Dylan Thomas’s “Over Sir John’s Hill”: The Motif of His Art Songs

S Bharadwaj

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.10n.1p.9

Abstract

In the last dramatic art song “Over Sir John’s Hill,” Dylan Thomas reiterates that the motif of his art songs has been the Yeatsian introspective process of individuation and integration, transfiguration and transformation, the mortal vision of Grecian altruistic art song as seen in his early poem 18 Poems. His Yeatsian process of tragic happiness, his warm impersonal art, his paradoxical sensibility that makes him an artist of success and popularity in contrast to W.H. Auden’s Eliotian motif of metaphysical process of self-annihilation and immortal art, his aesthetic amoral impersonal art, his tragic vision of art song which deprives him of his grandeur and influence. However, the main thrust is extending to the dismembered and discontented Auden the very same process of regeneration that Thomas has offered to the victims of Auden’s art song while ignoring everything about … allegations of tilting, toppling and conspiracy against him. The song also testifies to his Yeatsian cosmopolitan culture maintaining his equanimity and magnanimity when he confronts an atmosphere of envy and ill-will, and hatred and violence.

Highlights

The modern poet Raine perceives that in “Over Sir John’s Hill,” Thomas tries to uphold his Yeatsian pagan altruistic leit-motif as his mortal vision of art song and salvation that alchemizes the tragic suffering of the contemporary poets into tragic joy: Lying for the last time down on the green ground In farewell gesture of self-love, softly he curved To rest the delicate foot that is in my hand, Empty as a moth’s discarded chrysalis. (MV 374) G.S
(409) For Thomas the poetic practice of inclusiveness is integrated with the practice of living offering harmonious co-existence to the afflicted Auden and his system of salvation, transgression and transmigration, pure art and pure being that is the elaboration of the aesthetic distance, the metaphysical process of self-annihilation or crucifixion and co-inherence into a way of life
Both the leit-motif and the introspective process of Thomas’s art song is “humanized” by life-centric Grecian tradition of Yeats, “buried its right ... before it opened eyes to be emulous” unlike Auden’s metaphysical process and the aesthetic which are de-humanized by death-centric metaphysical tradition of Eliot, “barbarously you might ... have made beast-death of the one a sacrifice ... to the god-head of the other” (Hughes 25) according to Hughes

Summary

Introduction

Of the many paradoxes that characterize the literary efforts of the poets of the thirties, the forties and the fifties, one is, as Dylan Thomas points out in the last poem In Country Sleep, the ambition to write pure poetry, a work of art that assures immortality: As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the windMilled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged Apple seed glides, And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides, As the world falls, silent as cyclone of silence. (Poems 80) The introspectiveness that is noted in much of what may called the Wordsworthian poetry of the inactive political poets of the thirties, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice and the romantic war poets of the forties, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, Keidrych Rhys and F.T. (Poems 80) The introspectiveness that is noted in much of what may called the Wordsworthian poetry of the inactive political poets of the thirties, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice and the romantic war poets of the forties, Roy Fuller, Alan Rook, Keidrych Rhys and F.T. Prince, while conflicting with W.H. Auden’s Eliotian metaphysical art and Thomas’s Grecian altruistic art songs, turn their visionary poems into interior monologues, “and alone in the night’s eternal, curving act ... Despondence seizes the dejected Movement poets whose early poems are, as it were, symbolic of an urge for immortal art that most creative poets of the early decades exhibit in varied levels, “the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb ... MacNeice underscores the passion for immortal art as underlying motif of poets of the inter-war period, “under the surface of flux and fear there is an underground movement ... Thomas recasts “the gravest ghost,” the existential Eliotian motif of Auden’s last phase:

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