"Even in religious fervor,' said Whitman in his fervor and animal heat were
in the poetry of Dylan Thomas to a high degree. His poetry was the "pure fire
compressed into holy forms" of which one of Porphyry's Oracles spoke.
His was a language "fanned by the breath of Nature, which leaps overhead,
cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates
to grow." (Whitman, Notebooks.) He strips from words their old, used, dulled
sleepiness and gives them a refreshed and awakened meaning, a new percussion.
His voice resembles no other voice; the spirit is that of the beginning of
created things: there is here no case of a separate imagination, of
invention. From the depths of Being, from the roots of the world, a voice
speaks. ...
Though he felt, I think, and perhaps dreaded the conquering hand of Time,
and knew that he must die young, he defied, always, death and the world's
dust;
A cock-on-a-dunghill
Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity
Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil. ...
In that great poem A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by fire, of a Child in
London, with its dark, magnificent, proud movement, we see Death in its
reality -- as a return to the beginning of thins, as a robing, a sacred
investiture in those who have been our friends since the beginning of Time.
Bird, beast, and flower have their part in the making of mankind. The
water drop is holy, the wheat ear a place of prayer. The 'fathering and
hall-humbling darkness' itself is a begetting force. Even grief, even tears,
are a begetting. "The stations of the breath" are the stations of the Cross.
-- Edith Sitwell
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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