Abstract
In the poem “In the White Giant’s Thigh,” Dylan Thomas projects the contemporary poets’ wild passion for Eliotian amoral art song and their suffering and the contradistinction of his own occasional love of Yeatsian Grecian altruistic art song and his delight. The poem is at bottom optimistic as it offers the metaphysical and the metempirical wild lovers an alternative process of art song and also carries salvation to transcend their sorrowful failure. It is Thomas’s faith in the Yeatsian process of transfiguration and transformation, the possibility of deliverance from the bondage of experience and ignorance that assures him of success and appeal in his art songs, that Auden repudiates in his metaphysical process of transgression and transmigration and his immortal vision of aesthetic amoral art song. The poem implies that Auden, as a result of his continual ignorance of the human reality of life and death, his stoic love of metaphysical art and reality, loses his grandeur and literary reputation and stoops to the level of a common man susceptible to hatred and indignation, violence and vengeance like the victims of his art songs, the political, the war and the Movement poets who remain equally ignorant of the metaphysical process and the reality of breath and death.
Highlights
Dylan Thomas’s last poem In Country Sleep and even much of the poetry of preceding phases fall into a pattern as seen in the light of the formulations set forth in the early poem 18 Poems addressed to the lamenting contemporary political poets in ignorance
Auden sees that political poets fail to comply with the metaphysical vision of impersonal art, “the boys of summer in their autumn ... lay the gold tithings barren ... setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils” as they are ignorant of the metaphysical process, as they could not free themselves from the physical pleasures of the world, “their in their heat the winter floods ... of frozen loves they fetch their girls ... and drown the cargoed apples in their tides” (Poems)
In the early poem 18 Poems, Thomas recognizes his own ignorance, his inability to comprehend the mystery of impersonal art of the metaphysical poet John Donne and the intellectual poet Auden whose early poem Poems represents Eliot’s metaphysical process of art song and his bewilderment is equal to the bafflement of the political poets in their wild love of impersonal art, “there in the sun the frigid threads ... of doubt and dark they feed their nerves ... the signal moon is zero in their voids” (Poems 71)
Summary
Dylan Thomas’s last poem In Country Sleep and even much of the poetry of preceding phases fall into a pattern as seen in the light of the formulations set forth in the early poem 18 Poems addressed to the lamenting contemporary political poets in ignorance.
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