From Poetry (December 1952). It was signed by the pseudonym Winterset Rothberg.
In Country Sleep and Other Poems, by Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions.
HAS THE RING-TAILED ROARER begun to snore? The limp spirit of a Peruvian prince taken over his wild psyche? Has he shoved down the throttle only to find a ramshackle model of patch-work fancies fluttering to a short cough? What time’s the train of his true spirit due? To what wonders are we now exposed?
I say: The swish of his tail’s wakened another wind. The times he has stood in the white presence, the muse blowing through him with the true fury! Behold him now, a snout in the sun, father and mother imploring! Long may he wallow.
But ah, where the light is, strange forms of life gather; and what creeps come after him from the cracks, their hard eyes glittering, not lovely like mice, but beetles and toads even God would like to forget: those sea-weevils winding their slimy fingers about him, carrying out his laundry and then hiding it,—May the muse spit in their ears!—those loathly wearers of other men’s clothing, those ghleuphs, ouphs, oscars, lewd louies; yahoos and vultures hovering over dead and live horses; hyenas of sensibility; serpentine swallowers of their own slimy tails; dingle-dangle dilly-boys; anglo-saxon apostles of refinement; aging coy sibylline coeds; makers of tiny surprises; tweed-coated cliché-masters; grave senatorial language-swindlers; freak monsters with three frankfurters for toes; sleazy flea-bitten minor mephistoes, playing with the Idea of Good and Evil,—May he blow them all away with a single breath! And I give them another curse: May they be condemned forever to a perpetual reading of their own works.
What he wants is another Love: the far Son in his eye, not a thick Sunday of white thighs. So he babbles and laughs out of a shrewd mouth, the mournful daughters with him spilling the seed of his soul, praying lovers together in a wordy original song. Holy supposes come out of his mouth and nose. He’s bald where it suits the sun; a homemade halo he has in a sour country where at least they love a bard. And sing! O the chances he takes with the womanly words as we all wish and cry Never enough of this. Suppose he does beat the last breath from a lively meaning, he never escapes from himself without giving us more than we’d ever dare ask. Was it him I saw step from a cloud, alone as a lark, singing the things we can never know, taking a bird’s grace and the breath from us, speaking and thinking with his rude flesh, not a man slowed to a walk,—as if pigs could sing and as God’s spy he weeps for us all? Need such a Promethean keeper of fire and secrets look to his meanings, learned and tactful as Wystan? Should we love what we have and not wish for another thing? Here’s a great master of sweating who runs and rumbles in and out of his own belly, no staid husband of the dry sad disciplines.
This rare heedless fornicator of language speaks with the voice of angels and ravens, casting us back where the sea leaps and the strudding witch walks by a deep well. May he live forever in those black-and-white dreams, a centaur of something more than he knows, while the white maidens peep from behind the hedges and all the juttiest ends begin talking at once. In a light time the tempter’s wrong,—flesh from another dream, ghost on a thorn or high stone, a wonder a wave out far; a full-blown bladder in love, close to shining, the father and son of a smile.
But I say: In him God is still poor.
Wherefore, mother of fair love and the speckled hen, attend him in this hour. Angel of true serenity, nestle in his nerves. May this motion remind him of rest. His help is still in him, more than a trance of voice or skin. In sleep, in country sleep, he comes to believe.