Friday

27 October 2017

— roughly eighteen leaves left on the oak

Good Morning All,

Okay, I know, I know, I know I am pressing my luck here, hitting you with yet another poem here in the natter section, but the year is all too rapidly running out of new mornings, and there is absolutely no way I cannot put in here on the poet’s birthday one of the all time best love poems in the English language. Or any language. It’s by a Welshman named Dylan Thomas, from whom Robert Zimmerman, himself a fine poet, took his name.

Thomas died in November 1953, when my as-yet-unmet college friends and I were seven. Had he died eight years earlier, I would be convinced that one of my college friends was Thomas’s reincarnation. In fact, I am still half convinced that Thomas slipped of the skiff across the River Styx and somehow made it to Haddonfield, New Jersey, where he stepped gently into my friend’s seven-year-old soul while he slept.

Thomas also wrote the play Under Milkwood, in which my oldest friend was performing in a Tufts University production. I drove up from Jersey, and my friend was brilliant, as I knew he would be. 

Here are just a couple of Thomas's observations:

— When one burns his bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

— My education was the liberty to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

— Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or increase. I can with ease become and ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn’t do to upset one’s vanity.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, 

Time held me green and dying 

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

And from the beginning of A Child’s Christmas in Wales: 

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

The poem below, too long to fit in a Day Book, is a villanelle, a French form, nineteen lines, the first and third line alternately repeated. 

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Dylan Thomas

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 is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.   

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron 

P.S. Two Holly snaps: