Dylan Thomas

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound Except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep,

When the morning was waking over the war He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide, He dropped where he loved

It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of

All that I owe the fellows of the grave And all the dead bequeathed from pale estates Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood, Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots. O

I I see the boys of summer in their ruin Lay the gold tithings barren, Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils; There in their heat the winter floods Of frozen loves they

I have longed to move away From the hissing of the spent lie And the old terrors’ continual cry Growing more terrible as the day Goes over the hill into the deep sea; I

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires, Shall the blind horse sing sweeter? Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer The supper and knives of a mood. In the sniffed and poured

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month, Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill, As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time; Time, in a folly’s rider, like

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain, Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye, Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon. So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man

Before I knocked and flesh let enter, With liquid hands tapped on the womb, I who was as shapeless as the water That shaped the Jordan near my home Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter

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. The mighty

Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea’s side, hearing the

When all my five and country senses see, The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye, Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac, Love in the frost is

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms I labour by singing light Not

My tears are like the quiet drift Of petals from some magic rose; And all my grief flows from the rift Of unremembered skies and snows. I think, that if I touched the earth,

If I were tickled by the rub of love, A rooking girl who stole me for her side, Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string, If the red tickle as the cattle calve

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat On the silent sea we have heard the sound That came from the wound wrapped in the

How shall my animal Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull, Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell, Endure burial under the spelling wall, The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the

I All all and all the dry worlds lever, Stage of the ice, the solid ocean, All from the oil, the pound of lava. City of spring, the governed flower, Turns in the earth

When I was a windy boy and a bit And the black spit of the chapel fold, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women), I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood, The rude

Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died The darkest way, and did not turn away, A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride On that darkest day. Oh, forever may He

The bows glided down, and the coast Blackened with birds took a last look At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye; The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck. Then good-bye to the fishermanned

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

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

Now Say nay, Man dry man, Dry lover mine The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor, Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust, Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger. Now

In the beginning was the three-pointed star, One smile of light across the empty face, One bough of bone across the rooting air, The substance forked that marrowed the first sun, And, burning ciphers

There was a saviour Rarer than radium, Commoner than water, crueller than truth; Children kept from the sun Assembled at his tongue To hear the golden note turn in a groove, Prisoners of wishes

The sky is torn across This ragged anniversary of two Who moved for three years in tune Down the long walks of their vows. Now their love lies a loss And Love and his

The conversation of prayers about to be said By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs Who climbs to his dying love in her high room, The one not caring

From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second And to the hollow minute of the womb, From the unfolding to the scissored caul, The time for breast and the green apron

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb