Green Age

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas, high bard of Wales, was struck down on 9 November 1953 by drink and dissolution, his voice still thundering out the silences between his inimitable vowels. Of all the poets I heard in my youth, it was he who informed my teenage angst the most. The first encounters I had with him were at the Leys School, Cambridge, where I spent a short but very fruitful period of my education; the first poem of his that I met was The Hand That Signed The Paper. It begins like this:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

And it becomes more eloquent as it sinks into the contemplative stillness of its final quatrain. In many of his poems, one finds a structure which begins with birth foreshadowing death, and a body of the tension which must then follow, with an ending which is final yet bittersweet, because it is hard to tell if he opens a window for hope or closes a door to eternity.

The most wonderful experience is to hear the poet - public-domain recordings of his radio broadcasts of Under Milk Wood still can be found. From these, you can imagine him, all Brythonic power and sadness, reading out immortality as an alchemist might measure out tincture of orpiment.

What made me remember Dylan Thomas? A combination of a few very odd factors, really. Students telling me they find the study of literature exasperating, Arsenal beating PSV Eindhoven 1-0 at Highbury in north London, September and a cold grey rain - these came together, blended like a rare perfume which recalls the faint presence of someone deeply loved and gone.

I will never forget two of his poems, etched in my mind. They are Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and And Death Shall Have No Dominion. I have long dedicated them to the memory of those I have known who are only with me in that memory. I shall quote only one verse of each.

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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (last verse)

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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And Death Shall Have No Dominion (first verse)

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

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Amen. Thank you, Master Dylan.