As we pass the 70th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death - or rather his work - has remained dear to me, one way of another, for nearly 40 years, from his poems, through the biographies I consumed at Edinburgh and subsequently, a profile on Great Lives and an excellent BBC commentary on Under Milk Wood.
During a guided "green meditation" in the summer of 2023, while focusing my attention on the beauty of a nearby plant, I was reminded of Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Another beautiful example of the villanelle form is Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Thomas, a poem I first heard as a teenager, recited not by Thomas himself but by Richard Bebb, on a record of poetry in which, inter alia, he shares the reading with Richard Burton of Under Milk Wood, parts of which I'd known since boyhood, and huge sections of which I can still remember and recite today, with a mixture of admiration and affection.
See also:
- Five Fascinating Facts about Dylan Thomas
- Seven Classic Dylan Thomas Poems Everyone Should Read
- Poem in October was written in October 1944 to celebrate a walk that he took through Laugharne on the occasion of his 30th birthday. This version was recorded by Dylan Thomas himself for a radio programme called ’New Poems’ in September 1945.
- The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
- “Being but Men” was written by Thomas in 1939 - a time when we were all “men,” a time when Thomas was only twenty-five — and posthumously included in the indispensable Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas . Maria Popova notes that it came alive anew at the 2020 Universe in Verse, celebrating fifty years of Earth Day, in a reading by astronomer Natalie Batalha, who spearheaded NASA’s Kepler mission and its search for habitable worlds outside our solar system and who prefaced her reading with a personal reflection as poetic as the poem: