Welsh Journals

BOOK REVIEWS THE MAP OF Love. Dylan Thomas. Dent and Sons, 1939. 7s. 6d. This exciting book contains sixteen poems and seven stories. I do not pro- pose to treat the poems with any fullness here: I may have an opportunity for a study of Dylan Thomas's poetry later on. It is probably a good time for such a study. I shall be surprised if his future verse is not profoundly, if subtly, different from the verse he has given us so far. He has obviously, indeed avowedly, reached a crisis. The poems numbered 1, 2, 6, 9, 13 and 16 in his new book are direct treatments of the problems of his craft. (Mr. Thomas studies his own poetic development with an unusual conscientiousness. So, of course, did Milton). And their general import is clear. While he cherishes his uncompromising poetic defence-mechanisms (6 O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies .) he knows that his method is as capricious and exacting as young love, a thing of constant importunacy and pardon, of warring absence and forgiving presence (2). And while he recognizes that an imaginative mood (mood almost completely uncontaminated by sentiments and the motives that ordinarily impel writers to write) is the normal cause of his work (1), he has begun to feel strongly the impact of less inbred compulsions (16). A phase has ended and he is on the move Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes. (Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour) In the final direction of the elementary town I advance for as long as forever is." The poems numbered 9 and 13, which appeared together in a recent number of WALES, speak of a functional revolution in his craft and of a determination to fulfil its destiny Now my saying shall be my undoing, And every stone I wind off like a reel." To surrender now is to pay the expensive orge twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to bum or return this world which is each man's work." For the rest, these new poems have the same qualities as Mr. Thomas's pre- vious verse and will attract the same small but intimate audience, the few people who can genuinely enjoy an almost (not quite) pure aestheticism of imagery and word. The typical Dylan Thomas poem is a movement of the sensuous imagination built around a slight intellectual theme in associations of colour and sight and sound. Much modern verse, there is scarcely need to say, is a dreary agony of cultivated obscurity and laboured pretentiousness; but those charges seem to me to be as irrelevant to Mr. Thomas's craft as some of the vague eulogies that have been lavished on it. He is no more capable of per- petrating literary swindles than of producing immortal sonnets." If you wish to understand his real poetic gifts examine the poem beginning cc It is the sinners' dust-tongued bell" and observe how the initial reflection (that dia- bolical time, the marriage of flesh and spirit, brings into being the urchin grief) has been surrounded by a luxurious array of images and symbols evolved from