Britain’s Last Romantic Poet: Dylan Thomas

British Heritage  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Even before Dylan was born, future contradictions cast their shadow. His father, David John Thomas, was totally Anglicized and a teacher of English literature at Swansea Grammar School. He was atheistic in the extreme, a lifelong opponent of religion, whether pagan or Christian, who was always ‘railing against God. His angry rejection took the form of continual cursing against the damp Welsh weather. Staring at the rain streaming down the windows of the family house in Swansea, he would shout, It’s raining, blast Him!

Dylan’s mother, on the other hand, was a staunch Christian chapel-goer. Her road to salvation was narrow and Non-Conformist but undeviating. She imposed some of her religious influence on her gifted son. Florence Thomas gave Dylan his totally unformulated love of God, in complete contrast to his father’s explicit atheism. This must have led to great turbulence within the marriage, and it is easy to understand why Dylan’s poetry and his personality were so ambivalent.

Religion figures largely in his work, but it would be a mistake to assume that his God is the merciful being of the New Testament, or even the stern desert deity of the Old. In his writings we may detect the dark presence of primeval gods; the pagan gods of the Celts who were cruel, violent, and savage in their retribution. Certainly, there is little promise of future salvation in his work. Death is inimical, inevitable. He wrote, in an introduction to one of his books of verse, that his poems were written to the glory of God–but we must never visualize his God as the one with which we are familiar.

The small boy who later became the most famous poet of Wales was the product of two directly opposed natures; two directly opposed cultures. Despite early maternal guidance, Dylan was influenced most strongly by his irascible father, who refused to have Welsh even spoken in the house. David John Thomas was steeped in the diverse and poetic language of Shakespeare, which he often recited to his small son. These sonorous recitations undoubtedly had a lasting effect on Dylan. Long before he began writing, he fell in love with words–powerful, vigorous, and beautiful in their manifold meanings.

Dylan Thomas was born on 27th October under the zodiacal sign of Scorpio. Certainly, he seems to have had many Scorpio characteristics–passion, lust, violence, insight, and profundity. The dark nature of Scorpio might be said to have found a natural home in Dylan.

One must also take into account influences outside the home in an effort to understand this most interesting of writers. As Andrew Sinclair tells us in his book Dylan Thomas: Poet of His People:

The Welsh were in fear of their dark desires, their natural bawdiness, of their love of drink and chat and copulation [yet] after Wesley, seem to have lept first into a hell-fire puritanism and then a suffocating respectability that was the condition of . . . Swansea society, in which Dylan was born, and from which he fled, against which he rebelled, out of which he could never escape.

This perceptive comment sums up the archetypal Welshman and it sums up the complex character of Dylan Thomas. Certainly the drunkenness that is said to be a perennial weakness of the Celts was a fatal flaw in his character. The Celtic liking for a drink was even remarked upon by the Romans (themselves no mean tipplers) and hard drinking was prevalent among the miners of the South Wales valleys, near which Dylan grew up.

From the beginning, there was not much doubt about Dylan’s future career. His father’s constant efforts to involve Dylan in English literature, at the highest level, were bound to bear fruit. The only subject in which Dylan was interested, and indeed the only one at which he excelled, was English.

This was despite the fact that both his given names were Welsh. Dylan came from the Mabinogion, a collection of old Welsh myths. His second name, Marlais, was the name of a river, but Dylan, always eager to self-dramatize, said it meant prince of darkness. Be that as it may, both Dylan and Marlais were pre-Christian names. According to Andrew Sinclair: Both had to do with the mystery of water, the big seas and the rivers of dreams that were to haunt Dylan’s imaginings.

Tags: British Heritage, Historical Figures, Literature

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.