Yet Laugharne provided the perfect working environment for Dylan. As he wrote in an essay: A poet must have a home to go back to in the provinces whenever he breaks down. The Boat House at Laugharne, it was said, represented for him the last refuge of life and sanity in a nightmare world. Here, in what he called, the romantic, dirty summerhouse, he wrote some of his most memorable poems.

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The main attractions at Laugharne, apart from the sea, were two public houses: The Cross House Inn and Brown's Hotel, where Dylan satisfied his taste for alcohol and his equally important need to entertain, to hold forth upon any subject that appealed to his fertile imagination. He was well known in the tap room at Brown's Hotel. There may still be people at Laugharne who can boast that they heard a discourse by Britain's last romantic poet.

Every morning, in the isolation of his summerhouse (affectionately called the shack), Dylan worked at his poems, striving for an elusive perfection. He would make as many as 500 alterations in a single poem, copying out the entire poem after each alteration, so that he could see his word sculpture taking shape before his eyes. He was a craftsman par excellence. Few poets have labored so mightily or sacrificed so much for their work–that sullen art, as he called it. Self-indulgence and sacrifice: those contradictory terms describe him accurately, for no one ever drank harder or worked harder than he did.

There is a photograph of Dylan, taken at Laugharne during his most intensive period of work, which has a deeply disturbing and pathetic aspect. It is the picture of a sacrificial victim and the victim knows it. The clown and bar-room entertainer wears a half-smile but this does nothing to conceal the tragedy of his pose.

His work may appear to be obscure but not when one understands the ambivalence of his thought. He aimed at conflict and contradiction in his poems, choosing not only words capable of opposite interpretations but also subjects that aroused conflicting emotions. His poem In the White Giant's Thigh is an example. It relates to the Neolithic Age Man carved into a chalk hillside on England's

South Downs. The giant figure, located at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, just north of Dorchester, is explicitly sexual. Dylan found humor in the fact that the feet of this ancient artifact, probably used in fertility rites, actually touch the walls of the Christian abbey there, mocking the sanctity and sexual abstinence of the monks.

Many Americans feel a deep personal interest in Dylan. He made grueling lecture tours in the States, like Charles Dickens before him–and, as with Dickens, they proved fatal. Drink and adulation were put before Dylan in vast quantities and he thrived on both. His grotesque figure–badly dressed and obese–as well as his wonderfully middle-class, literary English voice exerted a fascination over Americans that was almost without precedent.

The end came after a binge of almost monumental proportions. He said: I've had 18 straight whiskies, I think that's the record. His last words were: After 39 years this is all I've done. He lay in an alcohol-induce coma for a week before he died, at age 39, in New York.

Dylan lies buried in the cemetery at St. Martin's Church, Laugharne. Caitlin had the satisfaction of knowing that she helped a remarkable poet create his own view of life and of nature in the workroom overlooking the sea that he loved so much.

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