0:00:14 > 0:00:17This is the city where one of the most extraordinary
0:00:17 > 0:00:19stories of British poetry unfolded.
0:00:19 > 0:00:22It was here in New York that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas first
0:00:22 > 0:00:25burst onto the American scene - reading to thousands,
0:00:25 > 0:00:29recording LPs, and touring like an unlikely rock star.
0:00:34 > 0:00:38And Thomas might have done a lot more, too, had he not died here -
0:00:38 > 0:00:40aged just 39.
0:00:40 > 0:00:42But death didn't stop the bandwagon.
0:00:44 > 0:00:45By the end of the 1960s,
0:00:45 > 0:00:49Dylan Thomas was arguably the most famous poet in the world.
0:00:49 > 0:00:53And he's still famous today - although often as much for the tales
0:00:53 > 0:00:57of his eventful life, his drinking and womanising, as for his poetry.
0:01:02 > 0:01:04I'm Owen Shears, a Welsh poet,
0:01:04 > 0:01:08and this year, I'll be the same age that Dylan Thomas was
0:01:08 > 0:01:10when he died in this city.
0:01:10 > 0:01:12Over the years, like many readers,
0:01:12 > 0:01:14I've fallen in and out of love with Thomas's poetry.
0:01:14 > 0:01:16But what I've never lost is
0:01:16 > 0:01:19an admiration for the unmistakable power of his work.
0:01:22 > 0:01:25So just what was it about these poems that shot him to fame
0:01:25 > 0:01:27as a teenager?
0:01:27 > 0:01:29How did he go about creating them?
0:01:29 > 0:01:33And looked at in the cold light of day, just how good are they?
0:01:35 > 0:01:39100 years after his birth, and six decades from his death,
0:01:39 > 0:01:42now is a fitting time to ask just what was it about Dylan Thomas's
0:01:42 > 0:01:47poems that so caught - and continues to catch - the world's imagination?
0:02:12 > 0:02:15Dylan Thomas might just be the most famous English language poet
0:02:15 > 0:02:17of the 20th century.
0:02:17 > 0:02:18Poems like Fern Hill
0:02:18 > 0:02:21and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night regularly top
0:02:21 > 0:02:25polls of all-time favourites - and not just in Britain.
0:02:27 > 0:02:29And yet for all that his work is loved,
0:02:29 > 0:02:32Thomas is certainly not without his detractors.
0:02:32 > 0:02:35Some critics have claimed that his poetry is showy and overblown,
0:02:35 > 0:02:39a collection of turbo-charged sound effects, high on style
0:02:39 > 0:02:42but low on content. I don't really think that's fair,
0:02:42 > 0:02:44and in this programme I want to take a clear-eyed look
0:02:44 > 0:02:49at Dylan Thomas's poetry, across the full range of his writing life.
0:02:49 > 0:02:53Because if you do, I think, what you find is plentiful evidence
0:02:53 > 0:02:57of a great craftsman at work, and for Thomas being perhaps
0:02:57 > 0:03:01the most original poetic visionary of the last hundred years.
0:03:01 > 0:03:04This, then, is a tale, not so much about Thomas's life
0:03:04 > 0:03:05as about his words.
0:03:20 > 0:03:24It's not always easy to pinpoint the beginning of a literary career.
0:03:24 > 0:03:28But in the case of Dylan Thomas, I think we can do just that.
0:03:28 > 0:03:31And for one of the most challenging, controversial poets
0:03:31 > 0:03:34of the 20th century, it all begins in a pretty unusual place.
0:03:34 > 0:03:38And this is it - The Listener magazine, March 14, 1934.
0:03:39 > 0:03:42Dylan Thomas was just 19 years old.
0:03:46 > 0:03:50The Listener was one of the BBC's two weekly publications -
0:03:50 > 0:03:54the smaller, brainier sibling of the Radio Times.
0:03:54 > 0:03:59But here, tucked away in a corner, was something completely unexpected.
0:04:01 > 0:04:04Light breaks where no sun shines
0:04:04 > 0:04:08Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
0:04:08 > 0:04:10Push in their tides
0:04:10 > 0:04:14And broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads
0:04:14 > 0:04:18The things of light file through the flesh
0:04:18 > 0:04:19Where no flesh decks the bone.
0:04:22 > 0:04:24Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines
0:04:24 > 0:04:27was one of the major poems of the 1930s,
0:04:27 > 0:04:32a creative depth charge unlike anything seen before.
0:04:32 > 0:04:35The great poet TS Eliot was so taken with Light Breaks
0:04:35 > 0:04:36that he wrote to its author.
0:04:38 > 0:04:40Eliot was a literary giant,
0:04:40 > 0:04:43yet the person he was writing to was a virtual unknown.
0:04:55 > 0:04:57Some people might expect at that time
0:04:57 > 0:05:00a letter from TS Eliot to a radical young poet
0:05:00 > 0:05:04to be making its way to an Oxford college or a Bloomsbury flat.
0:05:04 > 0:05:06But instead, that letter came here -
0:05:06 > 0:05:09a semidetached suburban house in Swansea,
0:05:09 > 0:05:12an industrial town on the Welsh coast.
0:05:12 > 0:05:16Certainly well on the outer fringes of the literary establishment.
0:05:21 > 0:05:25Number Five, Cwmdonkin Drive was a respectable middle-class household.
0:05:27 > 0:05:28Its head, DJ Thomas,
0:05:28 > 0:05:31was an intellectual schoolmaster with a book-lined study.
0:05:31 > 0:05:36His wife, Florence, had a maid to help her run the house.
0:05:36 > 0:05:39But TS Eliot's letter was addressed to their son -
0:05:39 > 0:05:4219 years old, still living at home
0:05:42 > 0:05:44and with barely a qualification to his name.
0:05:47 > 0:05:50Upstairs, behind his closed bedroom door,
0:05:50 > 0:05:53something extraordinary was happening.
0:06:14 > 0:06:16So this is it.
0:06:16 > 0:06:19The bedroom where the young Dylan Thomas would have worked.
0:06:19 > 0:06:23And it's amazing to think that in this very small room,
0:06:23 > 0:06:26so small that Dylan said you had to walk out to turn around,
0:06:26 > 0:06:28this is where some of the most exciting
0:06:28 > 0:06:31and original poems of the 20th century were written.
0:06:31 > 0:06:34Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, And Death Shall Have No Dominion,
0:06:34 > 0:06:37The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower -
0:06:37 > 0:06:40they all started here in this room
0:06:40 > 0:06:45with, it has to be said, not the most inspiring of views, just a view
0:06:45 > 0:06:48of a blank wall, but it obviously worked for the young Thomas.
0:07:05 > 0:07:08A candle in the thighs
0:07:08 > 0:07:12Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age
0:07:12 > 0:07:13Where no seed stirs
0:07:13 > 0:07:17The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars
0:07:17 > 0:07:19Bright as a fig
0:07:19 > 0:07:23Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
0:07:24 > 0:07:28He's got this intensity, this full-on-ness,
0:07:28 > 0:07:31he's so unembarrassed
0:07:31 > 0:07:34and so full of...
0:07:34 > 0:07:39There's a boldness to his poetry, to the...kind of the sexual fluids
0:07:39 > 0:07:42and the massive universal life and death imagery,
0:07:42 > 0:07:46It's incredibly ambitious and bold and lusty and rich
0:07:46 > 0:07:51and he's obviously just intoxicated by language - he loves words,
0:07:51 > 0:07:55and if there's a kind of gateway drug to poetry, if there's a poet
0:07:55 > 0:07:59who's going to get you addicted to words, perhaps it's Thomas.
0:08:05 > 0:08:09The extraordinary poems that the teenage Dylan Thomas created
0:08:09 > 0:08:14in his bedroom were all set down in very ordinary school exercise books.
0:08:17 > 0:08:21Amazingly, we still have those books, now 80 years old.
0:08:21 > 0:08:24They're owned by the university at Buffalo in New York State,
0:08:24 > 0:08:29and are back in Wales this year for the first time since they left.
0:08:29 > 0:08:32It's extraordinary to think that these are those very same notebooks
0:08:32 > 0:08:34that Thomas worked on in that tiny bedroom in Swansea.
0:08:34 > 0:08:36It's a very intimate
0:08:36 > 0:08:39and a very moving experience to be here with them.
0:08:39 > 0:08:42I'm not only able to see his drafting and the elements
0:08:42 > 0:08:46of his writing, but there are even his fingerprints in the ink.
0:08:50 > 0:08:52It's because Thomas was so young
0:08:52 > 0:08:56when he was writing in these notebooks that we can trace through
0:08:56 > 0:09:01them, poem by poem, his youthful search for an original poetic voice.
0:09:01 > 0:09:04And what's very clear is that Thomas had no interest, obviously
0:09:04 > 0:09:09from very early on, in merely following the style of the day.
0:09:09 > 0:09:11We can watch him in these poems as step by step
0:09:11 > 0:09:16he increasingly moves further away from the everyday world around him
0:09:16 > 0:09:18of trams and cars and away from the standard
0:09:18 > 0:09:23modes of poetry being written at the time, until he arrives at poems
0:09:23 > 0:09:27such as Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, which although we can
0:09:27 > 0:09:30see where they've come from, at the same time,
0:09:30 > 0:09:34they're also like nothing that's ever been seen before,
0:09:34 > 0:09:36incantatory, hypnotic and visceral.
0:09:38 > 0:09:40And yet for all this impact,
0:09:40 > 0:09:45what bothered some readers was quite simply - what does it mean?
0:09:49 > 0:09:53In the case of Dylan Thomas, to ask what the poem means,
0:09:53 > 0:09:54what is its story,
0:09:54 > 0:09:57is sometimes to ask the wrong question of his work.
0:09:57 > 0:09:59The poem itself is actually inviting us
0:09:59 > 0:10:02to ask a much more interesting question.
0:10:02 > 0:10:06Not so much WHAT does a poem mean, as HOW can a poem mean?
0:10:06 > 0:10:08Because that's what's going on here.
0:10:08 > 0:10:11Thomas wants to create new forms of poetic experience,
0:10:11 > 0:10:16to open language to new ways of meaning, on an instinctive,
0:10:16 > 0:10:18aural, maybe even animalistic level.
0:10:18 > 0:10:22He wants Light Breaks to be a communication more than
0:10:22 > 0:10:25a description, a sensory event.
0:10:32 > 0:10:35Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines is unusual
0:10:35 > 0:10:41because it's intensely inward, and it fuses the cosmos with
0:10:41 > 0:10:45the body, there's no social level or layer at all.
0:10:45 > 0:10:49At a time when young poets were all moving towards making
0:10:49 > 0:10:53political statements, talking about modern machinery, modernity,
0:10:53 > 0:10:58the surfaces of the new Britain, trains, pylons,
0:10:58 > 0:11:04at that time, Thomas was the one poet who seems to be turning back
0:11:04 > 0:11:09to more archaic things. Blood, bone, the heart,
0:11:09 > 0:11:12the inwards of the body, as it were,
0:11:12 > 0:11:18and connecting those to the stars, the galaxies, the cosmic cycles.
0:11:23 > 0:11:26So, what exactly is the experience Thomas wants us
0:11:26 > 0:11:28to have in Light Breaks?
0:11:28 > 0:11:31Well, looking at these images in the first verse,
0:11:31 > 0:11:33where are they leading us, what are their associations?
0:11:33 > 0:11:36"Light breaks where no sun shines
0:11:36 > 0:11:37"The things of light
0:11:37 > 0:11:40"File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones."
0:11:40 > 0:11:45To me, this seems to be a poem about the conception of a child.
0:11:45 > 0:11:48"Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides."
0:11:48 > 0:11:51Is this not the very first circulation of the blood?
0:11:51 > 0:11:55And these "broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,"
0:11:55 > 0:11:59could these not be the sperm, travelling towards the ovum?
0:11:59 > 0:12:01Am I right? Who knows?
0:12:01 > 0:12:03However we try to interpret the poem, though,
0:12:03 > 0:12:06what's always true is that having passed through it,
0:12:06 > 0:12:09we've been altered by its images and music.
0:12:09 > 0:12:12We've been moved by it as a song might move us,
0:12:12 > 0:12:15on an emotional level of sound and association.
0:12:15 > 0:12:17And that's what's really important here -
0:12:17 > 0:12:20that we've sensed a creation rather than known one.
0:12:23 > 0:12:25Light breaks on secret lots
0:12:25 > 0:12:30On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain
0:12:30 > 0:12:32When logics dies
0:12:32 > 0:12:36The secret of the soil grows through the eye
0:12:36 > 0:12:39And blood jumps in the sun
0:12:39 > 0:12:43Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
0:12:48 > 0:12:52Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines appeared in Dylan Thomas'
0:12:52 > 0:12:56first collection, 18 Poems, published in 1934.
0:12:56 > 0:13:00The book's dense, visionary poetry wasn't to everyone's taste.
0:13:00 > 0:13:04One critic said it was "just poetical stuff without
0:13:04 > 0:13:07"shape or form, rather like a tap being turned on."
0:13:09 > 0:13:13The unlikely lad from Swansea had made a huge breakthrough.
0:13:14 > 0:13:17But the charge of being out of control of his art
0:13:17 > 0:13:20would haunt him for the rest of his career.
0:13:20 > 0:13:22MUSIC: "Love Is The Sweetest Thing" by Ray Noble
0:13:22 > 0:13:27# Love is the sweetest thing
0:13:27 > 0:13:32# What else on earth could ever bring
0:13:32 > 0:13:37# Such happiness to everything
0:13:37 > 0:13:42# As love's old story... #
0:13:42 > 0:13:46As the 1930s unfolded, Dylan Thomas led a nomadic life,
0:13:46 > 0:13:48centring on London.
0:13:48 > 0:13:51He married Caitlin Macnamara, a former dancer,
0:13:51 > 0:13:54and they had a son, Llewelyn.
0:13:54 > 0:13:59Two further collections cemented his reputation, but didn't advance it.
0:13:59 > 0:14:03Some critics detected a repetitiveness,
0:14:03 > 0:14:05a failure to move on.
0:14:05 > 0:14:08And it was hardly surprising - Thomas was still drawing
0:14:08 > 0:14:11most of his poems from his early teenage notebooks.
0:14:14 > 0:14:17But then the outside world intervened in Thomas's life
0:14:17 > 0:14:20in the most direct way imaginable
0:14:20 > 0:14:23and propelled his poetry to a new level.
0:14:23 > 0:14:26EXPLOSIONS AND GUNSHOTS
0:14:42 > 0:14:45So, what did Dylan Thomas do during the war?
0:14:45 > 0:14:49Well, it was a highly unlikely job for a radical modernist poet
0:14:49 > 0:14:51and a political refusenik.
0:14:51 > 0:14:54But it was one which would contribute to a crucial
0:14:54 > 0:14:55change in Thomas's poetry,
0:14:55 > 0:14:59when Dylan Thomas the poet became Dylan Thomas the propaganda writer.
0:15:01 > 0:15:04MARCHING MUSIC
0:15:09 > 0:15:11'We are the makers, the workers
0:15:11 > 0:15:15'the wounded, the dying, the dead,
0:15:15 > 0:15:18'the blind, the frostbitten, the burnt, the legless
0:15:18 > 0:15:20'the mad...'
0:15:20 > 0:15:23Working for the Ministry of Information, Thomas scripted
0:15:23 > 0:15:2614 wartime documentaries.
0:15:26 > 0:15:29Some of these films are now regarded as classics,
0:15:29 > 0:15:32the qualities of Thomas's storytelling and language
0:15:32 > 0:15:35lifting the images beyond their immediate purpose.
0:15:35 > 0:15:38'..the slaves, in Greece and China,
0:15:38 > 0:15:40'and Poland,
0:15:40 > 0:15:43'digging our own graves.'
0:15:49 > 0:15:52Writing poems, though, was proving more difficult.
0:15:53 > 0:15:56"War can't produce poetry," Thomas wrote to a friend,
0:15:56 > 0:16:01and for much of the conflict, it was true where he was concerned.
0:16:01 > 0:16:06Between 1941 and 1944, he wrote little poetry that we know of.
0:16:06 > 0:16:09But then the words began to flow again.
0:16:13 > 0:16:15Over the course of the war, Thomas would write three poems
0:16:15 > 0:16:18in response to the bombing of British cities.
0:16:18 > 0:16:21The best of these, and I think the poem in which he glimpses
0:16:21 > 0:16:24his way forward, is the audaciously-titled
0:16:24 > 0:16:28A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.
0:16:33 > 0:16:36Never until the mankind making
0:16:36 > 0:16:38Bird beast and flower
0:16:38 > 0:16:40Fathering and all humbling darkness
0:16:40 > 0:16:44Tells with silence the last light breaking
0:16:44 > 0:16:45And the still hour
0:16:45 > 0:16:48Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
0:16:48 > 0:16:50And I must enter again the round
0:16:50 > 0:16:52Zion of the water bead
0:16:52 > 0:16:54And the synagogue of the ear of corn
0:16:54 > 0:16:57Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
0:16:57 > 0:17:00Or sow my salt seed
0:17:00 > 0:17:03In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
0:17:03 > 0:17:06The majesty and burning of the child's death.
0:17:08 > 0:17:12A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.
0:17:12 > 0:17:14It offers itself no hiding place.
0:17:14 > 0:17:18It imagines an afterlife in which suffering won't occur again,
0:17:18 > 0:17:21in which death cannot happen again because it's happened
0:17:21 > 0:17:23in the here and now,
0:17:23 > 0:17:25and I find that very moving.
0:17:34 > 0:17:38The poem opens with an incredibly long opening sentence.
0:17:38 > 0:17:42If you look at it, it doesn't land with the poem's first full-stop
0:17:42 > 0:17:45until halfway through the poem.
0:17:45 > 0:17:49It's a really brave piece of suspended sense by Thomas
0:17:49 > 0:17:52in which he holds us off and then holds us off again.
0:17:52 > 0:17:55What the sentence is saying, essentially,
0:17:55 > 0:17:58is that Thomas is refusing to participate in the public
0:17:58 > 0:18:00mourning of the child's death
0:18:00 > 0:18:03until a list of impossible conditions have been met,
0:18:03 > 0:18:06until both he and the world have come to an end.
0:18:06 > 0:18:09He will not mourn her, he says, until the last light has broken
0:18:09 > 0:18:13or the sea tumbling in its harness has been stilled.
0:18:13 > 0:18:16Now, perhaps this is a response by Thomas to his working in those
0:18:16 > 0:18:20propaganda films in which the horrors of war are exploited
0:18:20 > 0:18:22for other purposes.
0:18:22 > 0:18:26But I think there's something else feeding into this line as well.
0:18:26 > 0:18:29A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, yes,
0:18:29 > 0:18:34it's about the archaic continuum that the dead girl
0:18:34 > 0:18:39will enter into, and you think, well, no, it's not specific,
0:18:39 > 0:18:42maybe it is just Thomas talking about the cosmos
0:18:42 > 0:18:45and the body again, and then you start to notice details.
0:18:45 > 0:18:50For example, there's a reference to "the round Zion of the water bead"
0:18:50 > 0:18:53and "the synagogue of the ear of corn".
0:18:53 > 0:18:57If you look at the draft for this poem, November 1944,
0:18:57 > 0:19:00those two properties aren't in it,
0:19:00 > 0:19:04but between that time and March of 1945,
0:19:04 > 0:19:08the revelations about the concentration camps have emerged.
0:19:08 > 0:19:10And he's writing a poem about a dead child,
0:19:10 > 0:19:16I don't think, once you've detected that, there can be any doubt that
0:19:16 > 0:19:22this is what he's hinting at, the atrocities of Nazi-occupied Europe.
0:19:24 > 0:19:25I shall not murder
0:19:25 > 0:19:28The mankind of her going with a grave truth
0:19:28 > 0:19:31Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
0:19:31 > 0:19:33With any further
0:19:33 > 0:19:35Elegy of innocence and youth.
0:19:37 > 0:19:40Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter.
0:19:42 > 0:19:44Robed in the long friends
0:19:44 > 0:19:48The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother.
0:19:49 > 0:19:52Secret by the unmourning water
0:19:52 > 0:19:54Of the riding Thames.
0:19:55 > 0:19:58After the first death, there is no other.
0:20:02 > 0:20:06Having refused to elegise the child, Thomas then does exactly that,
0:20:06 > 0:20:10and all the more effectively for having repudiated a public mourning.
0:20:10 > 0:20:13And then there's that great final line,
0:20:13 > 0:20:15simple but pregnant with ambiguity,
0:20:15 > 0:20:18"After the first death, there is no other."
0:20:18 > 0:20:21It's a line that's been interpreted at either end of the scale,
0:20:21 > 0:20:25both as an affirmation of life everlasting after death,
0:20:25 > 0:20:26and also not.
0:20:26 > 0:20:29But what's really interesting for me is that regardless of how
0:20:29 > 0:20:33you interpret the line, because of its pacing and its lilt,
0:20:33 > 0:20:38it's been lent a very strong sense of finality and consolation.
0:20:38 > 0:20:41And what's especially effective here is that break,
0:20:41 > 0:20:45that pause halfway through that you can't help but read.
0:20:45 > 0:20:48"After the first death, there is no other."
0:20:48 > 0:20:51And through that breaking of his rhythm, somehow Thomas has
0:20:51 > 0:20:54managed to pull it off, and has moved from the apparently impossible
0:20:54 > 0:20:57challenge of the poem's title
0:20:57 > 0:21:00to a very real note of resting and peace.
0:21:09 > 0:21:13I...always want...poems,
0:21:13 > 0:21:18and I think the best poems do get away from you all the time.
0:21:18 > 0:21:21If you're being entranced enough by the thing
0:21:21 > 0:21:24and it's still like smoke in your clutch,
0:21:24 > 0:21:27then that'll do for me, I mean, that is a kind of
0:21:27 > 0:21:31hallmark of a good poem for me and I imagine for most people as well.
0:21:31 > 0:21:34And that's absolutely what I get at the end of this.
0:21:34 > 0:21:37Where that ambiguity works, as in this particular poem,
0:21:37 > 0:21:40we're talking about a very significant poet indeed.
0:21:45 > 0:21:49A Refusal to Mourn appeared in Dylan Thomas's fourth collection
0:21:49 > 0:21:54of poetry, Deaths and Entrances, published in 1946.
0:21:54 > 0:21:56The volume was hailed as a triumph,
0:21:56 > 0:22:00and established Thomas as the major British poet of the decade.
0:22:00 > 0:22:02His first three volumes
0:22:02 > 0:22:05had sold just a few hundred copies between them,
0:22:05 > 0:22:09but Deaths and Entrances shifted over 10,000 copies
0:22:09 > 0:22:11in its first year alone.
0:22:11 > 0:22:14And Thomas was still young, just 31.
0:22:14 > 0:22:17So where would he take his art next?
0:22:18 > 0:22:22The answer lay in part in the last poem in Deaths and Entrances.
0:22:22 > 0:22:26Thomas rushed it to the publishers at the last minute.
0:22:26 > 0:22:28"I very much want it included," he wrote,
0:22:28 > 0:22:31"as it is an essential part of the feeling
0:22:31 > 0:22:33"and meaning of the book as a whole."
0:22:33 > 0:22:36It's a poem that he later described as being one
0:22:36 > 0:22:38"for evenings and tears."
0:22:38 > 0:22:41And yet he also said of it that it was a joyful poem,
0:22:41 > 0:22:45"the joy as real as that which made the words come at last
0:22:45 > 0:22:50"out of a never-to-be buried childhood in heaven, or Wales."
0:23:07 > 0:23:10Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
0:23:10 > 0:23:14About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green
0:23:14 > 0:23:16The night above the dingle starry
0:23:16 > 0:23:19Time let me hail and climb
0:23:19 > 0:23:21Golden in the heydays of his eyes
0:23:21 > 0:23:26And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
0:23:26 > 0:23:30And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
0:23:30 > 0:23:33Trail with daisies and barley
0:23:33 > 0:23:35Down the rivers of the windfall light.
0:23:39 > 0:23:43Fern Hill was a real place - the Carmarthenshire farm
0:23:43 > 0:23:46where Dylan the child had spent summer holidays.
0:23:47 > 0:23:52The poem was written in 1945 shortly after V-J Day in a cottage
0:23:52 > 0:23:54a stone's throw from Fern Hill itself.
0:23:56 > 0:23:59Thomas had always been a poet of early life.
0:23:59 > 0:24:03But here foetuses and burning children give way to real,
0:24:03 > 0:24:06ordinary childhood - Thomas's own.
0:24:06 > 0:24:10It's been called the poem he was born to write.
0:24:12 > 0:24:15My favourite Thomas poem is probably Fern Hill.
0:24:15 > 0:24:18It seems to me somehow a cornerstone,
0:24:18 > 0:24:20it seems to lie at the heart of it all,
0:24:20 > 0:24:24that this was him definitively saying, "I am like this
0:24:24 > 0:24:28"because this was my childhood, this is me, this is what I am,"
0:24:28 > 0:24:31and I think just the best things about Thomas are all working there.
0:24:33 > 0:24:37It's a song of praise. Whatever you believe, it's a song of praise.
0:24:41 > 0:24:45So, just what did Dylan Thomas manage to do in this poem to give it
0:24:45 > 0:24:48such a place in the hearts of generations of readers?
0:24:51 > 0:24:55As usual, Thomas begins as he means to proceed.
0:24:55 > 0:24:59"Now as I was" is a paradox in terms of time. It's both past
0:24:59 > 0:25:02and present, and it wonderfully prepares us
0:25:02 > 0:25:05for Fern Hill's winning mix of immediacy and nostalgia.
0:25:05 > 0:25:08But that "now" also does something else for Thomas,
0:25:08 > 0:25:11in that it introduces a more conversational tone,
0:25:11 > 0:25:14a more storytelling voice.
0:25:14 > 0:25:15From that first line,
0:25:15 > 0:25:19the poem really rolls along as if in the voice of a remembering,
0:25:19 > 0:25:23excited child, all of these "ands" and "its" and "lovelies" layering
0:25:23 > 0:25:27upon each other like the brimming delights of a summer holiday.
0:25:27 > 0:25:29Fern Hill is like a lot of Thomas's poems,
0:25:29 > 0:25:31it works on at least two levels.
0:25:31 > 0:25:33So there's a popular level.
0:25:33 > 0:25:35It's everybody's granny's favourite poem.
0:25:35 > 0:25:40It was voted fourth in a recent poll of favourite poems.
0:25:40 > 0:25:41It's a feel-good poem.
0:25:41 > 0:25:45But it has other levels, you know, it has depths.
0:25:45 > 0:25:47Fern Hill is a poem of peace.
0:25:47 > 0:25:50It comes in September of 1945,
0:25:50 > 0:25:55after the war, and I think Thomas does want to lead the reader out
0:25:55 > 0:26:00from these meditations on war, these hauntings by dead children,
0:26:00 > 0:26:03as it were, by presenting something which is fresher.
0:26:03 > 0:26:05But it's not a total escape.
0:26:05 > 0:26:06"Time held me green and dying
0:26:06 > 0:26:09"Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
0:26:09 > 0:26:14It's hardly a ringing endorsement of a utopian childhood.
0:26:15 > 0:26:18So what of the underlying meaning of Fern Hill?
0:26:18 > 0:26:22Well, right from the first stanza, there are hints.
0:26:22 > 0:26:25"Once below a time" sounds rather whimsical at first.
0:26:25 > 0:26:29But it's a line that carries the great theme of the poem.
0:26:29 > 0:26:34Even a child is "below," subject to the inescapable process of time.
0:26:36 > 0:26:40Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
0:26:40 > 0:26:44Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand
0:26:44 > 0:26:47In the moon that is always rising
0:26:47 > 0:26:49Nor that riding to sleep
0:26:49 > 0:26:52I should hear him fly with the high fields
0:26:52 > 0:26:57And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land
0:26:57 > 0:27:01Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
0:27:01 > 0:27:04Time held me green and dying
0:27:04 > 0:27:07Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
0:27:17 > 0:27:20As the poem draws to an end, the skies darken.
0:27:20 > 0:27:23The swallow-thronged loft is a symbol of evening,
0:27:23 > 0:27:26but also of departure and migration.
0:27:26 > 0:27:29And the child is led there by the shadow of his hand
0:27:29 > 0:27:32"in the moon that is always rising."
0:27:32 > 0:27:35The moon, that colder, nocturnal celestial body.
0:27:41 > 0:27:45Fern Hill, I've always found a difficult poem,
0:27:45 > 0:27:48because it's always made me feel melancholy.
0:27:48 > 0:27:50I think there's a tremendous...
0:27:54 > 0:27:57..awareness of the world slipping away...
0:28:00 > 0:28:02..that is quite breathtaking,
0:28:02 > 0:28:08and I feel emotional about it now, and I'm quite surprised at myself
0:28:08 > 0:28:12because I thought I was past feeling emotional about Dylan Thomas.
0:28:12 > 0:28:15But that poem...
0:28:16 > 0:28:21..is so knowing about what it's losing,
0:28:21 > 0:28:26that it's no wonder that it's stood the test of time.
0:28:34 > 0:28:37Fern Hill closes with one of poetry's great endings,
0:28:37 > 0:28:40and this from the master of endings.
0:28:40 > 0:28:43"Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
0:28:43 > 0:28:46"Time held me green and dying
0:28:46 > 0:28:49"Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
0:28:49 > 0:28:52There's a wonderful balance of opposites here. The speaker
0:28:52 > 0:28:54in the poem is both young and free,
0:28:54 > 0:28:57and, yet, also dying and constrained.
0:28:57 > 0:28:58And with that very last line,
0:28:58 > 0:29:01"Though I sang in my chains like the sea,"
0:29:01 > 0:29:04you can't help but think that this is Thomas also writing about
0:29:04 > 0:29:09himself as a poet, his verbal energy that is given liberty
0:29:09 > 0:29:13through the chains of the patterns and forms in which he works.
0:29:16 > 0:29:18Fern Hill confirmed Dylan Thomas
0:29:18 > 0:29:21as the most popular British poet of his day.
0:29:21 > 0:29:24But some early critics were far from kind to it,
0:29:24 > 0:29:28seeing it as a pastoral sell-out by a previously tough-minded poet.
0:29:30 > 0:29:32Yet, to me, Fern Hill,
0:29:32 > 0:29:36with its tender and vulnerable exploration of innocence and loss,
0:29:36 > 0:29:41reads like Thomas's moving search for healing after the trauma of war.
0:30:29 > 0:30:36In 1949, Dylan Thomas - husband, father of three, famous poet -
0:30:36 > 0:30:39moved to the place now most associated with him,
0:30:39 > 0:30:41the Boat House in Laugharne.
0:30:44 > 0:30:48Thomas was 34 years old and now had, at long last,
0:30:48 > 0:30:53what all writers yearn for - a place of his own in which to write.
0:31:03 > 0:31:07Wow. And this is it.
0:31:07 > 0:31:09The near-mythical Writing Shed,
0:31:09 > 0:31:12where most of his late poetry was written.
0:31:12 > 0:31:15It's in this extraordinary position, perched on a cliff,
0:31:15 > 0:31:19with this amazing view of sea and fields and sky.
0:31:20 > 0:31:23I must say it's very moving to be in here.
0:31:24 > 0:31:28So close to Thomas's desk where he wrote those poems.
0:31:30 > 0:31:33Thomas may have found the perfect place for writing
0:31:33 > 0:31:36but the poetry was not coming easily.
0:31:36 > 0:31:40For all that the Writing Shed has become a symbol of his craft,
0:31:40 > 0:31:43he only ever managed to write six poems here.
0:31:45 > 0:31:49But those late poems saw him once again moving in a new direction,
0:31:49 > 0:31:53drawing inspiration not from his teenage febrile imagination,
0:31:53 > 0:31:55or from events of war or memory,
0:31:55 > 0:31:58but from the natural landscape outside these windows.
0:31:58 > 0:32:01This was the view he looked out on every day,
0:32:01 > 0:32:04and it soon began to flood into his poems.
0:32:04 > 0:32:07One of the best of these late poems is Poem On His Birthday.
0:32:13 > 0:32:16In the mustardseed sun
0:32:16 > 0:32:19By full tilt river and switchback sea
0:32:19 > 0:32:21Where the cormorants scud
0:32:21 > 0:32:24In his house on stilts high among beaks
0:32:24 > 0:32:26And palavers of birds
0:32:26 > 0:32:30This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
0:32:30 > 0:32:33He celebrates and spurns
0:32:33 > 0:32:36His driftwood 35th wind turned age
0:32:36 > 0:32:39Herons spire and spear.
0:32:45 > 0:32:48The poem is packed full
0:32:48 > 0:32:50of the natural world outside these windows -
0:32:50 > 0:32:54palavers of birds, herons spire and spear,
0:32:54 > 0:32:57the switchback sea with its congered waves,
0:32:57 > 0:33:01full of eels, pastures of otters, hawks and gulls.
0:33:01 > 0:33:05It's a great example of Thomas the nature poet, capturing
0:33:05 > 0:33:08in single images the essence of the animal world around him.
0:33:08 > 0:33:11But unlike in Fern Hill,
0:33:11 > 0:33:14the natural world here isn't being used to celebrate.
0:33:14 > 0:33:17Rather the actions of the birds and the fishes are harnessed
0:33:17 > 0:33:20by Thomas to illustrate the argument of his poem.
0:33:20 > 0:33:23That man in his living, like all of nature,
0:33:23 > 0:33:27is progressing headlong in the direction of his own death.
0:33:28 > 0:33:30Under and round him go
0:33:30 > 0:33:34Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails
0:33:34 > 0:33:36Doing what they are told
0:33:36 > 0:33:39Curlews aloud in the congered waves
0:33:39 > 0:33:41Work at their ways to death
0:33:41 > 0:33:45And the rhymer in the long tongued room
0:33:45 > 0:33:47Who tolls his birthday bell
0:33:47 > 0:33:51Toils towards the ambush of his wounds
0:33:51 > 0:33:54Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.
0:34:00 > 0:34:06They're poems of observation but there's also that strong sense
0:34:06 > 0:34:10of the outsider in the natural world, someone who hasn't got
0:34:10 > 0:34:14access to the continuity of nature, someone who will die.
0:34:14 > 0:34:19It's as if the sense of mortality means
0:34:19 > 0:34:24he can't or can't any longer engage in nature as part of it.
0:34:24 > 0:34:30He's a watcher, almost a desirer, who can't ever reach it.
0:34:45 > 0:34:50Ideas of death, entwined with nature and religion, haunt the poem.
0:34:50 > 0:34:54Yet Thomas was writing about his 35th birthday -
0:34:54 > 0:34:59only halfway to the Biblical quota of three score years and ten.
0:34:59 > 0:35:01What could account, then,
0:35:01 > 0:35:05for this growing obsession with mortality?
0:35:05 > 0:35:08What's of no doubt is that there is a great power
0:35:08 > 0:35:10at the heart of this poem.
0:35:10 > 0:35:13Not a celestial one, but a terrible man-made power.
0:35:13 > 0:35:16One which, at the time Thomas was writing, threatened everyone,
0:35:16 > 0:35:18wherever they lived.
0:35:30 > 0:35:34He talks about the bones of the hills being blasted out,
0:35:34 > 0:35:39he talks of rocketing winds, and he speaks of a serpent cloud.
0:35:39 > 0:35:44So again in Thomas's slightly disguised and mythical register,
0:35:44 > 0:35:47he's talking about the threat of another world war,
0:35:47 > 0:35:50and he's talking about the threat of atomic destruction.
0:35:50 > 0:35:52So that hangs over this poem.
0:35:52 > 0:35:54And he's very aware of the fact that
0:35:54 > 0:35:58that might be the end of the world, there might be no more birthdays.
0:36:02 > 0:36:05And this last blessing most
0:36:05 > 0:36:07That the closer I move
0:36:07 > 0:36:12To death, one man through his sundered hulks
0:36:12 > 0:36:14The louder the sun blooms
0:36:14 > 0:36:18And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults
0:36:18 > 0:36:21And every wave of the way
0:36:21 > 0:36:25And gale I tackle, the whole world then
0:36:25 > 0:36:27With more triumphant faith
0:36:27 > 0:36:30That ever was since the world was said
0:36:30 > 0:36:33Spins its morning of praise.
0:36:47 > 0:36:52I think of Thomas working in that boat house
0:36:52 > 0:36:55and his poems have at once
0:36:55 > 0:36:58that sense of timelessness that
0:36:58 > 0:37:03all great poems have, that they've existed forever.
0:37:03 > 0:37:07And that they have made themselves, in some sense.
0:37:07 > 0:37:11And set against that, of course, the very strong sense that
0:37:11 > 0:37:16a lot of banging and sawing have gone into
0:37:16 > 0:37:19the making of the poems.
0:37:19 > 0:37:24And I think of his poems in a strange way as being clinker-built.
0:37:24 > 0:37:29As being actually marvels of engineering.
0:37:31 > 0:37:34These here are some copies of just some of the worksheets for
0:37:34 > 0:37:38Poem On His Birthday. In total, there were over 200 of them.
0:37:38 > 0:37:41What these lists brilliantly illustrate is the nature
0:37:41 > 0:37:45of Thomas's tireless search for what he considered to be the right word.
0:37:45 > 0:37:49Not just in terms of its sense, but in terms of its music.
0:37:49 > 0:37:52In these worksheets we can follow him on his trails and watch
0:37:52 > 0:37:56the lines of the poem strengthen as he changes his choices.
0:37:56 > 0:38:01So "the shriller the sun blooms" becomes "the louder the sun blooms."
0:38:01 > 0:38:03"Sings its morning of praise"
0:38:03 > 0:38:06becomes "spins its morning of praise."
0:38:06 > 0:38:08What's quite surprising is just how ordinary
0:38:08 > 0:38:13and expected some of Thomas's first word choices are.
0:38:13 > 0:38:16But he then uses that first choice as a launch pad,
0:38:16 > 0:38:19a starting point from which to go off and search for
0:38:19 > 0:38:23the unexpected word that will bring the line springing off the page.
0:38:26 > 0:38:30In a short career, Dylan Thomas had already travelled a great way.
0:38:30 > 0:38:35He had been a radical young modernist, a public elegist,
0:38:35 > 0:38:38a poet of place, and now a nature poet.
0:38:38 > 0:38:42But his next step would see him move into a whole new world -
0:38:42 > 0:38:44and take modern poetry with him.
0:39:02 > 0:39:05For quite a while, there'd been growing interest
0:39:05 > 0:39:08in Thomas's work across the Atlantic.
0:39:08 > 0:39:11In turn, Thomas had his eye on America -
0:39:11 > 0:39:14a place blissfully free of establishment critics and
0:39:14 > 0:39:17whatever it was that was stemming the flow of his poetry.
0:39:17 > 0:39:19So when John Malcolm Brinnin -
0:39:19 > 0:39:22an American poet and literary wheeler-dealer -
0:39:22 > 0:39:26invited Thomas to cross the Atlantic to tour, read and lecture,
0:39:26 > 0:39:28he didn't hesitate to sign up.
0:39:31 > 0:39:36In February 1950, Dylan Thomas stepped onto a plane
0:39:36 > 0:39:39bound for America, and poetry stepped into the mass media age.
0:39:45 > 0:39:49There's something of a Dylan Thomas heritage trail in New York City,
0:39:49 > 0:39:51just as there is in back in Wales.
0:39:51 > 0:39:53There's the Chelsea Hotel where he stayed,
0:39:53 > 0:39:55the White Horse Tavern where he drank,
0:39:55 > 0:39:57and St Vincent's Hospital where he eventually died.
0:39:57 > 0:40:00These are the places, more than anywhere else,
0:40:00 > 0:40:02that have fuelled the Thomas myth
0:40:02 > 0:40:06and, I think, helped to obscure the poems themselves in the process.
0:40:06 > 0:40:09But while these places might be the Stations of the Cross for
0:40:09 > 0:40:13Thomas tourists, none of them really tells us anything about the poetry.
0:40:29 > 0:40:33The Poetry Centre at the 92nd Street Y in New York was
0:40:33 > 0:40:37the site of Dylan Thomas's first public poetry reading in the US.
0:40:37 > 0:40:41Its thousand-seater Kaufmann Auditorium was sold out,
0:40:41 > 0:40:44and many more people were left standing.
0:40:44 > 0:40:47Yet hardly anyone present had ever heard this poet speak.
0:40:52 > 0:40:54So what happened that night?
0:40:54 > 0:40:57Well, John Malcolm Brinnin - Thomas's promoter -
0:40:57 > 0:41:00introduced the poet with showbiz flair,
0:41:00 > 0:41:04and perhaps more than a little sense of what the audience wanted.
0:41:04 > 0:41:10'Not very long ago, readers of poetry in the English-speaking world
0:41:10 > 0:41:14'found their senses quickening at the sound of a new voice.
0:41:14 > 0:41:20'A man still in his 20s had quite casually walked in and sat down
0:41:20 > 0:41:23'among the geniuses of English poetry.
0:41:23 > 0:41:27'This young man's name was Dylan Thomas.
0:41:27 > 0:41:30'And he came, said fact and fancy,
0:41:30 > 0:41:34'out of the druidical mists of Wales.'
0:41:34 > 0:41:36"The druidical mists of Wales."
0:41:36 > 0:41:39The exact positioning of Brinnin's tongue and his cheek
0:41:39 > 0:41:41are a little difficult to gauge here.
0:41:41 > 0:41:43But then Thomas himself stepped up.
0:41:43 > 0:41:47He had with him his books and lists, a selection of his own poems,
0:41:47 > 0:41:50and favourites culled from the work of others.
0:41:50 > 0:41:53Hesitant in his introduction, maybe even a little unsure,
0:41:53 > 0:41:56everything changed when he began to read.
0:41:56 > 0:41:59APPLAUSE
0:42:01 > 0:42:03'And death shall have no dominion
0:42:03 > 0:42:06'Dead men, naked they shall be one
0:42:06 > 0:42:09'With the man in the wind and the west moon
0:42:09 > 0:42:12'When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone
0:42:12 > 0:42:15'They shall have stars at elbow and foot
0:42:15 > 0:42:18'Though they go mad they shall be sane
0:42:18 > 0:42:22'Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
0:42:22 > 0:42:25'Though lovers be lost, love shall not
0:42:25 > 0:42:28'And death shall have no dominion.'
0:42:29 > 0:42:32What you notice about Thomas' voice here is how
0:42:32 > 0:42:35different it is from the voice he used in Britain.
0:42:35 > 0:42:37It's more dramatic, more performed,
0:42:37 > 0:42:40edging the poems even closer towards song.
0:42:40 > 0:42:42He himself described it as hammy,
0:42:42 > 0:42:46his second-rate Charles Laughton voice, a badly-played trombone.
0:42:46 > 0:42:50But whatever his own opinion, the American audiences loved it.
0:42:52 > 0:42:56I think he did inherit that sense of the oral tradition
0:42:56 > 0:42:58from his Welsh background.
0:42:58 > 0:43:02A lot of the preachers were also poets, and
0:43:02 > 0:43:04when they were in the pulpit,
0:43:04 > 0:43:10they very often almost sang their homily.
0:43:10 > 0:43:14They were able to make the congregation hold their breath.
0:43:14 > 0:43:19And I think he must have tried to emulate some of those.
0:43:19 > 0:43:22'Though they be mad and dead as nails
0:43:22 > 0:43:26'Heads of the characters hammer through daisies
0:43:26 > 0:43:31'Break in the sun till the sun breaks down
0:43:31 > 0:43:34'And death shall have no dominion.'
0:43:35 > 0:43:38APPLAUSE
0:43:40 > 0:43:44They're poems that come from the pulpit. They are shanties,
0:43:44 > 0:43:47they are nursery rhymes, they've got all these spoken
0:43:47 > 0:43:49and sung qualities about them.
0:43:49 > 0:43:54Get recordings of him reading the poems, listen to them.
0:43:54 > 0:43:57I think that's the best way to experience the poems,
0:43:57 > 0:44:00mainline, straight into the ear.
0:44:00 > 0:44:03There were several reasons for Dylan Thomas's extraordinary
0:44:03 > 0:44:05success in America.
0:44:05 > 0:44:09Perhaps most significant, though, was his timing, which was perfect.
0:44:09 > 0:44:12His leaping rhythms spoke to the Beat writers
0:44:12 > 0:44:14and to great jazz musicians like Charlie Parker.
0:44:14 > 0:44:17Alan Ginsburg - who became one of the gurus of this new age -
0:44:17 > 0:44:19was enchanted.
0:44:19 > 0:44:23As was Bob Dylan, who borrowed the poet's name, and never gave it back.
0:44:23 > 0:44:27Middle-aged and portly, with bad breath and bad teeth,
0:44:27 > 0:44:31in America, Thomas became the first major British cultural export of
0:44:31 > 0:44:36the post-war era, an unlikely rock star before rock stars even existed.
0:44:41 > 0:44:44Over the next three years,
0:44:44 > 0:44:49Dylan Thomas would give over 150 poetry readings in America,
0:44:49 > 0:44:53crisscrossing the country on trains, boats and planes.
0:44:53 > 0:44:55It was exhausting.
0:44:55 > 0:44:57He may have been a literary rock star,
0:44:57 > 0:44:59but he had to carry his own suitcases.
0:45:11 > 0:45:16America wasn't all about giving readings of past glories, though.
0:45:16 > 0:45:20Something new finally emerged here, and it provoked a response
0:45:20 > 0:45:23very different from that directed towards the poetry.
0:45:26 > 0:45:29In a programme about Thomas's poetry,
0:45:29 > 0:45:32I don't want to dwell too long on Under Milk Wood.
0:45:32 > 0:45:34For a start, it isn't a poem -
0:45:34 > 0:45:37"a play for voices" is how Thomas himself described it,
0:45:37 > 0:45:40written in a "prose with blood pressure."
0:45:40 > 0:45:45But at the same time, you can't deny the poetic charge of the piece.
0:45:45 > 0:45:48There are, I think, between the lewd jokes
0:45:48 > 0:45:51and the montages of dialogue, so many moments of, for Thomas,
0:45:51 > 0:45:55surprisingly understated pathos and lyrical beauty.
0:45:59 > 0:46:03Under Milk Wood premiered in New York in May, 1953.
0:46:03 > 0:46:08That opening night saw Thomas himself take the role of narrator.
0:46:10 > 0:46:12'To begin at the beginning.
0:46:13 > 0:46:17'It is spring, moonless night in the small town,
0:46:17 > 0:46:22'starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the
0:46:22 > 0:46:26'hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood
0:46:26 > 0:46:33'limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack,
0:46:33 > 0:46:35'fishing boat bobbing sea.'
0:46:35 > 0:46:38It's just shot through with poetic technique,
0:46:38 > 0:46:44and when I listen to it I get hung up on the word order.
0:46:44 > 0:46:48I'm fascinated by the character description,
0:46:48 > 0:46:51the choice of words, the diction.
0:46:51 > 0:46:54Not so much the story, not really interested.
0:46:54 > 0:46:59I just love the roll and pitch of the language all the way through.
0:47:01 > 0:47:06Even the prose is always veering towards poetry, I think.
0:47:06 > 0:47:08Poetry was his first language.
0:47:14 > 0:47:18On the whole, I've never thought of Thomas as a poet you'd go to
0:47:18 > 0:47:21for intimate truths of human nature.
0:47:21 > 0:47:24But in Under Milk Wood, that all changes.
0:47:24 > 0:47:27Here in the dark, sexualised, funny and flawed hopes
0:47:27 > 0:47:30and dreams of the people of Llareggub, Thomas reveals
0:47:30 > 0:47:34himself to be a passionate observer of human frailties.
0:47:34 > 0:47:38And this, I think, is where the real strengths of the play lie.
0:47:38 > 0:47:41Not so much in its poetry as in its being infused,
0:47:41 > 0:47:45for all its satire and mocking, with a sincere warmth
0:47:45 > 0:47:49and love for the characters at the mercy of Thomas's pen.
0:48:02 > 0:48:05Under Milk Wood was the last major piece of writing
0:48:05 > 0:48:06that Dylan Thomas completed.
0:48:06 > 0:48:10But there's one final poem I want to have a look at.
0:48:10 > 0:48:14It's perhaps Thomas's most famous poem, many would say his best.
0:48:14 > 0:48:16And it brings our story full circle.
0:48:30 > 0:48:33Do not go gentle into that good night
0:48:34 > 0:48:40Old age should burn and rave at close of day
0:48:41 > 0:48:47Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
0:49:05 > 0:49:09If Thomas's poems got more personal as he got older,
0:49:09 > 0:49:12his craft ever more wedded to the suffered life,
0:49:12 > 0:49:15then Do Not Go Gentle is surely one of the most personal of all.
0:49:15 > 0:49:18We're left in no doubt as to its subject.
0:49:18 > 0:49:22"And you, my father, there on the sad height..."
0:49:22 > 0:49:25This is no longer the cosmos going about its cyclical business,
0:49:25 > 0:49:27observed from a writerly distance.
0:49:27 > 0:49:31This is death crossing the threshold into the house,
0:49:31 > 0:49:34and coming for the man who helped shape the young poet.
0:49:36 > 0:49:41Though wise men at their end know dark is right
0:49:41 > 0:49:45Because their words had forked no lightning they
0:49:45 > 0:49:49Do not go gentle into that good night.
0:49:53 > 0:49:55Dylan Thomas's father, DJ,
0:49:55 > 0:50:00had been his son's poetical starter motor, reading him poems,
0:50:00 > 0:50:04providing him with books, correcting his early work.
0:50:04 > 0:50:08But DJ himself was a man of frustrated talents.
0:50:08 > 0:50:11Despite his first-class degree in English, he never attained
0:50:11 > 0:50:15the university post some say he always longed for.
0:50:15 > 0:50:18And his own poetry passed unnoticed.
0:50:18 > 0:50:22How exactly this affected DJ's son is difficult to say.
0:50:22 > 0:50:26But some have interpreted Dylan Thomas's very particular career
0:50:26 > 0:50:28in the light of his father's life.
0:50:28 > 0:50:31Literary aspiration and achievement, yes,
0:50:31 > 0:50:35but also a certain disdain for the establishment worlds of academia
0:50:35 > 0:50:39and literature that had left his father out in the cold.
0:50:40 > 0:50:44What's remarkable about Thomas's great lament for his father, though,
0:50:44 > 0:50:47is its extraordinary restraint.
0:50:50 > 0:50:57Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
0:50:57 > 0:51:01Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
0:51:02 > 0:51:09Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
0:51:13 > 0:51:15This is one of the very earliest manuscripts
0:51:15 > 0:51:18of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.
0:51:18 > 0:51:21It's such a famous poem, and such a complete poem,
0:51:21 > 0:51:24that to hold it here now, it feels almost timeless,
0:51:24 > 0:51:25or centuries old,
0:51:25 > 0:51:28rather than something that was written in the 1950s.
0:51:28 > 0:51:31It's become, in the scale of its popular reception,
0:51:31 > 0:51:33almost a secular psalm.
0:51:40 > 0:51:44It's impossible to go to a funeral these days
0:51:44 > 0:51:47without hearing a Dylan Thomas poem.
0:51:47 > 0:51:50I mean, those poems - And Death Shall Have No Dominion and
0:51:50 > 0:51:55Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night touch people.
0:51:57 > 0:51:58Um...
0:52:01 > 0:52:09And people feel that poetry has some kind of use in the world
0:52:09 > 0:52:14at that moment when they feel that they need to reach for something.
0:52:16 > 0:52:19The first thing that's really noticeable about this poem
0:52:19 > 0:52:23is its form, which I think is vital to understanding its power.
0:52:23 > 0:52:25To write about his dying father,
0:52:25 > 0:52:28Thomas has chosen one of the most difficult poetic forms imaginable.
0:52:28 > 0:52:32This is a villanelle - originally a French form that was used
0:52:32 > 0:52:36for lighter subjects such as dancing songs or stories of rural delight.
0:52:36 > 0:52:40So to write a villanelle about death was highly unconventional.
0:52:42 > 0:52:46The villanelle is a tight, limiting form.
0:52:46 > 0:52:50There are just two repeating rhymes across the whole poem.
0:52:50 > 0:52:55And it's not enough to get a line to work once.
0:52:55 > 0:53:01Two lines are repeated, their meanings subtly changing.
0:53:01 > 0:53:06It's an argument that advances while using exactly the same words.
0:53:06 > 0:53:09The thing about a villanelle is that although it's limiting,
0:53:09 > 0:53:13if you get it right, it has an almost undeniable power.
0:53:13 > 0:53:15Look at those repeating lines for example.
0:53:15 > 0:53:18"Do not go gentle into that good night
0:53:18 > 0:53:21"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
0:53:21 > 0:53:24As the poem advances, these lines pull against each other to
0:53:24 > 0:53:27create a really interesting tension.
0:53:27 > 0:53:30On the one hand, they repeatedly reinforce the idea that
0:53:30 > 0:53:34Thomas wants his father to resist death, to struggle and to fight.
0:53:34 > 0:53:37But on the other, the sheer number of repetitions makes us
0:53:37 > 0:53:41begin to wonder if Thomas is protesting too much.
0:53:41 > 0:53:44And whether even he is really convinced by what he's saying.
0:53:46 > 0:53:49CLOCK TICKS
0:53:55 > 0:54:00I lost my own father recently and was rereading Do Not Go Gentle.
0:54:00 > 0:54:06And I cannot believe any child would wish a parent or a father,
0:54:06 > 0:54:11a loved father, to go raging into the dark.
0:54:11 > 0:54:13That doesn't convince me.
0:54:13 > 0:54:17My view...I've changed my mind about this poem.
0:54:17 > 0:54:21My view is that it's Dylan Thomas's elegy for himself.
0:54:21 > 0:54:24He was already drying up,
0:54:24 > 0:54:28facing a period where he couldn't write as fluently as he could.
0:54:28 > 0:54:34This is a terrible thing for a poet, because if you don't write,
0:54:34 > 0:54:37you believe that you're never going to write again.
0:54:37 > 0:54:40I think he was talking to himself and saying,
0:54:40 > 0:54:45"Come on, don't go gently, don't accept this, do something,"
0:54:45 > 0:54:49so I find it quite a desperate poem and a very painful one to read now.
0:54:52 > 0:54:55One of the great strengths of Dylan Thomas's poetry is that it's
0:54:55 > 0:54:59loaded with meaning, often multiple meanings, both contradictory
0:54:59 > 0:55:01and yet complementary.
0:55:01 > 0:55:04In Do Not Go Gentle he takes this quality to a new level.
0:55:04 > 0:55:08In the poem, there's one sense that belongs to its words on the page,
0:55:08 > 0:55:11and then another quite different sense that belongs to its sound.
0:55:11 > 0:55:14And it's there, I think, in that contradiction,
0:55:14 > 0:55:18that the key to this poem's emotional potency lies.
0:55:18 > 0:55:21The poem is actually saying...
0:55:21 > 0:55:25don't die. It's saying, kick against the pricks.
0:55:25 > 0:55:27And it's addressed to his father.
0:55:27 > 0:55:29That's what the poem says on the surface,
0:55:29 > 0:55:31that's the content, if you like.
0:55:31 > 0:55:36But if you read the poem to yourself or aloud, it has a lulling,
0:55:36 > 0:55:39almost a lullaby sort of effect, and it seems to me that
0:55:39 > 0:55:42that's the counter-narrative.
0:55:42 > 0:55:47On the surface the poem is saying, "put up a struggle, don't go gently"
0:55:47 > 0:55:51But the rhythm of the poem is saying, you know,
0:55:51 > 0:55:56"Please, just go peacefully, good night, make it a good death,
0:55:56 > 0:55:59"lapse into it, let there be no pain for you."
0:56:00 > 0:56:07And you, my father, there on the sad height
0:56:07 > 0:56:14Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray
0:56:16 > 0:56:21Do not go gentle into that good night
0:56:21 > 0:56:27Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
0:56:47 > 0:56:51The end of the story for Dylan Thomas the man is well-known.
0:56:51 > 0:56:53Dead in New York at 39,
0:56:53 > 0:56:56with all the usual suspects in the vicinity.
0:56:56 > 0:56:58To long-standing illness,
0:56:58 > 0:57:02there'd been added the familiar excesses of a celebrity lifestyle.
0:57:02 > 0:57:07And a posthumous celebrity was what Dylan Thomas became -
0:57:07 > 0:57:11the poet of choice for film stars, pop stars, presidents,
0:57:11 > 0:57:15and countless teenage poetry fans all over the world.
0:57:19 > 0:57:2460 years on, the stations of Dylan Thomas's life have
0:57:24 > 0:57:26become something of a tourist trail.
0:57:26 > 0:57:31But is this the best way to get closer to him and his work?
0:57:34 > 0:57:38I'd argue that if you really want to make a pilgrimage to Dylan Thomas,
0:57:38 > 0:57:41then you're better off opening a book of his poems
0:57:41 > 0:57:42than jumping on a bus.
0:57:42 > 0:57:46Because it's in his poems that you'll meet the truest
0:57:46 > 0:57:49essence of him, and with all the immediate energy of his living self.
0:57:49 > 0:57:53His ideas and concerns, his joys and despairs, and of course
0:57:53 > 0:57:56his extraordinary gift for making language dance to his tune.
0:57:58 > 0:58:01When we enter his poetry, we see through his eyes,
0:58:01 > 0:58:03and speak with his voice.
0:58:03 > 0:58:06We inhabit him and he inhabits us, and in so doing
0:58:06 > 0:58:10a part of him, I'd say the most vital part of him, lives on.