Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > [(The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas)] [ By (author) Dylan Thomas, Edited by John Goodby ] [October, 2014] > Status Update

But when the stars, assuming shape,
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
He drowned his father’s magics in a dream.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half it’s light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.

A process in the eye forewarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the central root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Once in the wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunge in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grapes joy.

The brains of death undid the knot
Before the blood and flame were twined
In love’s last collar.

Night in the sockets round,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;

[letter] I realise that it is impossible for me to raise myself to the altitude of the stars, and that i am forced, therefore, to bring down the stars to my own level and to incorporate them into my own physical universe.

When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,