Dylan Thomas

 

To-Day, This Insect

To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe, 
Now that my symbols have outelbowed space, 
Time at the city spectacles, and half 
The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence, 
In trust and tale I have divided sense, 
Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double 
Of head and tail made witnesses to this 
Murder of Eden and green genesis. 

The insect certain is the plague of fables. 

This story's monster has a serpent caul, 
Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline, 
Measures his own length on the garden wall 
And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning; 
A crocodile before the chrysalis, 
Before the fall from love the flying heartbone, 
Winged like a sabbath ass this children's piece 
Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden. 

The insect fable is the certain promise. 

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen, 
An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse, 
John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision, 
Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice: 
'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless, 
No tell-tale lover has an end more certain, 
All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories, 
My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.'

Dylan Thomas

 

Our Eunuch Dreams

1

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boy's limbs,
And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

2

In this age the gunman and his moll,
Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,
Strange to our solid eye,
And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;
When cameras shut they hurry to their hole
Down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
Impose their shots, showing the nights away;
We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill,
Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

3

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which
Shall fall awake when cures and their itch
Raise up this red-eyed earth?
Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,
The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,
Or the drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;
The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

4

This is the world: the lying likeness of 
Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
Loving and being loth;
The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.
This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,
Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack
The image from the plates;
And we shall be fit fellows for a life,
And who remain shall flower as they love,
Praise to our faring hearts.

David Jones

                                                Eric Gill. Pencil & colored paper (1921)

from The Anathemata (Rite and For-time)

This man, so late in time, curiously surviving, shows courtesy 

to the objects when he moves among, handles or 

puts  aside the name-bearing instruments, when he shows every  day in 

his hand the salted cake given for this gens to savour  all the gentes.

*****

What, from this one’s cranial data, is like to have been his kindred’s psyche; in that they, along  with the journey-food, donated the votive horn? and with  what pietas did they donate these among the dead—the lifegivers—and by what rubric?

Was their oral gloss from a Heidelberg gaffer or did they emend a Piltdown use, was the girl from Lime Street a butty of theirs, or were the eight Carmel fathers consanguine or of any affinity to those that fathered them

*****

or were the eight Carmel fathers consanguine or of

any affinity to those that fathered them, that told what they had heard with their ears of those german to them, before the palmy arbours began again to pine —and at which of the boreal oscillations?

And before them?

those who put on their coats to oblate the things set apart  in an older Great Cold.

And who learned them

if not those whose fathers had received or aped the groping disciplina  of their cognates, or lost or found co-laterals, on the proto-routes or at the lithic foci?

Tundra-wanderers?

or was there no tundra as yet, or not as yet again, to wander —but grew green the rashes over again? Or was all once again  informis, that Cronos for the third time might see how his  lemmings run and hear the cry of his tailless hare from south  of the sixties, from into the forties?

For the phases and phase-groups

sway toward and fro within that belt of latitude.

There’s where the world’s a stage

for transformed scenes

with metamorphosed properties

for each shifted set.

The mimes deploy:

anthropoid

anthropoi.

Who knows at what precise phase, or from what floriate  green-room, the Master of Harlequinade, himself not made,  maker of sequence and permutation in all things made, called  us from our co-laterals out, to dance the Funeral Games of the 

Great Mammalia, as, long, long, long before, these  danced out

 the Dinosaur?

David Jones

                                    Hound of S. Dominic. Wood engraving (1922)

From In Parenthesis

     On addressing commissioned officers--it was his
     favorite theme.  John Ball stood patiently, waiting for the
     eloquence to spread itself.  The tedious flow continued, then
     broke off very suddenly.  He looked straight at Sergeant Snell
     enquiringly--whose eyes changed quietly, who ducked in
     under the low entry.  John Ball would have followed, but
     stood fixed and alone in the little yard--his senses highly
     alert, his body incapable of movement or response.  The
     exact disposition of small things--the precise shapes of
     trees, the tilt of a bucket, the movement of a straw, the
     disappearing right foot of Sergeant Snell--all minute
     noises, separate and distinct, in a stillness charged through
     with some approaching violence--registered not by the ear
     nor any single faculty--an on-rushing pervasion, saturating
     all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed,
     millesimal--of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's
     contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy.
         He stood alone on the stones, his mess-tin spilled at his
     feet.  Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came--bright,
     brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling
     crescendo's up-piling snapt.  The universal world,
     breath held, one half-second, a bludgeoned stillness.  Then
     the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings
     out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through--all
     takings-out of vents--all barrier-breaking--all unmaking.
     Pernitric begetting--the dissolving and splitting of solid
     things.  In which unearthing aftermath, John Ball picked up
     his mess-tin and hurried within; ashen, huddled, waited in 
     the dismal straw.  Behind "E" Battery, fifty yards down the
     road, a great many mangolds, uprooted, pulped, congealed
     with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid
     boards leading to the emplacement.  The sap of vegetables
     slobbered the spotless breech-block of No. 3 gun.

                                                (IP II, 24)

Alun Lewis

 

Song

(On seeing dead bodies floating off the Cape)

The first month of his absence
I was numb and sick
And where he’d left his promise
Life did not turn or kick.
The seed, the seed of love was sick.

The second month my eyes were sunk
In the darkness of despair,
And my bed was like a grave
And his ghost was lying there
And my heart was sick with care.

The third month of his going
I thought I heard him say
‘Our course deflected slightly
On the thirty-second day – ’
The tempest blew his words away.

And he was lost among the waves,
His ship rolled helpless in the sea,

The fourth month of his voyage
He shouted grievously
‘Beloved, do not think of me.’

The flying fish like kingfishers
Skim the sea’s bewildered crests,
The whales blow steaming fountains,
The seagulls have no nests
Where my lover sways and rests.

We never thought to buy and sell
This life that blooms or withers in the leaf,
And I’ll not stir, so he sleeps well,
Though cell by cell the coral reef
Builds an eternity of grief.

But oh, the drag and dullness of my Self;
The turning seasons wither in my head;
All this slowness, all this hardness,
The nearness that is waiting in my bed,
The gradual self-effacement of the dead.

Edward Thomas

1905

Adelstrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop -- 
The name, because one afternoon 
Of heat the express-train drew up there 
Unwontedly. It was late June. 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. 
No one left and no one came 
On the bare platform. What I saw 
Was Adlestrop -- only the name 

And willows, willow-herb, and grass, 
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, 
No whit less still and lonely fair 
Than the high cloudlets in the sky. 

And for that minute a blackbird sang 
Close by, and round him, mistier, 
Farther and farther, all the birds 
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas

 The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; 

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof 

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest 

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof. 

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, 

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. 

All of the night was quite barred out except 

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry 

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, 

No merry note, nor cause of merriment, 

But one telling me plain what I escaped 

And others could not, that night, as in I went. 

And salted was my food, and my repose, 

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice 

Speaking for all who lay under the stars, 

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.