The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Woo... Brief Chronology

POEMS

18 Poems
--I see the boys of summer
--When once the twilight locks
--A process in the weather of the heart
--Before I knocked
--The force that through the green fuse
--My hero bares his nerves
--Where once the waters of your face
--If I were tickled by the rub of love
--Our eunuch dreams
--Especially when the October wind
--When, like a running grave
--From love's first fever
--In the beginning
--Light breaks where no sun shines
--I fellowed sleep
--I dreamed my genesis
--My world is pyramid
--All all and all

Twenty-Five Poems
--I, in my intricate image
--This bread I break
--Incarnate devil
--Today, this insect
--The seed-at-zero
--Shall gods be said
--Here in this spring
--Do you not father me
--Out of the sighs
--Hold hard, these ancient minutes
--Was there a time
--Now
--Why east wind chills
--A grief ago
--How soon the servant sun
--Ears in the turrets hear
--Foster the light
--The hand that signed the paper
--Should lanterns shine
--I have longed to move away
--Find meat on bones
--Grief thief of time
--And death shall have no dominion
--Then was my neophyte
--Altarwise by owl-light

The Map of Love
--Because the pleasure-bird whistles
--I make this in a warring absence
--When all my five and country senses
--We lying by seasand
--It is the sinners' dust-tongued bell
--O make me a mask
--The spire cranes
--After the funeral
--Once it was the colour of saying
--Not from this anger
--How shall my animal
--The tombstone told
--On no work of words
--A saint about to fall
--If my head hurt a hair's foot
--Twenty-four years

Deaths and Entrances
--The conversation of prayers
--A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
--Poem in October
--This side of the truth
--To Others than You
--Love in the Asylum
--Unluckily for a death
--The hunchback in the park
--Into her lying down head
--Paper and sticks
--Deaths and Entrances
--A Winter's Tale
--On a Wedding Anniversary
--There was a saviour
--On the Marriage of a Virgin
--In my craft or sullen art
--Ceremony After a Fire Raid
--Once below a time
--When I woke
--Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred
--Lie still, sleep becalmed
--Vision and Prayer
--Ballad of the Long-legged Bait
--Holy Spring
--Fern Hill

In Country Sleep
--In Country Sleep
--Over Sir John's hill
--Poem on his Birthday
--Do not go gentle into that good night
--Lament
--In the White Giant's Thigh

STORIES

--After the Fair
--The Tree
--The Dress
--The Visitor
--The Vest

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
--The Peaches
--A Visit to Grandpa's
--Patricia, Edith, and Arnold
--The Fight
--Extraordinary Little Cough
--Just Like Little Dogs
--Where Tawe Flows
--Who Do You Wish Was With Us?
--Old Garbo
--One Warm Saturday

--The Followers
--A Story

BROADCASTS

--Memories of Christmas
--Holiday Memory
--The Festival Exhibition
--A Visit to America
--Return Journey

--Under Milk Wood

What is one to make of the book-as-artifact?

 

Since it is usually discussed regarding the superiority/eventual triumph of eBooks, I try to keep to practical considerations and try to avoid getting too sentimental about the book as an object, but the truth is I love books almost as much as I love reading. When I worked at a used book shop I enjoyed flipping through the volumes and finding boarding passes, pictures, postcards, and ephemera from any number of locations and events.

I write my names in the back of all my books and I enjoy the thought of the book telling a story. There is the copy of The Snow Leopard I was given by an ex-girlfriend who was not nearly as impressed as I was, a paperback Vampires in The Lemon Grove that I leant to a friend before I finished it and now resides somewhere in her apartment, or the copy of NW that had come damaged and that I appropriated even with the front cover torn off. Though I joke around about people disrespecting books, I love to find old dog ears and underlined passages—it is really best if you keep this to your own books and spare those of the school or library.

 

I was recently enjoying a day free of commitment and went for a stroll through Center City. I headed toward a place I had heard of during the Bloomsday celebrations. The Rosenbach Museum and Library, a modest place tucked among the row houses near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, is the home to Joyce’s manuscript for Ulysses as well as a first edition copy. That is what brought me. They had an exhibit held over from Bloomsday about the Shakespearean influences on Joyce. That is the kind of thing I go for. Now you know why I have a blog on books.

 

The Rosenbach isn’t very large, there are three exhibit rooms, but their collection definitely makes it a cool stop. They have Maurice Sendak’s papers as well as a mural he painted in a friend’s home in one exhibit and the delightfully morbid collection of early American children’s books in another. The tours are the most interesting thing though. The free tours take you through the brothers’ house, not particularly compelling but certainly nice, then you get to the Library. Here are Joyce’s manuscript pages on display, here are Joseph Conrad’s papers, a first English edition of Don Quixote, John Ruskin, letters of Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas’s manuscript for Under Milk Wood, and more. There are some 400,000 volumes in all.

 

Marianne Moore’s papers are there too, also her living room. The whole room. Recreated and arranged just as it was in her East Village Apartment.

 

I went on a second tour. The hands-on tour gets you access to some of these materials in a guided presentation by the librarian. I hopped on to the hands-on tour of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The librarian talks about interesting features about the story behind the story. Bram Stoker’s terrible handwriting for instance, little drawings, reading notes from his research—mercifully typed.

 

There is something particularly appealing to writers in this experience. It brings things closer to life. Even biographies and apocryphal stories have plots, they are selling you a story, but the notes, the manuscripts, they are just chaotic enough to be real. Stoker was as methodical as anyone in his research, but then there are notes with a shaky outline of a castle, a phrase or two, something about a character that never makes the story, something about three characters that kind of merge into one in the final draft.

 

I think there is still something to be taken by passing a day considering art and books. It has an effect on us that is more than just clicking through images, it is a communal experience. The small museums especially are great for talking with intelligent, interested people. It was a day outside of the apartment, outside of myself.

 

A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town.

 

bookshelves: play-dramatisation, poetry, published-1954, britain-wales, teh-brillianz

 

Must finish listening to the Richard Burton reading of this...

A smorgasbord of language. I am still blown away every time I read that first measured sentence, about the woodland ‘limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.

If you only knew Dylan Thomas from his short poems (as I did before I read this) then prepare for a very pleasant shock. The wonderful rhythm of the lines here, the extraordinary creativity of compound words and unexpected similes, all sustained over a considerable distance, is something quite distinctive and entirely absorbing. And surprisingly funny at times: there is a lot of warm, affectionate interplay between the different characters of this sleepy Welsh town, rivalries, fantasies, frustrations, sexual liaisons real and imagined, boredom, dreams – everything you'd expect from small-town life is here.

But it's the poetic language that makes me really love it. The ‘sunhoneyed cobbles’, the ‘dumb goose-hiss of the wives’, Gossamer Benyon who is ‘spoonstirred and quivering’ and who ‘high-heels out of school’ – milk churns that stand ‘like short, silver policemen’, and lovers in ‘the grassgreen gooseberried double bed of the wood’ – it's all described as though in the throes of some ecstatic vision, which I suppose is what good poetry should be like.

I don't want to overstate my case too much, but go here and listen to Richard Burton reading the opening section, and if you're not rolling on the floor in delight after about thirty seconds, then you probably have no soul.