On 14 May, 1953, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had its first staged reading at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York. From now on, the event will be commemorated with Dylan Day, an international celebration of the life and work of the Welsh poet.
Thomas is a great writer because he wrote with accuracy and truth about being human. His language is inventive, yet stolen and re-made from every word he read, every phrase he heard. His poetry, including Under Milk Wood, which I’d call a radio poem, leaves echoes in the mind as music does, as all true poetry should. His prose shows a hawk’s eye and ear for detail; fierce, but shaped by tenderness, fearless honesty and humour. The whole man, body and mind, and the whole life are in the words. We see ourselves on the page, feel the arrow in the heart. He gave not a toss for any critical reader but himself. Music and truth, the qualities of all great writers, are what convinces us to read him, to believe him. James Joyce, one of his inspirations, is a prime example. There is no contrivance, no self-consciously “good English” in such writing.
But what does he mean to me? To Wales? I was a teenager when Under Milk Wood was first broadcast. My father, a BBC sound engineer, a Welsh speaker from Carmarthenshire, met Dylan at the BBC, and spoke about the “difficult young genius”. He turned on the radio and made me sit down and listen. What I heard changed my life. It was the real thing - alive, lyrical, funny, sad, familiar, tender, and spoken in the phrasing and accent of south-west Wales. It was a revelation.
In my education there were no Welsh writers, and no Welsh characters in the books I read. We were invisible and silenced. Great Literature was a far country. Under Milk Wood changed all that. My tribe, the Williams, went to the same chapels, preached in the same pulpits, farmed the same countryside as his tribe. The citizens of Llarregub spoke with the language and lilt of my grandmother, aunts and uncles: irreverent, colourful, comic, the same wild imagery and metaphor, and their way with words. Not grand words. Ordinary words. Swansea English words like “lovely”, and “wicked”, for example. “Hasn’t the price of fruit gone wicked?” confides a stranger, a woman shopping in Carmarthen. In Under Milk Wood the boys are “dreaming wicked”. “Thank you, lovely boy,” a woman might say to a man, young or old, acquaintance or stranger. In the lyrical Fern Hill, Dylan writes:
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it
was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.”
That South Wales “lovely” sings in Fern Hill, a speech-pattern the boy might hear as he waves to Aunt Annie and climbs the “house high hay” on the horse-drawn hay-wagon. Dylan is not short of words, using “lovely” twice. He is talking Swansea.
Once, on the early London train from Carmarthen, the train manager welcomed us on board over the loudspeaker, remarked on the beautiful morning, the herons along the Tywi estuary, hoped we had packed a woolly as it was chilly in London. I smiled. I looked up, and the man opposite was smiling too. In unison we said: “The Reverend Eli Jenkins!” It rang true. “We are not wholly bad or good who live our lives under milk wood.”
Dylan’s father, head of English at Swansea grammar school, fed him great literature, and in his boxroom in Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan read voraciously, filling notebooks with drafts of poems, many of which would become his most famous works, while his early stories grew, fed by a febrile teenage imagination. He read. He listened. He wrote. What he read was the work of the greatest writers, what he heard was the lilt and vitality of the word music of west Wales, his English mediated by the pulse made by that other drum, Welsh, beating in the syntax and the sound. Uniquely mingling both made him an original. He changed the language for all future poets as Eliot did, and James Joyce, and a few others.
Dylan’s Welsh-speaking parents spoke only English at home, and sent him for elocution lessons, as was the fashion then. (My mother, a generation later, made the same decision.) However, Dylan’s perfect ear for both the language of his education and that of his west Wales relatives heard the cadences of both. He brought into his written English the sound, traditions and the influence of cynghanedd (an ancient, sophisticated system of Welsh alliteration) from the Welsh he heard around him. Welsh was the tongue of his country relations. He heard it on the hearth at Fern Hill, in the rhetoric and poetry of chapel, eisteddfod and choir, the doorway of the pub. He was an eavesdropper. An English-only education gives Welsh the potency of something only half-silenced.
The language of his finest poems and stories drums with its undercurrent. An example lies in surely the world’s best villanelle, the poem of grief for his dying father, Do not go gentle into that good night, mingling classic iambic pentameter with Welsh cynghanedd, where consonants are echoed, or mirrored. In the poem, the sound-pattern of the opening d,n,t,g, is reversed in the closing g,d,n,t. (t and d are interchangeable here). It could not be more English, more Welsh.
At home in the boxroom at Cwmdonkin Drive, he read, dreamed and filled notebooks with his astonishingly precocious writings. At Aunt Annie’s Fern Hill – “Gorsehill” in the story The Peaches – he ran wild, got muddy, and played cowboys and Indians with his posh grammar school friend, Jack Williams. In the story he gives his whole boy-self to the game in a marvellous description of burgeoning human consciousness, until finally his whole, vulnerable boy-self and his loving Aunt Annie are humiliated and left heartbroken by posh, wimpish Jack and the even posher Mrs Williams, who “sat with Jack in the back of the (chauffeur-driven) car gazing at the ruin of Gorsehill”.
Gillian Clarke is National Poet of Wales. Find out more about Dylan Day events on the Literature Wales website.
