As soon as I saw him I knew that the only thing to do was to love him. He was nervous, however, chain-smoking the whole time, and he complained of severe gout pains … ‘but I prefer the gout to the cure; I’m not going to let a doctor shove a bayonet into me twice a week’. His face and skin had the colour and swelling of too much drinking. He was a shorter man than I expected from his portraits, not more than five feet five or six, with a large protuberant behind and belly. His nose was a red bulb and his eyes were glazed.
IGOR STRAVINSKY: in ‘Conversations with Igor Stravinsky’, published in Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft (1962)
Despite his name and birthplace (Swansea), Dylan Thomas spoke no Welsh but could, apparently, by the age of three recite numerous Shakespearian soliloquies. Having left Swansea Grammar School, he eked out a living as a journalist, first in Swansea and then in London, where he started to broadcast and make films. He began writing poetry at school and published his first volume of verse, 18 Poems, in 1934. He acquired a reputation in London for exuberance and debauchery, married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937 and finally settled down with her in Wales. Deaths and Entrances (1946) contains some of his best-known poems, such as ‘Fern Hill’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London’, ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ and ‘Poem in October’ (‘It was my thirtieth year to heaven’). His Collected Poems 1934–1952 (1952) were prepared with his customary meticulous, obsessional care (many of them were reworkings of poems he had written much earlier) and enjoyed great success. Thomas visited Stravinsky in May 1953 to discuss the opera on which they wished to collaborate. ‘ “His” opera’, Stravinsky told Robert Craft, ‘was to be about the rediscovery of our planet following an atomic misadventure. There would be a re-creation of language, only the new one would have no abstractions; there would be only people, objects, and words. He promised to avoid poetic indulgences: “No conceits, I’ll knock them all on the head.” ’ His prose works include Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955) and A Prospect of the Sea (1955). His most popular work remains the radio drama Under Milk Wood, first broadcast by the BBC in 1954. Thomas was still working on the text when he died during his fourth lecture tour of the United States. Despite a recent dip in popularity among academics, Dylan Thomas – pace R. S. Thomas – is still considered, with Wilfred Owen, one of the two greatest Welsh poets of the twentieth century, whose work, characterized by an essential optimism, is conveyed by that Welsh quality of hwyl – high-flown rhetoric – that’s so noticeable in his own readings of his work.
Other settings of Dylan Thomas include the incidental music to Under Milk Wood (1954) by Thomas’s close friend Daniel Jones, who dedicated his Fourth Symphony (1954) to the memory of the poet. There is also a full-length opera, Do Not Go Gentle: The Last Days of Dylan and Caitlin, with music by Robert Manno and libretto by Gwynne Edwards. Manno also set ‘Fern Hill’ (1973) for baritone and chamber ensemble. David Diamond’s ‘I have longed to move away’ was composed in 1968, and there is an attractive cycle of songs by William Mathias, The Fields of Praise. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s When I Woke (2001) for baritone and orchestra was premiered in December 2004 in the Royal Festival Hall by Gerald Finley and Vladimir Jurowsky. The first movement, ‘The Turn of Time’, contains lines from ‘Vision and Prayer’, the second sets the poem ‘When I woke’, and the third is a setting of ‘Lie still, sleep becalmed.’
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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.
(Lutyens, McCabe)