Being and Greenness: Phenomenology of the Poetic Persona and Nature in Dylan Thomas’s Green Poems

Abstract

Ecopoetry, a relatively recent approach in ecocriticism, refers to nature poems which are closely linked to environmental issues. Deliberating nature in poetry is indeed not something new, yet, what is new in ecopoetry, which is a characteristic that discerns it from, especially Romantic poetry, is that it delineates the relationship between the human and non-human worlds. In other words, ecopoetry stands out from both contemporary nature poetry and Romanticist poetry. It is characterized by the eco-centric view it provides, which axiomatically brings with it the principle of reciprocity, interrelationship, and egalitarianism. In this perspective one might argue that the majority of Dylan Thomas’s (1914-1953) nature poems could be rendered ecopoems as they see nature and natural phenomena as components of a unified and closely connected whole. In these poems Dylan Thomas’s poetic eye adopts an eco-centric verb tense and functions as a camera which record the harmonised movements of the poetic persona and the natural phenomena manifesting the intentionality of the eye of the ecopoet. Through this particular vision Dylan Thomas generates a place out of space in which both human and the other-than-human are deployed, thereby creating a specific subject-object relationship according to which the existence of the human and the non-human are interrelated. This study focuses on the ontological relationship between the poetic persona and nature and analyses the subject-object relationship in Thomas’s “Poem in October”, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”, and “Fern Hill” through the lens of phenomenology and object-oriented ontology.