BY CHANCE
.
By chance I picked out Dylan.
Not his swinging easy, not his remembered known.
It was his mysterious, dipped in Taliesin,
Dipped in the sublime.
Next to nonsense with the druids.
Next to lullaby and curse,
Next to madness (as all true wisdom is).
Line on line, piled up volcanically,
Overstepping the mark,
Singeing the happy world,
Burning the lazy words and setting the others free –
The other words of fire and gold,
The words barely human that insinuate
Ungodly pictures of worlds here but covered.
True but shattered words, sharp as glass.
Words reflecting bone and salt and jet and thunder.
Mad Dylan, burning his fuses day and night.
Eating passion, smoking passion, drinking passion.
Fingertips brushing hot, soft passion and laughing
Like a babe, drunk on sound and made mad
By cobweb sobrieties, made mad by ancestors,
Mad by earlier gods who required always the best sacrifices:
The first sons, the first lamb, the first daughter, the first grain.
See him fall burning, head downwards, like Blake in the night.
See him wish petticoats to lift and seed to be cast.
See him turn to serpent, turn to tree, turn to the gate unlocked,
And run into the world, naked, naked, naked, clothed in dreaming.
Released from the ocean’s fist, a sunlight shout, dazzling
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Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets. However, I do weary of the overexposure given to his (few) easier pieces, Fern Hill, Do not go gentle, Under Milk Wood and so on. The majority of his works are catastrophes of piled imagery singing so deep as to bamboozle everyone not simply happy to delight in ecstatic sound and image. His chaos, too, is usually so skilfully structured that he can hide rhyme structures seamlessly into them. On this occassion, I opened his collected works at random, and was as usual blown away by the heavy gold-threaded brocade of his lines.
simonhlilly 