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Cursed and blessed
National Review, Sept 13, 2004 by Algis Valiunas
Still, political opinions are not art, and Thomas turned the raw awareness of the world's cruelty that made him a pacifist into some extraordinary stories and poems. That celebration must be won from all but unendurable pain is his greatest theme, and it makes "Who Do You Wish Was With Us?" one of the most beautiful short stories in the English language. Two friends, a boy and a young man, go off on an outing to the Worm's Head, an island of primordial rock accessible from the seashore at low tide. Their perfect day is disfigured by the psychic presence of the young man's dead father and brother, whom they had been trying to banish from their minds for the moment. As they think of the missing, the tide comes in and strands them on the rock; but the grief that separates them from the festive mainlanders comes to seem not so much a disfigurement as a completion, in the way life is completed by sadness inextricable from joy.
In Thomas's best poetry, the impulse to praise nearly always overcomes the longing to howl. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," one of his wartime poems, scorns conventional decent grief and embraces the glory of the divine arrangements behind this tragedy, however heartless they might seem. The inconsolable is consoled by the indifference of nature--"the unmourning water Of the riding Thames"--which possesses a majestic rightness that ordinary churchly sentiment cannot approach. Another great wartime poem, "Ceremony after a Fire Raid," deepens the theme of the death of innocents:
Myselves The grievers Grieve Among the street burned to tireless death A child of a few hours With its kneading mouth Charred on the black breast of the grave The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.
The opening syntactical conundrum (a device Berryman was to adopt in The Dream Songs) suggests a pain that all suffer and a loss that all mourn. In the agony that renders subject indistinguishable from object is found the ultimate democratic solidarity; this is Thomas's tortured 20th-century gloss on Walt Whitman's signature line, "I am the man; I suffer'd; I was there." Everyone suffers, everyone is there, and from this pain Thomas wrests a heroic affirmation: "Glory glory glory."
Thomas's gravest flaw as a poet is his flair for the unintelligible sublime; the torrential outpour from the open word-spigot washes away any evidence of thought, and leaves the poet drunk and reeling with a love of pure sound. But at his best--in the poems mentioned above as well as in "And death shall have no dominion," "Find meat on bones," "Do not go gentle into that good night," "On a Wedding Anniversary," "In My Craft or Sullen Art," "Fern Hill," and "Over Sir John's Hill"--Dylan Thomas is one of the great 20th-century poets in English. The true poet, he declared toward the end of his life, "sings in the direction of his pain." He surely had pain enough, and sometimes he knew just what to make of it.
