TOP88-DES85
This Old Poem #88:
Dylan Thomas’s Light breaks where no sun shines
Copyright © by Dan Schneider,
4/3/04
Dylan Thomas
is doubtlessly 1 of the most overrated poets of all time. Don’t get me wrong,
he wrote a handful of arguably great poems. But, ala T.S. Eliot, that’s it-
the bulk of the rest of his poetry ranges from the mediocre down to the bad.
His poems do have excellent music, especially when read aloud. But, as I showed
in my classic essay comparing his noted villanelle Do Not Go
Gentle Into That Good Night to my wife’s far superior Moth
Lost In A Laboratory villanelle, his reputation far outstrips his poetic accomplishment. This
is mainly due to 2 things- his having written some of his best poems about WW2,
thus ensuring his granting down to future generations of Brits, & his own
archetypal life as a poet-in-waste & drunkard. Similarly, the equally
overrated Arthur Rimbaud holds a similar spot in the French poetic pantheon.
A quick
glance of the many 100s of online bios of DT confirm the very why of why he’s
so feted for so little:
Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914, as a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. This shyness exhibited itself in early fantasies of an Arthurian nature. Later, in his teens, he read D. H. Lawrence's poetry, & reveled in the vivid natural world of DHL’s poems. He excelled in English, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. He was already an alcoholic. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published when he was twenty, and he was widely regaled as a great new poetic voice. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.
To state that the man was a walking cliché is beside the point. More
relevant is that he never sought to perfect many intriguing, but disappointing
poems. An example is this noted poem:
The force that through the green fuse
drives the flower
The
force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The force that drives the water through the rocks
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
The music is sublime, but what is said is not. The raft of clichés (underlined) makes 1 wonder just how long DT spent in revision- because they are so obvious & so obviously clichés that would go in a melancholy poem as this. Also, while the 1st lines act as de fact titles it’s always curious how DT’s poems suffer from any play off of main ideas- his poems are generally 1-dimensional riffs pro or con something. Perhaps his most famous poem, this 1 does NOT suffer from the clichés & monodimensionality of the prior poem. Also look how the title sets up the theme of negation to be played with & negated in the body of the poem:
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Never
until the mankind making
And I must enter again the round
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
DT skillfully
grazes death & elegy clichés, but invigorates them with subtle twists- the majesty
of the child’s death, or the shadow of a sound- not merely death &
shadows. The last line is also a triumphant declaration. It’s excellence
derives from the fact that it can be read as both an acceptance of death, &
a rejection of it. In short, it involves the reader.
Not so the
titular poem:
Light breaks where no sun shines
Light
breaks where no sun shines;
A candle in the thighs
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
Night in the sockets rounds,
Light breaks on secret lots,
The poem gets better & more unique as it goes on. Could DT have deliberately dropped so many clichés to show the speaker’s maturation? I doubt he was that self-aware. More likely he just ran out of handy clichés for a poem on aging. Let’s snip what needs snipping, & condense this quite a bit. I’ll retain the form & music as best I can:
Light breaks where no sun shines
Things
of light behind the eyes;
Night in the sockets rounds,
Light breaks on secret lots,
A simple condensation of the 1st 3 stanzas into 1 yields some terrific result. The poem is wiped clean of clichés, the light takes a greater role in the poem & the speaker’s life & awareness, + we get a more utile title. Instead of the 1st line being a being a mere recapitulation of it, the title acts as an agent of declaration for the unique imagery of the poem. The title, being a cliché in phrasing, nonetheless actually states the coming of the new- both the poem’s use of language, & its views on aging. Had DT ever put down the damned bottle he may have been the 1 to have written this poem.
Final Score: (1-100):
Dylan Thomas’s Light breaks where no sun shines:
70
TOP’s Light breaks where no sun shines: 95
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