In the hooting, nearly dark

With Welsh and reverent rook,

Coo rooing the woods' praise,

Who moons her blue notes from her nest

Down to the curlew herd!

From the Author's Prologue to Collected Poems 1934-1952.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;

Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,

And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,

Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.

Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,

Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,

With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,

Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,

Scraped at my cradle in a walking word

That night of time under the Christward shelter:

I am the long world's gentleman, he said,

And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

The 1st stanza of Altarwise by Owl-light.

Sounds absolutely gorgeous. But for me the alliteration and all such tricks sometimes just get a bit too much at times.