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Collected Poems

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 8,661 ratings · 167 reviews

Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems (1934-1952) gambol and frisk across the tongue and imagination like those of few other poets. His finely crafted phrases, his musicality and his lilting language are nicely captured by the first two stanzas of his poem, 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...more

Paperback, 203 pages

Published March 1st 1971 by New Directions Publishing Corporation (first published 1952)

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Nov 27, 2012 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: young ardent romantics

Shelves: poetry-is-language-on-drugs

I work in an office where we get a zillion phone calls from all over the world. The people who call us are doctors or clinicians who have a problem with one of the many clinical trials we manage. About half of the time the callers have broken English, and in a few cases they have no English so we get a translator by calling a translation service and conferencing them into the call. This one particular evening a female co-worker - we'll call her Sarah because it was Sarah - got this call from a g...more

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May 16, 2009 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Graffiti Artists Everywhere

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Grandpa Busch, Mum

Shelves: poetry, celts

I know I'm not supposed to find graffiti amusing, because then the barbarians are at the gates or have already won or the barn door is still open or something, but there's an enterprising graffiti person (graffiter?) in my neighborhood who likes to scrawl lines of poetry on the privacy fences, billboards and garage doors. One of my best mornings involves rolling down the alley and seeing “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” in letters that started big and got smaller all ove...more I know I'm not supposed to find graffiti amusing, because then the barbarians are at the gates or have already won or the barn door is still open or something, but there's an enterprising graffiti person (graffiter?) in my neighborhood who likes to scrawl lines of poetry on the privacy fences, billboards and garage doors. One of my best mornings involves rolling down the alley and seeing “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” in letters that started big and got smaller all over my neighbor's back fence. Later, I saw my neighbor scrubbing it off looking all bitter. I gave him my condolences and complained about the times I've had to paint over a bunch of stupid, illiterate gang graffiti on my garage doors, but I was thinking, “You lucky bastard. I would leave this up until the city cited me, and then I'd consider freaking out and fighting the Man and taking it to City Hall.”

I am not the graffiti person. Seriously.

Man, though. What a thing to see. What power and glory in those words. Dylan's lyrics buzzed in my brain for the rest of the day, like a song without a tune. (They're not called lyrics for nothing, what, hey?) I don't have many poems committed entirely to memory, just waiting on the tongue for breath to give them life, but Thomas' poems? There's a few of them in there: Fern Hill, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. They're solid; they have weight. They coil around your hippocampus and squeeze out tears and sweat and love and nostalgia and disappointment, like that earwig thing from the Wrath of Khan.

Once, I had to write paper on “A Refusal” and I made a complete mess of it, in a spectacular manner. I ranted on, at length, about the interplay between Old and New Testament metaphors for death and rebirth, how Thomas ties a pagan notion of rebirth with a Christian idea of everlasting life. We die, become wormfood, seeds sprout in the dirt, we live forever, ah, the paradox. (This shows up again in “After the Funeral”: stuffed fox, the seeds of the fern on the window sill.) My professor thought, kindly, that I was full of crap, and let me rewrite the paper towards a more conventional vein.

I still think I'm right though, that I'm on to something with Thomas. Poets like Yeats, okay, the poet who is Yeats, has this theory about the world that he acts out in his great poems: the gyre of history, a millennial sense of time that cycles the birth and death of civilizations as they move from austerity to decadence and back again. Yeats has an idea, a framework, and while not everything fits exactly, his poems tend to bend to that gravity. (While not as bad as Wordsworth with the the revisions, Yeats did spend a good deal of time later in life revising his earlier work to make it jibe, especially the Michael Robarts stuff. Michael Robarts is Yeats' Richard Bachman, btw.)

Dylan Thomas doesn't have an idea, he has words. He takes them all, the stuff that got into his brain, the long, droning hours in a Welsh congregation, the hymns and daily conversations, the petty ruralisms and transcendent naturalism and rolls them into a ball of language and beauty that will sear your brain. The force behind his language is mimetic, not intellectual. He creates using the part of the mind that remember the childhood rhyme, but halfway. He fills in the rest with whatever's at hand.

Although his villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is the most well known of that specific kind of poem, (can you name another? I didn't think so) Dylan's not necessarily a formalist. Some of his best work dips into and out of form, like "In my Craft or Sullen Art". I remember once sitting with a copy of that poem trying to figure out wtf? with the rhyme scheme. I'd written the pattern out in the margins, like a n00b: abcdebdecca abcdeecca. They're not matching stanzas. Why the change from one set of lines to another? He's no Dickinson, so what's with the imperfect rhyme on "psalms" in the second verse? Ah, whatever, you have your own freshman English paper to write. Get to it and get off the Internet, punk.

The thing that makes it so beautiful is the reactive humanity. Thomas was, by some accounts, a bastard. He and his wife left their daughter alone in their apartment at night during the Blitz as they went out drinking. I suppose there's a fatalism to the V2s screaming across the sky, but still. His last words were, apocryphally, “I've had 27, and I think that's a record” as he fell off the stool in the White Horse Inn in the Village. He was referring to whiskeys, of course. A bastard, but a human bastard, singing songs about raging against the dying of the light while he danced in the dark, and the light, and the half-light, to mix my poetic references. (Can you spot the Andrew Marvell for bonus points?)

The graffiti person has been tending towards Blake recently. Right now, on the corner of Lake and Lyndale, you can see “Tyger, tyger, burning bright...” scrawled out over a billboard. The best part is that he (or she) has misspelled other words from the poem. I think this is hysterically funny and it makes the damn “LK5” I had to scrub off the garage look prosaic and lame in comparison.
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Jul 15, 2012 Charles Levenstein rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: live-poetry-shelf

Magnificent.

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Feb 12, 2008 matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetic-rapture, top-shelf, worldly-lit, favorites

Just a master of sheer language.

His poetry works on your inner consciousness, you feel it and hear it before you think it.

Untangling his syntax and his associations makes for some interesting reading all its own.

His name meant "wave", as in the ocean, in Welsh.

He said his three biggest influences were Yeats (I think), The Bible, and Freud.

Imagine this simmering stew, this cauldron if you will, and you've got yourself something rich, evocative, stormy, and powerful.

It's the goshdarn lifeforce in...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Robert Jacoby rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-favorites

This slim volume has a special place on my shelf. Every so often I take it out and treat myself (and I do mean treat myself) to Dylan Thomas's gift to the world: his poetry. Quite simply, I think he is the greatest poet to have ever written in the English language. No poet I have read comes close to what Thomas achieves here in this small volume. (If someone can share with me some poet who does, please send me the information.)

And why does Thomas write? From Dylan Thomas's introduction to this v...more This slim volume has a special place on my shelf. Every so often I take it out and treat myself (and I do mean treat myself) to Dylan Thomas's gift to the world: his poetry. Quite simply, I think he is the greatest poet to have ever written in the English language. No poet I have read comes close to what Thomas achieves here in this small volume. (If someone can share with me some poet who does, please send me the information.)

And why does Thomas write? From Dylan Thomas's introduction to this volume:

"I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: "I'd be a damn' fool if I didn't!" These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't."

A very human introduction to the most inventive and powerful collection of poetry ever written in the English language.

I find that I can enjoy his language only a little bit at a time; it is too much to bear. I can usually read only a few pages in one sitting. I'll dip into this volume, at any poem, and read, chewing his words. Lingering when it feels right, going through when that feels right. Because to me that's how Thomas's writing should be enjoyed. Like eating words. I have found that there is no need to try to "understand" his poems in the usual way you might try to understand a poem. A Dylan Thomas poem is word-food. It is meant to be felt. It is meant to be savored. Savor how he chooses words, how he places words together, and how he uses language as no other poet has.

Another thing I enjoy about this volume is that Thomas chose only these poems, out of ALL of his poems, to be his collected work. As the back cover states: "This edition of Dylan Thomas's poetry contains all of the poems which he himself wished to preserve." So here you have THE collection of the finest English-language poetry, selected by the master himself.

Detractors from his style (especially other writers) I think are jealous of Thomas's talent and genius. And I don't throw around that word "genius" lightly. If you are a writer (a novelist, a poet, or just plain like the English language), you owe it to yourself to buy a copy of this volume and keep it on hand to remind yourself of what language is capable of doing. Ultimately, to lift yourself out of yourself, to help you see other, higher worlds. To see the glories of love and Man and God.

This language does that.(less)

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Jun 15, 2012 Chris rated it 2 of 5 stars

I tried to like it. God knows how hard I tried. The first half of the book was much more comprehensible than the last. The poems I did understand were absolutely amazing, which makes me think I'm just missing out on the poems I can't understand. Much of his stuff really seems like a word game to him. He toys with the meanings and sounds of words, actually calling himself in a letter to a friend "a freak user of words." He feathers out a word and seizes a single strand of meaning from our million...more

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Jan 04, 2012 Christina Marie Rau rated it 3 of 5 stars

Dylan Thomas is the unhappiest poet I've ever read. I've read poems about rape and incest that didn't make me feel this horrible.

"Do Not Go Gentle" is usually the way young people find Thomas, or at least people of my generation who walked around quoting the hot guy from the Michelle Pfeiffer flick, Dangerous Minds: "You've got to RAGE against the DYING of the LIGHT!" That dude dies because he doesn't knock on a door. Michelle Pfeiffer becomes the apple of the unruly students' collective eye. C...more Dylan Thomas is the unhappiest poet I've ever read. I've read poems about rape and incest that didn't make me feel this horrible.

"Do Not Go Gentle" is usually the way young people find Thomas, or at least people of my generation who walked around quoting the hot guy from the Michelle Pfeiffer flick, Dangerous Minds: "You've got to RAGE against the DYING of the LIGHT!" That dude dies because he doesn't knock on a door. Michelle Pfeiffer becomes the apple of the unruly students' collective eye. Coolio goes on to sue Weird Al Yankovic for satirzing "Gangsta's Paradise" because he (allegedly) never gave Weird Al permission to use the song because the song was too important to be satirized. Years later, Hilary Swank films Freedom Writers, a complete rip-off of Dangerous Minds; instead of reading, they write. In any case, "Do Not Go Gentle" is the featured poem in the Dylan-Dylan contest in the movie that asks the students to find a poem by Dylan Thomas that conveys the same message as a Bob Dylan song, like "Mr. Tambourine Man."

"Do Not Go Gentle" is a plea to a father to fight against death. Though death is involved, it's not as gloomy. I thought that an entire collection of raging against death could not be so gloomy.

I wanted to slit my wrists with the pages of the book by the time I was halfway into it. Alas, it was an old book, and the pages were not crisp enough. So I read on, all about death, dark, death, melancholy, aching, longing, death, more death, dreariness, darkness, death.

Some bright sides:

"If I Were Tickled By The Rub Of Love" is the only playful poem I found. It made me not want to die so much.

"When, Like A Running Grave" is not so gloomy, yet it uses Cadaver more than any other poem I've ever seen.

"A Grief Ago," "Alterwise By Owl-Light," "The Tombstone Told When She Died," "Deaths and Entrances," and "Once Below A Time" are all thoughtful, not gloomy for gloom's sake, and use language skillfully. "This Side Of Truth" also offers a different take on death, questioning what truth is, what life is, and what death is if we don't know the answers to the first two questions. He also has a set of concrete poems in all different shapes, some like a diamond, others like an hourglass, which most likely signifies time is running out.

So if you find yourself in a moment of euphoria and you need to come down, pick up Dylan Thomas's collected poems. (less)

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Dec 05, 2011 Mason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Fiction, Updike once said, should be no more clearer than life. Thomas takes a similar approach to verse—each poem in this collection is wildly contradictory and ripe with paradoxical complexity. His best poems pure dark beauty; almost sensually ecstatic even in the face of the darkest sorrows, they give our tremors and terrors wings, and dare us to follow them into the deepest secrets of life itself. To read a Thomas poem is to see common experience frozen in the glowing amber of language; who...more

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Mar 31, 2010 Esther rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, favorites

I don't pretend to understand a lot of his work, but I love it. Anyone who can write things like -
-"they shall have stars at elbow and foot"
-"joy has moved within the inmost marrow of my heart bone"
-"at last the soul from its foul mousehole slunk pouting out"
-"Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart push in their tides" or
-"The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind."
not to mention his wonderful trick of turning nouns into verbs, and his Beowulf-like kennings - no one can write like...more

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Nov 30, 2009 Candace rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

When I was in my teens, I loved music of the Romantic period -- Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and such. I thrilled to the nocturnes of Chopin, that I would play alone in my room, by candlelight. I even, later on and very briefly, flirted with a few overbearing composers like Wagner. Yes, it was the lusty, passionate music I identified with. I disdained Baroque and early Classical music, which I insulted as "chamber pot pieces."

And my tastes in poetry, then ran to Dylan Thomas, and Carl Sandberg, a...more

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Jan 10, 2012 Mark Soone rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: classic, poetry

I used to write and read poetry in my younger days, and have had a desire to reconnect with that part of me during this year. Dylan Thomas has long been one of my favorites, and I thought I would begin this year with him.

Of course most people are familiar with "Do not go gentle into that good night" (If you are not, make it must read!!!!), and rightfully so. it is one of the most famous poems of all time and easily sits inside of my top 10 (Which might be filled with more Poe than most others)....more

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Jan 12, 2008 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

What can I say? Still my all-time favorite. Maddeningly dense and self-absorbed in places, but always a master of language and sound. The closer you look, the more you see just how carefully constructed the poems are, and how he pulls off complicated structures with disarming ease. Just hearing the poems out loud is a transcendent experience, and many of the best are available online in his voice.

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Oct 06, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not g...more

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Sep 03, 2007 R.Joseph rated it 5 of 5 stars

This collection has the great poems “Fern Hill” and “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines”. This collection also holds one of my personal favorite poems of all times, the simple yet majestic “I Have Longed To Move Away”. This book is a great introduction to Thomas’s work.

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Dec 05, 2007 Chrissie Willicombe rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Studied these poems at university and am in awe at Dylan's genius. I can't begin to claim I understand all of the poems in this work, but all of the ones I have looked at in depth are quite amazing as pieces of English that touch a nerve and stir your soul.

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Sep 27, 2007 Shannon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My favorites are IF I WERE TICKLED BY THE RUB OF LOVE & 146: POEM IN OCTOBER. I declare a favorite and then find another equally or surpassingly exquisite. Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas both do this to me! Damn, I love my Dylans!

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Sep 25, 2011 Julia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

i read this at camp and i'm pretty sure i only rarely understood what thomas was even saying, possibly because i was using the wrong reading method for a poetry collection. my poetry teacher at camp said she never reads a book of poetry straight through, she flips to random pages and reads the poems in random order. i feel that this kind of reading method should be the case for dylan thomas.
but even if you're not quite sure what dylan thomas is saying you can still appreciate the sounds and ima...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Libby rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

Well, that took all summer.

I have not read many collections of poetry in their entirety, and while I liked many of Thomas' poems, I found most of them hard to read and impossible to read quickly. While I often had trouble keeping the thread of an entire poem or any story the poem was telling untangled, I thought Thomas' imagery was really searing. A few recurrences I noticed were the sea (and I learned in the introduction that "Dylan" means "son of the sea"), evocative pictures of nature, and ve...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Nikki rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry, welsh-writing

What can one say about Dylan Thomas that has not been said? I suspect I start many of my reviews of classic books like that, but it's true -- I don't know where to start. Dylan Thomas' poetry is amazing, particularly the ones like 'Prologue', where the first line rhymes with the last, the second with the penultimate line, etc... and it's 102 lines long. I love the ones that work with content appropriate to the form, like the perennial example of his villanelle, 'Do not go gentle into that good n...more

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Apr 08, 2012 Toni rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british, poetry

И ти, мой татко, сам на висотата,

ругай, ридай с плача на яростта!

Не си отивай кротко в тъмнината!

Вий, вий срещу смъртта на светлината!
***
Влюбените ще умрат, но не и любовта.

И смъртта ще остане без царство.

Всичко ще се скърши в тях, но те ще устоят.

И смъртта ще остане без царство.

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Jan 01, 2012 Matt DeCostanza rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, modernism

I wrote this essay on Thomas's poetry for English class last year while we were covering modernist literature. It's pretty rough around the edges, but, I think, not without its charm. Hopefully you will find something for yourself in it.

Matt DeCostanza
Aiden O’Leary & Tom Ashby
American Literature
10 May 2011

Facade and Psychological Realism in the Work of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is a poet whose body of work is shot with obscurity to such an extent that it may seem like gibberish upon first gl...more

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Jun 29, 2011 Catherine added it · review of another edition

Always when he, in country heaven,
(Whom my heart hears),
Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,
Humble in all his planets,
And weeps on the abasing hill,

Then in the delight and grove of beasts and birds
And the canonized valley
Where the dewfall stars sing grazing still
And the angels whirr like pheasants
Through naves of leaves,

Light and his tears glide down together
(O hand in hand)
From the country eyes, salt and sun, star and woe
Down the cheek bones and whinnying
Downs into th...more

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Apr 30, 2011 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

My favorite is "Poem in October" but I love to read and reread them all. I guess it is the music that is alive in Thomas' poetry that makes it come alive for me. Here is an example:

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 honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns,
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail...more

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Apr 09, 2010 Pete daPixie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry, 20thc-cymru

I don't do poetry. However, this collection is what I would wish to take to my desert island. Richard Burton took this book to his grave. I prefer the desert island idea. 'Do not go gentle into that good night' must be one of my favourite poems. But there are so many here. Monumental stuff. The bard of the 20th century. I went on pilgrimage to Laugharne to visit his house.
The collection I keep like a bible. I can take this down from the shelf and just open it at any page. It's remarkable that mo...more

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Dec 11, 2008 Moody rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've been going back and forth on how to rate this one. I mean what can you do with two hundred poems. It's like this: Some cut deep, are dead on, all punch and polish; then there are those, maybe half, that are just words on paper, bounce off you like the local newscast. I've just realized...It seems I've forgotten my stupid notes. Which means that I'm left with my stupid memory.

I heard this discussion on NPR, someone said that poetry should be approached as music, where you gather its essence...more

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Apr 04, 2009 Erik Graff rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: English speakers

Recommended to Erik by: Richard A. Hyde

Shelves: poetry

Cannabis was so prevalent by the end of high school and beginning of college, my need to belong so great, that I was a regular user on weekends. Eventually, however, having explored the action of the drug to the extent of taking enough hashish as to be unable to move, absorbed in drifting over brilliant kaleidoscopically checkered fields, I recognized that I wasn't learning anything new. Marihuana made me silly, made me hungry, made me sleepy, left me with a hangover the next day, a mild stupor....more Cannabis was so prevalent by the end of high school and beginning of college, my need to belong so great, that I was a regular user on weekends. Eventually, however, having explored the action of the drug to the extent of taking enough hashish as to be unable to move, absorbed in drifting over brilliant kaleidoscopically checkered fields, I recognized that I wasn't learning anything new. Marihuana made me silly, made me hungry, made me sleepy, left me with a hangover the next day, a mild stupor. None of this was very important or very interesting. I pretty much stopped taking the stuff.

There were, however, exceptions. One, of course, was music. I could understand why my musician friends liked the stuff. The other was music's cousin, poetry.

Thank heavens I was forced to read so much poetry in the public schools! I have some acquaintance with the major English and American poets because of it--some too with the Germans in translation. But, come college, there was no time for such indulgence. Time constraints being what they were, the poems that were assigned in some classes were read quickly, silently and with little enjoyment. The music was lost, only the concepts were obtained, enough to get by in class. Weed, the great time-waster, provided a fortuitous exception to the rule, an exception that remains vivid to this day.

It was a weekend in the winter of sophomore year. I had gotten stoned, gotten introspective and had wandered off to a lounge on north campus, leaving my partying friends. Not being sleepy, not liking my typically self-critical thoughts, I had prudentially grabbed a book, Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. Normally, under the influence, reading wasn't easy. Printed words played like eels in shifting, shallow waters. Reading was slow going, distractive, the mind going hither and yon much like the eels. But I had never tried poetry before.

To focus, and because his style so obviously demands vocalization, I read the poems aloud, sittling there alone on an ugly couch in an ugly lounge. They were beautiful, impressive. I read a poem, got the concept, the pattern, and read it again, better, with understanding, with proper emphasis. I did my best with what I imagined to be a Welch accent, an imitation of his voice from "A Child's Christmas in Wales" which Father had listened to yearly. Certain of the critical faculties being shot, it sounded pretty good. It was quite enjoyable, baroquely enriching. I forgot to be depressed, staying up the night with the music of Dylan Thomas.(less)

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Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch

According to Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves referred to Thomas as "a Welsh demagogic masturbator."

In a story published in 1958 (The New Yorker,...more
updated Jan 23, 2009 11:58pm

Nov 01, 2008 Y. Jacintho Bloom rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have, for a long time, enjoyed listening to his recorded readings. Each time I listen to him, I know a lustier poet could not exist. His lust for experience—for the "Light (that) breaks where no sun shines" or the "rub of love"—comes across in the verve contained in his choice words and in the mechanism of his voice. Thomas owned the unusual gift of Being, within himself and within the pulse of other living things that would later become the inspiration for his work... His Work breathes life i...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Arwen56 added it · review of another edition

Shelves: poesia

On A Wedding Anniversary

The sky is torn across
This ragged anniversary of two
Who moved for three years in tune
Down the long walks of their vows.

Now their love lies a loss
And Love and his patients roar on a chain;
From every tune or crater
Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

Too late in the wrong rain
They come together whom their love parted:
The windows pour into their heart
And the doors burn in their brain.

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May 29, 2012 Bennievermeer added it

In the work of Wales' most famous writer, Dylan Thomas, the sea is never far off, whether it's the "dolphined sea" above or the "sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea" of 'Under Milk Wood'. In his poetry, written on "spindrift pages" ('In my craft or sullen art'), it's actually hard to find a poem that doesn't mention the sea at least once.

http://www.brnrd.net/blog/archive/200...

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Apr 21, 2009 J Preece rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

probably the first collection of poetry i ever read.

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begin,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.

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About Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet. He is regarded by many as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.

In addition to poetry, Thomas also wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times ostentatious, voice with a subtle Welsh lilt, became...more

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Quotes from Collected Poems

“Love drips & gathers,
but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores..."
-Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” — 8 people liked it

“On No Work of Words

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.” — 7 people liked it

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Collected Poems

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