Image of Energy: The Vortex in Dylan Thomas

Abstract

IM A G E OF E N E R G Y : THE V O R T EX IN D YLA N TH O M A S DONALD F. MCKAY University of Western Ontario Vortex is energy. — henri gaudier-brzeska D y l an Thomas has usually been accepted as a celebrator of life and of those organic rhythms that unite nature with man, the extension of a romanticism that is transmitted through Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, and Lawrence, and gar­ nished with Rimbaud. His prefatory note to Collected Poems 1934-1952, declaring the poems to be “ written for the love of Man and in praise of God," encourages an orientation that is romantic, humanistic, and religious. But this approach, sound as it appears, simply fails to account for some of the poetry's primary attributes. And in seeking to rectify this insufficiency one comes to an awareness of a new element conflicting with organic rhythms to produce tensions that are distinctly modern. His articulated views on the creative process show that Thomas sustains a belief in the magical afflatus that will “ creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in "1 to animate the finished poem. But where others would seek this power in the realm of spirit, Thomas invests in flesh. As he explains to Henry Treece, perhaps with Yeats's “ images that yet / Fresh images beget" murmuring offstage, his images breed and die into other images. His method is a “ building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and creative at the same tim e."2 The striking feature of this descrip­ tion of the creative process, apart from Thomas's affirmation that it is a “ dialectal method," is the sustained organic analogue. To adopt, for the mo­ ment, the terms of Yeats's poem, Thomas is stating his intention to traffic in unpurged images, to root his poetry in the fury and the mire of human veins and abjure the chill, superhuman perfection of the Byzantine dome. In his poems, organic processes attain tropical intensity. Images "breed," the central image is a "seed," the motivating centre is a "womb of w ar," a poem is a “ warring stream." The allied theme, that the force which drives the flower also drives mankind upon a wheel of birth and death, is ubiquitous, and finds itself acted out by Thomas's metaphorical strategy. Persistently, the poems rely upon the interpenetration of natural and human phenomena: "The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair"; "the terrible world my brother En g lish Studies in Ca n ad a, ii , 3, Fall 1976 3*5 The Vortex in Dylan Thomas bares his skin"; "the world's my wound."3 And such interpenetration of man and the world is taken up by the poem "This bread I break" as its central theme. This strategy with metaphor surfaces as an articulated principle in one of Thomas's critiques of Pamela Hansford Johnson's poetry in 1933 before the publication of his first volume. He emphasizes, with his usual freedom from tact, that natural affiliation must be acted out poetically, and not merely affirmed, as it is in Miss Johnson's poetry: By the magic of words and images you must make it clear to the reader that the relationships are real. And only in, "M y blood is drawn from the veins of the roses," do you provide any proof. You gave the rose a human vein, and you gave your own vein the blood of the rose; now that is relationship. "I am his son" means little compared with "I am his flesh and blood."4 But it is evident that Thomas is not simply interested in getting back to the soil, nor does he "commune" in the usual sense. There are few particulars of any kind in Thomas's poetry; we encounter the worm and the long world's gentleman, but seldom specific worms or fathers. His own father becomes a symbolic father-figure in such poems as "I, in my intricate image"; and the particular infant who died in the raid which inspired both "A Refusal to...