Dylan Thomas

I can't find the Bukowski poem I'm looking for, so I'll start with Dylan Thomas.  In my time at EMU, I have found very few lessons to be learned from the courses I have taken.  One pursuit that seemed worthwhile was introduced to me last semester, by Professor Rob Halpern, in a class I failed by my own design.  It was an inspection into what modernity really is defined as, and how it can be effectively pursued in art.  We examined the paradox of literary modernity (all too briefly, so I cannot claim to know much about it) Baudellaire and de Man wrestled with, and I wrote an essay examining the possibility of Dylan Thomas being the one poet I know of that was effectively modern with his poetry, through his impeccable use of the english language.

I have no idea if I was on the right track, as my essay was so far off the prompt the essay was intended, it was not reviewed.

Though I only followed the instructions of the class - that is, I continued my examinations from my first essay into my second essay.

What looked to be a promising class turned into another class where the students were given the false belief that they were far more clever than they really were, and I guess it was assumed that with such a weighted subject, more than 20 people could understand in a month what it took far smarter writers a lifetime to try to understand.

In either case.

Here is the poem that struck me with its use of language:


A Grief Ago
by Dylan Thomas

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, malted 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,
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,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before 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 and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.