Thomas has been called a womb-tomb poet

 

Write a comprehensive note on the themes with which Dylan Thomas deals in his poetry, illustrating your answer from the poems you have read.

Or,

It has been alleged that the subject matter of Thomas's poetry is disastrously limited. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.

Or,

It has been said that Thomas's poetry deals only with copulation, birth, and death, and hardly anything else. Comment on this view.

Or,

Thomas has been called a womb-tomb poet. What does this mean?

Or,

Examine some of the major poems of Thomas to bring out his main preoccupations in his poetic work.

 

Extremely Limited Subject Matter

According to one view. Thomas's poetry is the poetry of the elemental physical experience, dealing with copulation, birth, and death. This means that the range of subjects in Thomas's poetry is extremely narrow. A similar view has been expressed by the critic who speaks of Thomas's "disastrously limited subject-matter". According to this critic, there are really only three subjects in Thomas's poetry. They are: (1) childhood, and the memories of childhood; (2) the viscera (that is the anatomy of man); and (3) religion. This critic goes on to say that the first of these subjects has been well handled by Thomas; that Thomas's Carly poems with their obsessive concern with the human anatomy and crude physical sensations 4re fine valuable poems; but that, so far as religion is concerned, Thomas hardy deals with it in any profound sense.

Man Be My Metaphor"

In one of his early poems, Thomas himself declares "Man be my metaphor." In other words, the professed aim of Thomas in his poetry was to deal with man, man living, loving, using his five senses, and functioning fully. Furthermore, man for Thomas is man from seed to grave with the emphasis on the grave. Here is pertinent to note what Thomas said in a note to his Collected Poems" He said that he had written these poems for the love of man and in praise of God (even though he did not give any evidence of a definite belief in a personal God or the God of traditional Christianity). If we accept Thomas's claim that he wrote his poems about man and for the love of man, we should have no ground to complain about the limited range of subject matter in his work. Writing about man would mean writing about many aspects of human experience or about human experience in its many-sidedness. Of course, as is well known, Thomas does not deal with political ideologies or social problems or social evils in his poetry. In this respect he broke away from the kind of poetry that W. H. Auden and others were writing at the time.

Birth, Death, Sex, Religion, Nature

If to the themes of copulation, birth, and death, we add religion and Nature, we shall have a fairly accurate statement of the subject-matter of Thomas's poetry, and then we would also recognize the fact that his poetry covers a fairly wide range of material. What is more, he deals with these various themes in a highly original manner. In other words, his Approach to these subjects is startlingly novel. There is nothing stale or hackneyed about his treatment of these subjects. His attitude towards sex is central as is clear from his statement that poetry must cast light upon what has been hidden for too long and, by so doing, make clean the naked exposure. He claimed that his poetry was the record of his individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light. There is plenty of sexual symbolism in his poetry, even in what can justly be regarded as his religious poetry. Biblical imagery and sexual symbols are found in his poems side by side. Nor is Nature absent from Thomas's work. Some of his poems contain vivid and refreshing pictures of Nature, even though he does not have a philosophy of Nature to offer. The theme of death is also recurrent in his work. In fact, when he talks about birth, he cannot help referring to death also. In this context, we must admit that, although the theme of sex is quite prominent in his poetry, he has not contributed much to love-poetry that is, love poetry in the proper sense of the term. And yet he is regarded, justly again, as one of the leading lyrical poets of the twentieth century.

 

Pre-Natal Experience: Poems About the Embryo

An examination of some of the major poems of Thomas will bring out his preoccupations in his work and reveal the range of his subject matter. Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines which is an early poem, is about the embryo, and what will happen to it. The theme of this poem is that life should be regarded as a process, something that goes on, and that death is implicit from the very moment of conception. Thomas here identifies the human body with the entire physical universe. This identification elementalizes the body and personalizes the universe. Thomas himself said that this poem was based on the cosmic significance of the human anatomy. In another poem Before I Knocked. Thomas depicts a child speaking from the womb. Here we are to assume that consciousness exists in the child even before it is born, in fact even before the conception takes place. In other words this poem deals with a prenatal experience. If we regard the speaker in the poem as Christ-in embryo, we shall find him foreseeing the course of his life from birth to crucifixion. It is indeed, a unique poem so far as its subject-matter is concerned. Yet another poem dealing with pre-natal life is If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot in which the child, speaking from the womb, tells his mother that he would not like to hurt her by being bon.

Poems With a Cosmic Significance

One of Thomas's most famous poems is The Force That Through the Green Fuse. In this poem also Thomas identifies the world's elemental forces with those which govern the human body. The force, or the driving spirit, which operates in the world of Nature and is responsible for both creation and destruction, is the same which animates and destroys the human body. However, in one respect, a human being is different from the world of Nature. Physically he is one with the universe but he is separated from it by intellectual conscious-ness. Although consciousness distinguishes a human being from the universe, a vague kind of pantheism underlies this poem. Like Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, this poem too has much larger dimensions than a human being because both poems go beyond a human being to the universe at large. Both poems have a cosmic significance.

An Elegiac Poem

Another poem which also has a cosmic significance is Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child Here, Thomas expresses the belief that the child, by dying. has returned to Cosmic life. The dead child lies deep. "robed in the long friends, the grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother." There is therefore, no need to mourn. This is a very moving poem, having an affirmative and positive quality, and it is in effect, an elegy

Two Other Memorable Elegies

Another elegy that is well-known is the poem called After the Funeral written to commemorate Ann Jones, the poet's aunt, who died at the age of seventy. Here, after giving us a picture of the artificial or pretended grief of the dead woman's relations, the poet gives us a brief character-sketch of Ann Jones who was a personification of love. Ann Jones had led a laborious life, as was clear from her "scrubbed and sour humble hands". Thomas declares that through the power of his poem, he will build a marble statue of the dead woman and that he will put life even into the stuffed fox which will then utter the word "love". After the Funeral, too, is a poignant poem which immortalizes a woman of the working class. Another moving elegy which deserves mention is Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, addressed to the poet's father.

Poems of Nature and of Childhood

Then there are the four birthday poems of Thomas, of which Especially When the October Wind and Poem in October deserve special mention. The first-named poem has two themes. One is the inadequacy of words to express human experience. The poet would like to express his reactions to the universe at a level deeper than that of language, but his only tools are words--vowels, voices, notes, and speeches. The second theme in the poem is that of mutability and decay. The poem contains a number of images of disintegration and death--frosty fingers, crabbing sun, the raven coughing, the windy weather, the wormy winter, etc. The Nature-imagery in this poem is very depressing. Poem in October, however, reveals a different mood. On his thirtieth birthday, Thomas sees himself on his way to heaven or in the sight of heaven. The wood is his neighbor: the herons are priests: the morning beckons; the water prays and the sea-birds call Thomas finds himself in harmony with Nature. He leaves the sleeping town and climbs a hill where he finds a "springful of larks in a rolling cloud. All the gardens are blooming. The poet then suddenly sees a vision of his childhood. Finally, he prays for another year of poetic creation, one more year of singing his "heart's truth" on that high hill. It is one of the roost remarkable poems of Thomas, wherein we get wonderfully vivid Nature pictures, a beautiful account of the poet's childhood days, and a general atmosphere of joy.

The Glorification of Childhood in "Fern Hill"

One of the best-known and most popular poems of Thomas is Fern Hill in which, as in the poem just considered, Thomas recreates his childhood experiences. In this poem Thomas is at his best. He evokes the joys, mysteries, and wonders of childhood through a series of images which have a rich, sensuous quality. As a poem which glorifies childhood, it ranks very high, though it does not have the spiritual and transcendental quality of Wordsworth's great ode.

A Poem About Thomas's Poetic Aims

One of the well-known poems of Thomas is In My Craft Or Sullen Art, which may be treated as a statement of Thomas's poetic aims. Thomas here says that his poetry is not prompted by a desire for fame or money or self-display. He writes his poems in honor of the lovers who lie in their beds at night holding each other in their arms and holding also all their griefs and the griefs of the ages in their arms. Thus Thomas dedicates his poetry to the lovers who symbolize to him the immemorial tragedy of the human race but whose love is something precious in hit eyes

The Religions Sonnets

Ten fourteen-line poems written by Thomas deal with religious themes taken from the Bible. This sonnet-sequence, called Altarwise by Owl-Light, describes the Nativity, the Passion, and the Crucifixion, it is a magnificent achievement, though it is marred by the extreme obscurity of the work. These poems are difficult to follow because of the exceptionally dense concentration and complex interweaving of its imagery. The poems show stylistic similarities with the work of the Metaphysical Poets of the seventeenth century: Thomas's use of metaphor here is an extension of their use of "conceits".

A Humorous Poem

Although the bulk of Thomas's work is serious and somber, he was not totally devoid of humor. Lament is a very amusing poem in which the author makes fun of his own promiscuous living and, towards the end of his life, he feels that "all the deadly virtues plague my death'! The poem contains a lot of sexual imagery such as "the old ram rod, dying of bitches": seesaw Sunday nights", "wick-dipping moon"; "sizzling beds": "I romped in the clover quilts"; "hickory bull"; "a black sheep with a crumpled horn"; "the limp time". Sexual imagery is, indeed omnipresent in Thomas's poetry: there is plenty of it even in the religious sonnets.

Some Other Poems

There are other poems deserving mention from the thematic point of view. The Spire Cranes is a poem that questions the nature of reality. I See the Boys of Summer accuses the boys of suppressing their natural sexuality and taking recourse to masturbation. Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait is the story of marriage and of the fulfilment of sexual desire, told in a kind of Freudian dream about a fisherman who uses a woman for a bait. The Hunchback in the Park is a thoroughly objective poem depicting a tramp, a vagrant, or a homeless outcast. The man is doubly an outcast because of his deformity and vagrancy, and therefore an object of mockery to the truant boys playing in the park. In Vision and Prayer Thomas handles the theme of the identity of himself, every man, and Christ. The dominant note of this poem is one of celebration and exultation.