The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas: Annotated Manuscript Edition 9781350103832, 9781350103849, 9781350103863, 9781350103856

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THE FIFTH NOTEBOOK OF DYLAN THOMAS

Modernist Archives Series Series Editors: Matthew Feldman (University of York, UK), Erik Tonning (University of Bergen, Norway) and David Tucker (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) Editorial Board: Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand), Ronald Bush (University of Oxford, UK), Mark Byron (University of Sydney, Australia), Wayne K. Chapman (Clemson University, USA), Miranda Hickman (McGill University, Canada), Gregory Maertz (St John’s University, USA), Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College, USA), Steven Matthews (Oxford Brookes University, UK), Lois M. Overbeck (Emory University, USA), Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp, Belgium). From letters, journals, and notebooks to unpublished or out-of-print works, unfamiliar but important writings in translation and forgotten articles, Bloomsbury’s Modernist Archives series makes available to researchers at all levels historical archival material that can reconfigure received views of Modernist literature and culture. Annotated throughout and supported by extensive contextual essays by leading scholars, the Modernist Archives series is an essential resource for anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century literature and culture.

Titles in Series David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture Edited by Thomas Berenato, Anne PriceOwen and Kathleen Henderson Staudt David Jones’s The Grail Mass and Other Works Edited by Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison Ezra Pound and Globe Magazine: The Complete Correspondence Edited by Michael T. Davis and Cameron McWhirter Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition Edited by Mark Byron and Sophia Barnes W. B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings, Wayne K. Chapman Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s The Call: A New Scholarly Edition Edited by Stephanie Brown Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition Edited by Pamela Caughie and Sabine Meyer

Forthcoming Titles The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and the Frobenius Institute, 1930-1959 Edited by Ronald Bush and Erik Tonning The Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield Edited by Todd Martin

THE FIFTH NOTEBOOK OF DYLAN THOMAS

ANNOTATED MANUSCRIPT EDITION Edited by John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne, 2021 John Goodby and Adrian Osbourne have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Dylan Thomas (1914–53), 1934 (oil on canvas), Alfred Janes, (1911–99) / National Museum Wales / Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934403 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0383-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0385-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-0384-9 Series: Modernist Archives Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels Dylan Thomas, ‘I, in my intricate image’

vi

CONTENTS

List of figures viii Editorial preface to Modernist Archives ix Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations xii Introduction – ‘From the oracular archives’: The fifth notebook of Dylan Thomas

1

Contents of the fifth notebook

39

Facsimile of the fifth notebook with facing transcription

41

Editorial note and annotations 141 Bibliography 187 Index 193

FIGURES

1 2 3 4

Dylan Thomas biographical note Tesco bag in which the fifth notebook was kept Louie King note Image of Zenith school exercise book

17 23 25 28

EDITORIAL PREFACE TO MODERNIST ARCHIVES

Archival excavation and detailed contextualization are becoming increasingly central to scholarship on literary modernism. In recent years, the increased accessibility and dissemination of previously unpublished or little-known documents and texts has led to paradigm-shifting scholarly interventions on a range of canonical authors (Beckett, Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Woolf, among others), neglected topics (the occult, ‘primitivism’, fascism, eugenics, book history and the writing process) and critical methodologies (genetic criticism, intertextuality and historical contexts). This trend will surely only increase as large-scale digitization of archival materials gathers pace and existing copyright restrictions gradually lapse. Modernist Archives is a book series that aims to channel, extend and interrogate these shifts by publishing hitherto unavailable or neglected primary materials for a wider readership. Each volume also provides supporting, contextualizing work by scholars, alongside a critical apparatus of notes and references. The impetus for Modernist Archives emerges from the editors’ wellestablished series, Historicizing Modernism. While Historicizing Modernism’s focus is analytical, Modernist Archives will make accessible edited and annotated versions of little-known sources and avant-texts. The monographs and edited collections in Historicizing Modernism have revealed the extent to which contemporary scholars are increasingly turning towards archival and/or unpublished material in order to reconfigure understandings of modernism in its broader historical rootedness as well as in its compositional methodologies. The present series extends this empirical and genetic focus. Understanding and defining such primary sources as a broad category extending to letters, diaries, notes, drafts and marginalia, Modernist Archives

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EDITORIAL PREFACE TO MODERNIST ARCHIVES

series produces volumes that not only unearth significant unpublished material and provide original scholarship on this material but also develop cutting-edge editorial presentation techniques that preserve as much information as possible in an economical and accessible way. Also of note is the potential for the series to explore collections pertaining to the relations between literary modernism and other media (radio, television) or important cultural moments. The series thus aims to be an enabling force within modernist scholarship. It is becoming ever more difficult to read this extraordinary period of literary experimentation in isolation from contextualizing archival material, sometimes dubbed the ‘grey canon’ of modernist writing. The difficulty, we suggest, is something like a loss of innocence – once obviously relevant materials are actually accessible, they cannot be ignored. They may challenge received ideas about the limits or definition of modernism; they may upend theoretical frameworks or encourage fresh theoretical reflection; they may require new methodologies or revise the very notion of ‘authorship’; likewise, they may require types of knowledge that we never knew we needed – but there they are. However, while we are champions of historical, archival research, Modernist Archives in no way seeks to influence the results or approaches that scholars in this area will utilize in the exciting times ahead. By commissioning a wide range of innovative and challenging editions, this series aims to once more ‘make strange’ and ‘make new’ our fundamental ideas about modernism. Matthew Feldman, Erik Tonning and David Tucker

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the generous help and support of Swansea University, its College of Arts and Humanities (COAH) and COAH’s Research Institute of Arts and Humanities (RIAH). They made this edition possible both by purchasing the manuscript of Dylan Thomas’s fifth notebook and through funding Adrian Osbourne’s PhD research and work on the notebook during 2015–18. The edition itself has been four years in the making and, as ever with a Dylan Thomas project, many individuals, too numerous to name, offered help, information, guidance and insight along the way. However, among those we would like to single out for particular thanks are Siân Williams, Steve Williams and the Archive team of Swansea University Library; Peter Davies of Swansea University Engineering Department; the editorial and production team, including Lucy Brown and David Avital, at Bloomsbury; Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, series editors of Modernist Archives; Gabriel Heaton and Toby Skegg of Sotheby’s; Hilly Janes; Hannah Ellis; Rob Penhallurick; Steve Vine; and the research and postgraduate student community of COAH. Last, but never least, we wish to record our thanks to our partners Nicola Goodby and Shareena Hamzah-Osbourne. The epigraph to this volume is for them.

ABBREVIATIONS

The four poetry notebooks held at the State University of New York at Buffalo are commonly referred to in the critical literature as N1, N2, N3 and N4. In accordance with this commonly accepted shorthand, we refer to the fifth notebook as N5. 18P

18 Poems

25P

Twenty-five Poems

CP52

Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952)

CP88

Collected Poems 1934-1953 (1988)

CP14

Collected Poems (2016)

CL

Collected Letters

CS

Collected Stories

DTANL Dylan Thomas: A New Life, Andrew Lycett DDT

Discovering Dylan Thomas, John Goodby

DT

Dylan Thomas, Paul Ferris

LVW

Letters to Vernon Watkins

PITM

Poet in the Making

QEOM Quite Early One Morning TNP

The Notebook Poems 1930-1934

TP71

The Poems (1971)

Introduction ‘From the oracular archives’: The fifth notebook of Dylan Thomas

In the evening, before calling on my new friend, I sat in my bedroom by the boiler and read through my exercise-books full of poems. There were Danger Don’ts on the backs. Dylan Thomas, ‘The Fight’ (1938)

DISCOVERY On 2 November 2014, Sotheby’s announced in its online catalogue the forthcoming sale of a hitherto unknown notebook of autograph poems by Dylan Thomas at their New Bond Street auction rooms. The sale was due to take place on 2 December, and was being conducted on behalf of the relatives of Louie King, a former servant at the home of Yvonne Macnamara, Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law, in Blashford, Hampshire. According to a scribbled note to posterity on the paper Tesco bag containing it, King had saved the notebook from being burnt as scrap paper over half a century before. The notebook – which was, in fact, a standard school exercise book of eightytwo pages, each ruled with twenty-two feint blue lines – contained sixteen of Thomas’s poems in all (or fifteen and a half, strictly speaking, since it contained only the first five sonnets of the ten belonging to the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sequence). These were set out as nineteen separately numbered items, largely written on the right hand, or recto, pages. All had long been in print by 2014, having appeared in Thomas’s first two collections – six in 18 Poems (1934) and ten in Twenty-five Poems (1936).

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Yet while it contained no unknown poems, the notebook nevertheless promised to be of the greatest interest and value. Three poems in N5 – ‘Incarnate devil’, ‘Foster the light’ and ‘The seed-at-zero’ – are reworked poems Thomas had entered in two earlier notebooks, while another, ‘Do you not father me?’, also existed in typescript. There also existed an unfinished autograph manuscript (MS) of ‘I, in my intricate image’ almost identical to the N5 version. However, in most other cases, there had been no previously existing MS versions or copies of the poems N5 contained. In addition, thirteen of the items in it had been revised and reworked, either as they were being written up or afterwards, some extensively. Two of them, ‘The seed-at-zero’ and ‘I dreamed my genesis’, included entire previously unpublished, and unknown, stanzas. Moreover, the order of the poems in the notebook, which it was not unreasonable to suppose was the order of their composition, differed in several cases to that proposed by Thomas’s editors.1 All of this promised to shed a good deal of new light on Thomas’s development as a writer and on his compositional processes. All in all, the notebook was easily the most significant addition to the body of Thomas MSS to have appeared since 1941. It was in 1941 that Thomas had sold four similar exercise books containing his early poetry, with another (known as ‘The Red Notebook’) of short stories, together with some recent worksheets, to Bertrand Rota, a London bookdealer. Rota was acting on behalf of the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York, at Buffalo. Its director, Charles D. Abbott, was forbidden by library regulations from buying MSS from a living author, but, finding the prospect of acquiring Thomas material irresistible, he was prepared to use a middleman to circumvent them.2 Like the better-known transatlantic economic and political concessions being made at the time, the deal can be regarded as a cultural example of the hard bargains the United States was able to drive with cash-strapped, wartime Britain.

In the case of the most recent edition of the Collected Poems (2014), edited by John Goodby, ‘Should lanterns shine’ and ‘Grief thief of time’ are interpolated, probably wrongly, among the run of N5 poems. While ‘All all and all’, ‘My world is pyramid’, ‘Especially when the October wind’, ‘Now’ and ‘How soon the servant sun’ are in correct sequence, the majority of Goodby’s guesses are out. Thus, ‘Foster the light’ is positioned too early, ‘Do you not father me?’ too late, while ‘A grief ago’ occurs before ‘I, in my intricate image’, not after it and so on. 2 Following an enquiry by Abbott to Thomas, Rota was contracted to take charge of the purchase. ‘I cannot imagine,’ Rota wrote to Abbott, on 1 September 1941, ‘any collection of manuscripts which illustrates better the genesis and development of poetic ideas, which I understand to be the aspect which appeals to you particularly’. ‘According to all rules and regulations I cannot buy them,’ Abbott replied on 24 September, ‘but I want them so badly that I have … persuaded a private friend to buy them for us. It is a transaction which is most unlikely to occur again.’ The ‘private friend’ who supplied the necessary $140.00 was Thomas B. Lockwood, the library’s chief benefactor. See Ralph Maud, ed., Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1968), 274. 1

INTRODUCTION

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The four notebooks (N1, N2, N3 and N4) contained fair copies of 207 poems by Thomas dating from 27 April 1930 (the first poem in N1) to 30 April 1934 (the final entry in N4). Nearly three decades after their sale, and over twenty years after Thomas’s death, they were edited and published by Ralph Maud in 1968 as Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas. Maud noted that the sequence of notebooks was incomplete; a gap existed between N2, in which the final poem was dated 2 July 1932, and N3, in which the first poem was dated 31 January 1933. He posited the existence of a missing notebook covering the period, undiscovered or destroyed – speculation about the existence of lost or undiscovered notebooks having long been part of Dylan Thomas studies.3 So where did N5 fit in the sequence of Thomas’s notebooks? The first poem in it to be dated was ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’, which was entered on ‘Sept 30 1934’. (N5 also shows that he returned to it ten months later, in summer 1935, revised it and re-dated it.) Since the last poem in N4 was dated 30 April 1934, the two poems preceding ‘Three’ in N5 – ‘One’, ‘All all and all’ and ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’ – had to belong to the period between May and September 1934. This was just two poems from five months. However, although the gap between 30 April and 30 September 1934 was a lengthy one, it was rather too short to have been occupied by an intermediate, still-missing notebook, given the very small number of known poems of the period which might have been recorded in it and the time it usually took Thomas to fill a notebook. Moreover, the circumstances of Thomas’s life in summer 1934, as we shall see, were highly likely to have contributed to a slow start. The new discovery could therefore be legitimately regarded as the direct successor to N4, a continuation of the N1-N4 sequence, with something of the mystique of other additions to famous quartets – the archival equivalent, say, of the fifth member of the Burgess-Maclean Cambridge spy ring or a fifth Beatle.4 The appearance of N5 was, as all of this suggests, both astonishing and, in some ways, unsurprising. Thomas kept notebooks of this kind throughout his life, and while many of them have been discovered, a substantial number have not.5 The notebook missing between N2 and N3 has already been remarked

In assuming a missing notebook for this period, Maud printed what he called ‘collateral’ poems, which Thomas had transcribed at a later date, but which had no existence or prototype in the surviving notebooks. 4 The three poems are substantial enough to have occupied Thomas in May–September 1934, especially since he spent much of summer 1934 preparing 18P for the press. The slowing of his creative burst at this time is confirmed by a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of May 1934 in which he lamented that ‘the old fertile days are gone, and now a poem is the hardest and most thankless act of creation’ (CL, 156). 5 Prior to, and perhaps partly concurrent with, the N1-N4 notebooks are those held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin at Texas, known collectively as ‘the Walter Bram notebooks’. Named after an imaginary poet invented by Dylan Thomas and Daniel Jones (the word ‘bram’ 3

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THE FIFTH NOTEBOOK OF DYLAN THOMAS

and, as Maud also observed, Thomas’s short story of 1938 ‘The Fight’ uses three early poems (‘Grass Blade’s Psalm’, ‘Warp’ and ‘Frivolous is my hate’), which it is reasonable to presume date from another unknown notebook kept just before, or during, the period of N1. Thomas himself referred several times to the many notebooks he kept, especially in his early years, in conversation and correspondence. He wrote, for example, of the poems contained in ‘innumerable school exercise books’ to Geoffrey Grigson in Spring 1933, while in May 1938 Henry Treece was informed of the existence of ‘about 10 exercisebooks full of poems’ (CL, 33, 345). Moreover, as Thomas’s letters and Maud’s researches had showed, he was in the habit of keeping his notebooks after filling them in order to quarry the material they contained for new poems, sometimes for years. Given his peripatetic lifestyle after he left Swansea at the end of 1934, this meant he was also in the habit of carrying many of them around with him and of occasionally mislaying them. And since 2014 was the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth, and had seen a series of celebratory events, it was likely that anyone possessing such a mislaid or lost notebook would choose to sell it at this juncture, when the publicity surrounding Thomas meant that its market value would be highest. (When its existence was disclosed, N5 did in fact briefly become a minor media phenomenon, just missing an appearance on BBC 2’s Newsnight before featuring on BBC1’s Breakfast, in front of eight million viewers, on 13 November.)6 Whatever the considerations of the vendors, the rediscovery and auction of N5 was, for many, a fitting climax to the centenary year. As good luck would have it, and as Thomas himself would surely have wished, it was Swansea University, of his native ‘ugly, lovely town’, which made the successful bid of £85,000.7 Swansea University naturally – if rather sweepingly – made much of the fact that the notebook was ‘coming home’ (it contained poems written in three other locations), and the university library had the MS digitized in January 2015. The editors of this volume were duly tasked with beginning the task of preparing a publishable version of the MS later that year.

means ‘fart’ in Welsh), these contain collaborations between the two. Their contents include playlets, poems and sketches, usually dated to Thomas’s early- to mid-teens. They have little direct bearing on the work contained in N1-N4, although they do include surrealist-style cadavre exquis word-games. 6 John Goodby notes: ‘I was asked to authenticate N5, and was able to do so from a photocopied sample. However, owing to the centenary, and hence a timetable crowded by Dylan Thomas himself (a festival in Sheffield, an MLA panel in Pittsburgh), viewing the MS itself proved trickier. It seemed briefly that BBC 2’s Newsnight might unite us, but its feature, proposed for 10 November 2014, was displaced by a juicier story at the last minute. However, on 12 November, Sotheby’s asked if I would discuss N5 on BBC 1’s “Breakfast” the following morning, and at Salford Quays – courtesy of Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s in-house manuscripts expert and his colleague, Toby Skegg – I made its brief acquaintance before Gabriel, N5 and I went on air.’ 7 The total price to Swansea University, after auctioneers’ fees and taxes, was £104,500.

INTRODUCTION

5

ORIGINS, PROVENANCE AND PURPOSES OF N5 The story of the survival of N5, appropriately for a poet as flamboyant as Thomas, is a dramatic one. Yet to understand how this particular notebook came to be hidden, lost to view and rediscovered, it is necessary to understand the role such notebooks played in Thomas’s writing more generally and the contexts in which he compiled and used them. To do this it is also necessary to briefly consider just how he created poems and recorded them. In both cases, to some extent, it is therefore appropriate to consider the life of Dylan Thomas himself. First and foremost, then, it should be said that the notebooks were intended as a permanent record for completed poems. Once written down, the notebooks were treated as a store, or bank of finalized work, to be sent out to journals or kept in reserve for Thomas’s next collection of poems. This function is clear from the fact that a brief author biography, in Thomas’s hand, suitable to be sent with poems to journal editors, was found with N5. Second, the notebooks also served as an aide-mémoire – a measure and summary of his development and progress as a poet – and a prompt as to where his poetry might go next. Keeping them and referring to them helped Thomas keep a grip on what he was doing, in the face of his own unnerving precocity and potentially disorienting success. In his letter of May 1938 to Treece, for example, he speaks revealingly of ‘reading through’ all the notebooks he has to hand, and we can assume that he referred to the notebooks fairly regularly in his early twenties and also that this was creative rather than self-indulgent or a sign of immaturity, as some still claim. Third, as noted already, Thomas used his old notebooks as a source for new poems, up to the end of the 1930s. By way of clarification, it should be said at this point that the poems in the earliest notebooks were already very different from the conventional verse on conventional subjects for which Thomas was noted by most of those who knew him in his mid-teens. He had been writing poems of this kind – on nature, the First World War dead, comic verse narratives – since he was a boy, keen to amuse friends and impress adults. They were skilful of their kind, and were published in the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, and even occasionally in newspapers such as The Western Mail. However, they were distinct in almost every way from those he was already entering in N1 and N2. By his mid-teens, Thomas was known for his poetry, but perceived by most as a very different sort of poet to the one he was intent on becoming. Percy Smart, a school friend who knew about both types of poem, noted: He was writing at the time some delightful light verse, sparkling, bright and clear, but he was of course already producing verse of a kind which many people can’t understand, and I remember asking him why he did it: what was the point of writing ‘privately’ in this way. But he couldn’t really understand

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the question: he wrote, he said, what was in him, and it was really quite irrelevant whether anyone else even read it.8 From April 1930, then – that is, from the age of fifteen and a half onwards – Thomas was schooling himself, in semi-secrecy, as a consciously ‘difficult’ modernist poet, and the notebooks are the record of that enterprise, one which, for a while, ran parallel with that of the versatile versifier. By Spring 1933, around half the way through N3, Thomas was confident enough of the quality of this ‘private’ work to send it to national outlets. ‘And death shall have no dominion’, his first publication in a London journal – the New English Weekly – dates from the middle of April 1933. From this point onwards, the notebooks increasingly have the appearance of a holding bay for poems before they were sent off to journals. In N4, which runs from September 1933 to April 1934, we can trace the arrival and consolidation of his mature ‘process’ style, the one with which he would ‘hit the town of London’, as William Empson put it.9 The proportion of the poems entered in the notebooks and subsequently accepted for publication now increased: eight of fifty-three poems in N3 would be published, but eighteen of forty-one from N4 were published, including every one of its last seven poems. By the time he began N5, in summer 1934, Thomas’s mastery of the style was so complete that none of the poems entered it would fail to find an outlet.10 As a whole, the notebooks are one of the most comprehensive records of the progress from promising but undistinguished juvenilia to a fully fledged mature style, which we possess for any major poet – perhaps the most comprehensive. However, they are an incomplete record, insofar as they almost invariably record the final product; worksheets, for this period at least, do not survive. This was largely due to Thomas’s standard method of composition at the time, according to which the act of actually sitting down and writing a first draft would be preceded by a period in which he gathered material. This material would have disparate sources and modes – it would comprise not only the product of conscious thought and labour but might include fragments of conversation, a dictionary definition, a piece of urban lore, a pun, a joke or a

Percy Smart, ‘“Under Milk Wood” – and Reminiscence of School Days’, The Spread Eagle, XXIX (April 1954): 134, cited in PITM, 274. The overlap between the public versifier and the private modernist can be seen in the fact that just three notebook poems were ever considered suitable for the Swansea Grammar School Magazine: ‘The shepherd blew upon his reed’, which Thomas deleted in N1, and IV and V in N2, both of which prompted the poet’s later marginal inscription ‘Ugh’. PITM, 275. 9 William Empson, Argufying, ed. John Haffenden (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 387. 10 The exceedingly high ratio of published to unpublished poems of Thomas’s output is a striking feature of his writing after April 1934; apart from comic pieces written for friends, usually in letters, and around half a dozen uncollected poems (‘The Countryman’s Return’ being the most substantial), he wrote none which were not later published and collected. 8

INTRODUCTION

7

piece of wordplay, slang, reworked idioms and clichés, dream scenarios. Some or all of these might, at some point, cohere in Thomas’s mind to suggest the metaphors, parallels, conflicts and paradoxes which could drive a poem forward. Such material would be written on whatever came to hand – usually paper, but also envelopes, cigarette packets, betting slips and so on. When it reached what Thomas considered to be a critical mass, and he began to discern the shape of the poem asking be coaxed from it, he would start trying to write, although the writing, in the form of worksheets, might have begun while the material was still being gathered. This kind of accretive, pre-compositional activity is practised by many poets, of course. However, in Thomas’s case, and following surrealist and modernist promptings to circumvent the conscious mind in order to access the unconscious, it would seem the first fluid, incremental, associative stages loomed larger with him than for most. Once completed and fair-copied in a notebook, a poem’s form was generally fixed for future use. The process of its emergence from an assemblage of odds and ends, its haphazard and bricoleur-like origins, meant that the contributory materials and worksheets were unlikely to survive. Indeed, Thomas’s account of disposing of them once his compositional labours were done reads as if it were part of the creative–destructive cycle which, in cosmic form, is the subject of the poems themselves. What this means is that, except in very rare cases, there is no documentation of the evolution of Thomas’s early poems before they entered a notebook.11 Hence his reply to a former school friend, Charles Fisher, who requested some MSS in early 1935 – that is, at the time when N5 was his ‘live’ notebook: I’m very pleased and glad that you do want a manuscript of some poems of mine, and I’ll try to let you have what you want. But my method is this: I write a poem on innumerable sheets of scrap paper, write it on both sides of the paper, often upside down and criss cross ways, unpunctuated, surrounded by drawing of lamp posts and boiled eggs, in a very dirty mess; bit by bit I copy out the slowly developing poem into an exercise book; and, when it is completed, I type it out. The scrap sheets I burn, for there are such a lot of them that they clutter up my room and get mixed in the beer and butter. (CL, 209) This leaves the question of when N5 was actually begun and under what circumstances. Its first two poems are undated, as already noted. However, we can hazard a guess at the dates of their completion and entry in N5, and

Once Thomas realized his MSS were saleable, in 1941 (when the deal with Rota included the MS of the recently completed ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’), he naturally enough started to keep some of his worksheets. 11

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hence (roughly) the date the notebook was begun, from references in Thomas’s correspondence. Thus, N5 ‘One’, ‘All all and all’, is mentioned in a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of 20 July 1934, and ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’, in a letter to her of 2 August 1934. ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’, was revised in September 1934. The next poem, ‘Especially when the October wind’, dates from 1 October, and two further poems were entered during that month. We can surmise, then, that Thomas began N5 in July 1934, just over two months after he entered the last poem in N4 on 30 April. The initial delay and then slow use of N5 are best explained by the fact that in summer and early autumn 1934 Thomas was much preoccupied with preparing his forthcoming first collection, 18 Poems. There was, to begin with, a good deal of uncertainty as to who would actually publish it. ‘The force that through the green fuse’ had won a prize for the best poem published in the Sunday Referee in 1933, and the prize was book publication; however, the Referee would foot only half the bill, and Thomas had to seek out a co-sponsor, Parton Books. In May 1934 he sent poems to Hamish Miles, an editor at Jonathan Cape, presumably to try to interest him in publication, and as late as November Faber & Faber were considering his MS (only a hesitancy on Eliot’s part, which he later regretted, led to Thomas pulling out) (CL, 199–200). Thomas was also under pressure because of his concerns about what should go in the collection and a desire to make it as strong as he could. In a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of 2 May 1934 he discussed the issue, rejecting four of her suggestions and listing twelve poems he said he wanted to include. However, he would later drop three of these and end up including one of Johnson’s rejected suggestions, ‘The eye of sleep’ (which he rewrote as ‘I fellowed sleep’). His chronic uncertainty at this point is registered in the fact that his list of twelve omits four N4 poems, already written (though not revised), which did make it into 18 Poems: ‘My hero bares his nerves’, ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love’, ‘In the beginning’ and ‘When once the twilight locks’ (which he revised in March and was published in New Verse in June 1934). The uncertainty about both potential publishers and the contents of his collection as well as the pressures of editing, rewriting, and composing new material before his November submission deadline would have slowed the flow of poetry Thomas had enjoyed before May. Under the circumstances, the gap between the entry of the final poem in N4, on 30 April, and the mid-July start for N5, as well as the limited use of N5 before October, is hardly surprising. At the same time, the 2 May letter to Johnson more or less seals N5’s claims to be the direct successor to N4. In the same letter Thomas had noted that there were ‘about six or seven others [poems] I am still in the process of pruning and cutting about’. The first figure matches the six poems in N5 which, as we have said, made it into 18 Poems, and completes the total of eighteen. Of these, ‘One’, ‘All all and all’, ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’, ‘Four’, ‘Especially when

INTRODUCTION

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the October wind’, ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’ and ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’, unmentioned in the letter, were either new poems or (in the case of ‘Four’ and ‘Five’) radical revisions of older ones; while ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’, was, as already noted, a revision of a poem Thomas changed his mind about after telling Johnson it was ‘very bad indeed’ – albeit he had ‘rewritten [it] entirely’, making it ‘a little better, though still shaky on its rhythms and very woolly as to its intention (if any)’ (CL, 151). In other words, there are no poems in 18 Poems unaccounted for in N4 and N5; moreover, N5 ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’, which had to be further revised the following summer, before appearing in Twenty-five Poems, is the only exception to the rule that successive entries in N5, from ‘One’ to ‘Seven’, went straight into 18P. As this suggests, however, a poem’s date of entry in N5 is not to be confused with some singular date or period of composition. While N5 datings may give a rough indication of a composition period, or periods, these are unverifiable in any absolute sense, in the absence of other evidence. This does not mean that we cannot make informed guesses, of course. For example, where there are earlier extant versions of poems, such as N5 ‘Five’, ‘Six’, ‘Sixteen’ and ‘Eighteen’, each of which is derived from an earlier version in N3 and N4, we have some indication of a revision period, and can at least chart some of the poem’s evolution. A prototype for N5 ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’, for example, first appeared as ‘Twenty Seven’ in N4, in October 1933. Its three stanzas were of eight, twelve and ten lines, respectively; these had become eight quatrains by October 1934, while its opening lines, relocated to the third quatrain in N5, disappeared when that stanza was omitted in 18P. We know that Thomas sent a version of the poem in quatrain form to Hamish Miles, an editor at Jonathan Cape, in May 1934, which seems to indicate that he had got it close to its final form in that month (though we can’t be certain, because the poem he sent is not extant) (CL, 161–2). It could well be that he revised ‘Five’ for the final time in May, but did not enter it into N5 until after he had heard from Miles. Meanwhile he may have devoted most of the little time he had in summer 1934 to work on ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’, the longest and most demanding poem among those he was working on at this time. There are no earlier versions of this poem, and we feel it is likely that Thomas composed it from scratch and that it constitutes his chief poetic labour for August–October 1934. However, we cannot know this for certain; no notes or previous versions exist, but its gestation could have begun at an earlier date.

THE TRAVELS AND TRAVAILS OF N5 Thomas’s letter to Charles Fisher bears the address ‘5 Radcliffe Street SW10’, and is dated by Paul Ferris to January 1935. At that point he had been in London for about two months, having moved there in mid-November 1934, shortly

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after confirming the forthcoming publication of 18 Poems, which he wanted to see through the press. He spent Christmas in Swansea, but soon returned to the task of trying to make his way in the metropolis; the last sentence of the passage from the Fisher letter gestures comically towards the disorder of the digs he shared there with Fred Janes, a Swansea friend who was studying at the Royal Academy Schools in Piccadilly.12 Both the London address and the Swansea recipient of the letter are a reminder that, while N5 was begun in Swansea in summer 1934, it is not, unlike its four predecessors, a ‘Swansea’ notebook as such. Part of the fascination of N5 is its peripatetic aspect; over half of the poems it contains were entered into it (and in many cases probably composed) in London, Cheshire and Donegal. In this sense it records the opening phase of the footloose lifestyle Thomas would follow for four years after he left his home town. However, a reader’s interest in this fact does not reside so much in the fact that those other places were the subject of, or ‘influenced’, the poems themselves; Thomas would not write a ‘place poem’ proper until ‘Poem in October’, in 1944. Rather, they intrigue because they testify to his persistence in exploring the implications of the ‘process’ style consolidated in N4, despite the somewhat unpropitious circumstances – a point worth making, if only because so many commentators have insisted that Thomas was completely dissolute during this period, and only able write when he had a secure ‘home’ – invariably, it is claimed, a Welsh one. The first seven poems in N5 were written while Thomas was still in Swansea, since he did not leave for London until November. However, N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’, is dated ‘December ’34’, making it possibly his first London poem (although it could have been entered when he was home for Christmas). It is more likely still that he was at Redcliffe Street when N5 ‘Nine’ ‘How soon the servant sun’, and ‘Ten’, ‘A grief ago’, both dated ‘January ’35’, were written up. In February of that year, Thomas moved, with Fred Janes and another Swansea artist friend, Mervyn Levy, to new lodgings, in nearby Colherne Road. It was here that he probably entered ‘Eleven’, the first of the three sections of ‘I, in my intricate image’. This was followed in March by the second section, titled – as if Thomas considered it a separate poem at this stage – ‘Twelve’. Thomas’s first three years in London, 1934–7, have been presented, and rightly, as a fairly chaotic period. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to imagine they were aimless or completely dissolute. Thomas was wholly serious about being a professional writer, and this meant that he assiduously, if

Dylan shared digs with Fred Janes at Redcliffe Street, in an area of London which Paul Ferris describes as a ‘seedier adjunct to Chelsea’, between Old Brompton Road and Fulham Road (Ferris, 1978, 118). Hilly Janes gives more detail without Paul Ferris’s sour disapproval; see The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (London: Robson Press, 2014), 4–19. 12

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somewhat haphazardly, strove to court and forge contacts who might further his career. In April 1936, seven months after the period covered by N5 had ended, for example, he would tell Vernon Watkins: ‘I was in London for just over a week and the same things happened there that always happen: I kept roughly a half of my appointments, met half the people I wanted to, met lots of other people, desirable and otherwise, and fully lived up to the conventions of Life No. 13: promiscuity, booze, coloured shirts, too much talk, too little work. … I left London with Life No. Thirteen’s headache, liver and general seediness, and have by this time fully recovered’ (CL, 248–9). The point about this passage – and it is borne out by reports of Thomas’s activity at the time – is that the ‘appointments’ and ‘meetings’ were a regular occurrence, whatever else went on. In the words of Fred Janes, who was trying to paint his portrait at the time, with limited success owing to the elusive character of his subject, Dylan was in and out of their digs ‘like a cat in a tripe shop’, ‘tremendously restless’, with periods of relative calm often punctuated by ‘a furious burst of work’, his behaviour characterized by ‘endless comings and goings … at all times’13 (DTANL, 113). For all his boozing, it is clear that Thomas rapidly and effectively expanded his network beyond the Swansea friends who had also moved to London at around the same time (Janes himself, Levy, Daniel Jones, Vera Phillips and Trevor Hughes among them) and built an enviable web of allies and confrères. Among his contemporaries it included, for example, Desmond Hawkins, Robert Herring, Michael Roberts, David Gascoyne, Rayner Heppenstall, William Empson, David Archer, George Barker, Roger Roughton, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Grigson, Norman Cameron, Cyril Connolly and John Lehmann – a formidable list – to which can be added a number of older heavyweights, including John Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Edwin and Willa Muir.14 As Grigson noted, a little acidly, Thomas swiftly gained confidence in the capital, playing up to, but also playing with, and manipulating its tendency to see him as a brilliant, if obscure Celtic wunderkind. Turning the ambivalent appreciation to his own advantage, he was able to position himself as a successor to modernism and the Auden group. The process seems to have begun as soon as he arrived. Thus, on 30 December 1934, The Sunday Referee carried an interview with Thomas titled, mock-provocatively, ‘Our Literary “Gangsters”: Young Poet Attacks Modern Writers’. Thomas opined: ‘Most writers today move about in gangs. They haven’t the strength to stand and

Janes, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, 4, 11. Indeed, Thomas seems to have concentrated on making new contacts to the point of neglecting, and even annoying long-standing Swansea friends such as Daniel Jones, who was living in Harrow at this time (DTANL, 114). 13 14

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fight as individuals. But even as “gangsters” their machine guns are full, not of bullets, but of dried peas’ (DTANL, 109). Similarly, in January 1935, J. D. Williams, Thomas’s former editor at the South Wales Evening Post used his diary column in the paper to praise 18 Poems, referring in it to a conversation with Thomas. To Williams’s claim that he was a modernist, Thomas is alleged to have replied, ‘Eliot! Pound! Auden! They are back numbers in the poetical world’ (DTANL, 109). However calculated and clichéd these claims appear now, they clearly reflect him attempting to position himself as the latest thing. During his frequent outings into the daytime world of fellow-writers, editors, publishers, agents and reviewers, and the night-time sorties into the literary demi-monde, Thomas’s notebooks – which contained numerous striking and as-yet-unpublished poems – were useful calling cards, a resource his less precocious contemporaries often did not possess. As Ralph Maud puts it, ‘The Notebook poems were the ammunition with which he began his assault on London’ (PITM, 39). Of course, drink, promiscuity, horseplay and his slowly disintegrating relationship with Pamela Hansford Johnson took their toll. Thomas, we should not forget, was only just twenty when he moved to London. As a result, over the next two years or so, he would yo-yo between its excitements, which invariably ended up in excess and collapse (what he dubbed ‘capital punishment’), and the staid, but necessary recuperative comforts of the parental home. In March 1935 he had to return to Swansea, from where he wrote to Glyn Jones: ‘The trials of life have proved too much for me, the courts have found me guilty, and, rather hollow-eyed and with little real work to my credit, I’ve returned home for a few weeks’ holiday’ (CL, 213). Yet for all the self-flagellation, N5 shows that he had actually completed the quite substantial ‘real work’ of three poems and two-thirds of one of his longest, ‘I, in my intricate image’, during his first stay in London. In the second week of April 1935, Thomas took N5 with him when he went north to stay with Alan (A. J. P.) Taylor, a lecturer in History at Oxford University, and his wife, Margaret Taylor. Alan Taylor was a friend of the poet Norman Cameron, a new London friend of Thomas’s who was attempting to wean him off his dissolute lifestyle. He had persuaded Taylor to take Thomas as a guest at the cottage owned by Margaret, in Disley, Cheshire (DTANL, 114). Thomas’s sojourn there lasted for around a month, and during it he completed and entered ‘Thirteen’ (‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’) and ‘Fourteen’ (the third part of ‘I, in my intricate image’). In the long run, Thomas made a better impression on Margaret Taylor than her husband; in fact, she became infatuated with him (and would became his patroness later in his career). However, perhaps because the first signs of this affection were already apparent, Thomas did not endear himself to Alan Taylor. They seem to have got on well enough for a fortnight and then to have fallen out. Taylor would later complain about Thomas’s over-consumption of his beer, and his bad manners, although tellingly

INTRODUCTION

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he seems to have been incensed most of all by his gleeful explanation of how he contrived to make things difficult for his readers, in what seems to have been a severe case of the prosaic historian unable to grasp modernist parataxis. ‘Fourteen’ is dated ‘May’, with a ‘Disley’ byline, and is dedicated to ‘A & M’; perhaps ironically so in ‘A’s case, given that this poem could easily have served for Thomas to demonstrate his devices for readerly frustration. By the end of May 1935 Dylan Thomas was back in London. His attendance at a dinner party at Cyril Connolly’s Chelsea flat at that time, attended by Evelyn Waugh, shows him still working at cultivating contacts. However, several weeks later his drinking seemed to be getting out of hand once more. Grigson and Cameron, concerned for his well-being again, persuaded him to take a more drastic break from London’s fleshpots and watering holes. In July, chaperoned by Grigson, Thomas set off for a relatively alcohol-free working holiday at a remote cottage at Glen Lough, in County Donegal in Éire.15 There he relaxed, grew a beard and lived on fish from the local lake, which Grigson taught him to catch. Groceries were delivered by a local farmer, Dan Ward, and washed down with the odd tipple of poteen or porter. Grigson returned to London after a fortnight, at the end of July, leaving Thomas on his own. He was seemingly content enough, if willing to complain for humorous effect, as he did in a letter to Bert Trick about being ‘as lonely as Christ’ in ‘a wild, unfrenchlettered country, too far from Ardara, a village you can’t be too far from’ (CL, 217). Again, as N5 reveals for the first time, Thomas accomplished a good deal when Grigson was present and after he had been left to his own devices, both revising older poems and writing new ones. ‘Fourteen’, for example, the third part of ‘I, in my intricate image’, begun at Disley, was revised at Glen Lough before Grigson left, if its July date is anything to go by, as was ‘Fifteen’, a revision of the much fussed-over ‘Incarnate devil’, which he entered in N5 on 24 July. On 2 August, by which date Grigson had probably left, Thomas copied up ‘Sixteen’, ‘The seed-at-zero’ and began ‘Altarwise by owl-light’. Parts I and II of ‘Altarwise’ were entered in N5 as ‘Seventeen’. ‘Eighteen’ is a revision of ‘Foster the light’, another poem which had been causing him trouble for many months. Finally, he entered ‘Nineteen’, III, IV and V of ‘Altarwise’, in N5. With the entry of these, the most radically experimental of all his poems, N5 concluded. Thomas, it seems, did not slacken in his networking and publishing efforts while he was in Ireland, posting off poems from N5 for publication as and when he completed them. On 3 August, he had sent ‘I’ in my intricate image’,

This former donkey-shed had been converted as a studio, and then abandoned, by the US painter Rockwell Kent. 15

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with five other poems to John Lehmann for consideration for the anthology This Year’s Poetry (he also sent it to Grigson for journal publication in New Verse, where it appeared in the August / September 1936 issue) (CL, 221–2, 226–7). A little later he sent another N5 poem, probably ‘A grief ago’, to Robert Herring, the editor of Life and Letters To-day. He also sent Herring the short story ‘The Lemon’ – a reminder that he was writing fiction as well as poetry in Glen Lough; the letter to Trick also mentions working on ‘Prologue to an Adventure’. One incidental aspect of Thomas’s Irish sojourn illuminated by his promotional activity and the long letters he wrote to Bert Trick and Daniel Jones is that his use of the verso pages in N5 from ‘Sixteen’ onwards was not necessarily simply the result of a shortage of paper. Rather, it seems that once he had started entering a poem in a notebook he wanted it to be completed there, and to keep his revisions with the originals if possible. In Glen Lough, for example, he rewrote ‘Grief thief of time’, ‘Five’ in N4, although N4 had been filled over a year before he took it to Donegal, evidently planning to rework this particular poem there. The new version was entered on the verso page next to ‘Five’ with the note: ‘Written and copied in later, August 1935. Glen Lough. Donegal’ (PITM, 322). This is another reminder that Thomas often worked on several notebooks at once – and a reminder, given what was to happen, that although the procedure was productive, it made it more likely that notebooks would be lost.

THE LEAVING OF N5: ACCIDENT OR ABANDONMENT? When Thomas filled N5, in mid-August 1935, work still had to be done with it. If all the poems in it had arrived at publishable form, or nearly, most had yet to find journal publication, while the longest piece in it, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, was still incomplete. On returning to London he continued to place the N5 poems in journals. ‘How soon the servant sun’ and ‘A grief ago’, for example, appeared shortly afterwards in Programme, on 23 October. Wishing to follow up swiftly on the success of 18P, Thomas now worked during the winter of 1935–6 on a second collection, extending his Christmas stay at Cwmdonkin Drive until February 1936 and continuing his labours into May. His haste meant some ransacking of N3 and N2 for poems to bulk out the more challenging work of N5, which was to be the backbone of 25P, just as the N4 poems had formed the core of 18P. Most of these rewrites, among them ‘I have longed to move away’, ‘Here in this spring’, Shall gods be said’, ‘Out of the sighs’ and ‘Why east wind chills’, simply refine the originals; others, such as ‘To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe’, are fully in the condensed N5 style and would have been written after N5 was finished. On 17 March 1936, Thomas sent an MS of twenty-three poems to Dent to be published (this edition

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included only eight of the ‘Altarwise’ sonnets, such was his rush). However, publication was delayed in part by his epistolary jousting with Richard Church, his editor at his new publisher, Dent, concerning the admissibility of the more obscure poems. Thomas used the time to revise existing poems and write new ones, bringing the total count up to twenty-five. In a letter of 1 May to Church, he stated, ‘I shall probably be able to let you have the other half dozen poems you need: two new ones, completing the long poem of which you have the first eight sections, and four younger ones selected and revised.’ The ‘two new ones’ were IX and X of ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, while one of the ‘younger ones’ was a revision of ‘To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe’ and another, ‘Then was my neophyte’, also in the dense N5 style and not deriving from any notebook. Both were published in Purpose in July 1936.16 25P itself was finally published on 10 September 1936. During 1936 and 1937, the pattern of Thomas’s irregular to-ing and froing between London and Swansea altered. In December 1936 his father, D. J. Thomas, retired, and Thomas’s parents let the house in the Uplands, Swansea, where their children had grown up. In April 1937 they moved to a smaller house in Bishopston, a Gower village just outside Swansea. In Paul Ferris’s words, ‘Dylan, his childhood home gone, edged towards a home of his own’ (DT, 156). By 1936, too, most of Dylan’s old Swansea friends had left the town, to find work elsewhere. Although he had recently met and befriended Vernon Watkins, there was less and less to return to. In April 1936 Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara for the first time in the Wheasheaf in London. Although he would have other relationships in the following year, his letters show he had his heart set on Caitlin from the start. In order to meet her, new locations, such as Laugharne and Cornwall, now cropped up in his itinerary, altering the Swansea–London axis and, to some extent, his lifestyle. Thomas’s literary career was well under way by this point. His second collection had appeared with a mainstream publisher; he had an editor (who sometimes questioned, rather than deferred to him) and an agent, David Higham. Following a rave review of his second collection by Edith Sitwell in The Sunday Times, he had provoked a debate in its Letters Page which lasted several weeks, as readers debated the merits and demerits of modern poetry. Thomas had arrived, and it was partly on the basis of this success, on 11 July the following year, he and Caitlin were married. However, the newlyweds had no home, and in the first year or so they were forced to lodge with friends or with their parents. Their possessions, which included the notebooks, became

There are no MSS for numbers VI-X of ‘Altarwise’, but the letter to Church shows the sequence was finished in late Spring 1936; Thomas sent a copy of IX, recently completed, to Elfriede Cameron on 25 April 1936 (CL, 251). 16

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ever more liable to be left behind as they flitted from one temporary home to the next. As we have seen, Thomas was in the habit of taking his notebooks with him wherever he travelled; equally habitual was leaving them behind in the places he stayed. As early as May 1934, a letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson records that he had left one at her house in Chelsea (CL, 151). In attempting to determine the date when Thomas left N5 at Blashford, and exactly when it was almost destroyed, we are fortunate in having the biographical note he left with it, and which (we must assume) was given at the same time to Louie King for fiery dispatch. (Figure 1) Its amusing selfdeprecating humour aside, the significance of the note lies in the fact that it lists The Burning Baby as among Thomas’s publications ‘in 1938’. However, no such book as The Burning Baby was ever published by Thomas. In December 1937, desperate for money, and without consulting Higham, he had made a deal with his acquaintance George Reavey, who owned the Europa Press, to publish a collection of his early short stories under this title. This had the muchdesired effect of netting some hard cash; just before Christmas 1937 he and Caitlin went to London to collect £15 of the £20 advance Reavey had agreed, staying in Hampstead with his friend, the poet Anna Wickham. In January 1938, the Thomases received the final £5 instalment of the advance. However, in February 1938, Europa’s printer, William Brendon of Plymouth, refused to publish The Burning Baby on the grounds of obscenity. Reavey arranged for another press, Obelisk, to publish the book instead. Unfortunately, their royalty terms were less generous than Europa’s, and Thomas dug his heels in about continuing with the project. Reavey made no further progress in getting the book published with Obelisk, and in October 1938, after Thomas made his peace with his agent over his earlier misdemeanour, Higham promptly annulled the agreement with Reavey. In other words, the only time Thomas could have believed that Europa would be publishing The Burning Baby would have been between December 1937 and February 1938. Thomas’s letters allow us to roughly date the often lengthy periods he and Caitlin spent at Blashford in the early years of their marriage. There are three of these: October 1937–April 1938, November 1938–March 1939 and January– March 1940. This allows us to say with some degree of certainty that N5 was left behind, along with the by-then inaccurate biographical note, when the Thomases left Blashford in April 1938, following their first stay. Although there is an outside possibility that the note was not disposed of by Thomas when it became invalid and that it and N5 were left behind after one of the two later sojourns, it is most likely that he wrote the note early during their first stay and left it behind then. The crucial question, of course, is not so much when Dylan Thomas left N5 behind or how he came to mislay it in the first place – it had happened before and would happen again, as the record shows – but rather why he left it and, most importantly, why, having left it, he did not try to recover such

INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 1  Dylan Thomas, brief biographical note, written ca. late 1937 to early 1938. Image courtesy of the Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University Library.

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a consummate example of his meticulous record-keeping. When he mislaid notebooks on other occasions, as we have seen, Thomas tried to recover them. But this time he did not; there is nothing in any of his letters about its loss, no record of him trying to recover it, not a trace of any complaint or bemoaning of its fate, as we would expect if he had valued it at all. This leads to the question of whether the near-destruction of N5 was simply the result of malice. When N5 reappeared in 2014, and it was reasonably suggested that it must have been Yvonne Macnamara, as mistress of the house, who gave the order for it to be burnt, journalists were swift to scent the story of a mother-in-law’s ire and quick to write it (‘Saved: the revelatory notebook Thomas’s fiery mother-in-law sent off to be burned’, one headline ran).17 It wasn’t difficult to imagine Thomas as the son-in-law from hell, of course, or to find evidence of him being waspish about Mrs Macnamara. In a letter to Charles Fisher of January 1939, he slates her and Blashford, and England into the bargain: This flat English country levels the intelligence, planes down the imagination, narrows the ‘a’s, my ears belch up old wax and misremembered passages of misunderstood music, I sit and hate my mother-in-law, glowering at her from corners and grumbling about her in the sad, sticky quiet of the lavatory, I take little walks over the Red Earth. Our baby should be born at the end of next week, we wait and it kicks. Lack of money still pours in. (CL, 403) This, however, as most readers of his letters will recognize, is standard Thomas bellyaching for humorous effect, sharpened in this particular instance by having a Welsh correspondent. Against it must be set the record of his appreciation of Blashford and its surroundings; so, writing to Vernon Watkins on an earlier occasion, on 25 October 1937, he had claimed: This is a very lovely place. Caitlin & I ride into the New Forest every day, into Bluebell Wood or onto Cuckoo Hill. There’s no-one else about; Caitlin’s mother is away; we are quiet and small and cigarette-stained and very young. I’ve read two dozen thrillers, the whole of Jane Austen, a new Wodehouse, some old Powys, a book of Turgenev, 3 lines by Gertrude Stein, & an anthology of Pure Poetry by George Moore. There are only 2,000 books left in the house. (CL, 301–2)

Or see this article in The Irish Times by Mark Hennessy, in which Thomas is described as an ‘unwelcome guest’, ‘loathed’ by Yvonne Macnamara, and the notebook said to be full of ‘nearindecipherable scratchings’ and ‘often impenetrable thoughts and meanings’. https​://ww​w.iri​shtim​ es.co​m/new​s/wor​ld/uk​/dyla​n-tho​mas-n​otebo​ok-go​es-un​der-h​ammer​-1.19​99958​? 17

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Moreover, while he may not have been an ideal son-in-law, Dylan seems to have behaved himself relatively well at Blashford, and to have been liked, and even mothered to some extent, by Yvonne Macnamara; she was liberal and bohemian by nature, and sometimes helped him out with small gifts of money (DTANL, 160). Moreover, it is unlikely, given her awareness of the poverty of her daughter and her husband, that she would have destroyed anything which might help Thomas earn a living. Oversight cannot be ruled out as a reason, of course, but it seems likeliest to us that Thomas had left the material in the Blashford house because he no longer needed it and that Yvonne Macnamara may well have been aware of the fact. The question that follows is why, by early 1938, this might be so? To answer it we have to bear in mind the nature of N5 and the point in Thomas’s poetic career at which it disappeared from view. On the first point, we have seen that N5 differs from all the other known notebooks in containing no unpublished work. Moreover, we know that the unpublished poems in his other notebooks were very much on his mind at the time. During his first stay at Blashford, plundering N2, N3 and even N1 for poems for The Map of Love, as he had previously for Twenty-five Poems, he managed to rewrite ‘O make me a mask’, ‘The spire cranes’, ‘When all my five and country senses see’, ‘Not from this anger’, ‘We lying by seasand’, and ‘How shall my animal’ (CP14, 98, 99, 27, 100). The revision of the first is dated ‘Nov 1937 Blashford’; the fifth ‘January 1938 Blashford’; all but ‘How shall my animal’ were sent to Poetry (Chicago), where they appeared in August 1938. To either side of what we might call this ‘Blashford group’, in compositional chronology, are ‘I make this in a warring absence’, completed in November 1937, and ‘After the funeral’, dating from March to April 1938. Like ‘How shall my animal’, ‘After the funeral’ was derived from N3; both, however, were major poems in the new style. They reflect the fact that Thomas felt he had reached an impasse with the ‘process’ poetry he had originated in 1933 in N3, and developed at breakneck pace in N4 and N5. What we can discern in the poems written in the new style is a major shift in outlook, less feverish and morbid than previously, and one which would necessitate a change in attitude towards his first four notebooks. The work derived from them for The Map of Love was a kind of clearing-out, we might say. Even though he would continue to raid them (for ‘On no work of words’, ‘The tombstone told’ and ‘The hunchback in the park’) and continue to carry them around for another three years (he took a phrase here and a line there for two still later poems, ‘On the Marriage of a Virgin’ and ‘Holy Spring’), this activity was more or less desultory. The year 1938 marked the end of his use of them in any significant way. Indeed, in ‘Once it was the colour of saying’, written later in 1938, Thomas would thematize the process of saying farewell not only to the earlier poetry but also, arguably, to these notebooks too.

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But N5 was never part of this final process of extraction. It could not contribute even to the diminishing returns to be had from N1, N2, N3 and N4, and in that sense, nothing was lost by letting it go, once the poems in it had been polished and published. By April 1938, that point was almost two years in the past. More importantly, Thomas had turned the kind of self-consciousness explored in ‘After the funeral’, ‘How shall my animal’ and ‘Once it was the colour of saying’ into a new kind of writing. He had a new direction, one he had been forced to take because he reached a stylistic impasse within a year of completing N5. As early as April 1936 he had admitted to Watkins: [P]erhaps, as you said once, I should stop writing altogether for some time; now I’m afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life of me, get any real liberation, and diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words; I seem, more than ever, to be tightly packing away everything I have and know into a mad doctor’s bag, and then locking it up: all you can see is the bag, all you can know is that it’s full to the clasp, all you have to trust is that the invisible and intangible things packed away – if they could only be seen and touched – are worth quite a lot. … I don’t fear … any sudden cessation or drying-up, and coming to the end, any (sentimentally speaking) putting out of the fires; what I do fear is an ingrowing, the impulse growing like a toenail into the artifice. (CL 249–50) Two years later, in 1938, he would reflect back on a crisis which seemed to have been resolved in favour of a rather more transparent style in letter to a former school friend, Bob Rees: I … think that I was always attracted to the idea of extremely concentrated poetry; I could never like the poetry that allowed itself great breathing spaces, tediums and flatnesses, between essential passages; I want, and wanted, every line to be the essence of the poem, even the flourishes, the exaggerations. This, naturally, I could never achieve, but it still remains an ideal for me. … Later I realised that this essential writing, this writing without concessions – I say ‘without concessions’ for I think that the only person allowed, in a poem, to take a moment off is the reader – could avoid dullness only if it was dramatically effective at the same time.18 There is an element of disingenuousness about this, of course. Few would argue that ‘How shall my animal’ is an easy poem in any way, even if it is less mindbogglingly demanding than ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, say; Thomas’s shift to

Quoted in Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems, ed. Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1995), xxxvi.

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transparency was relative and far more marked in his prose than in his poetry. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that he had tired of the dark intricacies of his first two collections. The stylistic turn of 1938 is not fully apparent in The Map of Love (1939), the collection he was beginning to think about at the time he left N5 behind at Blashford. Like 25P, it is a transitional work, assembling as it does revised versions of early pre-‘process’ poems from N2 and N3, tough pieces, of which ‘I make this in a warring absence’ is the most formidable, and more straightforward recent poems such as ‘After the funeral’. The stylistic shift would itself become one of the subjects of the stories making up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940). Unlike the seething, experimental prose of the early short stories, some of which Thomas had also included in The Map of Love, these tales were written in a style that was closer to his letters; discursive, acidly comic and sentimental by turns, they were an episodic Bildungsroman based closely on young Dylan’s Swansea childhood and adolescence. Since they had been those of a precocious poet, the stories commented ironically on the modernist pretensions of his earlier self. The reference to the ‘exercise-books full of poems’ in the epigraph to this Introduction, taken from one of those stories, ‘The Fight’, is part of this gentle sending-up. The renunciation became a physical one, however, once Thomas was approached by Rota and realized that there was money to be made from his MSS. On 2 April 1941, from Bishopston, he wrote to Clement Davenport: In the pink bedroom we slept and stored apples in and knocked about, you’ll find unless they’ve moved a number of, I think, red small exercise books full of my old poems and stories. Would it be a lot of trouble for you to send them to me? I mean, will you? I’ve got a chance of selling all my mss, for about the price of a two large Player’s after the next budget, and it’s easier, and more honest too, to send the real mss rather than to copy out the copies in different coloured inks and with elaborate and ostentatiously inspired corrections. Will you send them here, and not to Laugharne as we haven’t reached there yet … I’ve got to send them off in the next few days. Thanks very much. (CL, 543) By this point, of course, it was too late for him to add N5 to the bill of sale. Thomas would have believed it to have been destroyed long before, at some point around April 1938. He may well have thought If only I had known then what I know now, but he hadn’t, and it was gone. A profound symbolism has been detected in the sale of N1-N4 by Constantine Fitzgibbon and other biographers. Dylan Thomas reached the age of twentysix in October 1940, Fitzgibbon notes, the age at which Keats died, and he had drawn parallels between his writing career and Keats’s several times. He had more or less used up whatever he could from the notebooks. The war

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was well under way, and he had a family to support; he felt it was time, it has been suggested, to finally abandon his past, and sever the umbilical cord connecting him with his Swansea youth. It may be that the passive disposal of N5 in 1938 had been his first tentative gesture in this direction. According to Fitzgibbon, Thomas’s own comment on his sale of the notebooks to Rota was: ‘It’s lovely when you burn your boats. They burn so beautifully.’19 But Caitlin Thomas was surely nearer the mark when she claimed that ‘[it] was the calm, rational, literary Dylan who decided that he didn’t want to refer to them any more. … “I’ve pretty well exhausted all the stuff in there; there’s nothing more I want to use”, he told me.’ She also added, ‘The drinking Dylan may have drunk those notebooks … but it was the creative Dylan who decided to sell them.’20

THE CONDITION AND CONTENTS OF N5 The nature of N5 as a material object, along with its paratexts, or material contexts, sheds light on its literary contents in a detailed and fascinating way. After she had saved them from destruction, it would seem Louie King set N5 and its accompanying biographical note aside and forgot about them for fifteen years or so, until she was reminded of them by news of Thomas’s death, in November 1953. Thereafter, alerted to the status of the surviving members of the Thomas and Macnamara families as a minor media phenomenon, she occasionally added newspaper cuttings to the bag in which she kept them. With what degree of secrecy she did this, and who, if anyone else, knew about N5, we do not know; the sellers, presumably family members, disclosed nothing in public on the subject at the time of the Sotheby’s sale. Evidently, she must either have willed it to her heirs or left it to be discovered by them after her death in 1984. She had kept the notebook in a small blue-and-white paper bag from Tesco, bearing, in blue, the logo, ‘DELAMERE the symbol of quality and value at TESCO’, with ‘Dylan Thomas’ written across the top, in blue biro capitals (Figure 2). Into this bag, along with the notebook, Thomas’s note and her own, she placed three newspaper cuttings. i. Cuttings The first cutting consists of all of page eight of The Daily Express for Thursday 29 May 1958. It carries an article headlined ‘DYLAN THOMAS’S WIDOW’S SISTER …’, and is based on an interview with Nicolette Devas, Caitlin’s sister,

Constantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London: Plantin Publishers, 1987), 281. Caitlin Thomas with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 83. 19 20

INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 2  Paper Tesco bag in which the fifth notebook was kept by Louie King. Image courtesy of the Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University Library.

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with a brief assessment of her thinly disguised autobiographical novel Bonfire. The second item is page nine of The Daily Mirror for Friday 14 June 1963, and it contains a scathing review by Marjorie Proops of Caitlin’s recently published Not Quite Posthumous Letter to My Daughter, headlined ‘THE ECCENTRIC MOTHER WHO PUTS MONEY BEFORE LOVE’. Finally, there is a much smaller cutting (newspaper unknown) on the success of the BBC’s television documentary ‘The Life of Dylan Thomas’ at the 1963 Cannes Television Festival. ii. Notes The first note, in what seems to be the same blue biro as that used on the paper bag, is in Louie King’s hand, and is written on a slip supplied with school exercise books on which pupils had to enter ‘School’, ‘Name’, ‘Subject’ (Figures 3a and 3b). It reads: This Book of Poetry by Dylan Thomas was with a lot of papers given to me to burn in the kitchen boiler. I saved it and forgetting all about it until I read of his death. The photoes [sic] were given to me by Mrs Summers of (Ferdown) Alas! time goes on I do nothing. With a Pathetic passionate voice Oh! Caitlin these people that do believe they must have something.21 ‘Mrs Summers’ is the painter and photographer Nora Summers, a well-off artist and friend of the painter Augustus John and his family, who lived near Blashford, at Fryern Court. The ‘photoes’ referred to were presumably some of those taken by her of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas during their first visit to Blashford (Louie King, or her heirs, had removed the photos before N5 came up for sale in 2014). ‘Ferdown’ is a misspelling of Ferndown, the house where the Summers family lived. Yvonne Macnamara had separated from her husband, Francis Macnamara, in 1919, and had moved to Hampshire in order to be near John, a family friend, and the children of the Johns and the Macnamaras grew up, to some extent, together. It was at the Johns’ house that Yvonne met Nora Summers, and they became lovers. Yvonne’s children resented Nora, looking on her as a monster who had stolen their mother from them. Nevertheless, despite Caitlin’s resentment, Summers was a fine photographer; her photographs of Caitlin, at Blashford in summer 1936, and of Caitlin and Dylan as a young married couple, taken in 1937–8, are among the best ever taken of either of them. By way of contrast to its halting and ‘Pathetic passionate’ tone, the second note in the Tesco bag, in Thomas’s own hand, as we have noted (see Figure 1), is a brief, mildly rogueish biography of the sort he would have enclosed when submitting work to journals:

The stray word ‘oven’, which follows the final sentence, may be a correction of ‘boiler’.

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FIGURE 3A AND 3B  Sides 1 and 2 of note by Louie King enclosed with N5. Image courtesy of the Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University Library.

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Dylan Thomas. Born in Swansea, South Wales. No respectable occupation, no permanent address. Contributor to many periodicals in England and elsewhere, including the Criterion, Life and Letters Today, New Verse, Contemporary Verse and Prose, Transition. ‘18 Poems’ (Parton Press) was published in 1934; ‘25 Poems’ (Dent) in 1936; and ‘The Burning Baby’ (Europa Press) in 1938. iii.  Poems in N5 N5 contains the following poems. Unless otherwise specified, the dates when they were entered in N5, and the places where they were entered, were appended by Thomas at the end of the poem and are given in brackets.

1. ‘One’, ‘All all and all’. (No date; last half-stanza on missing page.)



2. ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’. (No date; last stanza on missing page.)



3. ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’. (Heavily deleted ‘Sept. 30. 1934’ after stanza 3 of first version; the revision, of the stanza which follows it on the same page, plus an additional and final stanza on the facing verso page, is dated ‘July 26. 35. Glen Lough’.)



4. ‘Four’, ‘Especially when the October wind’. (‘1 Oct 1934’.)



5. ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’. (‘1934’.)



6. ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’. (‘1934’.)



7. ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’. (‘27 Oct 1934’.)



8. ‘Eight’, ‘Now’. (‘December ’34’.)



9. ‘Nine’, ‘How soon the servant sun’. (‘January ’35’.)

10. ‘Ten’, ‘A grief ago’. (‘January ’35’.) 11. ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, I. (‘February ’35’.) 12. ‘Twelve’, ‘They see the country pinnacle’. (‘I, in my intricate image’ part II.) (‘March ’35’, at beginning and end of poem.) 13. ‘Thirteen’, ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’. (‘April ’35’ (Cheshire).) 14. ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water’. (‘I, in my intricate image’ part III). ‘(Disley. May)’ at beginning of poem; ‘July ’35 Glen Lough, Donegal’. 15. ‘Fifteen’, ‘Incarnate devil in a talking snake’. (‘July 24. ’35. Glen Lough’.) 16. ‘Sixteen’, ‘The seed-at-zero’. (‘August. 2. 35. Glen Lough’.) 17. ‘Seventeen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, I and II. (‘August 35 Glen Lough’, in blue pencil – poem is in ink.) ‘(To be continued)’ at the end of the entry, immediately after II. 18. ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’. (‘August. ’35. Glen Lough’.)

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19. ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, III, IV and V. (‘August 35 Glen Lough’, in blue pencil after III; ‘August 35 Glen Lough’, in blue pencil after IV; ‘Glen Lough’, in ink, after V.) iv.  Condition and contents of N5 N5 is the same kind of school exercise book as N1-N4; that is, of the kind with brand names such as ‘The Zenith Exercise Book’, common at the time and still manufactured today. They made provision for entering ‘Name’, ‘School’ and ‘Date’ on the front cover, and often contained useful reference material on the inside of the front cover and the inside and outside of their back covers. This material could include multiplication tables, a map of the British Isles and lists of imperial weights and measures (chains, furlongs, poles, perches, etc.). Thomas alludes in his stories ‘The Fight’ to the ‘Danger Dont’s’ that were often printed on the outside of the back cover. These were a series of exhortations intended to prevent children being involved in ‘street accidents’; they included such injunctions as ‘Don’t follow a rolling ball into the road or street while there is traffic about!’ (Figure 4). N5 is centrally stapled, and its two original staples, slightly rusted, remain in the spine, but it has lost its cover. It is also missing several sheets. What would have been its third sheet (or pages five and six) has been removed, with the result that the page containing the last three lines of ‘All all and all’ has disappeared. However, the sheet has been cut out flush with the spine, so its continuation in the second half of the notebook remains in place. The final stanza of ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’ is also missing. This could mean that what would have been the sixth sheet in N5 (or pages eleven and twelve) has also been removed; if it has, the continuation of the sheet in the second half of N5 (what would have been pages seventy-seven and seventy-eight) has also been removed. However, it is impossible to be certain that this is what happened, since we do not know what the original number of pages was; it could be that ‘Two’ had not been finished when Thomas entered it or that he simply decided not to add the final stanza. All we do know for sure is that the total number of pages in N5 is eighty-two and that this number is not divisible by four, whereas if the notebook were intact it would be, given that each sheet making up the book has four sides or pages. It currently has a total of forty and a half sheets, making eighty-two pages (verso and recto). Three of the pages – thirty-seven/-eight; forty-seven/-eight; and sixty-five/six – have been partly torn out. Pages forty-three/-four and fifty-nine/-sixty have been torn, but are otherwise fully intact. Overall, the physical condition of N5 is good; its pages are slightly foxed, but otherwise undamaged by age or use. Thirty-one of the pages of N5 are completely blank, and fifty-one are written on. Of the written-on sides, two are merely verso sides with pencil

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FIGURE 4  Cover of Dylan Thomas’s Red Notebook, a school exercise book of the same kind as N5. Image courtesy of the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York, Buffalo.

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scribbles unrelated to the poetry. The first of them, page four, has a smudgy, pencilled calculation in the top left-hand corner. The second, page eighty-two, has a pencilled address (‘Mrs Morgan Grimm’s Kitchen Abinger nr Dorking’), a phone number (‘Wembley 2851’) and (upside down) ‘Michael Harrison c/o Outham Bankes’. The other forty-nine written-on pages have been used for poetry. Of these, forty-one are the recto pages Thomas preferred to use, and eight are verso pages. The verso pages which have poetry on them are pages twelve, sixty, sixty-two, seventy-two, seventy-four, seventy-six, seventy-eight and eighty. Thomas wrote in N5 largely in ink, but he also used at least one pencil and a blue colouring pencil, particularly when revising poems on the verso pages. As in N1-N4, he initially wrote only on the recto pages of N5. The verso pages were used when Thomas returned to revise poems on the facing recto page (as for ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’), or when he began to run short of recto pages near the end of the notebook.

‘STYLUS OF LIGHTNING’: THE TRANSCRIPTION PROCESS Various difficulties were encountered in transcribing the MS, but almost all were minor and relatively easy to overcome. As already mentioned, three pages and parts of several other pages were missing, but as far as we could tell this only affected the first two poems in N5. It is unlikely that the missing parts of these poems – entered at the start of N5 when Thomas was doing very little in the way of on-the-spot revision – contained much if anything in the way of rewriting. Thomas’s handwriting is usually legible, if rather small and crabbed at times. There are, however, exceptions to the general pattern of clarity, particularly where Thomas deleted lines and interlineated new ones in writing that is even smaller than his usual hand. In some places, too, the ink has faded or the pencil is faint, or has been smudged and blurred. The main problem posed by the text was Thomas’s deletions. Starting with ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’, these become more frequent thereafter. They are not usually heavy, and can usually be deciphered with the naked eye (much of the crossing-out is in pencil). However, a handful of part-lines and words remained impenetrable. Digital image manipulation software was used on one occasion, and while it resolved the opening line of ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ V, other cases had to remain in limbo. These are recorded in the transcript and notes; they are to be found in the second and fourth stanzas of ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, in stanza one of ‘Fifteen’, ‘Incarnate devil’, in stanza two of ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’, and in ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ III, ‘First it was the lamb on knocking knees’. Detective work therefore awaits future scholars; in the meantime, readers are encouraged to make their own guesses.

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‘THE METRE OF THE DICTIONARY’: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF N5 Dylan Thomas’s notebooks have a significance rare in the history of poetry. Most poets destroy their juvenilia. Thomas is rare, among major poets, in his precocity (‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ was written within days of his nineteenth birthday), and in the fact that, partly as a result of this, he preserved so much of his juvenilia for later use. Most of the poetry in N1, N2 and N3 is relatively weak and unrealized, of course, before ‘And death shall have no dominion’ – Thomas’s first true ‘process’ poem – which was written in N3 in mid-April 1933. Coalescing several previously existing aspects of his poetry, this marked the beginning of the development of his unique process vision and voice and an astonishingly rapid development of his first mature style. In N4 in particular, begun in September 1933, we witness his poetry evolving in richness, subtlety and power on a weekly, if not daily basis. N5 seems initially to be simply a continuation of N4, both in the obvious chronological sense and in the fact that it, too, contains poems which would go into 18P. It is clear that the first poem in N5, ‘All all and all’ is in the same vein of confronting fears about the adult world and sexuality as is in ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love’, which precedes it as the last poem in N4, and both went into his first collection. Other themes and concerns of N4 continued to be explored in N5, or are intensified. Thomas’s use of Hamlet, for example, to explore the father–son bond crops up in ‘Now’, ‘I fellowed sleep’ and ‘I, in my intricate image’. The related fascination with suicide and death, and the resultant self-exhortations to avoid it, and shun morbidity, continue. However, this does not mean that N5 is merely an adjunct to N4, just more of the same. On the contrary, we would argue that N5 registers a formal shift, if not a thematic one, a move towards a less symbolically coherent, more metapoetic style, and its implications for understanding of Thomas’s poetic development are almost as great as those for N3 and N4. Before discussing this change, however, we will list a few of the more obvious ways in which N5 clarifies and enhances our understanding. One immediate impact of N5 is that it clears up some minor cruxes of Dylan Thomas scholarship. In the case of ‘I dreamed my genesis’, for example, there is a full stop at the end of the first stanza in its versions in 18P and CP52 – that is, in the versions of the poem published during Thomas’s lifetime and thus (apparently) with his authority. That full stop, however, leaves the second stanza without a subject, as Ralph Maud observed; his solution, as early as 1963, was to propose that it should be a comma. However, when Daniel Jones made this alteration in TP71 there was strident opposition to his tampering with the original punctuation, and Maud and Davies did not make the same change in CP88, nor did Goodby in CP14. However, with no MS version of the poem

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against which to check these claims there could be no certainty on this score. N5 shows the original to have had a comma, powerfully implying that the full stop is a compositor’s error which Thomas himself failed to spot before his death. Another obvious impact lies in the changes N5 makes to the dating, and thus the likely order of composition, of the poems. Maud and Davies argued in CP88 for a Christmas 1934 date for the start of ‘Altarwise’, on the strength that ‘the first two sonnets are nativity poems’ and that they were likely to be the two poems Thomas offered Grigson for New Verse in February 1935 (CP88, 210). But the poems’ entry into N5 in August 1935 virtually proves that they were composed at the height of summer, not in the depths of winter. Similarly, ‘Now’ and ‘How soon the servant sun’ could not have been composed in May 1935, as Maud and Davies also thought, or even ‘early 1935’, as Goodby hazarded of ‘Now’, since they were entered in N5 in ‘December ’34’ and ‘January ’35’, respectively (CP14, 296). N5 also now makes it possible to chart the history of the composition of a poem more accurately. The generally agreed range of dates for ‘I, in my intricate image’ was between October 1934 and March 1935. Yet N5 not only shows that the first part was not completed until February 1935, with parts two and three added in April, but that section three was fully revised at Glen Lough in July. Not all early guesses at dates are disproved: Paul Ferris’s speculation that ‘My world is pyramid’ is the poem mentioned in a letter of 2 August 1934 to Pamela Hansford Johnson can now be confirmed (CL, 190). In clarifying the order of composition, N5 also clarifies the relationships between its poems in illuminating ways. It shows, for example, how material was swapped between them, uncovering hitherto unsuspected links and interactions. We now know that ‘salvation’s bottle’ in ‘Altarwise’ V began life as a deleted line in the third section of ‘I, in my intricate image’, while the opening line of ‘Altarwise’ IV, ‘What is the metre of the dictionary?’, was originally line seven of a deleted section of the second sonnet in the sequence, ‘Death is all metaphors’. There is no doubt that being able to compare the different contexts in which these lines were used will allow readers to gain more purchase on them. The same evidence can, of course, also help to eliminate fruitless lines of enquiry. Maud and Davies ‘deduced’ in CP88 that ‘I, in my intricate image’ was a direct continuation of ‘When, like a running grave’; but, although both poems include the ‘Cadaver’ figure, we now know that there was a four-month gap between their entry in N5, making that deduction less likely (CP88, 195). N5 also reveals more general trends; thus, while 25P has traditionally been regarded as the Thomas collection most preoccupied with religion, N5 reveals that he consistently worked to reduce its Christian element, deleting the last two stanzas of ‘The seed-at-zero’, for example. These two stanzas are some of the more substantial pieces of previously unknown material N5 contains, and such material was one of the main reasons for excitement at the time of its discovery in 2014. However, it is often the

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smaller details – deleted phrases and even single words – which shed the most valuable light on Thomas’s working methods and intentions. For example, N5 tells us that the fifth line of ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ I originally began ‘Old Scratch the fork-tail lurcher’. ‘Old Scratch’ is a jocular term for the Devil, and its replacement by ‘The atlas-eater with a jaw for news’ seems therefore to be a case of Thomas curbing his infernal allusions and inserting his alter ego (as youthful journalist) more fully into the narrative. ‘Abaddon’, angel of the bottomless pit, had already appeared in line three, so it may be that adding ‘Old Scratch’ two lines later seemed like overdoing things. Nevertheless, the ‘gentleman’ to whom ‘Old Scratch’ is also syntactically related here is Christ, and as a good Blakeian, Thomas viewed Christ and Satan – as in ‘Incarnate devil’, the poem preceding this one – as twin victims of a tyrannical, Nobodaddy-like God-the-Father. The Devil therefore lurks within the ‘gentleman’ (as the echo of Edgar’s ‘The prince of darkness is a gentleman’ from King Lear hints), accounting for Old Scratch’s appearance in the first place. Thinking about it, Thomas may well have decided that the devilishness was better dispersed in the poem’s details, letting ‘scratch’ became the ‘scraped’ of line eleven, perhaps. Even so, the presence of Old Scratch in the N5 original boosts those critics who detect a certain satanic majesty in the ‘gentleman’ and undermines more straightforward Christological readings of the sequence. A similar revision in ‘Altarwise’ II, where ‘The devil’s grammar and the burning bibles’ was deleted, makes the same point. The revisions in N5, then, have the potential to tell us much about Thomas’s thinking and his compositional processes. In all, thirteen of its poems were altered after or while they were being fair-copied, some substantially (there are variant passages of up to eight lines), a much greater proportion than for any of the other notebooks. This reflects the speed of Thomas’s development at the time, of course, the pressures of his publication deadline for 18P and the complexity and daring of the poems themselves. All of this increased the need for on-the-spot revision, particularly in the two most radical and complex pieces in the notebook, ‘I, in my intricate image’ and ‘Altarwise by owl-light’. It is significant, we feel, that both of these poems were written and entered into N5 after the final poem in it intended for 18P, ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’. At that point, Thomas presumably knew that he had enough poems of a sufficiently high calibre to complete his first collection, and it seems to us that he made a point of registering the fact. The date he entered ‘Seven’ into N5, ‘26th October 1934’, with the year underlined, is given in unusually full form at the foot of the poem, and – uniquely in N5 – a second longer, more emphatic horizontal line, with two short vertical strokes delimiting its ends, has been drawn in the centre of the page beneath the poem and the date. Given that 26 October 1934 was the day before Thomas’s twentieth birthday, and knowing the significance he attached to birthdays (sometimes marking them with special stock-taking or summary poems), we feel it is likely that in doing

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so he was drawing a line under the first portion of N5 in a metaphorical and literary sense as well as a literal one. What follows immediately after ‘Seven’ strengthens this supposition. ‘Eight’ and ‘Nine’ – ‘Now’ and ‘How soon the servant sun’ – are the two poems Thomas acknowledged as being the two most purely based on sound he ever wrote. ‘Ten’, ‘A grief ago’, is stylistically more in accord with the ‘process’ style of 18P than this rather whimsical pair, but it, too, turns on a quibbling definition of, and play upon, a single word – the ‘she’ who is its subject. The verbal high (and low) jinks continue in N5, in a deeper vein, with ‘Eleven’ and ‘Twelve’, the first two sections of ‘I, in my intricate image’. Following these comes ‘Thirteen’, ‘Hold hard these ancient minutes’, a poem which Vernon Watkins described, correctly, as an example of Thomas’s attempt to create a verbal equivalent of abstract visual art. The last section of ‘I, in my intricate image’ follows this, and then the final version of an earlier poem, ‘Incarnate devil’. Because of its earlier provenance, predating ‘Seven’, this is a less radical work (‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’, falls into the same category). However, the experimental cudgels, albeit modest, are taken up again in ‘The seed-atzero’ and returned to in much greater earnest in ‘Seventeen’ and ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’. All of the new poems in this second part of N5, then, show Thomas pushing towards poems which are autonomous verbal objects, metapoetic in the degree to which they foreground sound and rhythm at the expense of sense, and to which they explore, rather than simply relish, the materiality of language. ‘Seven’, then, can be said to mark a watershed in Thomas’s stylistic evolution, a turning point or hinge between two different phases of his development. Faced, on entering ‘Seven’ in N5, with the question: where next? Thomas answered decisively, over the next three months, by striking out boldly and adapting his style. There was bravery in this since there was risk involved; he could, after all, quite easily have stuck with the proven success of straightforward process poems such as ‘The force that through the green fuse’ and ‘I see the boys of summer’, which were in most eyes innovative enough, and then some. Instead, remaining true to his experimental urge, Thomas chose to tease out the further implications of that style in a version of what Marjorie Perloff has called ‘mannerist modernism’, a highly self-conscious, quasi-parodic response to high modernism which emerged in the brief hiatus between its falling away around 1930 and the emergence of social realism in 1934–5. Accordingly, the bulk of the poems that make up the second part of N5 may be viewed as limit texts, part of Thomas’s deliberate attempt to extend himself in a risk-taking procedure which consciously courted excess and collapse. In this sense, we might say – and with all the usual caveats about confusing the work and the artist – his lifestyle at the time was not unrelated to what he was attempting in his writing.

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He was able to do so because he was not as susceptible as the Audenesque poets to the pressure of British, particularly English, literary culture to stabilize modernism’s disruptive tendencies in a poetry of ironic balance. A hybrid, gothic-grotesque, Anglo-Welsh and mongrel modernist, Thomas was freer to replicate the collage effects of modernism through pun, distended and compressed syntax, disguised main verbs and unsignalled switches of subjects and speakers. In doing so, he was able to probe the apocalyptic temper of the time in a way that was unique in British poetry, enacting social crisis and political polarization in a revolution of the word, rather than simply describing or allegorizing them. There are several instances in N5 of Thomas’s radicalism at this point. Take, for example, the revision of ‘Eight’, ‘Now’. When Thomas began entering it into N5, it was evidently a lyric in stanzas of eight lines each. But after writing the first three stanzas in ink he felt dissatisfied with it. He deleted, with pencil, the last (eighth) line of each stanza (lines which have never previously been seen and which merit future consideration in their own right). He proceeded to write out the fourth and fifth stanzas, tentatively, in pencil. He then wrote over these in ink – unlike the first three stanzas, which have no trace of pencil beneath the ink. Revealingly, the fourth and fifth stanzas have no eighth line; both are seven lines long. We surmise, therefore, that the original version consisted of five eightline stanzas, but that after copying the third stanza into N5, Thomas changed his mind, trimmed the first three and then (initially in pencil only) wrote in the fourth and fifth without their final lines, to see how they read. Once satisfied, he went over stanzas four and five in ink, and made some revisions to stanza three, also in ink. The most revealing aspect of this procedure is not the overwriting, of course. Using pencil to see how a poem might look before committing it to permanent form occurs quite often in N5. Rather, it is the sheer arbitrariness of the deletions. In 2013 John Goodby claimed that ‘Now’ was a mock avantgarde lyric, whose experimental appearance, deriving from its four shortish opening lines, was a kind of joke, based on the fact that the innovativeseeming form was a disguised quatrain, since the lines added up to make an iambic pentameter: Now + Say nay, + Man, dry man, + Dry lover mine The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor, Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust, Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.22

John Goodby, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 64–5. 22

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N5, with its arbitrary deletions of the eight line, can be taken to confirm this claim; it certainly seems as if Thomas suddenly realized, halfway through copying out ‘Eight’, that he could make sharpen his cod-modernist ironic point by a Dadaesque act of redaction. It is a further reminder of the level of his commitment, during this period, to a genuinely playful, experimental poetics. One of the more unlikely resources for experiment available to Thomas, as it was not to his English counterparts, was traditional Welsh poetry. Claims to have discovered a debt in Thomas’s work to cynghanedd – the strict patterning of vowels and consonants found in Welsh poetry – have been made many times, and Walford Davies has cautioned against making too much of small-scale, cynghanedd-like verbal patterns. As he rightly observes, ‘Talk of “modified cynghanedd”, when the examples amount to no more than alliteration helped by assonance, has, for too long been allowed to hallow some poets as Anglo-Welsh as if they knew fully what cynghanedd involves.’23 This is tonic and correct to the extent that it quashes vague assertions concerning Thomas’s ‘Celtic spirit’ and the like. However, one of the striking things about the poems assembled in N5 is that they show Thomas using devices found in Welsh poetry which go beyond mere word-music. This is a subject which demands extended consideration, of course, and this is not the place to do so in detail. However, it is revealing of Thomas’s poetic interests at the time of N5 that he should claim in May 1934, in a letter to Hamish Miles at Jonathan Cape, that N5 ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’, was ‘more or less based on Welsh rhythms’, as indeed it is (CL, 161–2). The poem is modelled on the Welsh englyn form, matching its strict syllable count, and the radically enjambed bisyllabic word at the end of the first line of each stanza which it requires. So much has been noted previously; however, what N5 suggests is that ‘Five’ was not a one-off. Other devices which we would argue were derived from medieval Welsh poetry abound in it, and probably reflect the fact that Thomas was drawing on the example of the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315 – c. 1350), who wrote several englyn sequences. Even more important, for Thomas’s practice, he frequently used sangiad, or the parenthetical phrase, dyfalu, hyperbolic comparison or description and torymadrodd, or inverted construction (a kind of tmesis). There are many points of similarity, in their subject-matter, style and lives, between Dafydd and Dylan, as Barbara Hardy has noted, and Thomas would have learnt something of his life and work from the books on Welsh literature in his father’s library and from Welsh-speaking friends and acquaintances such as Glyn Jones. There is only space here to touch on sangiad, which in Dafydd ap Gwilym, as Rachel Bromwich notes, is a device for signalling a parallel narrative to the poet’s

Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 10.

23

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main statement, one which underlines or emphasizes, but is subordinate to it.24 The parenthetical phrase, bracketted and unbracketted, is a central to the signature style of N5 as nowhere else in Thomas. ‘Four’, ‘Especially when the October wind’, ‘Nine’, ‘How soon the servant sun’, ‘Twelve’, ‘They climb the country pinnacle’, and ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ IV each contain bracketted clauses, while just about every poem employs unbracketted parenthesis. In such appositive sentences – made up, that is, of appositive sub-clauses linked additively, suspended in a fluid grammatical framework above the main thrust of the sentence, with little or no subordination of items – temporal resolution is deferred or unclear, with the main verb frequently delayed or disguised (as with ‘mine’, say, in ‘Eight’, ‘Now’). N5 ‘Seven’, ‘When like a running grave’, takes this to an extreme in opening with a single sentence which continues for five stanzas and consists of no less than thirty-five clauses, almost all of which are appositive or sub-clauses. Thomas’s updated sangiad is not merely rhetorical embellishment; rather, it is a verbal enactment of the simultaneity of event and the interlinkedness of all events and objects in the universe, in accordance with his process poetic. That poetic was underwritten by the discoveries of modern science – the new physics, Darwinian biology, Freudian psychology – and in this sense the poetry is to be seen as a form of what Terry Eagleton has called the ‘archaic avant-garde’, one in which traditional elements are paradoxically pressed into the service of literary revolution.25 In short, then, if N3 reveals Thomas’s discovery of the process poetic, and N4 is the record of his perfection of it, N5 charts his attempt to see how far that style could be extended, distended and upended – in other words, of his most experimental phase as a poet. More, N5 shows just how decisively and methodically he did this, and how, in doing so, he forged what may be called, with some justification, a proto-postmodernist style. Playful excess was always already implicit in Thomas’s subaltern, hybrid and gothic-modernist poetic; with N5, we would argue, he took this to its logical conclusion, following a course of development which is disguised and muffled by 25P, the volume to which it most largely contributed, by reason of the admixture of rewritten older poems. These prevented us from seeing, until we had N5, the consistent thrust of Thomas’s experimental urge in 1934–5. N5 makes clear Thomas’s continued commitment to a modernist poetics well after it had been abandoned by his contemporaries. It also shows his determination to do this in his own way, as we have seen, subtly subverting modernist pieties and using his Welsh heritage and hybrid status. It is significant, we feel, that he did this on his own terms. Thus, in ‘Fifteen’, ‘Incarnate devil’, we find the portmanteau coinage ‘sacret’. It is a brilliant invention, a compound of ‘secret’ and ‘sacred’ worthy of Joyce’s Work in Progress – yet Thomas eventually dropped it, aware, we would

Rachel Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym: Collected Papers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), 9. 25 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 273. 24

INTRODUCTION

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argue, of the dangers of seeming to be merely a Joycean imitator. In whatever light we wish to regard it, N5 is a significant document in the record of the fate of literary modernism in Britain in the 1930s.

IS THERE AN N6? Is it at all possible that yet another notebook – an N6 – exists? There could well be, we believe, although the odds against it having survived are very long. There are only so many careful, curious, yet forgetful former housemaids, and undisturbed Tesco bags in forgotten desk drawers, or their equivalents. But when N5 was complete, Thomas had still to complete the ‘Altarwise’ sonnet sequence, and in all likelihood he would have done so in a notebook bought when he returned from Donegal in August 1935. ‘Altarwise’ VI was written in September–October 1935; Thomas, we know, sent a six-part ‘Altarwise’ to Richard Church, his editor at Dent, on 8 October, and he presumably would have wished to write it, and the next four sections, in an exercise book, as was his wont (CL, 229). This putative N6 would also have contained the other new poems written for Twenty-five Poems, and for which there are either no or few MSS. They would include ‘Should lanterns shine’, ‘To-day, this insect’, ‘Then was my neophyte’ and perhaps some of the poems which were finished after Twenty-five Poems were published, in September 1936, such as ‘It is the sinner’s dust-tongued bell’. And it is with this thought – to keep one of the favourite speculations of Dylanites just about alive, and his own open-ended poetics open to future researchers and manuscript-hunters – that we conclude.

38

Contents of the fifth notebook

Title

Page number

‘One’, ‘All all and all’ ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’  ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’ ‘Four’, ‘Especially when the October wind’ ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’ ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’ ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’ ‘Eight’, ‘Now’ ‘Nine’, ‘How soon the servant sun’ ‘Ten’, ‘A grief ago’ ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, I ‘Twelve’, ‘They see the country pinnacle’: ‘I, in my intricate image’, II ‘Thirteen’, ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’ ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water’: ‘I, in my intricate image’, III ‘Fifteen’, ‘Incarnate devil in a talking snake’ ‘Sixteen’, ‘The seed-at-zero’ ‘Seventeen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, I and II ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’ ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, III, IV and V

43 47 55 59 63 67 71 77 83 87 93 97 101 105 115 117 125 131 135

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One. .I. All all and all the dry worlds lever, Stage of the ice, the solid ocean, All from the oil, the pound of lava. City of spring, the governed flower, Turns in the earth that turns the ashen Towns around on a wheel of fire. How now my flesh, my naked fellow, Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow, Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow. All all and all, the corpse’s lover, Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow, All of the flesh the dry worlds lever. .II. Fear not the working world, my mortal, Fear not the flat, synthetic blood, Nor the heart in the ribbing metal. Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,

CP14, 63 – All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever

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The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade, Nor the flint in the lover’s mawling. Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven, Know now the flesh’s lock and vice, And the cage for the scythe-eyed raven. Know, o my bone, the jointed lever, Fear not the screws that turn the voice, And the face to the driven lover.

CP14, 63 – mauling

CP14, 64 – O my bone,

.III. All all and all the dry worlds couple, Ghost with her ghost, contagious man With the womb of his shapeless poeple. All that shapes from the caul and suckle, Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine, Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

CP14, 64 – shapeless people.

Flower, flower the poeple’s fusion, O light in zenith, the midnight bud, And the flame in the flesh’s vision.

CP14, 64 – the people’s fusion, CP14, 64 – the coupled bud, [End of poem in N5; next page removed. CP14 concludes with the following three lines: Out of the sea, the drive of oil, Socket and grave, the brassy blood, Flower, flower, all all and all.]

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Two. .I. Half of the fellow father as he doubles His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk, Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles To marrow’s diver in her horny milk, Bisected shadows on the thunder’s bone Bolt for the salt unborn. The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled Corrosive spring out of the iceberg’s crop, The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled The swing of milk was tufted in the pap, For half of love is planted in the lost, And the unplanted ghost. The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple, The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep, Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep, And stake the sleepers in the savage grave That the vampire laugh.

CP14, 64 – Tomorrow’s diver

CP14, 65 – was planted

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The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded The wild pigs’ wood, and slime upon the trees, Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide, And loosed the braiding adders in their hairs, CP14, 65 – adders from their hairs; Rotating halves are horning as they drill The arterial angel. What colour is glory? death’s feather? tremble The halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air, And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble. The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw, The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew Blinds their cloud-tracking eye. .II. My world is pyramid. The padded mummer Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt Incising summer. My Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet, I scrape through resin to a starry bone And a blood parhelion.

[Not deliberate enjambment but lack of space in notebook – single line in CP14]

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My world is cypress, and an English valley. I piece my flesh that rattles on the yards Red in an Austrian volley. I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads, Strewing their bowels from a hill of bones, Cry Eli to the guns.

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CP14, 65 – rattled

CP14, 66 – Eloi

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan. The Arctic scut, and basin of the South, Drip on my dead house garden. Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn Through the Atlantic corn. The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel In casting tides, are tangled in the shells, CP14, 66 – On casting tides, Bearding the unborn devil, Bleed from my burning fork, and smell my heels. CP14, 66 – [No comma after ‘fork’] The tongues of heaven gossip as I glide, CP14, 66 – [No comma after ‘glide’] Binding my angel’s hood.              [End of poem in N5. CP14 concludes with the following stanza: Who blows death’s feather? What glory is colour? I blow the stammel feather in the vein. The loin is glory in a working pallor. My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn, The secret child, I shift about the sea Dry in the half-tracked thigh.]

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Three. Do you not father me, nor the erected arm For my tall tower’s sake cast in her stone? Do you not mother me, nor, as I am, The lover’s stair, lie suffering my stain? Do you not sister me, nor the erected crime For my tall turrets carry as your sin? Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb, Adore my windows for their summer scene? Do you not foster me, nor the hailfellow suck, The bread and wine, give for my tower’s sake?

[Stanza 1 in CP14]

Am I not father, too, and the ascending boy, The boy of woman and the wanton starer Marking the flesh and summer in the bay? Am I not sister, too, who is my saviour? directed Am I not all of you by the erected sea Where bird and shell are babbling in my tower? Am I not you who fronts the tidy shore, Nor roof of sand, nor yet the towering tiler? Am I not all of you, nor the hailfellow flesh, The fowl of fire and the towering fish?

[Stanza 2 in CP14]

CP14, 78 – The lovers’ house, lie

CP14, 78 – front

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Three (Concluded) destroying tower-docked Do you not father me on the x x strand? You, said seaweedy, are your sister’s sire, said seaweedy, The salt sucked dam and darlings of the land Who play the proper gentleman and lady. still widdershin earth, And Shall I be love’s house on the withershin world, Woe on the windy masons at my shelter? Love’s house, they answer, and the tower death all Who Lies unknowing of the grave sin-eater. July 26. Glen Lough   35.

[Stanza 4 in CP14]

CP14, 78 – destroying sand? CP14, 78 – sisters’ sire

CP14, 78 – Shall I still be love’s CP14, 78 – Woe to the windy

CP14, 79 – Lie all unknowing of

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57

This was my tower, sir, where the scaffolded coast Walls up the hole of winter & the moon. Master, this was my cross, the tower Christ, Master the tower Christ, I am your man. The resevoir of wrath is dry as paste; Sir, where the cloudbank and the azure ton Falls in the sea, I clatter from my post And trip the shifty weathers to your tune. Now see a tower dance, nor the erected world Let break your babbling towers in his wind. September ’34.

[Stanza omitted from CP14]

You are all these, she said, who gave me the long suck, All these, he said, who sacked the children’s town, Up rose the Abraham-man, mad for my sake, They said, who hacked and humoured, they were mine. a I am, the tower told, felled by the timeless strokes; Who razed my wooden folly stands aghast, For man-begetters in the dry-as-paste, The ringed-sea ghost, rise grimly from the wrack.

[Stanza 3 in CP14] CP14, 78 – these, said she who CP14, 78 – [No comma after ‘said’]

CP14, 78 – stroke,

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Four. Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words. Shut, too, in a tower of words I mark On the horizon walking like the trees The wordy shapes of women, and the rows Of the star-gestured children in the park. Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches, Some of the oaken voices, from the roots Of many a thorny shire tell you notes, Some let me make you of the water’s speeches. Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning

CP14, 68 – words, I mark

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Flies on the shafted disc, declaims the morning And tells the windy weather in the cock. Some let me make you of the meadow’s signs; The signal grass that tells me all I know Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye. Some let me tell you of the raven’s sins. Especially when the October wind spells (Some let me make you of autumnal meanings, The spider-tongued, & the loud hill of Wales) With fist of turnips punishes the land, Some let me make you of the heartless words. The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury. By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds . October. 1. ’34.

CP14, 68 – spider-tongued, and the

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Five. I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking Through the rotating shell, strong As motor muscle on the drill, driving Through vision and the girdered nerve,

CP14, 61 – nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled Off from the creasing flesh, fialed Through all the irons in the grass, metal Of suns in the manmelting night. CP14, 61 – man-melting All that I owe the fellows of the grave, agents Of the estated dust, glints In my rich stream, the will of blood, fortune In flesh of the provided gut.

[Stanza omitted from CP14; see N4, ‘Twenty Seven’]

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly A creature in my bones, I Rounded my globe of heritage, journey In bottom gear through night-geared man.

[Not deliberate enjambment but lack of space in notebook – single line in CP14] [No comma after ‘bones’ in TP71 and CP88]

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I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel Rammed in the marching heart, hole In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled Death on the mouth that ate the gas. Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest Of hemlock and the blades, rust My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing My second struggling from the grass. And power was contagious in my birth, second Rise of the skeleton and Rerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood Spat up from the resuffered pain. I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen Twice in the feeding sea, grown Stale of Adam’s brine until, vision Of new man strength, I seek the sun. 1934.

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Six. I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain, Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye, Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon. So, ’planing-heeled, I flew along my man And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky. I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather, Reaching a second ground far from the stars, And there we wept, I and a ghostly other, All My mother-eyed, upon the tops of trees; I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

CP14, 62 – stars;

CP14, 62 – My mothers-eyed,

“My father’s’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.” CP14, 62 – [Single quote marks, “This that we tread was, too, your fathers’ land.” not double, used throughout “But this we tread bears the angelic gangs, this stanza] Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.” “These are but dreaming men. Breathe, & they fade.” CP14, 62 – Breathe, and they Faded my elbow ghost, the mother-eyed, As, blowing on the angels, I was lost

CP14, 62 – the mothers-eyed,

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On that cloud coast to each grave-gabbing shade; I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost. Then all the matter of the living air Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words, I spelt my vision with a hand and hair, How light the sleeping on this soily star, How deep the waking in the worlded clouds. There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun, Each rung a love or losing to the last, The inches monkeyed by the blood of man. An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost, My father’s ghost is climbing in the rain. 1934.

CP14, 63 – My fathers’ ghost

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Seven. When, like a running grave, time tracks you down, Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs, Love in her gear is slowly through the house, Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse, Hauled to the dome, Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age, Deliver me who, timid in my tribe, Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape Of the bone inch, Deliver me, my masters, head and heart – Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin – When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time Drives children up like bruises to the thumb, From maid and head,

CP14, 69 – heart, CP14, 69 – thin,

For, sundayfaced, with dusters in my glove, Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,

CP14, 69 – sunday faced,

CP14, 69 – Drive children

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I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice May fail to fasten with a virgin o In the straight grave, Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force, My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime, Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain On fork and face. Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool. No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer Descends, my master, on the entered honour. CP14, 69 – masters, You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar Tells the stick fail. CP14, 69 – Tells the stick ‘fail’. Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam, The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever, Nor city tar and subway burrowed for the Man through macadam,

CP14, 69 – subway bored to foster CP14, 69 – macadam.

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I damp the waxlights in your tower dome. Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift, Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state, Sir, is your doom. Everything ends, the tower ending and, Have with the house of wind, the leaning scene, Ball of the foot depending from the sun, Give summer over, the cemented skin, The actions’ end. All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind With whistler’s cough contages, time on track Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick, Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take The kissproof world. 26th October 1934

CP14, 70 – (Have with the house of wind) CP14 p. 70 – (Give, summer, over)

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77

Eight. Now Say nay, Man dry man, Dry lover mine The deadrock base, and break the buried anchor, CP14, 75 – base and blow the flowered anchor, for Should he, who had centre sake, hop in the dust, Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger, CP14, 75 – anger. Draw dress on gristle with a cotton fist. Now Say nay, Sir no say, Death to the yes, The yes to death, the yesman and the answer, Should he who split his children with a cure, CP14, 76 – [No comma after ‘cure’] Have And, brotherless, his sister on the handsaw, CP14, 76 – Have brotherless his sister on the Shave bone of blood, and medicine the eye. handsaw. Now Say nay,

[Stanza 3 in CP14, 76] Now Say nay,

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No say sir, Yea the dead stir, And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow, He lying low with ruin in his ear, fire The cockrel’s tide upcasting from the fire, No master the unarguable crew. And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow, He lying low with ruin in his ear. Now Say nay, So star fall, So the ball fail, So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light, The sun that leaps on petals through a nought, The come a cropper rider of the flower.

79

No say sir Yea the dead stir, And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow, He lying low with ruin in his ear, The cockerel’s tide upcasting from the fire.

CP14, 76 – come-a-cropper

Now Say nay, CP14, 76 – [No comma at line end] A fig for The seal of fire, Death hairy-heeled, & the tapped ghost in wood, CP14, 76 – and the tapped

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We make me mystic as the arm of air, The two a vein, the foreskin, & the cloud.

81

CP14, 76 – two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the

December ’34.

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Nine. How soon the servant sun, (Sir morrow mark), Can time unriddle & the cupboard stone, (Fog has a bone He’ll trumpet into meat), Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown And the naked egg stand straight,

CP14, 76 – [No comma at line end] CP14, 76 – [No comma at line end] CP14, 76 – Can time unriddle, and CP14, 76 – [No comma at line end]

Sir morrow at his sponge, (The wound records),

grave cut CP14, 77 – [No comma at line end] cut The nurse of giants by the cracked sea basin, Sxxxx xxxxx xxx time, the bag of string, (Fog by his spring Soaks up the sewing tides) Tells you & you, my masters, as his strange CP14, 77 – you and you, Man morrow blows through food. All nerves to serve the sun, The rite of light, A claw I question from the mouse’s bone, The long tailed stone

CP14, 77 – long tailed

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Trap I with coil and sheet, Let the soil squeal I am the biting man And the velvet dead inch out. How soon my level, lord, (Sir morrow stamps Two heels of water on the floor of seed) Shall raise a lamp Or spirit up a cloud, Erect a walking centre in the shroud, Invisible on the stump A leg as long as trees, This inward sir, Mister and master, darkness for his eyes, The womb eyed, cries, And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour’s ear, Blasts back the trumpet voice.

January ’35.

CP14, 77 – womb-eyed

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Ten. A grief ago, She who was who I hold, the fats and flower, Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn, Hell wind and sea, A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower, Rose maid and male, Or, masted venus, through the paddler’s bowl Sailed up the sun; Who is my grief, A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron, Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud Shot through the leaf, Was who was folded on the rod the aaron Rose cast to plague, The horn and ball of water on the frog Housed in the side. And she who lies, Like exodus a chapter from the garden,

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Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring, Tugged through the days Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon, On field and sand The twelve triangles of the cherub wind Engraving going. Who then is she, She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her, Drives out the father from the caesared camp; The dens of shape Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water, Fill all her whelps with howling like a water, That she I have, The country-handed grave boxed into love, before Rise ere the dark. The night is near, A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid; I tell her this: before the suncock cast Her bone to fire, Let her inhale her dead, through seed & solid

CP14 p. 81 – seed and solid

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Draw in their seas, with grave gyspsy So cross her hand through their dead mortal eyes, And slack her fist. close January ’35.

CP14, 81 – gipsy

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Eleven. I I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels, Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator Laying my ghost in metal, The scales of this twin world tread on the double, My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor, To my man iron sidle.

CP14, 71 – man-iron

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels, Bright as her spinning wheel, the colic habit season CP14, 71 – spinning-wheels, Worked on a world of Halved on the [?????] petals; She threads off the sap and needles, And needling through, threads off the sap, and blood & bubble, CP14, 71 – blood and bubble Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain My promise in harvest lets fly her green forest Out of the naked entrail. [?] [?] [?] green [?] Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels, Image of images, my metal phantom Forcing forth through the harebell, My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal, I, in my fusion of rose and male motion, Create this twin miracle.

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manhood This is the fortune of [ending]: the natural peril, A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless, No death more natural; Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil, In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance: The natural peril parallel. My images stalk the trees, and the slant sap’s tunnel, No tread more perilous, the green steps & spire Mount on man’s footfall; I, with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles, In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower, Hearing the weather fall.

CP14, 72 – [No comma after ‘trees’] CP14, 72 – steps and spire CP14, 72 – footfall, CP14, 72 – [No comma after ‘I’]

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals, Voyageing clockwise by off the symboled harbour, CP14, 72 – Voyaging clockwise off Finding the water final, On the consumptive’s terrace taking their two farewells, CP14, 72 – consumptives’ Sail on the level, the departing adventure, To the sea-blown arrival. February ’35.

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Twelve      March '35 II The climb the country pinnacle, They walk the globe of grass, Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture, Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral; They see the squirrel stumble, The haring snail go giddily round the flower, A quarrel of weathers & trees in the windy spiral. As they dive, the dust settles, The Cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily, The highroad of water where the seabear & mackrel Turn the long sea arterial Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall. (Death instrumental, Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey, Your corkscrew grave centred in navel & nipple, The neck of the nostril, Under the mask in the ether, they making bloody The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

CP14, 72 – weathers and trees

CP14, 72 – cadaverous CP14, 72 – seabear and mackerel

CP14, 72 – navel and nipple, CP14, 73 – mask and the ether,

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Bring out the black patrol, Your monstrous officers, and the decaying army, The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles, A cock on a dunghill Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity, Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.) As they drown, the chime travels, Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift Rings out the Dead Sea scale; a And, clapped in water till the triton dangles, Strung by the flaxen whale weed, from the hangman’s raft Hear they the salt glass breakers & the tongues of burial.

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CP14, 73 – [No comma after ‘officers’] CP14, 73 – A cock-on-a-dunghill

CP14, 73 – the triton CP14, 73 – whale-weed, CP14, 73 – breakers and the

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral, The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned, CP14, 73 – the moon-turned table table, Let the wax disc babble Shames & the damp dishonours, the relic scraping. CP14, 73 – Shames and the damp These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.) March ’35.

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Thirteen. Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month, Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill, As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time; Time, in a folly’s rider, like a county man Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel, Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south. Country, your sport is summer, and December’s pools By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees Lie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown; Hold hard, my country children in the world of tales, The green wood dying as the deer fall in their tracks, This first and steepled season, to the summer’s game. And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape, snowy horsemen Summon your snowy horsemen , and the four-stringed hill, Over the sea-gut loudening , sets a rock alive; Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave, spring Crack like a [?????] in a vice, bone breaking April, folly’s hunter Spill the lank hunter’s folly and the hard-held hope.

CP14, 75 – The greenwood dying

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Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands, Stalking my children’s faces with a tail of blood, fromfrom valley Time, in a rider rising, and the sniper’s tree ; CP14, 75 – from the harnessed valley; Hold hard, my county’s darlings, for a hawk descends, CP14, 75 – my county darlings, Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds. Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily. April ‘35 (Cheshire).

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Fourteen. They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles, Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling, The flight of the carnal skull And the cell-stepped thimble; Suffer, my topsy turvies, that a double angel CP14, 73 – topsy-turvies, Sprout from the stormny lockers like a tree on Aran. Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule, Brass and the denseless image, on a staff of life; CP14, 73 – bodiless image, on a stick of folly Salvation’s bottle Star-set at Jacob’s angle, Is half glass half metal; Smoke hill and hophead’s valley, Be by your one quaff staggered to the pale of death, And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his Skating the ice that quarrels with the watered cordial. father’s coral, Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile. Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble, Be by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored The stoved bone’s voyage downward CP14, 74 – bones’ voyage In the shipwreck of muscle CP14, 74 – muscle; Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle, Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

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   (Disley, May)  Fourteen. (To A & M) They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles, Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling, The flight of the carnal skull And the cell-stepped thimble; Suffer, my topsy turvies, that a double angel Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran. Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule, bodiless Brass and the denseless image, on a stick of folly Star-set at Jacob’s angle, Smoke hill and hophead’s valley Thrusting the tom thumb vision up the iron mile And the five-fathomed Hamlet through his father’s coral. Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble, Be by the ship’s sea broken at the manstring anchored The stoved bones’ voyage downward In the shipwreck of muscle; Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle, Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

CP14, 73 – topsy-turvies,

CP14, 73 – hophead’s valley, And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral, Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

CP14, 74 – ships’ sea

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And from the pincers of the boiling circle, nicked The sea and instrument locked in the locks of time, His great blood’s iron single In the pouring town, He, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle, No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile. Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, saddler rushes, Tail, Nile, and snout, a straddler of the floods Time in the glass-backed hourless houses Buckling the tropic saddle; Shaking the sea-hatched skull, [?] Time in an hourless house shakes out the skull. And, as for oils & ointments on the flying grail, All-hollowed man shrieks for his shifted hide. Suffer the maul of images on one level.

CP14, 74 – in the pincers CP14, 74 – instrument, CP14, 74 – My great CP14, 74 – I, in a wind

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in And from the pincers of the boiling circle, The sea and instrument nicked in the locks of time, CP14, 74 – instrument, His great blood’s iron single CP14, 74 – My great In the pouring town, He, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle, CP14, 74 – I, in a wind No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile. Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, Tail, Nile, and snout, a straddler of the floods Buckling the glass-backed saddle. Time in an hourless house shakes out the skull, All-hollowed man shrieks for his shifted hide. Suffer the maul of images on one level. Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes, Time in the hourless houses Shaking the sea-hatched skull, And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail, All-hollowed man wept for his white apparell.

CP14, 74 – All-hallowed man wept for his white apparel.

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Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle, Windily master of man was the rotten fathom, My ghost in his metal neptune Forged in man’s mineral. This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl, And My images roared & rose on heaven’s hill. CP14, 36 – And my images roared and rose

July ’35. Glen Lough, Donegal.

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Fifteen. Incarnate devil in a talking snake, The central plains of Asia in his garden, In shaping-time the circle stung awake, forked out the cloven bearded apple In shapes of sin forked out the old-horned fruits, And god walked there who was a fiddling warden CP14, 80 – God the holy hill. And played down pardon from a tree of ghosts. CP14, 80 – from the heaven’s hill. thunder’s heaven’s When we were strangers to the guided seas, When storms struck on the tree, the flying stars A handmade moon half holy in a cloud, And the half moon half handed in a cloud The wisemen tell me that the garden gods Spread good and evil till the fancy fears Twined good and evil on an eastern tree; All in a fret of weathers made a word, And when the moon rose windily it  rose windily was And when the moon came silently she was Black as the beast and paler than the cross. Half white as wool and greener than the grass. We in our eden knew the secret guardian We in our eden knew the eastern guardian In sacret waters that no frost could harden, In golden waters that no frost could harden, And in the mighty mornings of the earth; And in our time that tumbled from the earth; Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth, All heaven in a midnight of the sun, A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time. Glen Lough. July 24. ’35.

CP14, 80 – Eden CP14, 80 – sacred waters

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Sixteen. The seed-at-zero shall not storm trodden That town of ghosts, the trampled womb With her rampart to his tapping, No god-in-hero tumble down Like a tower on the town stumbling Dumbly and divinely leaping Over the man-waging line. The seed-at-zero shall not storm That town of ghosts, the man-waged womb With her rampart to his tapping, No god-in-hero tumble down Like a tower on the town Dumbly and divinely leaping Over the warbearing line. Through the ramparts of the sky Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled, Manna for the rumbling ground, Quickening for the riddled sea,

CP14, 87 – manwaging

CP14, 87 – manwaged

CP14, 87 – riddled sea;

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Settling on a virgin stronghold They shall grapple with the guard And the keeper of the key. Through the rampart of the sky Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled, Manna for the guarded ground, Quickening for the virgin sea; Settling on a riddled stronghold They shall grapple with the guard And the loser of the key. May a humble village labour And a continent deny? A hemisphere may scald him And a green inch be his bearer; Let the hero seed find harbour, Seaports by a drunken shore thirsty Have their starving sailors hide him. May a humble planet labour And a continent deny?

CP14, 87 – Settled on CP14, 87 – He shall

CP14, 87 – He shall

CP14, 88 – scold

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A village green may scald him high And a bright sphere be his bearer; Let the hero seed find harbour, thirsty Seaports by a starving shore Have their drunken sailors hide him.

CP14, 88 – scold

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero, From the foreign fields of space, Shall not thunder on the town With a star-flanked garrison, Nor the cannons of his kingdom Shall the hero-in-tomorrow Range on the skyscraping place.

CP14, 88 – sky-scraping

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero, star-flanked From the foreign fields of space, Thunders on the foreign town With a sand-bagged garrison, Nor the cannons of his kingdom Shall the hero-in-tomorrow from Range on the grave-groping place.

CP14, 88 – Range from the

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He must stir before the seed And before the twilight sleep; Time exploding in the tide, He must camouflage the sea, That the pigeon fill her crop And the star-flanked eagle fly virgin With the leaden lamb of god.

[Stanza omitted from CP14]

He must stir before the seed star-flanked And before the twilight sleep; Time exploding in the tide, He must bare the twilight sea, That the eagle fill her crop And the iron pigeon fly With riddled With And the leaden lamb of god.

[Stanza omitted from CP14]

August. 2. 35. Glen Lough.

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Seventeen. I Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway-house The gentleman lay graveward with his [?seven] furies; Abaddon in the hang-nail cracked wizard from Adam, Hatching the hang-nail and the shafted arm, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater Old Scratch the fork-tail lurcher with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream;. Then And, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds, from nowheres and the heaven’s egg, Old cock esquire from a sea-cock’s egg, With bones unbuttoned His living turned to to the halfway winds, Hatched from the windy salvage Stiff in his wizard’s rubbish on one leg, Scraped at my cradle in a walking word That night of time under the Christward shelter, I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer. August 35 Glen Lough The child that sucketh long is shooting up, The A gender’s strip, death in a shape of history, That planet-ducted pelican of circles weaned on an artery.

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II Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;. The child that sucketh long is shooting up, The planet-ducted pelican of circles Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;. Over these groundworks on the shapeless levels Over these ground-works in a shapeless country Your hairs are but the roots of grass & tree Hairs of your head are but the roots of nettles What is the metre of the dictionary? The devil’s grammar and the burning bibles? The horizontal cross-bones of the buried, You by the cavern over the black stairs, Join your live verticals at vein and socket, And all night long they Jacob to the stars. Child of the (T. short spark in a shapeless country Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle; The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon, You by the cavern over the black stairs, Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam, And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars; Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent, Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers

CP14, 82 – history;

CP14, 82 – strip;

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Over these ground-works thrusting through a pavement And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers. (To be continued at length) August ‘35 Glen Lough

CP14, 82 – groundworks

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Eighteen. (Referee – altered) Foster the light, nor veil the manshaped moon, Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone; But Strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle, Master the night nor serve the snowman’s brain flaming air That shapes each bushy item of the sun Into a polestar pointed on an icicle. cockrel’s Murmur of spring nor crush the roaring eggs, Nor hammer back a season in the figs; your But Graft these four-fruited ridings on ^ country; burning Farmer in time of frost the red-eyed leagues, red-eyed snow By burning orchards sow the seeds of ice , In your young years the vegetable century. And foster all, nor fail the fly-lord’s acre, Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin sucker; your But Rail with ^ wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet; voices Of mortal music to the ninnies’ choir, speak cloud High lord esquire, sing up the singing air, And pluck a mandrake music from the marrow-root.

CP14, 66 – bone, CP14, 66 – But strip [...] circle;

CP14, 66 – cockerel’s CP14, 66 – figs, CP14, 67 – But graft

CP14, 67 – And father all nor CP14, 67 – goblin sucker, CP14, 67 – But rail

CP14, 67 – marrowroot.

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                III Roll unmanly over this turning tuft, O hill of seas, nor sorrow as I shift From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile, love Nor when my lover lies in the cross-boned drift Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted pinnacle. Who gave these seas their colour in a shape Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles, O who is glory in the shapeless maps, the Now make your world of me as I have made A merry manshape of your walking circle. August. ’35.  Glen Lough.

CP14, 67 – O ring of seas, CP14, 67 – smile;

CP14, 67 – tufted axle.

CP14, 67 – doubles;

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Nineteen. (Seventeen Continued) III First there was the lamb on knocking knees And three dead seasons on a climbing grave That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns, CP14, 83 – in a flock Butt of the tree-trailed worm that mounted Eve, Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes. CP14, 83 – [No punctuation at line end] On thunderous pavements in the [?Eden] garden-time; On Eden’s pavements by the black pavilions. Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow ladle CP14, 83 – marrow-ladle Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van, And, Rip van Winkle from a timeless cradle, CP14, 83 – Van Winkle Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone; The black ram, shuffling of the fold, old winter, shuffli CP14, 83 – the year, old winter, of the year Alone alive among his mutton race, mutton fold C P14, 83 – mutton fold, weathering the ladder, We rung our laddering changes on the weather, Said the antipodes, and spring chimed twice. & twice CP14, 83 – and twice spring chimed. spring chimed August ‘35 Glen Lough

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IV What is the metre of the dictionary? The size of genesis? The short spark’s gender? Pharoah’s Shade without shape? the shape of Europa’s echo? (My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper). Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry? Questions are hunchbacks. (And the straight dead’s No). (Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow). What of a bamboo man among your acres? Corset the boneyards for a crookèd lad? Button your bodice on a hump of needles, My camel’s eyes will splinter through the shroud. Love’s a reflection of the mushroom features, Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field, Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures, Ark-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood. August ‘35 salt Glen Lough Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel Pin-legged on pole-hills with a salt medusa. By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw. Glen Lough

CP14, 83 – the short CP14, 83 – Pharaoh’s

CP14, 83 – crooked CP14, 83 – hump of splinters, CP14, 83 – eye will needle

CP14, 84 – a black medusa

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V And from the windy West came two-gunned [You'll need a Christ's patience till ghost] Gabriel, From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots, From sleeve of stars trumps up the ten-decked dead The knave-decked sheathes who shuffle in their blades, And sniper’s aces in the joyless pits, Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle. Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades; For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s hill, Under the bread-legged mushrooms slew my hunger, A climbing sea from Asia snatched me down, And Jonah’s Moby had me by the hair; And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel, From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots, The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart; Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades, Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle, Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night; For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s hill plain, Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger, A climbing sea from Asia had me down, CP14, 84 – [No comma at line end] ←And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair; 

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EDITORIAL NOTE N5 contains nineteen entries. Of these, three are separately entered sections of a single poem, ‘I, in my intricate image’. Two others, ‘Seventeen’ and ‘Nineteen’, contain sonnets I-II, and III-V, respectively, of the ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ sonnet sequence. This is half the sequence, since there are ten sonnets in total. This means that N5 contains fifteen-and-a-half poems or part-sequences, entered as nineteen items containing twenty-three distinct poems. Each of these poems has been given its own entry in this annotations section. For those which are a constituent part of a longer poem or sequence, a general preface is given for the work as a whole at the first point of entry, with separate prefatory comments for the component pieces which follow, if necessary. Each note is prefixed by the number Dylan Thomas allotted to the poem in N5, followed by the title of the poem as it was given when it was collected in 18 Poems (18P) or Twenty-five Poems (25P), and later in the 2014 edition of the Collected Poems (CP14) The pages of N5 were not numbered by Thomas, but we have numbered the pages of the facing transcripts, which match them exactly; these page numbers are given with each note heading for ease of reference. The archival status of the N5 version of the poem is then given, that is, if it is the only autograph MS, together with information on versions of the poem in manuscript or typescript, plus publication details, and details of any alterations between the different MSS and published versions. If the poem is incomplete as a result of a missing page in N5, this is also recorded. Each poem is then placed in context, with a brief account of matters such as

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style, form, evolution, theme and any other issues deemed to be relevant to what follows. We have recorded all the changes between the N5 and the published versions of the poems in the transcripts, which appear on the recto pages facing the facsimile of N5 given on the verso pages in the previous section: these are highlighted in bold print, and include punctuation marks and parentheses, which are given with the preceding or surrounding words. When a poem is incomplete in N5, the recto page contains the lines or stanza which complete it in the published version. For example, the final three lines of ‘One’, ‘All all and all’, are omitted from N5 because a page was torn out; these are given in the transcript at the point where the N5 version ends. If any deleted poem (or passage) from the published version of the poem is longer than that in N5, or if the line order of a passage is different to that given in the published version (as in ‘Eight’, ‘Now’, for example), the final, published version of the passage is also given. The aim has been to err on the side of inclusivity and to ensure that the reader knows in every respect how N5 versions differ from published versions, in both directions – in other words, that there should be no ‘unknown unknowns’ for the reader. In order to avoid too much repetition, however, minor alterations already registered in the transcription, such as altered punctuation, are not usually flagged up in the notes. Where deletions have proved to be indecipherable this is noted, and if there are genuine grounds for informed guesswork concerning what Thomas permanently deleted we offer it. Our chief focus in annotating, understandably we hope, has been on any new light N5 might shed on the poems. In particular, where previously unknown phrases, lines and passages occur, we have tried to discuss and clarify these, relating them to the final versions of the poem. We have tried to avoid summarizing existing criticism or providing the kinds of introduction, overview or explication available elsewhere, although a certain amount of this has occasionally been unavoidable. There are a few occasions – very few – on which we stick our necks out a little and venture explications and commentary which may seem slightly far-fetched. We would like to assure readers that where we do so, we always have grounds for our speculations, even if we lack the space to fully set these out. Our assumed reader is a scholarly one in possession of a copy of CP14, although we have made some concessions to those less well equipped. Anyone requiring additional contextual material should consult the standard authorities on the early poems: Aivaz, Olson, Mills, Korg, Maud, Tindall, Emery, Kershner, Davies and Goodby can all be recommended, together with Vernon Watkins, Thomas’s fellow-poet and good friend. Thomas did not meet Watkins until September 1935 – after N5 had been filled – but he discussed several of the poems in it with Watkins in 1935–6, when Thomas was assembling 25P for publication.

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The notes refer to poems by their page numbers in the N5 transcript, and to specific glosses by line numbers, for ease of reference. (Thomas himself did not number the pages of his notebooks; our transcript supplies these, although to avoid congestion we did not attempt line numbering, feeling that readers could work these out for themselves given the easy multiples dictated by Thomas’s use of regular stanzas.) Where the sense of the text is opaque we have sometimes briefly glossed it, but we do not pretend to ‘explain’ it. We would always advise readers to try to work out for themselves what they think the sense of a word or line is before referring to what we have to say about it. That said, even the most difficult verbal items in Thomas can often be illuminated by reference to his use of the same or similar words or phrases elsewhere in his work, and so we have paid particular attention to his tendency to echo his other writings. The letters, other early poems and short stories, all overlap in many ways with the N5 material, and we have tried to give some idea of the totality of the verbal matrix, as it were, out of which they were produced, to reflect the fluidity and dynamism of Thomas’s imagination, and the extent to which he was prepared to dissolve and redraw genre boundaries in this period. There are very few allusions and echoes of other writers which have gone unnoticed by previous critics and editors, but where we think we have found these we have made a note of them. We would add, finally, that it is possible to be over-punctilious in annotating, as Ralph Maud notes of his own labours in Poet in the Making (PITM) (1968) in his later paperback version of that book The Notebook Poems (NP) (1989). We have tried to avoid this error, despite the temptations to indulge in it typically offered by Thomas’s poems. For example, Thomas’s ‘o’s’ can look very much like ‘a’s. As a result, ‘crop’ in line eight of ‘My world is pyramid’ looks more like ‘crap’. But this is so far from the sense of ‘crop’ (which is what appears in the published versions) that it is unnecessary to flag it up; it is evidently merely a quirk of Thomas’s handwriting. (We can be certain of this, since the consistent pararhyme of ‘My world is pyramid’ would be broken by the full rhyme ‘crap’ / ‘pap’.) The same issue recurs elsewhere in N5; in ‘The seed-at-zero’ we find what appears to be ‘scald’ in lines thirty-one and thirty-eight, but is in fact ‘scold’. On the other hand, ‘To marrow’s’, in the same poem, would seem to be an intentional word play on ‘Tomorrow’s’, even though Thomas eliminated it before publication in 18 Poems, perhaps feeling this was too clever by half, even for him, which leaves us to conclude that, while a preparedness to think laterally is as necessary as commonsense in editing Thomas, the only rule is that you should never take anything for granted.

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ANNOTATIONS One ‘All all and all’ Pages 1, 3. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. The removal of the third sheet of the notebook means that the last three lines are missing. The use of ‘people’ (twice) in ‘All all and all’ signals the rare appearance in Thomas’s mature work of the social realism of the New Country poets, and this poem can be regarded in several ways as his reworking of New Country concerns in terms of his own process poetic. Its form nods to the Hegelian / Marxist triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, of which Thomas was well aware, thanks to his friend, the Labour councillor Bert Trick (cf. his letter to Pamela Hansford Johnston of 20 July 1934: ‘Out of the negation of the negation must rise the new synthesis’) (CL, 185). A movement may be traced from a ‘dry world’ of personal anxiety and social crisis towards psycho-sexual and political liberation, resulting in a revolutionary resolution, in the poem’s third part. The general ‘theme’ is the inextricability of life and death, creation and destruction, organic and inorganic, and a running self-exhortation to be reconciled to, and to ‘fear not’, the ever-changing, processual world constituted by such paradoxical hybrid entities and energies. l.1 Deliberately misleading syntax; because of the absence of commas after the first two ‘alls’, and the emphatic end-line placement of lever, which is followed by a comma, it is briefly understood as a noun, with ‘worlds’ as ‘world’s’, despite its lack of the necessary apostrophe. Off-balance and unable to proceed, we have to re-read the line, discovering that worlds is the plural subject of the sentence and ‘lever’ its verb. The challenge to a stable grammatical footing continues in the second line with the appositive clauses, which refer to the ‘worlds’, with ‘lever’ returning as the main verb acting on l.3. l.3. ‘All’ leads to ‘oil’ via consonance. l.4. governed – ruled, but with a glance at the ‘governor’ mechanism which regulates the boiler pressure of a steam engine. l.10. This line and l.11 recall the ‘Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin’, of Tennyson’s ‘The Vision of Sin’. l.12. 18P, CP52 and CP14 have a medial comma after ‘flesh’. The absence of one in N5 (rendering the line a single clause) makes clearer the fact that

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‘worlds’ is the subject, and ‘flesh’ the object, of the sentence. It may therefore be the case that this comma, albeit without altering the basic sense, was inserted as a result of Thomas mechanically following the pattern of a medial comma in the previous five lines when transcribing the poem for the MS of 18P; the N5 line arguably makes better sense. l.15. ribbing – surrounding and protecting the organic ‘heart’; but the verb form accommodates an allusion to the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, and perhaps the colloquial expression for making fun of someone. l.16. tread – mechanical marching and, with ‘milling’ suggesting ‘treadmill’; but also (as ‘seeded’ hints) the archaic sense of copulation in birds. ll.17-18. It may be that ‘trigger’ triggers ‘flint’ because Thomas is thinking of the mechanism of a flintlock pistol, which uses both. l.19. jawbone – probably not a reference to a favourite figure in Thomas’s later poetry, Samson, who killed a thousand Philistines with the ‘jawbone’ of an ass, Judges 15:16, but to the self-divided speaker (i.e. to his uncertainty of speech, poetic and otherwise). l.20. vice – pun on moral and mechanical senses. ll.6, 24. cf. ‘raven’s sins’ in N5 ‘Four’, ‘Especially when the October wind’, ll. 17, 24. The likeliest sources of a raven for both poems are Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and the carrion birds which haunt battlefields in medieval Welsh poetry. l.22. Lower case vocative ‘o’ becomes upper case in 18P. O my bone. Cf. ‘When, like a running grave’ for use of lower case ‘o’ which remains in the published version. l.23. screws – cf. CP14, 55: ‘Where once the waters of your face / Spun to my screws’. l.24. driven – by sexual drives; by animal fear; as in a mechanical vehicle. Thomas may have in mind the English translation of Freud’s ‘Treiben’ as ‘drives’. l.27. There are marked similarities with the lexis (‘driven’, ‘people’) and subject – the biological drives – of stanza four of ‘Ten’, ‘A grief ago’. l.30. A play on ‘square’ (square up to; reconcile) and ‘circle’ (the circuit of birth, life, death and recycling through ‘process’). l.32. the coupled bud – the replacement of ‘midnight’ by ‘coupled’ suggests that Thomas may have been recalling a line in Keats’s ‘To Homer’, ‘There is a budding morrow in midnight’, a paradoxical ‘process’ image avant la lettre.

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The sonnet’s final line – ‘To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell’ – also resonates with ‘All all and all’s triadic structure. Two ‘My world is pyramid’ Pages 5, 7, 9. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. Titled ‘Poem’ on publication in New Verse in December 1934, this poem was listed as ‘Half of the fellow father as he doubles’ in the contents page of 18P, but retitled ‘My world is pyramid’ in CP52. The later, more resonant title, taken from the poem’s second part, is the standard one and we use it in this edition. Maud conjectured that the two parts were once separate poems; N5, however, makes clear that it was a single work even at this relatively early stage. The poem appears to open with a version of the Freudian ‘primal scene’ – the child witnessing, or at least imagining, his parents in sexual congress – engendering the speaker himself. Like the parents who create him, he is a ‘patchwork’ figure, a Frankenstein monster of disparate bits and pieces. The poem explores the dark fantasies created by Nonconformist repression via such monstrous figures; a ‘vampire’ is mentioned, and the world is ‘pyramid’ because, as a geometrical form, pyramids combine a triangle (Freud’s Oedipal triangle) and a square (‘square’ as familial stifling and social rigidity). The Pyramids are famously the tombs of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, monumental embodiments of a strictly hierarchical society and a death-centred belief system; mummies, like vampires and Frankenstein’s monster also featured heavily in the horror films Thomas delighted in watching in the early 1930s. This use of Ancient Egypt is common in the early stories and poems: cf. N5 ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water’, N5 ‘Nineteen’, ‘What is the metre of the dictionary?’ Stanza ten of the poem is missing from the N5 version, which ends at stanza nine. I ll.1-2. fellow-father – the embryo-as-father (and vice versa), and – in l.3 – embryo-as-mother. ll.5-6. The main verb is ‘bolt’; the gist is that the shadowy genetic halves (‘fellows’) of the parents combine to make the ‘salt unborn’ (‘for’ = towards, but also to create); salt – the womb-ocean (as in ‘sea-sucked’), but may also be a noun (the embryo as a ‘salt’, or sailor cf. ‘Before I knocked’, CP14, 39). ll.7-8. A series of paradoxical qualities; frozen / bubbled, corrosive / spring (pure source), iceberg / crop.

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ll.9-10. tufted – a verb, but cf. N5 ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’, l.24, as adjective (for pubic hair); here it is a growing embryo ‘tufted’, growing, on the breast. l.4 has already established a breast-feeding mise-en-scène – the poem is a typical Thomas-esque con-fusion of orgasm, conception, gestation and neonate states. l.11. is – became ‘was’ to agree with tense of stanza opening. ‘Lost’ is a common Thomas word for mankind bereft of spirit (cf. ‘Vision and Prayer’, CP14, ll.102, 170), but even among the ‘lost’, a potential for love exists (‘half ’); plant – puns on Welsh plant = children. l.12. ghost – for the shifting senses of this word, see N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, ll. 3, 5. l.13. cripple – because the child is the product of the ‘broken halves’ of its parents. The parents paradoxically only achieve fusion in their child, who is, in turn, as broken as they are. ll.14-15. Associative linkage generates the sequence ‘cripple’, ‘crutch’, ‘limp’. l.17. The ‘sleepers’ create their ‘stake’ in death by producing a child which will usurp them. l.18. The sense appears to be that the vampire laughs because it escapes being staked – its usual fate – at the expense of the sleepers. l.19. patchwork – because composite, like a sewn-together patchwork quilt; cloven – used because it can, paradoxically, signify complete (seeming) opposites – division, as in ‘cloven hoof ’, and unification, as in ‘to cleave to someone’. ll.19-20. scudded / The wild pigs’ wood – moved through the baser (sexual) passions (with a glance at Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine in the Odyssey). l.20. slime – reflects (Nonconformist) revulsion at sex; cf. ‘maiden’s slime’ in N5 ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’; trees – of the ‘forest’ of pubic hair; cf. ‘forest of the loin’, ‘A process in the weather of the heart’, CP14, 51. l.22. The alteration of ‘in’ to ‘from’ clarifies the act of ‘loosing’ the adders. l.23. horning as they drill – cf. N5 ‘Five’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’, which has ‘rotating’ and ‘drill’; tremble – in trepidation the parental ‘halves’ ask their questions of the ‘arterial angel’ / ‘ghost’ they have created. l.26: halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air – the questions are unanswerable ones; they may recall the classic illustration of the excesses of

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Medieval scholasticism – the debate about how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. ll.29-30. ghost – the narrator (a version of Thomas) himself; their – refers to his parents. II. ll.31-6. My world is pyramid … blood parhelion – Thomas’s fascination with Ancient Egypt, particularly its burial and funerary customs, derives from the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen by Howard Carter in 1924, and the welter of exhibitions, articles and books that followed. Ancient Egyptian materials are set beside Welsh ones elsewhere in Thomas’s work of this period as a way of figuring strangeness and shock, and collapsing time; ‘A Prospect of the Sea’, for example, plays on the similarity between the Welsh name Amman and similar-sounding Egyptian names, such as that of the god Amun: ‘I come from Amman valley’, said the boy. ‘I have a sister in Egypt’, she said, ‘who lives in a pyramid …’ She drew him closer. ‘They’re calling me in for tea’, he said. She lifted her frock to her waist. (CS, 90) l.34. buckling – cf. N5 ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water’, ‘Buckling the glass-backed saddle’, also in an Ancient Egyptian context. l.42. Eli – a slip for Eloi; however, Eli is the high priest of Shiloh, which Thomas knew about (cf. N4, ‘Six’, ‘Shiloh’s seed shall not be sown’). l.52. heels – cf. Thomas’s letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of October 1933: ‘I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind that I can only see his heels’ (CL, 43). See also ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’, ‘planing-heeled’, l.4. Three ‘Do you not father me?’ Pages 11, 12, 13. N5 is the only MS extant for the final, four-stanza version of the poem published in 25P and CP14. An earlier version exists in the form of a typescript three-stanza copy held among the Pamela Hansford Johnson papers at the Lockwood Memorial

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Library at SUNY Buffalo, and was included by Ralph Maud in an appendix to PITM. Like the first version in N5, it has ten-line stanzas, as opposed to the published version which has eight. Maud’s suggestion that this dated from ‘around September 1934’ and that it was ‘revised for publication in The Scottish Bookman, [in] October 1935’, was correct; N5 is evidently where the revision occurred (PITM, 349). We conjecture that Thomas entered this version in N5 in September 1934, making a typescript copy from it at some time in the next few months. Then, in July 1935, at Glen Lough, he decided to revise it, deleting the last two lines of stanzas one and two and all of stanza three, and the September 1934 date. He entered what became stanza three of the final version under the crossed-out third stanza. He then wrote stanza four on the verso page, the reverse of the page containing the first two stanzas, signing off with ‘Three (Concluded)’ and dating the revision. The cumulative effect of Thomas’s revisions is to shift his exploration and mapping of family tensions onto a framework which is certainly less Christian and arguably more Freudian. In the September 1934 version, for example, the tower is unambiguously Christ and the speaker tells Christ ‘I am your man’. In July 1935, the explicit Christian component was removed and rendered ambiguous in the rest of the poem (the eucharistic ‘bread and wine’ of stanza one also disappear, for example). l.15. erected – CP14 directed; cf. N5 ‘Fifteen’, ‘Incarnate devil’, l.7 ‘guided seas’. Both ‘directed’ and ‘guided’ are early examples of Thomas’s use of epithets ironical at the expense of hyper-rationalism’s presumed understanding of, or control over, natural phenomena: cf. ‘managed storm’, ‘ruled sun’, ‘discovered skies’ (CP14, 110, 184, 100). l.19 tidy – a South Walian idiom meaning neat, well-made, attractive; there may also be a pun on tide-y. Deleted stanza three. l.2. hole – pun on whole. ll.3-4. Master – may be verb and noun; the general sense seems to be that Christ is the Master, but the grammar makes the identification uncertain. l.5. resevoir – may allude to the reservoir on Cwmdonkin Drive, opposite Thomas’s birthplace; paste – exists in wet and dry states, and hence resembles the sand/strand, made wet and dry as the tide rises and falls. l.6. ton – pun on ton (imperial weight measure) and tôn, the Welsh for ‘wave’. ll.9, 10. tower … towers – see me (a follower of ‘Sir’ = Christ, l.6) dance, and (Sir) do not let the ‘erected world’ break / disturb the rest of your ‘towers’ / flock.

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Revised stanza three. l.2. no comma after ‘said’ in CP14; ‘he’ simply agrees with ‘she’. The overall effect is to disambiguate the two lines. Stanza four. l.1. destroying – eliminates the faint social context of the metaphor of ‘towerdocked’ (perhaps glancing at Swansea docks) in favour of focus on process. As so often in the early poems, the emphasis is on its negative rather than positive aspect. ‘Strand’, altered in the published version to ‘sand’, shows signs of struggle in N5; it is also typical of Thomas’s penchant for dropping single letters to reveal words nesting inside longer ones. l.2. said seaweedy – moved to end of line, possibly to aid alliteration and give end-rhyme. The apostrophe ‘s’s of ‘sister’s’ was moved to make the singular possessive a plural one, a practice Thomas applied in transcribing other 18P poems, such as N5 ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’. l.5. Line begins And, deleted; originally ‘I be’, interlineated to ‘I still be’; withershin world – becomes ‘widdershin earth’ to correct spelling and pararhyme with ‘death’, l.8. l.6. windy – puns on slang ‘cowardly’; shelter – cf. N5 ‘Seventeen’, ‘Altarwise’ 1, l.12: ‘That night of time under the Christward shelter’. Four ‘Especially when the October wind’ Pages 15, 17. An early version in typescript, now in the British Library, is dated by Maud to late 1932, the period of the missing July 1932–January 1933 notebook between N2 and N3. It was evidently revised in summer–autumn 1934, and entered into N5 just prior to its publication in The Listener on 24 October 1934 (as ‘Poem in October’). The poem is extensively discussed by commentators in terms of its Joycean probing of the word / world relationship. It is one of the most memorable explorations of several Thomas conducted on this subject, registering as it does both the urge to fuse word and object world and anxiety at thereby trapping oneself in asocial isolation, discernible in the repeated pleading to be allowed to verbalize a world so textualized. The fear of linguistic solipsism, imaged in the ‘tower of words’, links it to its N5 predecessor, ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’ and ‘Ears in the turrets hear’ (CP14, 34-5). Above all, it is a birthday poem, the

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first in a series of similarly occasioned meditations on mortality which includes ‘Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes’, ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Poem on his Birthday’ (CP14 107, 161-2, 197-200). Thomas’s handling of the stanza in this poem is masterly, and awareness of his accomplishment is registered in the fact that he sent it to the BBC’s chief cultural journal. l.9. A comma is inserted after ‘words’ in the Listener and CP14 versions; arguably it helps enact the isolating properties of the ‘tower’. l.26. meanings – may have been replaced because it only has one meaning, unlike ‘spells’, which is both plural noun and, punningly, a verb. This is the version in CP14; however, the Listener version has ‘vowels’, presumably dropped because of repetition in ‘vowelled’, six lines later.

Five ‘I dreamed my genesis’ Pages 19, 21. N5 is the only MS extant for the full version of this poem (which here has the additional stanza 3). This poem had probably the most complex evolution of any in N5, involving as it did recyclings from N3 ‘Two’ and N4 ‘Twenty-Seven’ (see stanza three below), drafts in one of the Walter Bram notebooks at Austin and the version in the surviving draft of letter to Hamish Miles at Jonathan Cape, also held at Austin. Additionally, according to Katherine Loesch (Loesch, 30), ‘the three back sides and three last pages and the inside of the … cover’ of one of the Walter Bram notebooks at Austin are in Thomas’s rather than Daniel Jones’s handwriting, and contain the following lines: Since first I sucked The milk of breath, no hair that touched on time Shot from me stronger than this midnight beard, Now on my jaw and burning like a lantern We are not convinced that these lines are necessarily from a draft of ‘I dreamed my genesis’ (the lexis accords more with that of other poems of the time, such as ‘From love’s first fever’), but we record them and Loesch’s conjectures here for the sake of completeness. ‘I dreamed my genesis’ is always cited in discussions of Thomas’s indebtedness to Welsh language poetry, since in a letter of May 1934 to Hamish Miles of

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Cape, he described it as ‘more or less based on Welsh rhythms’ (CL, 161-62). The stanzas of the poem do indeed replicate the syllable count of the Welsh form of englyn, namely a quatrain of twelve, seven, ten and eight syllable lines. The marked caesura before the last word in each line, followed by strong enjambement, is also a feature of englyn, in which a grammatically separate word or phrase is attached to the end of the line. It seems to us indisputable that Thomas had some basic knowledge of Welsh forms and that he applied it to the (re)writing of ‘I dreamed my genesis’ before entering it in N5. Despite his reservations, expressed elsewhere, about the viability of Welsh verse effects in English, this adaptation of a specific form of englyn – the englyn unodl union (the most straightforward single-rhyme form) – is wholly successful, and more localized usages of Welsh verse patterning techniques are apparent throughout Thomas’s work. As we argue in the Introduction, N5 is the place where Thomas makes the most radical use of Welsh poetic techniques. Thematically, the poem presents a dream of the narrator’s conception and birth (stanzas one to three), followed by death, resurrection, phallic erection and seminal emission (stanzas four and five), with a final optimistic stanza hailing rebirth (stanza seven). It may be seen as an early example in Thomas of a symbolic journey in which the speaker dies, usually during a sea-voyage and / or by drowning, and is reborn; cf. N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’. In this example, the journey maps the rise and fall of the penis before, during and after the sexual act onto the heroic quest narrative; with (orgasmic) death it dissolves in the elemental grave / vagina as the ‘feeding sea’, only to be reborn in the future. The poem draws heavily on the First World War imagery; ‘death in the trenches’, of all kinds, might be a summary of its theme. Together with N5 ‘One’, ‘All all and all’, and N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, ‘I dreamed my genesis’ is the best example of Thomas’s taste for organic–inorganic collocations (‘girdered nerve’, ‘motor muscle’, etc.). ll.1, 6, 11, 16, 36. The first lines of the opening four stanzas and final stanza use retroactive wordplay: for example, ‘breaking [into a] sweat’; ‘shuffled [a] measure’ (as dance), ‘estated … agents’; ‘costly … heir’; ‘fall … dead’. ‘Sweat of sleep’ initiates the sequence ‘sweat’, ‘sleep’ and ‘death’ (cf. l.29, ‘sweat of death’), echoing – as seems confirmed by the suicide imagery of stanza 5 – Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (‘that sleep of death’; ‘sweat under a weary life’). Cf. suicide and Hamlet as themes in N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’. l.4. nerve – CP52, CP88 and CP14 all have full stop; only TP71 has a comma. N5 also has a comma, suggesting that the full stop was entered, in error, in 18P and was not corrected by Thomas thereafter. The comma helps make easier sense of the second stanza and, with Thomas’s authority established by N5, is to be preferred.

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ll.6-7. filed through – cf. ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’, ‘The things of light / File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones’, CP14, 46. ll.9-12: An unpublished additional stanza. Derived from N4 ‘Twenty Seven’, with which it shares an opening line, and subsequent sense, phrasing, and lexis: All that I owe the fellows of the grave And all the dead bequeathe from pale estates Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood, Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots. The stanza may have been omitted to prevent a duplication of the idea of inheritance: ‘Heir … globe of heritage’ appears in the next stanza. l.13. N4 ‘Twenty Seven’ has ‘Heir to the scalding veins, that hold love’s drop’ (NP, 206). l.14. No comma after ‘bones’ in CP52, TP71 and CP88; the decision to add the comma for the sake of consistency in CP14 is vindicated by the N5 version. ll.19-20. muzzled / Death on the mouth that ate the gas – the image is of a First World War soldier putting the muzzle of a rifle in his mouth (or muzzle) in order to commit suicide, combined with the sense of embracing death by ‘eating’ poison gas. l.21. second death – anticipates the famous closing line of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, ‘After the first death, there is no other’, CP14, 173. l.23. tempered – another organic – inorganic collocation (as in tempered swords, suggested by ‘blades’, l.22). ll. 23-4. forcing / My second struggling from the grass – cf. final stanza of ‘And death shall have no dominion’, CP14, 24; also see note to ‘Why east wind chills’, CP14, 224. ll.27-8. manhood / Spat up – grew up, matured; also inseminated. l.30. feeding sea – the grave, post-mortem dissolution of the body which devours (‘feeds on’) life but ‘feeds’ new growth. l.31. Adam’s brine – sweat, tears. Cf. Adam’s Curse, Genesis 3:19: ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’; vision – both depiction of the ‘new man’s strength’, but also remaining an aspiration, as ‘seek’ confirms. The ‘strength’ of rebirth has not yet been arrived at.

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Six. ‘I fellowed sleep’ Pages 23, 25. N5 is the only MS extant for the full and final version of this poem. Earlier versions exist as N4 ‘Twenty Two’ and ‘Thirty One’, and Thomas mentioned a revised version of it, ‘The Eye of Sleep’, in his letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of 2 May 1934 (CL, 151). The first of these has eight stanzas; the second is a short, compressed lyric of just three, five-line stanzas. Thomas evidently rejected the experiment in compression and gave ‘Twenty Two’ a second, more gentle edit, retaining its dreamy, otherworldly quality, and entering the result in N5. However, he confirmed ‘Thirty One’s ditching of references to ‘God’ and ‘the Lord’ to make it less Christian and more susceptible of Freudian interpretation: cf. N5 ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’ for a similar shift. The N5 final version is based on a dialogue with a ‘ghostly other’, ‘the mothers-eyed’, who demystifies what the dreamer thinks are ‘angelic gangs’, telling him they ‘are but dreaming men’ and teaching him to blow on them. He does so, making them disappear, and this leads to a visionary state which is at the same time a decidedly materialist one, in which spiritual enlightenment and evolution appear to go hand in hand. The gender politics of the poem are perhaps its most interesting aspect for contemporary readers; in one possible reading, it is through the ‘mothers-eyed’ that the speaker overcomes a certain fixation on his father, represented by the ‘angelic gangs’. He inherits his ‘land’, finally coming to see him, in the Hamletic terms of much of N5, as the rather pitiful figure of the poem’s last two line. l.1. N4 ‘Twenty Two’s ‘The eye of sleep’ became, in a characteristic homophonic shift, ‘I’ in N4 ‘Thirty one’, the intermediate version. The poem traces the adventures of what l.2 calls ‘the sleepers’ eye’ / I; the self, or ego, as narrowly defined by sight or what Blake called the ‘tyranny of the eye’. l.2. tear – both senses (weep, rip up) may be intended. l.4. ’planing-heeled – cf. note to ‘My world is pyramid’, l.52. l.9. All mother-eyed – the shift from singular (and singular possessive) to plural forms is also applied to ‘father’ at l.11. Parents have become collective, Darwinianized as it were. l.11. Thomas placed an apostrophe directly above an ‘s’ in several places in this poem, and elsewhere in N5; globe – cf. Hamlet, I, v, 96-7, Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost: ‘Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe’.

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ll.15, 17. Breathe … blowing – obeying the mothers’ ghost, he disperses the ‘angels’ or ‘dreaming fellows’. l.18. grave-gabbing shade – Hamlet’s father talks a good deal about (not talking about) the grave. l.20. unknowing of their ghost – the other ‘angels’ are not knowing, as the speaker is, of their ghosts / fathers / inheritance. ll.21-25. Then all the matter … the worlded clouds – the stanza seems to describe Thomas’s discovery of a poetic voice (‘climbing on the words’), drawing on his understanding of a collective inheritance. It is a materialist ‘vision’ of ‘worlded clouds’, as the poet brings idealism and religious belief down to earth. 11.26-7. sun – pun on S/son; ladder … rungs – the shared imagery of the poems of N5 can be seen in the similarity between this ladder / rungs image and that of ‘Altarwise I, II and III’, derived from the last line of N4 ‘Twenty Two’, the ur-version which supplied l.26, but which also contains ‘the pulse of God’, ‘song of God’ and ‘mysterious order of the Lord’. As elsewhere in N5, Thomas was keen to play down the level of explicit Christian reference. l.27-28. the ‘love’ (sexual partner) as a rung on ladder of generational transmission of genetic material’; ‘monkeyed’ is a reference to caricatures of the theory of evolution. The ‘inches’ up the evolutionary ‘ladder’ are achieved through ‘monkeying’ around, that is sexually (involving the ‘inches’ of the penis). Thomas is subverting idealistic notions of how human progress is achieved found in Victorian poetry, such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam, with its fears of evolution and nature red in tooth and claw (though not necessarily ‘progress’ as such). ll.29-30. An old, mad man … climbing in the rain – Thomas’s father (D. J. Thomas) is conflated with Hamlet’s father’s ghost and collective, biological fathers. For other Hamletian subtexts, see N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’ and N5 ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water’, and analysis by Bigliazzi. Seven ‘When, like a running grave’ Pages 27, 29, 31. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. A complex, in some ways turbid poem; corrections to the N5 version show Thomas clarifying the duality of ‘heart’ and ‘head’, with whom the speaker of the

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poem is in colloquy (e.g. l.14 ‘Drives’ to ‘Drive’). It examines, and tries to come to terms with, adolescent fears on the threshold of sexual experience and adulthood, producing a drama in which a Medieval morality figure, Cadaver, symbolizes death, and ‘head’ and ‘heart’ – both masters of the speaking self – symbolize ‘blood’ and ‘logic’. The speaker addresses himself (as ‘you’, and also – more ironically – as ‘sir’). The ‘bruises to the thumb’ / children are a by-product of the clumsy wielder of the ‘descending hammer’, the penis (like the ‘rainy hammer’ of ‘Before I knocked’, CP14, 38), which operates sexually following orders from the ‘dome’, or brain. The speaker is anxious about the efficacy of this mechanism: will fear of death (‘Cadaver’) inhibit the message and ‘tell the stick [penis] fail’, at the crucial moment? The poem is a plea for delivery from the inhibition caused by fear of pregnancy and death. Sex can mean the bruising experience of having offspring, while impotence leads to stasis among the ‘eunuchs’ and neither outcome appeals; the ‘joy’ which sex should be is a ‘knock of dust’, deathly. Stanza seven, a summation of the threats to uninhibited sexual expression lists these as: illness, puritanical religious morality and urban modernity. The processual ‘moral’ of the poem, that ‘everything ends’, is to be taken in two ways: we are fated to die, but the inhibition the speaker suffers from will also end. l.5. dome – heavens; the brain, or mind, within the dome of the skull. l.16. sundayfaced – cf. Thomas’s letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson of 15 April 1934: Sunday in Wales. The Sunday-walkers have slunk out of the warrens in which they sleep and breed all the unholy week, have put on their black suits, reddest eyes, & meanest expressions and are now marching up the hill past my window ... all the starch, the thin pink blood, the hot salty longings, and the respectable cream on top of the suburban scum, run down the stones like a river [to] end up in the Sabbath well where the corpses of strangled preachers, promising all their days a heaven they don’t believe in to people who won’t go there, float and hide truth. (CL, 135) l.18. jacket – via ‘straitjacket’ this suggests the ‘straight’ of l.20. ll.27-28. descending hammer / Descends – the penis as hammer, descending (hanging) from the male body, as one of the two organs through which biological ‘descent’ occurs. l.30. With its ‘hangar’, and curt interlocutor, this is something of a ‘helmeted airman’, or Audenesque moment, in Thomas’s early work. l.32. summer feather – the feather seems more benign than is usual in early Thomas, where it so often has the sense of ‘death’s feather’; cf. note to ‘I have longed to move away’, CP14, 239-40.

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ll. 31, 40. sir – the speaker’s self (ironically addressed), as in N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’ and N5 ‘Nine’, ‘How soon the servant sun’. l.33. cuddled – repeated from l.2, but here perhaps with the sense of the Cross (‘tree’) embraced like a lover. l.35. ink comma after ‘macadam’ of initial version corrected to full stop in pencil. Cf. ‘The Orchards’, for references to ‘macadam’, a ‘cinder’ track like Cadaver’s and inexorable mortality: ‘Hail falls on cinder tracks and the angelled stone. It is all one, the rain and macadam; it is all one, the hail and cinder, the flesh and the rough dust’ (CS, 44). l.43. Ball of the foot – play on football. The image is disjunct and surreal, like many in this poem and can easily be over-read; but we may see in it ‘ball’ as testicle, ‘depending’ (hanging) from the ‘sun’ / son. l.44. Similar in tone to the linkage of ‘summer’ and ‘ruin’ in ‘I see the boys of summer’, CP14, 56. ll.46-7. Image of the consumptive, whose ‘whistling’ lungs are a sign of him spreading germs (‘contagion’ as a verb: he ‘contages’), making the wind ‘unwholesome’. l.48. love – the main verb in the final two-and-a-half lines, an imperative form, this acts as a paradoxical exhortation to his ‘madmen’ selves: ‘Love him [time, Cadaver] for [precisely because of] his trick’, which is sex, the drive which moves us towards death; one must embrace time, death and sex. Cadaver has a ‘hunger’ for sex because it produces death; yet, as elsewhere in N5, a positive energy, albeit provisional and ambiguous, is wrested from the poem’s sombre insights and frustrations. Eight ‘Now’ Pages 33, 35, 37. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. Thomas seems to us to have copied the poem out as far as stanza three, in ink. At this point he decided to delete the final, eighth lines of each stanza, and then continued writing out the poem in pencil, reflecting the fact that his attitude towards the poem’s final form was now more provisional. When he was sure of what he had written out, he overwrote the pencil in ink. We can only speculate as to why he should have deleted the eighth lines of each stanza in such an arbitrary manner. However, he had recently done the same with the ninth and tenth lines of N5 ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father

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me?’ Our preferred explanation is given in the Introduction, but it is not definitive, and there are others which may complement it. For example, the Hamletic repudiation of suicidal tendencies, which is what the poem is ‘about’, is strengthened by the deletions; the final lines of stanzas one, two and three now powerfully sum up this theme at their close, whereas the deleted lines had arguably repeated what had already been said, thereby muffling its impact (we presume that final eighth lines existed for stanzas four and five, as well as one, two and three, but that, after stanza three, Thomas decided not to enter them). The cost of strengthening the narrative was the absence of a rhyme for the penultimate line of each stanza; evidently he felt the loss was worth it. l.5. break – its replacement by ‘blow’ allows greater wordplay (blow = to flower; to destroy (‘blow up’)). A third alliteration of ‘b’ was avoided by the replacement of ‘buried’ by ‘flowered’ in 18P, anticipating the ‘petal’ and ‘flower’ imagery in stanza four. l.8. Draw dress on gristle with a cotton fist – amplifies and illustrates the preceding line; if ‘gristle’ is a sexual organ (male or female), the speaker exhorts himself to cover its naked rawness with a paradoxically soft ‘cotton fist’. ‘Dress’ may be both a specific item of woman’s clothing and a neuter, non-specific noun for clothes; as in the signs in Men’s toilets of the time, instructing those departing to ‘Please Adjust Your Dress’ (i.e. button up your flies). ll.14-15. The general sense of these lines is that of a cure which is excessive because it kills – ‘splits’ someone from their children and siblings – and is rejected as a result. With the commas removed a possessive, even sexual implication is created; the ‘he’ now ‘has’ his sister. This can be accommodated within the poem’s Hamletic framework, particularly if the ‘he’ is a Laertes figure (a ‘yesman’, like his father, Polonius). l.16. Shave bone of blood and medicine the eye – could mean to shave blood off bone or to shave a bone made of blood; either way, the conceit becomes visceral at this point and the general sense is a healing one: ‘medicine’ is a verb. l.23. fire – crossed out, in pencil, and then re-written in pencil. ll.27-33. The general sense of the stanza is a renunciation of morbidity and the embracing of the daily round of existence. The decline of the stars marks the passage of time, the failing ‘ball’ the end of childhood freedoms, the sinking sun the end of each day; but this is something the speaker must embrace as part of the universe of ceaseless, simultaneous creation–destruction; the sun is ever-sinking, and yet its energy, arriving on earth’s surface through what is, paradoxically, a lifeless void (‘a nought’), gives life to everything. ll.29-31. So – ‘in order that’.

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l.30. ball – Thomas uses a ball as an image for childhood freedom and play elsewhere (and a circle or sphere is traditionally emblematic of perfection); cf. ‘Should lanterns shine’: ‘The ball I threw while playing in the park / Has not yet reached the ground’, CP14, 71: ‘The Visitor’: ‘Hands had held other hands and thrown a ball high into the air. Now they were dead hands!’, CS, 24. It has other possible meanings here, of course (the earth; testicle). ll.32-33. The tenor is sexual – ‘leaps’, ‘rider’, ‘come’ – with earth as the sun’s ‘wife’ in a ‘mystic’ marriage informed by Thomas’s awareness of modern physics. The image sequence, typically, works at several levels: cosmic, bodily and religious (sun as Son). l.33. come-a-cropper … rider – terms associated with hunting (to ‘come a cropper’ means to fall badly from a horse, specifically over its croup, or crop; it often occurs, for example, in the once-popular hunting novels of R. S. Surtees [1805–64]). However, in a processual sense ‘cropper’ can mean to both create and cut down a ‘crop’. Cf. similar hunting imagery in N5 ‘Thirteen’, ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’. l.38. tapped – as in tap and spile, driving a faucet into a barrel; mad; knocked. ll.36-7. Morbidity and suicide are rejected: the ‘seal’ and ‘fig’ may be those of the opening of the sixth seal in Revelation, 6:12-13: ‘And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal and there was a great earthquake and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken of a mighty wind.’ 39-41. Deathly, ghostly qualities are rejected for mystical ones which are also materialist, and for an acceptance of a blend of different identities, as found in the complex, dialogic self of Freudianism. l.40. ‘arm of air’; possibly a wordplay on ‘air arm’, or airforce (as in the Fleet Air Arm, the Royal Navy’s airforce). l.41. two-a-vein – from ‘two-a-penny’ (cheap, of low quality) – continues the list of ‘mystic’ elements combining the material / spiritual properties of the previous line. Nine ‘How soon the servant sun’ Pages 39, 41. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. Like ‘Now’, this poem was written first in pencil and then written over in ink. The four commas at the line-ends of lines one, two, three and five differ

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from the others in the poem, which are in standard form, and would seem to have been added later in a rather casual way – at a greater distance from the line end than was usual, and with less attention to the forming of their backward curve. This suggests that on finishing the inking-over of the pencilled version, Thomas noticed the relative lack of commas in stanza one as compared with the rest of the poem, and decided to add them swiftly to even up its appearance. Thomas shows great uncertainty in the punctuation and use of parentheses in this poem. For CP52, he restored commas after the parentheses; these were removed by Davies and Maud in CP88, and Goodby followed suit in CP14. l.10. A deleted pencilled line, largely undecipherable, but which begins with ‘Shapes’ (probably) and ends ‘time, the bag of string’: interlineation above, with ‘grave’, ‘cracked’ (which could apply to basins) or ‘crooked’ and ‘cut’, all tried and crossed out before settling on ‘cut’. As with the line deletions in ‘Now’, in some ways its companion piece, it is only possible to speculate vaguely on why these alternatives did not work for Thomas; it may be that ‘grave’ was too obvious, and ‘crooked’ hypermetrical. l.32. Above ‘womb’ Thomas has written in pencil ‘dark’. Ten ‘A grief ago’ Pages 43, 45, 47. A typescript in Austin containing the alterations made to stanzas four and five is also dated ‘January ’35’ and signed. Like N5, it corrects ‘ere the’ to ‘before’, suggesting that the alteration came to Thomas when he was making the typewritten copy from N5, and he decided to change both at the same time. The N5 version is uncorrected in its first three stanzas, showing that the poem had reached near-final form before being entered, but the few alterations it contains potentially shed considerable light on what it is about. The ink of the interlineated line above the main correction, the crossed-out l.29, is much darker than the rest of the poem or any other interlineated corrections (all crossings-out are in pencil). We conjecture that this is because Thomas added it after the other, smaller corrections had been made, particularly those to the final stanza, where the negative attitude to gestation and birth presented earlier in the poem is revised and cast in a more positive light – almost reversed, in fact. At this point, we think, Thomas replenished the ink in his pen and rewrote l.29 to conform to the new, more empathic conclusion. (A tear across the page, running through the first stanza, has been repaired by Swansea University Library Archives.)

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l.19. If ‘lily’ is symbolic of God (as the Holy Spirit in the Annunciation, a scene in which his messenger Gabriel is usually depicted bearing a lily for Mary), then his ‘anger’ is that which he directed towards Eve (representing all woman) in Genesis, by making childbirth painful (‘bringing forth in pain’). Hence, in anatomical terms, ‘ring’ is the cervix (a common wordplay in Shakespeare, most notably in The Merchant of Venice). l. 23. twelve triangles of the cherub wind – the term for such a representation of the points of the compass on a map, often accompanied by pictures of four puffing cherubs symbolizing the north, south, west and east winds, is a compass rose, alluding the ‘rose’ of l.6. Cherubs, in turn are children, and this poem is very much about the possible consequences of sex – conception – and the greater absorption in humanity and the future of the human race this gives to women. l.28. dens – for plural usage cf. Paradise Lost, Book II, l. 621: ‘Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death’. l.29. The replacement of ‘fill’ by ‘shape’ gives an anadiplosis on ‘shape’ (a word ending one clause is used to begin the next); in a typical example of Thomas’s wordplay, the first use is as a noun, the second as a verb. A triple use of ‘shape’, within the space of two lines, and including anadiplosis, occurs forty-four lines after the famous line containing ‘dens’ in Paradise Lost, ll. 665-666, which, in the Oxford University Press edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton (1932), is almost directly opposite it on the recto page; whelps – cf. Caliban’s description as ‘a freckled whelp, hag-born’ in The Tempest; howling like – Thomas replaces simile with metaphor, and gives the line a more positive cast. l.32. ere – in making this ‘before’, Thomas removes an example of an archaic trace which he sometimes dropped into a poem to problematize its tone and texture (cf. the use of ‘unto’ in ‘The force that through the green fuse’, CP14, 43). ll.39-40. hand … fist – may refer to the womb (the normal size of the uterus is about the size of a woman’s fist). However, it could also be that, after writing the final stanza, Thomas noticed the potential for a more fruitful, less morbid, symbolism in ‘cross’. Its proximity to ‘hand’ hinted at ‘cross my palm with silver’, and this led him to remove the negative and tautologous ‘dead mortal’ and introduce a fortune-telling ‘gypsy’ in an allusion back to ‘caesared’ via the ‘gypsy’ Cleopatra (cf. Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, I.i.l.10: ‘a gypsy’s lust’). ‘Slack’, also negative (albeit its primary meaning here is ‘slacken’), was replaced by ‘close’ as the speaker ruefully accepts the right of the woman to channel the dead (‘let inhale’), to grasp (‘close her fist’) their eyes, rather than foregoing this (‘slack’, let go), thereby fulfilling her childbearing mission.

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Eleven ‘I, in my intricate image’ N5 is the earliest MS extant for this poem, although SUNY Buffalo has an autograph copy of the N5 version which ends at l.88, ‘In the shipwreck of muscle’. It is seemingly an interrupted attempt at a clean copy for a journal or reading purposes, although there is one word-change (in part III, l.80; see the entry for N5, ‘Fourteen’). Buffalo also has a typewritten MS titled ‘Poem in Three Parts’; this was the title under which the poem was first published in New Verse in August–September 1935, and both lack the minor alterations Thomas made before publishing it in 25P. Both autograph and typewritten copies must have been made fairly soon after August 1935. As discussed in CP14 and DDT, ‘I, in my intricate image’ is a quest narrative. It stands, with ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, as one of the twin peaks of Thomas’s experimental phase, and is a highly ambitious piece, in some ways a summary of his poetic development to date. If ‘Altarwise’ is a Bildungsroman, ‘I, in my intricate image’ is more a single voyage of verbal self-discovery. Its ‘voyaging clockwise by the symboled harbour’ is set in the context of the natural world’s paradoxical simultaneous growth and destruction, and in the course of it the speaker-protagonist appears to suffer a death, or transfiguration, by water. His ‘intricate (self)image’ ‘unravels’, only to be resurrected, self-remade, in the fiat of the final lines. This section gave Thomas a lot of trouble, as the density of alterations and the ‘maul of images’ to do with Ancient Egypt show. They also reveal that the resolution of the protagonist’s struggles was initially in the third person – ‘His great blood’s iron single’ – not in the first person, as published. More generally, the deleted lines generally tend to emphasize the extent that, as in ‘All all and all’, the human is conceived of in terms of a cyborg ‘fusion’ of the biological and the mechanical. The poem’s formal structure is as ambitious as it is thematically and verbally. Seventy-two of its 108 lines pararhyme on syllable + ‘l’, and Thomas uses varying combinations of a short line (trimeter or tetrameter) and a long line (hexameter or heptameter) in his six-line stanzas, six of which make up each of the poem’s three parts. Each of the three parts uses a different combination of these, maintaining the pattern throughout, except in stanza five of part II. ‘I, in my intricate image’ I Pages 49, 51. l.1. intricate – from Latin intricare, to entangle, perplex, embarrass; in + tricare = in + trifles, tricks, perplexities. In view of highly varied reader responses to the poem, Thomas’s awareness of the tricksterish etymology of this word as a basis for the poem should not be discounted.

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l.6. 25P and CP14 have ‘man-iron’. l.8. habit – replaced by ‘season’. It seems likely that Thomas wanted it in order to rhyme with ‘mountain’ when he changed l.11 (see below); spinning wheel – plural ‘spinning wheels’ in 25P and CP14; the additional ‘s’ provides fuller (internal) pararhyme with ‘unravels’ and ‘petals’. l.9. Halved on the xxxxx – the word is illegible, but informed guesswork might make out ‘carcass’; the unfinished clause beginning ‘Halved’ may have been dropped because the alliteration on ‘h’ from ‘habit’ disappeared with revision of l.8; petals – originally ‘petal’, with comma (rather than semicolon), following the pattern of stanza 1. l.10. There is an indecipherable word after ‘sap’ (it appears to be ‘and’ – if so, this is the point at which Thomas presumably decided for ‘blood’ rather than ‘sap’ as his vitalistic fluid). ‘Threading off ’ derives from sewing, possibly with a sewing-machine (‘spinning wheel’). The comma after ‘bubble’ was removed when the poem was published; She – the ‘spring’ / ‘colic season’ of lines seven and eight, and also Atropos, in Greek myth the spinner of man’s fate and determiner of his lifespan. Thomas swaps ‘her green forest’ for the barer image of a (masculine) ‘man … mountain’, setting up a gender interplay which is elaborated further in the following stanza. ‘Pine’ is suggested by ‘needle’ in previous line; the image-cluster generally is reminiscent of ‘The force that through the green fuse’ (spring, flowers [petals], roots). l.11. With the aid of digital image manipulation software we make the line, ‘My promise in harvest lets fly her green forest.’ To ‘let fly’ is to lash out in a fit of temper, but also refers back to wheel (‘flywheel’) and its mechanical (sewing machine) senses. The grammatical subject of ‘Casts’ in the replacement line is ‘She’ of l.10. l.12. Three deleted and indecipherable words before green, and one after it, in the deleted line. The removal of ‘green’ and use of ‘naked entrail’ gives a more visceral tone to the depiction of conception / birth in the spring; the image is of evisceration. The ‘entrail’ may be among those ‘cast’ by Roman augurs to foretell the future and also the womb. l.13. harebell – cf. ‘harebells’ in ‘That the sum sanity’, CP14, 37. Harebells can self-pollinate and have a rhizomatic (‘bulb’) root structure. l.19. Deleted word indecipherable. l.20. steeplejack – perhaps a play on ‘jack’, indicative of (male) Swansea native (‘a Swansea Jack’) and a key word in Thomas’s early poetry; cf. ‘If I were tickled by the rub of love’, CP14, 60, and ‘I see the boys of summer’, CP14, 56; also ‘Jack of Christ’, DDT, 36-39).

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l.24. Correction to avoid repetition of ‘peril / perilous’, ll.19, 26. l.25. No comma after ‘trees’ in 25P and CP14, ambiguating the line. l.27. End-line semicolon in N5 replaced by comma in 25P and CP14. l.28. The removal of comma after ‘I’ in 25P and CP14 seems to us an error; the use of the ‘I + comma’ formula here follows its use in the two previous odd-numbered stanzas. ll.28-30. N5 has a pencil line drawn down beside these three lines in the lefthand margin; perhaps uncoincidentally, these are precisely the three lines which Thomas told Vernon Watkins were his ‘favourites’: ‘It was characteristic of his taste at that time that his favourite lines in the poem were these’ (LVW, 15). l.29. glass – Thomas may be punning on Welsh glas = green/blue. l.32. Spelling error in ‘Voyageing’ corrected for 25P; ‘by’ for ‘off ’ gives the sense ‘by means of ’ as well as ‘escape from’, as in its radically ambiguous usage in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’ l.34. Characteristically (cf. N5 ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’) Thomas makes the singular possessive a plural possessive. Twelve ‘They climb the country pinnacle’: ‘I, in my intricate image’ II Pages 53, 55. l.1. globe of grass – perhaps too tritely alliterative to retain; in any event, after ending part I ‘on the level’, Thomas decided to have the ‘invalid rivals’ of his ‘intricate image’ ‘climb’, perhaps in preparation for the descent and submergence of the rest of this section. l.6. weathers – the exemplary process word, perhaps signalling the onset of turbulence. l.8. N5 has capital C for cadaver; it was made lower case in 25P and CP52; CP88 restored it and CP14 removes it. As this suggests, there is syntactical sleight-of-hand and an associated uncertainty is at work. ‘Cadaverous’ is an adjective, signifying ‘that which is cadaverous / belongs to Cadaver’. Cf. N5 ‘Seven’, ‘When, like a running grave’, where Cadaver makes his other, more active, appearance. l.17. The change of ‘in’ to ‘and’ reduces the ambiguity of ‘ether’ and makes the image more narrowly surgical.

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l.22. Hyphenation fuses ‘cock’ and ‘dung’, life (generation) and death (excrement). l.26. spindrift – cf. ‘In my craft or sullen art’, ‘spindrift pages’, CP14, 177; also ‘The Crumbs of One Man’s Year’, ‘The spindrift leaf and stray-paper whirl’, QEOM, 43. l.28. Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, carried a trident and a twisted conch which he blew to calm or provoke the waves; ‘a’ triton is a general term for a sea-spirit, which could be benevolent or malign. l.29. hangman’s raft – possibly Thomas, who views the voyage of life as one which takes place under imminent sentence of death, imagines it happening on a kind of gallows-raft; on this we sail to our doom, as here, where the raft is heading for the ‘breakers’. l.30. glass – see note for N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’; l.29. tongues – refers to ‘chime’, in l.26, and punning on ‘diver’s bell’, l.27, ‘rings’, l.28, and ‘clapped’ (bells’ clappers), l.29. The ‘chime’ that ‘travels’ will certainly ‘pass by’ an observer and thereby become a funereal ‘passing-bell’. The wave / bell image-cluster, probably deriving ultimately from legends of drowned Celtic / Welsh lands (such as Brittany’s Land of Ys (‘La cathèdrale engloutie’) and the Welsh legend of Seithyn / Cantre Gwaelod), is found in several Thomas works; cf. ‘A Prospect of the Sea’; ‘the heart in her breast was a small red bell that rang in a wave’; “‘She is ringing a bell for you in the sea”’ CS, 95; and ‘drowned deep bells’, in ‘Prologue’, CP14, 203. l.33. The ‘comma’ after ‘moon-turned’ is not as large or diagonally insistent as Thomas’s usually are; it appears to be more a mark made to separate ‘moonturned’ from ‘lightning’, which has been placed on this lower line because l.32 is so long. Thirteen ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’ Pages 57, 59. N5 is the earliest MS extant for this poem. Date ‘April ’35’ and place ‘(Cheshire)’ refer to the fact that Thomas entered this poem into N5 when he was staying with A. J. P. Taylor and his wife Margaret Taylor. Lycett notes: ‘In April [1935], [Norman] Cameron suggested that Dylan might like to get out of London and visit [Cameron’s] friend Alan Taylor. Despite his dislike for certain aspects of the Taylors’ life, such as long walks in the Derbyshire peaks, he remained there for nearly a month, until mid-May’ (DTANL, 133). The poem has been seen by Maud as reflecting Thomas’s rustication and recuperation in Swansea in spring 1935 after his London excesses, and this

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is plausible enough; the poem does have a ‘Glamorgan’ and ‘county’ flavour. However, it was completed in Cheshire, and is peculiar in that it is written in ink over a pencil original in stanzas three and four (as also is N5 ‘Fourteen’, ‘They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles’). The absolute readiness of the poem to be fair-copied when Thomas headed north with N5 may also be doubted. In l.6, spacing problems (alternately too much and then too little space) for ‘men’ and ‘hanging’ suggest that Thomas was unsure of what should go there, initially leaving gaps for the words and returning to fill them in later. One way of reading the poem is as a specifically Anglo-Welsh version of (and to some extent riposte to) certain poems by W. H. Auden and C. Day Lewis set in menacing Depression-era industrial-derelict landscapes. These invariably have an allegorical quality, and Thomas’s comes with many of the properties of the genre: a ‘sniper’, a ‘water-tower’, hawks and a despicable fox-hunting squirearchy. It differs from a New Country production in its insistence on energy (in this resembling another spring poem, ‘The force that through the green fuse’, CP14, 43-4) and on its status as a linguistic object. Wordplay (‘forth’ / ‘fourth’, ‘county’ / ‘country’) and pun (‘horn’, ‘crane’, ‘spring’, ‘folly’ ‘game’, etc.) seems to generate the narrative as much as any element in the external world. l.11. green wood – the change to ‘greenwood’ may be an accidental one, since it lessens the useful ambiguity of the original (green – verdant; young; naive; sick). ‘Green wood dying’ anticipates ‘green and dying’ in ‘Fern Hill’, CP14, 179. l.14. snowy horsemen – the same words are written in pencil and crossed out in pen in N5, and a gap between the two words and the following comma is inordinately large, suggesting an overgenerous space was initially left for them. The occurrence of ‘four’ in this line suggests the lurking presence of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. l.15. Space after ‘loudening’; see l.14 note above. l.17. spring – the pencil original seems to have been a short (four or five letter) word beginning with ‘h’ (‘hare’, ‘horn’?), but it is impossible to fully make out. l.18. folly’s hunter – refers back to ‘lank, fourth folly’ of l.2; by reversing his pencil original ‘hunter’s folly’ Thomas is reinforcing the fact that it is the folly which is ‘lank’, not the hunter. A ‘hunter’ may be a person or a kind of horse bred for hunting. l.21. We posit, on the basis of crossings-out of ‘and’, an interlineated ‘from’, and an illegible word which was replaced by ‘valley’, that the line originally read: ‘Time, in a rider rising, and the sniper’s tree’. l.22. Given the intensification of the poem’s bird theme (‘cuckoo’, ‘hawk’, ‘snipe’, ‘crane’, ‘birds’ (twice)) in these final lines, it might be justifiable to discern in the original’s ‘county’s darlings’ the word ‘starlings’.

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Fourteen ‘They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles’: ‘I, in my intricate image’ III Pages 60, 61, 62, 63, 65. Unlike the first two sections of ‘I, in my intricate image’, ‘They suffer the undead water’ is not preceded by a Roman numeral. Thomas entered two dates and places of composition for this third and final section of the poem. On either side of the ink fair-copy title on the recto (‘Fourteen’) he has written ‘(Disley, May)’ and ‘(To A & M)’ – the dedicatees, Alan and Margaret Taylor, his hosts at Disley. However, after the final stanza, he has written ‘July ’35.’ and ‘Glen Lough, Donegal’. Complicating the issue further, there is a parallel pencil version of the poem on two of the verso pages, undated and unlocated. It is clear – since corrections to the pencil version are incorporated in the ink version – that the former preceded the latter. For example, line eight in the pencilled version, ‘Brass and the denseless image, on a staff of life’, became ‘Brass and the denseless bodiless image, on a stick of folly’. This requires explanation. In DDT, John Goodby speculates that the pencil version was entered first as a three-stanza draft, and completed later, although we think it is possible that Thomas entered the entire pencil draft in one go. The crucial point is that the pencil draft on the verso pages preceded the ink copy on the recto pages, but that it became involved with the composition process of the poem when Thomas had second thoughts, particularly about the fifth stanza, in Glen Lough. We speculate that after writing out the pencil version on the verso pages as far as stanza four (doing so because he was unsure about the poem’s state of completion, as he had with N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’ and N5 ‘Nine’, ‘How soon the servant sun’), Thomas then entered the first sixteen lines of the poem as a fair copy in ink on the recto page facing it. He did this at Disley. However, for some reason he could not complete the fair-copying there; the ink and the handwriting of the rest of the fair copy are different in thickness and style, suggesting the use of a different pen and very probably a different occasion of writing from line seventeen onwards. This suggests that the fair-copying process was resumed two months or so later in Glen Lough, explaining the second dating and locating of the poem at its conclusion. The pencil copy ends at stanza five. However, after he had made its facing fair copy in ink on the recto page at Glen Lough, Thomas had second thoughts. He crossed out this ink copy out and, with the same pencil (darker than the one with which he had earlier written the pencil copy on the verso page), he began to revise the stanza, using the pencil copy as his main source. After doing so, he wrote another ink fair copy under the one he had crossed out. At a later date, Thomas tore out the page immediately below; this may have contained a draft of the final (sixth) stanza of the poem.

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l.6. stormy (pencil and ink versions) – stony (ink version); Aran – the Aran Islands are off the west coast of Ireland. They are treeless and stony, but have a central place in literary history since they provided J. M. Synge with inspiration for his greatest plays, and as a committed amateur actor in his teens, these would certainly have been known to Thomas. Nearer the time of writing, Robert J. Flanahan’s acclaimed pioneering documentary film Man of Aran had been released in 1934. l.8. denseless (pencil version) – bodiless (ink version). The British Library autograph MS has ‘denseless’ crossed out and replaced by ‘bodiless’, but is otherwise exactly as published; it is possible that in copying it out from N5 Thomas mis-transcribed the word or that he had second (and then third) thoughts about which version was better. ll.9-12. Pencil version (indicated as PV below); the passage reads: Salvation’s bottle Is half glass half metal; Be by your one quaff staggered to the pale of death, Skating the ice that quarrels with the watered cordial. The imagery centres on drinking and alcohol; PV l.9. Salvation’s bottle – a line transferred to N5 ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise’, V. PV l.11. pale – pallidness; pale ale; boundary (cf. Hamlet, I. iv. l.30: ‘the pales and forts of reason’; ice – as in ‘on thin ice’ (in peril), but also ice in drinks, in this case decidedly un-alcoholic ‘watered cordial’. PV l.12. As well as countering alcoholic drinks, ‘watered’ quarrels with ‘ice’ to some extent, the same chemical compound in a different state. This accords with the poem’s themes of boundary-crossing, process / travel, doubleness and multiplicity, but it could also simply be Thomas obliquely considering his problematic relationship to alcohol. In replacing these four lines, Thomas dropped the semicolon at the end of line eight allowing the clause to run-on in line nine, adding to the description of the pedagogical father’s ferrule-tipped stick (used by teachers of time, including his own father, D. J. Thomas) and making the entire stanza more syntactically fluid. The singular ‘father’s’, of line twelve, by contrast with the pluralized possessives Thomas opts for elsewhere in N5 (cf. N5 ‘Six’, ‘I fellowed sleep’) and the poems of 25P, suggests that the following lines have a bearing on his relationship with his father. One general sense is a contrast between ‘folly’, associated with classroom learning and ‘vision’, associated with poetry (albeit both are phallic, ‘stick’-like, and ‘thrusting’). The imagery of the next three lines is that of a steam locomotive, another ‘ghost in armour’, steam (spirit)

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within a metal casing. The ‘Tom Thumb’ engine of 1830, the first to pull a passenger train in the United States, was the US equivalent of Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’. Crucially, it gifts a pun on T(h)om(as), and an allusion to his own slightly below-average stature (General Tom Thumb (1838–83) was a famous dwarf and performer in P. T. Barnum’s circus). ‘Iron mile’, in line with Thomas’s literalist conceits, probably refers to a railway track (as in the Native American ‘iron horse’ for steam engine), and may allude to Thomas’s escape, via railway, to the metropolis (as comically rendered in his unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade [1941]). The other image stream, associated with vision, involves ‘hophead’ – a user of marijuana – and ‘smoke’; ‘smoke’ (rather than ‘thrusting’) may be read as the main verb of ll.10-12. l.10. Comma added after ‘valley’ in 25P and CP14. ll.11-12. tom thumb – hyphenated in 25P and CP14. Thomas may have reversed these lines in the ink version because he came to think l.11 was more conclusive-sounding, particularly with the emphatic closing consonance of ‘iron mile’. The effect, particularly in the published version, which has a comma after ‘coral’, is to make the Hamlet line float, syntactically, as a weakly appositive clause between verb-possessing ll.10 and 12. l.12. through – Thomas did not delete this, despite using the ‘on’ pencilled above it in the published version. The preference for ‘on’ may be to echo ‘on a stick of folly’. l.14. ship’s – ships’ in published versions, in accordance with Thomas’s general conversion of singular possessives to plural possessives in 25P (e.g. bone’s – bones’, l.15). l.15. muscle (pencil version) – muscle (ink version) l.19. from (pencil version) – in (ink version) l.20. Comma added after ‘instrument’ in ink version; ‘locked’ in pencil deleted and replaced with ‘nicked’ in order to create wordplay, apparently during the composition of the line. ll.21, 23. His ... He – My ... I in 25P and CP14. The third-person possessive and personal pronoun in N5 pencil and ink versions refer back to ‘your one ghost’, the only one who can ‘pierce’ you, namely the phallically endowed father. The reason for changing third to first person for publication is not clear; Thomas may have been referring to a double, the internalized father and the superego, but eventually decided that this distracted from the centrality of the ‘I’ and its ‘intricate image’. The risk of using the first person, as he well knew, was of making the speaker seem bombastic. On the other hand, this is an unashamedly bardic poem in which the speaker assumes a prophetic mantle.

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l.25. scales – many senses are combined: fish/crocodile, Anubis’ balances in which the hearts of the dead are weighed against the feather of truth, musical scales, scales that drop from the eyes in accord with the poem’s theme of self-awareness and bardic transformation. Cf. N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, l.4; N5 ‘Twelve’, ‘They climb the country pinnacle’, l.27. l.26. Pencil version has ‘straddler of the floods’, as does the first ink fair copy; this is changed on revisions to pencil copy to ‘saddler of the rushes’. ‘Tail’, ‘Nile’, ‘snout’, ‘straddler’ and ‘floods’ could all be linked to the crocodile of l.24. However, there may also be an echo of Queen of the Rushes (1906) by the Welsh novelist Allen Raine, and ‘rushes’ are also the initial prints of a film (Thomas used film imagery extensively in his poetry of this period), although the chief sense is probably related to the Egyptian and Biblical lexis. ‘Saddle’ is generated by wordplay from ‘straddle’; one straddles a horse on a saddle, but while straddling is a precarious business, being in the saddle is not. l.27. Pencil version has ‘tropic’ instead of ‘glass-backed’ in first ink fair copy, the only difference between the two. Thomas may intend a reference to a tropical saddle encircling or girdling the earth; hence to man’s ubiquity and dominance over nature; glass-backed saddle – if your support (by supernaturalism, religion) becomes ‘glass-backed’, transparent (through the demystifying power of modern science), you see through its ideological underpinnings. (As with other attempts to gloss the more opaque passages of this poem, we are aware that this probably smacks of over-ingeniousness.) l.28. Pencil version has ‘hourless house’; correcting the stanza, Thomas made this fourth line the third (l.27) and also made it plural ‘hourless houses’. See his letter to Bert Trick from Glen Lough: ‘My days these days are planned out carefully, or at least conveniently, to the clock I haven’t got (if time is the tick of a clock, I’m living in a funny dimension, in an hourless house)’ (CL, 218). Neither letter or poem are dated, so we cannot say where the phrase was first deployed; shaking – brandishing, or undermining; seahatched skull – perhaps an allusion to Darwin-informed accounts of the origin of all life in the sea. l.29. All-hollowed man – Cf. ‘hollow agent’ and ‘bamboo [hollow] man’ in N5 ‘Seventeen’ and ‘Nineteen’, ‘Altarwise’ II, IV. The Ancient Egyptian contexts of ‘Nile’, ‘hourless houses’ (tombs), and so on, also suggests the process of removing the internal organs from a dead body (‘hollowing’ it out) during the mummification process; shifted hide – skin hidden by a ‘shift’ (garment); portable birdwatcher’s hide; the ‘shifting’ of man’s ability to ‘hide’ within supernaturalism has ended, his true nakedness has been revealed and he ‘shrieks’ as a result. However, the ‘hide’ becomes Christian-angelic ‘white apparel’ in the transposed last line of the final version.

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l.30. maul – to injure, rough someone up; rugby maul; painter’s tool, used for resting the painting hand without smearing the canvas; cf. ‘The maul of her hands’, ‘The Map of Love’, CS, 115. The line as a whole, with its ‘one level’, is in dialogue with the opening line of N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, the first section of the poem, with its two levels. It registers some kind of reduction (‘Suffer the maul/ling’) which must be endured. Man no longer has the ‘level’ of a supernatural dimension by which to explain the universe or deal with his place in it, it seems to say, but by accepting this he can gain a new self-awareness of human responsibility and potential which is ‘intricate’, rich and empowering. The voyage of self-discovery leads to an overcoming of supernaturalism, as mankind assumes the mystery of creation. The name for this understanding is process (cf. ‘rushes’, ‘floods’), and it is harnessed (saddled / straddled) by the poet. To move from ‘straddler’ to ‘saddler’ is to write the poem, to paradoxically fix the ‘flood’; white apparel – replaces ‘shifted hide’, and is symbolic of innocence, and hence of the innocence lost by humanity; but cf. also Caradoc Evans, My People, for ironic connotations of ‘white shirts’. In general, the revisions soften the stanza’s tone and make it less melodramatic and more tragic, perhaps most obviously where ‘shrieks’ (l.29) is replaced by ‘wept for’. Structurally, Thomas compresses the third and fourth lines and makes the penultimate line the last one. The abstract ‘maul of images’ becomes the more concrete ‘oils and ointments’. Punctuation is made more fluid in the final version, too: both initial pencil and ink versions have full stop at ending of lines three, five and six, but Thomas makes one sentence of three, and allows ‘was’ to be main verb for the entire stanza. l.27. shakes – becomes ‘shaking’, a more continuous present form. l.34. man’s mineral – cf. l.2, N5 ‘Eleven’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, ‘man’s minerals’. l.36. ‘And’ is a later addition: ‘My’ is capitalized. ‘Images’ seems originally to have been ‘imaged’, as if Thomas were going to add ‘imaged + noun’, but decided against it as he was writing. While the final stanza provides a positive, even defiant, conclusion to the poem, it is nevertheless an ambiguous one. Man was the ‘masker’ (concealer / entertainer of) Cadaver, or death, the ‘mantle’ (or cover) ‘harnessing’ this role of concealing-entertaining through sublimation; energy came from the fact that man was subject to the cowardly (‘windy’) ‘rotten fathom’ or fear of death. But this death-hauntedness is taken as the basis for his forging of a new kind of poetic energy, or freedom, based in humanity: ‘man’s mineral’. ‘Mineral’ is defined in the OED as that which is mined, that is brought up from an underground mine. It is also, by an implied pun, what is mined from the self, what is ‘mine’ (while

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‘mine’ means In addition ‘to blow up, destroy’, cf. N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’). ‘Forging’, too, is profoundly and ambivalently to the point, as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist: ‘to forge ... the uncreated conscience of my race.’ Fifteen ‘Incarnate devil’ Page 67. The source of ‘Incarnate devil’ is N3 ‘Thirty’ ‘BEFORE WE SINNED’, of 16 May 1933, a thirty-seven-line poem cut down to eighteen lines. A handwritten (ink) version of the first two stanzas, plus four lines of the third stanza, exists at the Library of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas. That this is an earlier version of the N5 poem is strongly suggested by the progressive elaboration of line eleven from ‘the moon came out’ (in the Austin MS) to ‘the moon came silently’ (the crossed-out line in N5) to the final published version: ‘the moon rose windily’ (interlineated in N5). l.1. Incarnate devil – reverses the cliché ‘devil incarnate’; cf. also Titus Andronicus, V:1, l. 40: ‘O worthy Goth this is the incarnate devil / That robbed Andronicus of his good hand’ (the same speech also mentions ‘base fruit’ and ‘fruit of bastardy’ and a ‘tree’). l.2. One of the sources of the poem may be the pun on ‘garden’ / ‘guardian’ suggested by their similarity in pronunciation, and / or older spellings of the word, such as gardien. As an inveterate browser of the OED, Thomas would possibly have been aware of the link the entry for ‘guardian’ makes with ‘warden’, used in l.5: ‘Cf. Pr. gardian, Sp. guardian, It. guardian, and see WARDEN’ (Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, OUP, 1987, 717.) l.4. The five indecipherable deleted words are highly likely to be the same as those in the Austin MS, ‘forked out the old-horned fruits’. l.6. The deleted ‘a tree of ghosts’ became ‘the holy hill’, then (possibly) ‘warden’s hill’, and finally ‘heaven’s hill’. The original N5 stanza two differs markedly from the final version: When storms struck on the tree, the flying stars And the half moon half handed in a cloud Spread good and evil till the fancy fears All in a fret of weathers made a word, And when the moon came silently she was

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Half white as wool and greener than the grass. The deleted stanza has the same general meaning as its replacement, but is more nebulous and confused (Thomas may have felt that there were too many ‘halfs’ by half and decided to drop a couple). In particular, he imports personal pronouns (‘me’, ‘we’), brings in ‘wisemen’ to point the moral and makes the God-imposed antinomies and ‘fancy [fanciful] fears’ more obvious in lines ten and twelve. The fact that they are ‘fancy’ in a negative sense (cf. Coleridge’s famous definition of ‘fancy’ as inferior to ‘imagination’ in Biographia Literaria) is apparent from the use of the indefinite rather than the definite article: ‘a’ word, not ‘the Word’. Other material is derived from elsewhere in the poem, for example ‘eastern’ comes from a deleted line in stanza three. l.7. guided seas – cf. N5 ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’, l.15: ‘directed sea’. l.11. The gendered moon (‘she’) becomes neuter. Deleted ll.13-15 read: We in our eden knew the eastern guardian In golden waters that no frost could harden And in our time that tumbled from the earth The general sense is that in our prelapsarian state we communed with an unJehovah-like deity (the ‘eastern guardian’) and existed in timeless bliss (‘golden waters’), but ‘that’ condition ‘tumbled from the earth’ as God set up the Fall in order to impose ‘the cloven myth’ (both a divided myth, a myth of division, and division as myth), and set repressive ‘time’ in motion. ‘Golden waters’ may be urine (and link the four rivers of Eden with the ‘Jordan’ [slang for a chamberpot; cf. ‘Before I knocked’, CP14, 38]; certainly, urine is warm and doesn’t ‘harden’). Thomas is implicitly siding with the ‘incarnate devil’ as trickster principle, and so ‘tumbled’ has a sexual sense in addition to the theological one of the Fall. However, in line with the way he has made the poem less ambiguous in stanza two, we surmise that he felt ‘tumbled’ to be too jocular. 1.14. sacret – misspelt secret, but neatly combining ‘secret’ with ‘sacred’. Whether this neologism was intentional or not, it is richly creative and revealing. If he was aware of what he had done, however, we presume Thomas could not allow this Joycean portmanteau word to survive in a poem he was striving to make more serious. l. 17. Midnight of the sun – refers to the moon of the second stanza, giving light in the darkness. This imagery suggests the admixture of light and dark, white and black, good and evil which underscore the poem’s moral. Cf. the lines ‘And blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows’, in ‘I see the boys of summer’, CP14, 57, and ‘A process blows the moon into the sun’, ‘A process

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in the weather of the heart’, CP14, 52; the moon is frequently the sun’s negative, or other, in Thomas. Sixteen ‘The seed-at-zero’ Pages 69, 71, 72, 73. N5 is the earliest MS extant for the (almost final) published form of this poem; it derives some of its material from N4 ‘Six’. Entered in N5 on 2 August 1935, at Glen Lough. For the first time in N5 Thomas used the verso (page seventy-two) for the purposes of entering his fair copy – that is, not for a prefatory pencil version – or for revision purposes. He did the same for ‘Altawise by owl-light’ and ‘Foster the light’, so we conjecture that, suddenly realizing there was very little space left in N5, and knowing he had to squeeze the other poems into it, he was economizing. This poem is experimental in a minor vein; to write it, Thomas used material from N4, which he had also taken with him to Glen Lough, and reworked it as five pairs of twin stanzas, in which the second of each pair repeated the basic material of the first, but critiqued it by varying selected lexical items. It is a minimalist stripping-down of the N4 original, Thomas at his most Gertrude Stein-like, and an ingenious, if not wholly successful, example of variation within repetition. One of the main points of interest of the N5 version lies in the fifth and final pair of stanzas (nine and ten), which were dropped for publication, and have never been seen before. As with the somewhat arbitrary deletions in N5 ‘Three’, ‘Do you not father me?’ and N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’, the final pair of stanzas may have been dropped in a spirit of pseudo-Dada mischief. However, it is more likely that Thomas, as elsewhere in N5, wished to reduce the Christian element, which is strongest at this point, with its ‘lamb of god’, Paraclete-like ‘pigeon’ and ‘eagle’, symbolic of John the Evangelist. This allowed the sexual aspect of the poem to dominate and permitted the ‘hero’ more than the Christian identity he would have been limited by if ‘lamb of god’ had stood. Goodby, in CP14, claims that the ‘hero’ has accomplished his destiny by stanzas seven and eight in any case, and this may also account for the cut. The poem’s ‘zero’ ‘hero’ is, of course, the sperm (a conceit Thomas would use again in ‘A saint about to fall’, CP14, 105), and the poem is a conception narrative – insemination as quest romance. But he is also a worldly adventurer, with Napoleonic and Christ-like overtones, while his links to the (amniotic) sea lend him an Odysseus-like, trickster quality. Arguably, the entire poem derives from a hidden pun (‘sailors’ = seamen / semen).

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l.2. trodden – the change from ‘trampled’ gives a sexual pun (‘tread’ is the verb for birds mating). l.6. stumbling – gives an internal rhyme with ‘tumble’, but is the only lineend word not repeated between the stanza pairs of the poem. This, of course, wittily enacts what it refers to. l.15. Plural ‘ramparts’ was made singular, as in the fourth stanza. ll. 16, 23, 26, 70. riddled – cf. ‘riddled lads’, with multiple senses, in N5 ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’, l.40. l.18. As above, an added semicolon in the published version is consistent with stanza four. l.19. Becomes ‘settled’, unlike ‘settling’ in stanza four. The alteration is unsettling. l.20, 27. They – may be a slip; sperm is multitudinous, but the ‘hero’ is singular at every point in the poem. l.31, 38. scold – works better with the domestic debunking of heroic narratives which are part of the poem’s point. l.39. bright – prepares us for ‘star-flanked’ but Thomas may have decided that ‘high’ sphere allowed alliterative linkage with ‘hemisphere’; it also gave a metaphorical, high-flown abstract sense which could be undermined. l.41. ‘Starving’ has a merely alliterative function, while ‘thirsty’ prepares us for the drunken sailors. l.51. star-flanked – returns to the transposed epithet found in l.2 of stanza 1. l.56. The change to ‘from’ places the ‘Man in-seed, in seed-at-zero’ between the ‘skyscraping place’ and the ‘grave-groping place’. This could be a selfcritique of Thomas’s propensity to morbidity, which is the main subject of poems such as N5 ‘Eight’, ‘Now’. l.61. crop – its primary meaning is a chamber in a bird’s gullet in which food is stored and broken down before being passed on to the stomach proper, but it also puns on harvest: ‘seed’ becomes a ‘crop’, so to speak. l.63, 70. leaden – the repetition of this word (unlike the transposition in the final lines of the previous stanza pairs) may be deliberate: a flat-footed ending to the poem, reinforced by alliteration on ‘l’. Like the ‘iron’ pigeon, it represents a form of impossibility (‘And pigs might fly’). ‘Virgin’ and ‘riddled’ occur in stanzas three and four; this repetition may be another reason why the last two stanzas were dispensed with. l.66. The comma pencilled after ‘garrison’ has been inked in like the others in the poem.

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Seventeen ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ ‘Seventeen’ and its continuation as ‘Nineteen’ are the only MS versions of any of the ‘Altarwise’ sequence known to exist, with the exception of the opening lines of III (which rewrite N3, ‘Twenty Eight’). While the N5 MS does not ‘explain’ this most difficult and linguistically rewarding, yet baffling of Thomas’s poems, it does shed new light on its aims and procedures, by confirming some claims and disproving others. This is largely because of the extensive deleted material it contains: names, phrases, lines and passages often give a new angle on what Thomas was trying to achieve; examples would include the devilish ‘Old Scratch’ in I, the deleted ‘runging’ passage in II and the First World War ‘sniper’s aces’ and ‘joyless pits’ in V. Thomas made an initial start on II immediately after I, at the foot of page seventy-four. But he gave up after three lines (a version of what are now lines two, three and four); a new opening line (‘Death is all metaphors ... history’) seems to have been suggested by the phrase ‘death in a shape of which occurs history’, and he made a fresh attempt on the following recto page. The way the sequence is subsequently set out, on a poem-per-page basis, was forced on Thomas by space constraints but may also say something about the way ‘Altarwise’ hovers between being a sequence in which all parts rely on the others and a discrete series of free-standing poems. The sequence is broken between II and III by ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’. But I-IV are all dated ‘August ’35’, and V must also have been written in the same month, since Thomas returned to London later in August. The phrase ‘To be continued at length’, entered after ‘Altarwise’ II, confirms Thomas’s appetite for the poem, but also his uncertainty about how long it would be; in December 1935 he was still describing ‘Altarwise’ I-VIII as ‘the first passage of what’s going to be a very long poem indeed’, while a note in 25P, which was published in September 1936, described its ten parts – that is, the entire poem as we now have it – as ‘The first ten sections of a work in progress’ (DDT, 127). ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ I Page 74. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. l.2. The deleted word between ‘his’ and ‘furies’ is hard to decipher but could be ‘seven’. This is the number of the Deadly Sins, a part of Catholic doctrine which Thomas adapted for his short story written around this time, ‘The Holy Six’, which features the anagrammatical characters Mr Rafe (Fear), Mr Stul

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(Lust), Mr Vyne (Envy), Mr Edger (Greed), Mr Lucytre (Cruelty) and Mr Stipe (Spite). ‘Seven’ would lend support to the claim by Walford Davies and other critics that ‘furies’ means human passions and appetites – passions which Christ himself, once incarnated, would have experienced and suffered from. l.3. The capital initial letter of the first word on the original line has been made indistinct by Thomas’s deletion; it appears most like ‘N’ or ‘V’, but these would make no sense. ‘H’, ‘W’, ‘L’, or ‘C’ are therefore the likeliest contenders, with ‘clutching’ probably the best guess although none is wholly convincing. In an initial correction, ‘shafted’ was replaced by ‘wizard’ as the adjective for ‘arm’. ‘Wizard’ is used in the original l.10; on both occasions it deflates religious pretension. Cf. ‘Eighteen’, ‘Foster the light’, in which it is also used. l.5. Old Scratch the fork-tail lurcher – ‘Old Scratch’ is a colloquial term for the Devil; a lurcher is a kind of greyhound, favoured by the working class and associated with miners (Thomas may be remembering W.H. Auden’s ‘Song’, ‘O lurcher-loving collier, black as night’). The N5 version makes clearer the overlapping nature of the identities of Christ and the Devil in the poem (as in ‘Incarnate devil’, the latter is more a Blakeian contrary than the traditional Christian bogeyman). l.6. The comma originally after ‘scream’ becomes a heavily emphasized full stop. This makes clear the inverted Petrarchan sonnet form, with volta between the sixth and the seventh lines. l.7. The replacement of ‘then’ by ‘and’, like the full stop at l.6, helps to emphasize the volta. l.8 esquire – can be shortened to ‘squire’ as a slangy, mock-respectful form of address between males, like ‘old cock’, with which Thomas replaced it; seacock’s egg – the phrase subverts sexual roles – how can a male creature lay an egg? – and the fact that the ‘sea-cock’ is species of seagull. The paradox of a cock’s egg – which could also be a euphemism for a testicle – is also found in the variant form ‘cockerel’s egg’ in ‘Foster the light’, strengthening a sense of a link between the two poems. l.9. His living turned to – the sense is active rather than passive. Thomas may be replacing a clerical sense of ‘living’ as a noun (a priest’s incumbency) with a sexual one; the ‘buttons’ are perhaps those of the flies on a pair of trousers, the ‘bones’ penises (‘a bone’ is slang for an erection), characteristically conflating sex and death. l.10. Thomas’s revision of this line is a reversal of his revision in the previous one, dispensing with the sexual ‘stiff ’ in favour of play on religious terminology; salvage – can be a form of rubbish, but also, as a verb, the act

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of saving something, hence religious salvation; windy – takes up the ‘winds’ introduced in l.9 and puns on its sense of ‘cowardly’; one leg – conflates penis and cross; this will return in sonnet X. ‘Death is all metaphors, shape in one history’: ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ II Pages 74, 75, 76. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. The lengthy deleted section (ll. 5-12) makes clearer than the final version one of the major themes of the poem, namely, that the growing infant embodies the oneness of living growth (‘live verticals at vein and socket’) and death and decay (‘The horizontal cross-bones of the buried’). The image of horizontal, bony ‘rungs’ of death, and vertical life rising from and athwart it develops the final lines of I, in which the ‘gentleman’ (Christ-as-Everyman / Thomas himself) unites the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, life and death, in a Jacob’s ladder / cartographical conceit resembling those of Donne’s poems, and his Sermon on Psalm 89. (DDT, 95) It thus accords with the voyaging and seasonal themes of the sequence as a whole (cf. III: ‘weathering changes on the ladder’; VIII: ‘From pole to pole’; X: ‘voyage / Atlaswise’) (CP14, 85, 86). l.1. The comma of the end-line semicolon is deleted here and in line four to give a full stop; both were restored in the published version. ll.5-6. Thomas needed two fairly self-contained lines in order to end the sestet, but began by using and twice deleting variants of lines which would eventually become ll.12-13 (the initial ABCBAC pararhyme scheme is clear enough). The sense of both versions is processual; even at the point of ‘groundworks’ (infancy) the very hairs of your head already have their roots in the earth, nourished by dead things, from which they spring. But this, perhaps, he felt would serve better to close the poem. l.7. Became the opening line of ‘Altarwise’ IV. ll.7-8. the dictionary / The devil’s grammar – Thomas may have had in mind the title of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1911). l.8. deleted and not re-used, unlike l.7 and ll.9-12. ll.13-14. Became ll.5-6 in final version; the ‘shapeless country’ is both the womb and Wales, which had no separate political or legal status apart from England before 1997. l.17. rung – functions as a noun but is also a disguised main verb (the commas after ‘Abaddon’ and ‘stairs’, strictly unnecessary, confuse the ‘devil’s grammar’ at this point), that is, the act of making (‘runging’) the ladder, using life and death

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as the materials, which the self-addressing protagonist constructs in his Jacoblike ascent. A similar assemblage of midnight, bell-ringing, blackness, aspiration and death is found in stanza five of ‘I see the boys of summer’, CP14, 56-8. l.21. pavement – a revealing word, both biblical and humdrum-suburban, repeated in both versions of l.6 in ‘Altarwise’ III. l.22. weathers – Thomas sets up a wordplay on weather / wether in the following sonnet in the sequence. Eighteen ‘Foster the light’ Pages 78, 79. ‘Foster the light’ began life as N4 ‘Thirty Six’, dated ‘February 23. ’34’, and was revised for the Sunday Referee, where it was published in October 1934, with the opening line altered from ‘Foster the light, nor veil the bushy sun’ to ‘Foster the light, nor veil the feeling moon’. Thomas copied this Referee version into N5, as noted in parentheses beside its number, making more alterations, including of the opening line; the ‘bushy’ and ‘sun’ of the opening line were moved to l.5, but ‘sun’ was then deleted (hence the tonal shift from solar heat to lunar chill, in accordance with the snow and ice imagery). In September 1935, he sent this newer version, together with ‘Altarwise’ I-VII, to Desmond Hawkins, for publication in Purpose. But in October he had second thoughts about the ‘Altarwise’ pieces, and on 1 November 1935 wrote to Hawkins urging him not to use them, but rather ‘for sweet Christ’s sake use the one beginning Foster the light’ (CL, 230). The poem was then further revised, with the ‘Buts’ beginning lines three, nine and fifteen restored, and small alterations to the poem’s lexis (as noted in the transcription: cf. ‘father’, ‘foster’, ‘ring’, ‘axle’). This final version was published in Contemporary Poetry and Prose in May 1936, and subsequently in 25P; see TN, 214-15 and DDT, 122-3. As noted in CP14, ‘Foster the light’ is an example of Thomas’s interest in multiple negatives and manipulation of readerly expectations. Taking as its starting point an exhortation by his friend Trevor Hughes in a letter of 13 January 1934, now held in the Buffalo archives, that he should ‘foster the light’, it ostensibly agrees, endorsing the need to ‘strip the twelve-winded marrow’, ‘master the night’, ‘murmur of spring’, ‘graft ... four-fruited ridings’, ‘Farmer in time of frost’ and so on – in short, ‘foster all’ – rather than engaging in negative activity, such as ‘veiling the moon’ and ‘hammer[ing] back a season in the figs’. But this is complicated by the fact that ‘nor’ is invariably preceded by ‘neither’ or some other negative, meaning that the reader’s instinct, ‘fostered’ by Thomas, is to understand ‘neither’ as preceding the positive items in the

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argument, for example, ‘[neither (do not)] foster the light, nor veil the manshaped moon’. This grammatical ghosting qualifies the positive tone generated by the rhetoric, and the reason for this becomes explicit in stanza three, which extends Hughes’s advice to the need to ‘foster all’, including death (‘the flylord’s acre’), in accordance with his process philosophy. Hughes’ exhortatory positivism, with its simplistic division between light and dark, good and bad, is complicated and contradicted by a more disturbing, Blakeian vision in which the two are inextricably tangled. Beneath the poem’s main sense, and its many revisions, is a metaphysical conceit of a sexual union (‘tuft’ as pubic hair, ‘axle’, ‘cockwise’, ‘hill of seas’) as a ‘little word’, or globe, recalling the atlases and maps of ‘Altarwise’ (‘seas’, ‘shapeless maps’, ‘world’). Thomas’s answer to Hughes’s letter sheds light on the poem; cf. CL, 107-12. l.3. following the example of the second and third stanzas in the N5, Thomas heavily end-stopped the mid-line of each stanza with a semicolon before its second publication in Purpose. l.5. Deleted word, undecipherable; ‘sun’ is a conjecture. ‘Bushy’ seems to have generated ‘flaming’ through the image of the burning bush in Exodus, 3:2.: ‘And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.’ But see also the tale of the burning bush in ‘Peredur Son of Evrawg’ in The Mabinogion: ‘On the bank of the river he saw a tall tree: from roots to crown one half was aflame and the other green with leaves.’1 l.7. roaring – if the ‘eggs’ were testicles, then presumably they roared with testosterone; cockrell – cf. ‘mackrel’, ‘I, in my intricate image’. l.8. fig – euphemism for the female genitals and womb; their alleged similarities are made much of in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Figs’ in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), and used elsewhere in Thomas; cf. ‘The fig of man unwrinkles in the stars’, ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’. l.11. CP14, 46. Epithets swapped, possibly because Thomas wished to avoid the burning orchards of his short story ‘The Orchards’. l.13. In 25P, Thomas replaced ‘foster’ with ‘father’, strengthening the parental responsibility imposed on the addressee. l.14. music – deleted presumably because it would be repeated in l.18.

1

The Mabinogion, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Gantz (London: Penguin, 1976), 243.

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l.18. mandrake – cf. N5 ‘Seventeen’, ‘Altarwise by owl-light’: ‘the mandrake with tomorrow’s screams’. There are other lexical similarities in ‘wizard’, ‘owl-seed’ and ‘cross-boned’. l.23. As the sparrow admits in the nursery rhyme ‘Who killed cock robin?’, ‘With my bow and arrow / I killed cock robin’; however, bow and arrow also recall Cupid’s bow, by which one is smitten with love. l.28. glory – cf. N5 ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’: ‘What colour is glory?’ Nineteen (Seventeen Continued) ‘First there was the lamb on knocking knees’: ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ III Page 79. This poem is a rewriting of N3 ‘Twenty Eight’. The number ‘III’ is written and scribbled out at the top of the verso page on which stanzas four and five of ‘Foster the light’ are written, indicating an initial attempt to place this poem there. When he found a place to begin it, Thomas wrote ‘Seventeen Continued’ under ‘Nineteen’. l.3. the – an erratum in the first printing of CP14 makes this ‘a’; Adam’s wether – punning on ‘weathers’ in ‘Altarwise’ II, and ‘whether’, a state of choice, and hence potentiality; developed in l.11 ‘black ram’, l.12 ‘mutton fold’ and l.13 ‘weathering’. A wether is a castrated ram which acts as leader of the flock; if it wears a bell it is a ‘bellwether’. Thomas’s conceit, which casts the speaker as a sole, unworthy survivor of some kind (the race of the spermatozoa to the egg, perhaps?), channels the dark and semi-suicidal mood found elsewhere in N5 using the melancholia of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, IV, i, ll.114-16: ‘I am a tainted wether of the flock / Meetest for death. The weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me.’ l.5. The full stop in N5 is emphatic and is uncorrected by Thomas. The five lines to this point make complete sense, as the main verb is ‘horned’. l.6. this line is full-stopped, like l.5, in its original form; Thomas’s change of the punctuation to a semicolon at the end of the corrected line shows him exploiting the possibilities of his form (inverted Petrarch sonnet), wishing to prolong the sentence of the sestet into the octet. However, there are other issues to consider. The original line fitted Thomas’s usual rhyme scheme for the sestet of the ‘Altarwise’ sonnets (‘pavilions’ / ‘horns’), which is ABCBAC, whereas its replacement does not (‘time’ doesn’t pararhyme with anything in

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the preceding five lines). However, the original line is hypermetrical (eleven or twelve syllables), and he may have wished to correct this to a standard iambic pentameter. Thomas may also have wishes to eliminate ‘black’ because it appears in l.11 (we take the ‘black pavilions’ to be the clouds in which God is ensconced and from which he thunders, according to one translation of the phrase ‘in the cool of the day’, after Eve and Adam eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil [Genesis, 3:8]). The heavily crossed-out word in the replacement line is probably ‘Eden’. l.11. The margin notes show that Thomas replaced ‘fold’ with ‘year’ and moved it to replace ‘race’ in l.12. Together with the other alterations in these final four lines, he thereby lost – apparently not minding as much as one might suppose – the original’s end-rhymes ‘race’ / ‘twice’, and ‘weather’ / ‘ladder’ (which became the rather more remote ‘winter’ / ‘ladder’). l.13. Thomas transposes ‘weather[ing]’ and ‘ladder[ing]’; weather is a process word par excellence, while ladder in ‘Altarwise’ is almost a synonym for it, denoting as it does the ‘ladders’ of lines of longitude and latitude, and hence the different seasons occurring simultaneously, and the same seasons occurring separately, at the antipodes of the globe, as in l.14: ‘and twice spring chimed’. l.14. There is no obvious reason for the gaps either side of ‘and’; however, the change from ‘spring chimed twice’ to ‘twice spring chimed’ enables the verb to have the final word. ‘What is the metre of the dictionary?’: ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ IV Page 80. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. ‘What is the metre of the dictionary?’ is written out on the verso page opposite the recto page which bears ‘Altarwise’ V. As with the placing of stanzas four and five of ‘Foster the Light’ on a verso page, Thomas was trying to conserve space. It is not necessarily the case that Thomas had no paper at all other than the notebook, since he was writing letters while he was in Donegal (CL, 217). Rather, he probably had no new notebook he could start if he filled N5, so he tried to get all the poems he had to hand, and which he wanted to write up, into the one he had. This sonnet has some links with other poems in N5 and beyond; the paradoxical, riddling questions in lines one to eight resemble those in N5 ‘Two’, ‘My world is pyramid’, and ‘Why east wind chills’ (CP14, 29). The MS is, with the exception of line six, almost identical to the published version. l.2. The second question in the line begins with a capital ‘T’ in N5, lowercase ‘t’ in published form from 25P onwards.

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l.3 has a lowercase ‘t’ for its second question; the published versions make lines two and three conform. l.3. ‘Europa’s’ is crossed out and ‘Pharoah’s’ [sic] interlineated above. The change reduces the alliteration / assonance of ‘Europa’s echo’; it also reduces the line length to eleven syllables from twelve. No other line in this sonnet is twelve syllables long, and so the revised line fits in with the ten- and elevensyllable pattern of the rest of the sonnet (most are eleven-syllable hypermetrical lines). ‘Pharoah’s’ is Thomas’s misspelling, cf. ‘poeple’ in N5 ‘One’, ‘All all and all’ for his difficulties with vowel order, and ‘mackrel’ in N5 ‘Twelve’, ‘They climb the country pinnacle’ (‘I, in my intricate image’) for phonetic spelling. It was corrected to ‘Pharaoh’s’ on publication in 25P. The change removes an element of Greek mythology that could have linked with the ‘medusa’ of other parts of ‘Altarwise’ – V, l.12, and VI, l.5, as well as the ‘siren’ of V, l.14, VI, l.7 and the ‘odyssey’ of IX, l.13 – but the replacement now looks forward to the Egyptian imagery that suffuses IX, with its lowercase ‘pharaoh’ at l.11. l.6. The entire line is deleted, with the revision occupying the line below, rather than, as is usually the case, being interlineated with the one above. This suggests that the correction was made at the time, not after the sonnet was complete. The supposition is corroborated by the darkness of the ink; it is clear that Thomas refilled his pen after ‘sixth’ in l.5 (it also shows that he replaced ‘Europa’ at this point too). The new line discards the medial caesura, two-clause structure of the erased line. This, together with the shifting of the brackets to encompass the whole line provides symmetry with l.4. ‘Straight dead’s No’, gives ‘straight dead is No’ or ‘the No belonging to the straight dead’ as possibilities; there is also a pun on ‘strait’ and narrow – the dead lie in strait graves. Was this line revised because ‘the straight dead’ was too straight, too obvious a comparison with the hunchbacks? ‘The poker marrow’ of the new line offers a more phallic suggestion of straightness, along with the usual polysemy of ‘marrow’. ‘Poker’ also anticipates the card game in V. l.9. The ‘e’ grave of ‘crookèd’ indicates a stress on the syllable, but the accent was dropped in 25P even though correct scansion still requires the stress. Thomas did the same thing with the two ‘crookeds’ in ‘The force that through the green fuse’, both of which have accents in the N4 version which are dropped, but require articulation, in the 18P version of the poem. ll.10-11. ‘Needles’ (noun) and ‘splinter’ (verb) have swapped positions by the time of publication in 25P to ‘splinters’ (noun) and ‘needle’ (verb). As with ‘ladder’ and ‘weather’ in III, Thomas exploits the words’ dual verb– noun potential. The change to ‘splinters’ in 25P allows a fuller pararhyme with ‘features’, ‘pictures’ and even line seven’s ‘acres’, than with ‘needles’. Arguably, ‘splinter’ was more suitable because of its associations of arbitrary

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unwantedness; the implied deliberation of ‘needle’ was eliminated, while ‘needle’ moved closer to its biblical companion, the ‘camel’s eyes’ of line eleven, which thus penetrated the shroud by deliberate needling, rather than N5’s passive splintering. l.12. Further evidence that the intended line is ‘Love’s a reflection’ (cf. commentary in CP88, 167-68, 213; DDT, 135). ‘Then from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel’: ‘Altarwise by owl-light’ V Pages 81, 80. N5 is the only MS extant for this poem. One of the most enigmatic and daring of the Altarwise sonnets, V was evidently in a fairly fluid state at the time it was entered into N5, as Thomas’s deletion of the opening two lines line and crossing out of the next eight shows. After ending the ten-line version (Vi) with a semicolon, Thomas started again, making line order changes and minor corrections to punctuation and lexis in the sestet and adding the remaining four lines of the octet. Given that the other lines of this sestet are shuffled (like the pack of cards) rather than radically altered, the main alteration to Vi in the rewritten version (Vii) (continued beneath sonnet IV on the verso page) is the inclusion of ‘Jesu’ in the new second line, and the elimination of l.4 and its effective replacement by l.6 (‘Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night’). The ace of spades is traditionally known as the ‘death card’, although the imagery of the opening five lines – drawn from Western scenes of saloon poker games, shoot-outs and hellfire preachers – suggests Thomas was perhaps thinking specifically of the so-called ‘dead man’s hand’ in poker – the ace and eight of both spades and clubs – held by ‘Wild’ Bill Hickok when he was shot. Vi l.1. All but the final word in this line was heavily deleted; digital image manipulation software reveals it as ‘You’ll need a xxxx patience till ghost Gabriel’. The remaining undecipherable word we guess to be ‘Christ’s’. ‘Gabriel’ was the only word left undeleted, confirming Thomas’s need for the centrality of Gabriel to this line and the sonnet generally. l.2. Also heavily deleted with both scribble and line-through, but its similarity to the revised interlinear line allows for a more certain transcription. As the line stood, ‘dead’ broke the standard rhyme scheme of ABCBAC for the sestet in ‘Altarwise’, since ‘pits’ ended l.4. The revision to ‘spots’ makes for a pararhyme

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with ‘pits’, though Vii alters this, in any case, to the different pararhyme of ‘spades’. The ‘ten-decked’ dead are, we would hazard, both the layers of dead and the ten number cards in a suit of cards, especially spades. The general sense of this line and those to either side – the angel Gabriel as card sharp – remains. l.3. The appositive clauses of the opening lines are loosely connected, in order to make it difficult to trace consistent S–V–O relationships. The ‘ten-decked dead’ of l.2 seem to become ‘knave-decked sheathes’; ‘sheathes’ with second ‘e’ is a verb, but very similar to ‘sheaths’, a noun, which is what we need to make sense of the clause. Although this crams in several senses (the holstering of guns, ‘sheath’ as condom, the wrapper/sheath on a pack of cards, as well as sonically conjuring up ‘sheaves’), it may be that the awkwardness and obscurity it created was too great even by the standards of ‘Altarwise’. l.4. sniper’s aces – cf. N5 ‘Thirteen’, ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’, which has ‘sniper’s valley’ (also removed before publication). Joyless pits – similarly invokes the First World War (cf. Wilfred Owen’s ‘dark pits of war’ (‘Miners’) for the trenches of the western front), but also the grave and Abaddon of I and Inferno allusions of III and IV. l.5. salvation’s bottle – cf. Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, ‘My bottle of salvation’. Cf. ‘Salvation’s bottle’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, part II, l.9. This line keeps its position in Vii. l.6. Becomes l.4 in Vii. l.7. hill – becomes ‘plain’ in Vii. The original line is replicated in Vii, and the revision is a late one – perhaps to avoid a repetition of ‘hill’ (in the ‘pole-hills’ of l.12). Much of the story of Ishmael, Hagar and Abraham in Genesis takes place on desert plains. This line keeps its position in Vii. l.8. bread-legged mushrooms – with a possible wordplay on ‘dead-legged’, this takes up the foetus imagery of IV’s ‘mushroom features’ and ‘bread-sided field’; the Vii revision emphases postnatal suckling at the breast. l.9. The end comma in Vi and Vii disappears in 25P, perhaps to link the actions across ll.9-10 more strongly. ll.9-10. ‘snatched’ and ‘had’ are transposed in Vii; however, this does not much alter our understanding of the actions of the ‘climbing sea’ or ‘Jonah’s Moby’. Vii l.9. End comma removed for 25P. l.12. salt medusa – ‘salt’ probably confirms Thomas had the medusa jellyfish in mind as a possible sense; it is the less revealing ‘black medusa’ in 25P.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVAL MATERIAL Dylan Thomas Fifth Notebook (N5), archive reference 2014/27, Richard Burton Archives, Singleton Campus Library, Swansea University.

PUBLISHED MATERIAL Books by Dylan Thomas 18 Poems, London: Parton Books, 1934. Twenty-five Poems, London: Dent, 1936. Collected Poems 1934-1952, London: Dent, 1952. Collected Poems 1934-1953, eds. Ralph Maud and Walford Davies, London: Dent, 1988. Collected Poems, centenary edn, ed. and annotated John Goodby, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson / Orion, 2016. The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris, London: Dent, 2000. Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies, with an introduction by Leslie Norris, Dent: London, 2014.

Book length critical studies Ackerman, John, A Dylan Thomas Companion: Life, Poetry and Prose, London: Macmillan, 1991. Barfoot, Rhian, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-sexual Servitude, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. Davies, Aneurin Talfan, Dylan: Druid of the Broken Body, London: Dent, 1964; repr. Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1977. Davies, Walford, Dylan Thomas, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986. Davies, Walford, Dylan Thomas, Writers of Wales Series, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014.

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Goodby, John, Discovering Dylan Thomas: A Companion to the Collected Poems and Notebook Poems, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017. Goodby, John, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. Hardy, Barbara, Dylan Thomas: An Original Language, Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Kershner, R. B. Jr, Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics, Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1976. Kleinman, Hyman H., The Religious Sonnets of Dylan Thomas: A Study in Imagery and Meaning, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963. Korg, Jacob, Dylan Thomas, New York, NY: Twayne, 1965; repr. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1972. Maud, Ralph, Entrances to Dylan Thomas’ Poetry, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. Moynihan, William T., The Craft and Art of Dylan Thomas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Olson, Elder, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954. Pratt, Annis, Dylan Thomas’ Early Prose: A Study in Creative Mythology, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Treece, Henry, Dylan Thomas: ‘Dog Among the Fairies’, London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949. Wigginton, Chris, Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007.

Essay collections Allen, Edward, ed., Reading Dylan Thomas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Bold, Alan, ed., Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art, London and New York: Vision Press, 1990. Brinnin, J. M., ed., A Casebook on Dylan Thomas, New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1961. Cox, C. B., ed., Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, London: Prentice-Hall, 1962; repr. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Davies, Walford, ed., Dylan Thomas: New Critical Essays, London: Dent, 1972. Ellis, Hannah, ed., Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014. Goodby, John and Chris Wigginton, eds, Dylan Thomas: New Casebook, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Smith, Kieron and Rhian Barfoot, eds, New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas: ‘A Writer of Words and Nothing Else?’, Cardiff: Wales University Press, 2020.

Special journal issues Adam International Review, Dylan Thomas memorial number, 238 (1953). Les Années 30: Dylan Thomas, Université de Nantes, 12 (Juin 1990). Poetry Wales: Dylan Thomas Special Issue, 9/2 (Autumn 1973).

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Pursglove, Glyn, John Goodby and Chris Wigginton, eds, The Swansea Review: Under the Spelling Wall, 20 (2000).

Book chapters, journal essays and reviews Aivaz, David, ‘The Poetry of Dylan Thomas’, The Hudson Review, viii/3 (Autumn 1950); repr. Tedlock, 1963, 382–404. Balakiev, James J., ‘The Ambiguous Reversal of Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep”’, Papers on Language and Literature, 32/1 (1996): 21–44. Bayley, John, ‘Dylan Thomas’, in The Romantic Survival, London: Constable, 1957. Beardsley, Monroe and Hynes, Sam, ‘Misunderstanding Poetry: Notes on Some Readings of Dylan Thomas’, College English, XXI (March 1960): 315–22. Berryman, John, ‘Review of The Loud Hill of Wales’, Kenyon Review, 2/4 (Autumn 1940): 481–5. Bigliazzi, Silvia, ‘Fable versus Fact: Hamlet’s Ghost in Dylan Thomas’s Early Poetry’, Textus, V (1992): 51–64. Caines, Michael, ‘Buying Dylan Thomas a Pint’, Times Literary Supplement 5829/5830 (19 and 26 December 2014): 7–8. Carson, Ricks, ‘Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”’, The Explicator, 54/4 (Summer 1996): 240–2. Conran, Tony, ‘“After the Funeral”: The Praise-Poetry of Dylan Thomas’, in The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales, 180–7, Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1982. Conran, Tony, ‘“I Saw Time Murder Me”: Dylan Thomas and the Tragic Soliloquy’, in Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry, 120–33, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997. Crehan, Stewart, ‘The Lips of Time’, in Alan Bold (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Craft or Sullen Art, New York and London: Vision Press, 1990; repr. in Goodby and Wigginton, 2001. Davies, James A., ‘“A Mental Militarist”: Dylan Thomas and the Great War’, Welsh Writing in English, 2 (1996): 76–81. Davies, Walford and Maud, Ralph, ‘Concerns about the Revised New Directions Dylan Thomas’, P.N. Review, 31/2 (November–December 2004): 67–70. Empson, William, ‘Review of the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas’, New Statesman and Nation, 15 May 1954: 643–6. Garlick, Raymond, ‘Shapes of Thought’, Poetry Wales: A Dylan Thomas Number, 9/2 (Autumn 1973): 40–8. Goodby, John, ‘“Bulbous Taliesin”: Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice’, in Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (eds), ‘Incorrigibly Plural’: Louis MacNeice and His Legacy, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012. Goodby, John, ‘Djuna Barnes’ as a source for Dylan Thomas’, Notes & Queries, 58/1 (March 2011): 127–30. Goodby, John, ‘Dylan Thomas’s Sources in Whitman and the Use of “Sidle” as Noun’, Notes & Queries, 52/1 (March 2005): 105–7. Goodby, John, ‘“The Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive”: Dylan Thomas as Surrealist’, in Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (eds), Dada and Beyond: (Vol. 2) Dada and Its Legacies, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2012. Graves, Robert, ‘These Be Your Gods, O Israel!’, sixth Clark Lecture on Professional Standards in English Poetry, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, 1954; pub. Essays in Criticism, 5 (1955): 129–50; repr. in Brinnin, 1961.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hawkins, Desmond, ‘Poetry’, review of 18 Poems, Time and Tide, XVI (9 February 1935): 204, 206. Heaney, Seamus, ‘Dylan the Durable? On Dylan Thomas’, The Redress of Poetry, 124–45, London: Faber, 1995. Heys, Alistair, ‘Dialectic and Armistice: Dylan Thomas’s Reception of Keats’, KeatsShelley Review, 18 (2004): 217–38. Hopwood, Mererid, Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, Llandysul: Gomer Press, 2004. Horan, Robert, ‘In Defense of Dylan Thomas’, The Kenyon Review, vii/3 (Spring 1945): 304–10. Huddlestone, Linden, ‘An Approach to Dylan Thomas’, Penguin New Writing, XXXV (1948): 123–60. Keery, James, ‘The Burning Baby and the Bathwater’, P.N. Review, 151 (May–June 2003): 49–54; P.N. Review, 152 (July–August 2003): 57–62; P.N. Review, 154 (November–December 2003): 26–32; P.N. Review, 156 (March–April 2004): 40–2; P.N. Review, 159 (September–October 2004): 45–9; P.N. Review, 164 (July–August 2005): 57–61; P.N. Review, 170 (July–August 2006): 59–65; P.N. Review, 171 (September–October 2006): 56–62. Loesch, Katharine T., ‘Welsh Poetic Stanza Form and Dylan Thomas’s “I Dreamed My Genesis”’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1982): 29–52. Mathias, Roland, ‘Lord Cutglass, Twenty Years After’, in Danny Abse (ed.), Poetry Dimension 2, 61–89, London: Sphere Books, 1974. McKay, Don, ‘Crafty Dylan and the Altarwise Sonnets: “I Build a Flying Tower and I Pull It Down”’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (1985/6): 357–94. McKay, Don, ‘What Shall We Do With A Drunken Poet?: Dylan Thomas’ Poetic Language’, Queen’s Quarterly, 93/4 (1986): 794–807. McNees, Eleanor J., Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill, 110–46, Lewisburg, TN: Bucknell University Press, 1992. Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Dylan Thomas’, in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers, 190–216, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Mills, Ralph J., ‘Dylan Thomas: The Endless Monologue’, Accent, XX (Spring 1960): 114–36. Morgan, George, ‘Dylan Thomas’s “In the Direction of the Beginning”: Towards or Beyond Meaning?’, Cycnos, 20/2 (2003): 1–17. See Selected online resources, below. Morgan, George, ‘Dylan Thomas and the Ghost of Shakespeare’, Cycnos, 5 (1989): 113–21. Moylan, Chris, ‘Thomas’s “O Make Me a Mask”’, The Explicator, 54/1 (1995): 39–43. Mundye, Charles, ‘Lynette Roberts and Dylan Thomas: Background to a Friendship’, PN Review, 41/2 (November/December 2014): 18–23. Neill, Michael, ‘Dylan Thomas’s “Tailor Age”’, Notes & Queries, 17/2 (February 1970): 59–63. Nowottny, Winifred, The Language Poets Use, London: Athlone Press, 1962; repr. 1975. Perry, Seamus, ‘Everything Is Good News’, review of centenary edition of the Collected Poems, Literary Supplement, 36/22 (20 November 2014): 5–8. Riley, Peter, ‘Thomas and Apocalypse’, Poetry Wales, 44/3 (Winter 2008–9): 12–16.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

191

Roberts, Harri Garrod, ‘“Beating on the Jailing Slab of the Womb”: The Alleged Immaturity of Dylan Thomas’, in Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. Scarfe, Francis, ‘Dylan Thomas: A Pioneer’, Auden and After: The Liberation of Poetry 1930–41, London: Routledge, 1942; repr. 1945. Silkin, Jon, ‘Dylan Thomas’, in The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in TwentiethCentury Poetry, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Simpson, Louis, ‘The Color of Saying’, in Louis Simpson, A Revolution in Taste, New York: Macmillan, 1978. Stearns, Marshall, ‘Unsex the Skeleton: Notes on the Poetry of Dylan Thomas’, The Sewanee Review, LII/3 (1944): 424–40. Sweeney, John L., introduction to Dylan Thomas: Selected Writings, ix–xxiii, New York: New Directions Press, 1946. Thomas, M. Wynn, ‘“Marlais”: Dylan Thomas and the “tin bethels”’, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales, 226–55, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Thomas, M. Wynn, ‘Portraits of the Artist as a Young Welshman’, Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales, 75–110, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999. Thurley, Geoffrey, ‘Dylan Thomas: Merlin as Sponger’, The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the Twentieth Century, London: Edward Arnold, 1974. Weick, George P., ‘Dylan Thomas’s “When, Like a Running Grave”’, The Explicator, 62/3 (Spring 2004): 172–6. Young, Alan, ‘Image as Structure: Dylan Thomas and Poetic Meaning’, Critical Quarterly, 17 (1975): 333–45.

Guides and bibliographies Emery, Clark, The World of Dylan Thomas, Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1962. Maud, Ralph (with Albert Glover), Dylan Thomas in Print: A Bibliographical History, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Maud, Ralph, Where Have the Old Words Got Me?, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. Rolph, J. Alexander, Dylan Thomas: A Bibliography, London: Dent, 1956. Tindall, William York, A Reader’s Guide to Dylan Thomas, New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1962; repr. 1996, Syracuse University Press.

Biography Brinnin, John Malcolm, Dylan Thomas in America, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1955. Davies, James A., Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, Gower and Laugharne, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Ferris, Paul, Dylan Thomas, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Fitzgibbon, Constantine, The Life of Dylan Thomas, London: Dent, 1965; repr. Plantin Paperbacks, 1987. Hardwick, Elizabeth, ‘America and Dylan Thomas’, in John Malcolm Brinnin (ed.), Dylan Thomas in America, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1961.

192

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hawkins, Desmond, When I Was: A Memoir of the Years between the Wars, London: Macmillan, 1989. Heppenstall, Rayner, Four Absentees, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960. Janes, Hilly, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas, London: Robson Press, 2014. Jones, Daniel, My Friend Dylan Thomas, London: Dent, 1977. Lycett, Andrew, Dylan Thomas: A New Life, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003. Tedlock, E. W., ed., Dylan Thomas: The Legend and the Poet, London: Heinemann/ Mercury Books, 1963. Thomas, Caitlin, Leftover Life to Kill, London: Putnam, 1957. Thomas, Caitlin, with George Tremlett, Caitlin: Life with Dylan Thomas, London: Secker & Warburg, 1986. Thomas, David N., ed., Dylan Remembered: Interviews by Colin Edwards, Vol. 1 1914–1934, Bridgend: Seren Books, 2003. Thomas, David N., ed., Dylan Remembered: Interviews by Colin Edwards, Vol. 2 1935–1953, Bridgend: Seren Books, 2004. Watkins, Gwen, Dylan Thomas: Portrait of a Friend, Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2005. Watkins, Vernon, ed., Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins, London: Dent/London: Faber, 1957.

PhD theses Golightly, Victor, ‘“Two on a Tower”: The Influence of W. B. Yeats on Vernon Watkins and Dylan Thomas’, PhD thesis, University of Wales Swansea, 2003. Hornick, Lita, ‘“The Intricate Image”: A Study of Dylan Thomas’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1958. Parkinson, Siobhán, ‘Obscurity in the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas’, University College Dublin, 1981.

Selected online resources The Boathouse, Laugharne: http:​//www​.dyla​nthom​asboa​thous​e.com​/educ​ation​/essa​ ys-ac​ademi​c-pap​ers/.​ Dylan Thomas blog run by Andrew Dally: www.dylanthomasnews.com and twitter feed @dylanthomasnews. Ellis, Hannah: Dylan Thomas site: http://www.discoverdylanthomas.com. George Morgan, essay on ‘In the Direction of the Beginning’: http:​//rev​el.un​ice.f​r/cyc​ nos/i​ndex.​html?​id=84​. Goodby, John, ‘Dylan Thomas’, Oxford Bibliographies Online: http:​//www​.oxfo​rdbib​ liogr​aphie​s.com​/view​/docu​ment/​obo-9​78019​98467​19/ob​o-978​01998​46719​-0057​ .xml?​rskey​=o0p4​9f&am​p;res​ult=4​1&​;q=.

INDEX

Abbott, Charles D.  2 Amphitrite  165 Archer, David  11 Ardara  13 Auden, W. H.  11–12, 34, 156, 166, 177 Barker, George  11 Barnum, P. T.  169 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  4, 24, 151 Brittany  165 Bishopston  15, 21 Blake, William  148 Blashford  1, 16, 18–19, 21, 24 Brendon, William  16 bricoleur  7 Bromwich, Rachel  47 Buffalo, State University of New York at (SUNY)  xii, 2, 28, 149, 162, 179 Cameron, Elfriede  15 Cameron, Norman  11–12, 165 Cannes Television Festival  24 Cape, Jonathan (publisher)  8–9, 35, 151–2 Celtic (stereotype)  11, 35, 165 Chelsea  10, 13, 16 Christ  13, 32, 57, 125, 149–50, 163, 174, 177, 178–9, 184 Christianity  31, 154–5, 170

Church, Richard  15, 37 Colherne Road  10 collage  34 Connolly, Cyril  11, 13 Contemporary Poetry and Prose  26, 179 Cornwall  15 Criterion  26 Cupid  181 cyborg  162 cynghanedd  35 Dada  35, 174 Daily Express, The  22 Daily Mirror, The  24 ‘Danger Don’t’s’  1, 27 Darwin, Charles  36, 154, 170 Davenport, Clement  21 Davies, Walford  20, 35, 177 Dent  15, 26, 37 Derbyshire  165 Devas, Nicolette  22 Disley (Cheshire)  10, 12–13, 26, 107, 166 Donegal  10, 13–14, 26, 37, 113, 167, 182 dyfalu  35 Eagleton, Terry  36 Éire  13 Eliot, T. S.  8, 11–12 Empson, William  6, 11

194

England  18, 26, 101, 178 englyn  35, 152 Europa  137, 183 Europa Press  16, 26 ‘Ferndown’  24 Ferris, Paul  9–10, 15, 31 Fisher, Charles  7, 9–10, 18 Fitzgibbon, Constantine  21–2 Fryern Court  24 Fulham Road  10 Gascoyne, David  11 Genesis, Book of  153, 161, 182, 185 Glen Lough  13, 14, 26–7, 31, 55, 113, 115, 125, 129, 133, 135, 137, 149, 167, 170, 174 Goodby, John  2, 4, 30–1, 34, 142, 160, 167, 174 Gothic-grotesque  34, 36 Grigson, Geoffrey  4, 11, 13–14, 31 Gwilym, Dafydd ap  35 Hampshire  1, 24 Hampstead  16 Hardy, Barbara  35 Harrow  11 Hawkins, Desmond  11, 179 Heaton, Gabriel  xi, 4 Heppenstall, Rayner  11 Herring, Robert  11, 14 Higham, David  15, 16 Hughes, Trevor  11, 179–80 Hybridity  34, 36, 144 Janes, Fred  10, 11 Janes, Hilly  10, 11 Johnson, Pamela Hansford  3, 8, 9, 12, 16, 31, 148, 154, 156 Jones, Daniel  3, 11, 14, 30, 151 Jones, Glyn  12 Joyce, James  36–7, 150, 164, 172–3 Keats, John  21, 145 Kent, Rockwell  13 King, Louie  1, 16, 22–5 Laugharne  15, 21 Lawrence, D. H.  180

INDEX

Lehmann, John  11, 14 Levy, Mervyn  10, 11 Life and Letters To-day  14, 26 Loesch, Katharine  151 London  2, 6, 9–16, 165, 176 Lycett, Andrew  165 Macnamara, Caitlin  15–16, 18, 22, 24 Macnamara, Francis  24 Macnamara, Yvonne  1, 18–19, 22, 24 Margaret Lockwood Memorial Library  2, 28, 148 Marxism  144 Maud, Ralph  2–4, 12, 30–1, 142–3, 146, 149, 160, 165 Middleton Murry, John  11 Miles, Hamish  8–9, 35, 151 modernism  11, 34, 37 Moore, George  18 Muir, Edwin  11 Muir, Willa  11 New Country Poets  166 New English Weekly  6 New Verse  8, 14, 26, 31, 146, 162 Obelisk Books  28 Old Brompton Road  10 Old Scratch  32, 125, 176–7 parataxis  25 Parton Press  8, 26 Perloff, Marjorie  33 Petrarchan sonnet  177 Phillips, Vera  11 Poetry (Chicago)  19 Poseidon  165 postmodernism  36 process poetic  30, 33, 36, 144, 171 Proops, Marjorie  24 Raleigh, Sir Walter  185 Reavey, George  16 Redcliff Street  10 Rees, Bob  20 Richard Burton Centre  17, 23, 25 Roberts, Michael  11 Rota, Bernard  2, 7, 21–2 Roughton, Roger  11

INDEX

sangiad  35–6 Satan  32 Scottish Bookman, The  149 Seithyn  165 Shakespeare, William  161 Anthony and Cleopatra  161 Hamlet  30, 105, 107, 152, 154–5, 158, 168, 169 King Lear  32 Merchant of Venice, The  161, 181 Titus Andronicus  172 Sitwell, Edith  11, 15 Skegg, Toby  4 Smart, Percy  5–6 Sotheby’s  1, 4, 22 South Wales Evening Post  12 Spender, Stephen  11 Stein, Gertrude  18, 174 Summers, Nora  24 SUNY, see Buffalo surrealism  4, 7 Surtees, R.S.  159 Swansea  4, 10–12, 15, 21–2, 26, 150, 163, 165 Swansea Grammar School Magazine  5–6 Swansea University  4 Swansea University Archives  160 Taylor, A. J. P. (Alan)  165 Taylor, Margaret  12, 165, 167 Tesco  1, 22, 24, 37 Thomas, Caitlin, see Macnamara, Caitlin Thomas, Dylan comic verse  5–6 composition techniques  6–7, 32, 169 juvenilia  5–6, 30 life in London  9–14 N1  xii, 3, 4–6, 19–21, 27, 29–30 N2  xii, 3, 5–6, 14, 19–21, 30, 150 N3  xii, 6, 9, 14, 20–1, 30, 36, 151, 172, 176, 181 N4  xii, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 10, 14, 19–21, 27, 29–30, 36, 148, 151, 153–4, 155, 174, 179, 183 N5  xii and passim The Red Notebook  28 Walter Bram notebooks  3, 151 parental home  14–15, 21, 149

195

poems ‘After the funeral’  19–21 ‘All all and all’  8, 26, 39, 42–5 ‘Altarwise by owl-light’  1, 13–15, 20, 26–7, 31–3, 36–7, 39, 124–9, 134–9, 143, 150, 155, 162, 168, 170, 176–85 ‘Ballad of the Long-legged Bait’  7 ‘The Countryman’s Return’  6 ‘And death shall have no dominion’  6, 30, 153 ‘Do you not father me?’  2–3, 8–9, 26, 29, 39, 52–7, 148–50, 154, 157–8, 173–4 ‘Especially when the October wind’  2, 8–9, 26, 36, 39, 58–61, 145, 150–1 ‘The force that through the green fuse’  8, 30, 33, 161, 163, 166, 183 ‘Foster the light’  2, 13, 26, 29, 33, 39, 130–3, 147, 174, 176–7, 179–82 ‘Frivolous is my hate’  4 ‘Grass Blade’s Psalm’  4 ‘A grief ago’  10, 14, 26, 33, 39, 86–91, 145, 160–1 ‘Hold hard, these ancient minutes’  12, 26, 33, 39, 100–3, 159, 165–6 ‘Holy Spring’  19 ‘How shall my animal’  19–20 ‘How soon the servant sun’  2, 10, 14, 26, 31, 33, 36, 39, 82–5, 157, 159–60, 167 ‘I, in my intricate image’  v, 2, 10, 12–13, 26, 29, 30–3, 39, 92–9, 104–13, 141, 147, 152, 162–5, 167–72, 180, 183, 185 ‘I dreamed my genesis’  2, 9, 26, 30, 35, 39, 62–5, 147, 151–3 ‘I fellowed sleep’  8–9, 26, 30, 39, 66–9, 148, 150, 154–5, 164, 168 ‘I make this in a warring absence’  21 ‘Incarnate devil’  2, 13, 26, 29, 32–3, 36, 39, 114–15, 149, 172–4, 177

196

‘It is the sinner’s dust-tongued bell’  37 ‘My world is pyramid’  2–3, 8, 26–7, 31, 39, 46–51, 143, 146–8, 154, 175, 181–2 ‘Not from this anger’  19 ‘Now’  10, 26, 30–1, 33–4, 39, 76–81, 142, 157–60, 167, 172, 175 ‘O make me a mask’  19 ‘Once it was the colour of saying’  19–20 ‘On the Marriage of a Virgin’  19 ‘Poem in October’  151 ‘Poem on his birthday’  151 ‘A process in the weather of the heart’  147, 173–4 ‘Prologue’  165 ‘Then was my neophyte’  15, 37 ‘The seed-at-zero’  2, 13, 26, 31, 33, 39, 116–23, 143, 174–5 ‘The shepherd blew upon his reed’  6 ‘Should lanterns shine’  159 ‘The spire cranes’  19 ‘To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe’  14–15, 37 ‘The tombstone told’  19 ‘Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes’  151 ‘Warp’  4 ‘When, like a running grave’  9, 26, 31–2, 36, 39, 70–5, 145–6, 155–7, 164 ‘When all my five and country senses see’  19 poetry collections

INDEX

18 Poems (18P)  xii, 1, 3, 8–9, 10, 12, 14, 26, 30, 32–3, 141, 143, 145–6, 150, 152 The Map of Love  xii, 19, 21 Twenty-five Poems (25P)  xii, 1, 9, 14–15, 19, 26, 29, 31, 36–7, 141–2, 148, 162–3, 168–9, 178–9, 180, 182–3, 185 short stories ‘The Fight’  1, 4, 21, 27 ‘The Map of Love’  171 ‘The Orchards’  157, 180 ‘A Prospect of the Sea’  148, 165 ‘The Visitor’  159 short story collections The Burning Baby  16, 26 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog  21 tmesis  35 Tom Thumb  169 torymadrodd  36 transition  26 Treece, Henry  4–5 Trick, Bert  13, 144, 170 triton  165 Uplands (Swansea)  15 Watkins, Vernon  11, 15, 18, 20, 33, 142, 164 Waugh, Evelyn  13 Western Mail, The  5 Wickham, Anna  16 Williams, J. D.  12 Ys, Land of  165 Zenith (exercise book)  viii, 27–8