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
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm. 

  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
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

  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;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

  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;
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones,
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkled in the stars,
Bright as a fig,
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

  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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