WHERE DYLAN THOMAS FOUND INSPIRATION
As people become more familiar with the works of Dylan Thomas, a moment arrives in their lives when something tells them to come to Laugharne. Some make the journey in their early twenties, armed with his COLLECTED POEMS. Lovers arrive in each other’s arms, and later return with their children.
And then there are the Jimmy Carters who wait thirty or forty years before traveling half way across the world to spend a few moments by Thomas’s grave.
As President, Carter read himself a Dylan Thomas poem every night before switching off the bedside light – and then one day, there he was, outside in the street with his wife and daughter, walking from St. Martin’s Church to The Boat House, drinking two pints of beer in Brown’s Hotel, familiarizing himself with the Thomas enigma.
It’s a compulsion that cuts across all ages and backgrounds.
Katherine Hepburn arrived unannounced, booked herself in for a night, asked if she could make her own breakfast – and stayed three days.
Richard Burton would walk into Brown’s or the rugby club, have a beer or two and leave. Like Carter, Burton constantly re-read Thomas’s poems, finding (as we all do), a different resonance, a meaning we might have missed – and after he died at his home in Switzerland, his copy of COLLECTED POEMS was buried with him.
Pearce Brosnan, who named his son Dylan, turned up one day, and flopped into our daily routines as if he had lived here all his life and the town responded affectionately.
Others react in similar ways, be they film stars like James Coburn or Anthony Hopkins; writers like Louis de Bernieres, Roger McGough or Patti Smith; politicians from David Owen to Denis Healey, Michael Foot….. or Bill Clinton, who was on his way from Oxford when his car broke down.
We’re not worried about Bill. He’ll get here in the end.
By now you must be wondering what it is about Laugharne’s relationship with Dylan Thomas’s work that makes it so compelling, not just to famous people but the tens of thousands who make this pilgrimage.
This is a question I often ask when they walk into the bookshop.
A few, just a few, say they once heard Dylan speak on one of his lecture tours, and have been wanting to come here ever since.
And then there are those who have appeared in UNDER MILK WOOD, somewhere in the world (for it has been translated into more than eighty languages), and realize its timelessness lies in the way Thomas captured the character and speech patterns of Laugharne; they want to find out for themselves just what it was that caught his ear.
Of course, they rarely do.
Magic is like that. It cannot be caught in a net or kept in a bottle ….. but for just a few moments, moments that may last forever if you’re lucky, you can share it with him, as the years slip away and he walks beside you through the trees or along the water’s edge, especially for me in rainy autumn when the October sun is summery on the hill’s shoulder.
It’s more than a question of landscape.
Walking around this sea town, Thomas’s poems come alive.
This is the shed where Dylan Thomas wrote some of his best work
Words resonate somewhere in the back of the mind – over Sir John’s Hill, underneath the Castle brown as owls, past the mussel pooled and heron priested shore, overlooking throats where rivers meet, or across at his sea-shaken house on a breakneck of rocks – and suddenly you realize that whatever it was he found here is still here and will never go away.
But how did Thomas know that this was what he needed? How did he find it?
Instinctively, all his life, Thomas was driven by an inner sense of direction, confident in his skills, rarely seeking a safety net.
On both sides of his family, he was Carmarthenshire-bred. For generations, the Thomases and the Williamses (on his mother’side), lived within a few miles of Carmarthen, latterly (ie. during the 19th and early 20th Centuries) just across the river from Laugharne, with several branches of the family farming between Llangynog, Llangain, Llanybri, Llansteffan and Carmarthen. One grandfather lived in Llansteffan; the other at The Poplars, now a public house overlooking Johnstown green.
Like so many Welsh speaking young men from rural Wales, Dylan’s father Jack, the first of the Thomases to have a University education, moved to “the big city”, first Pontypridd and then Swansea, in pursuit of work.
This brought him security, a steady job as English teacher at Swansea Grammar School and his own house in the newly-built Cwmdonkin Drive, but although Dylan was born & educated in Swansea, there is little trace of its provinciality in his writing.
Prose pieces like A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES, or the short stories, largely written in Laugharne as “a sort of provincial autobiography” and gathered together in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG DOG, capture a sense of his childhood happiness.
But UNDER MILK WOOD and the great poems that define his name – poems like IN MEMORY OF ANN JONES, FERN HILL, the three Birthday Poems, THE TOMBSTONE TOLD WHEN SHE DIED, A SAINT ABOUT TO FALL, DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, OVER SIR JOHN’S HILL, POEM IN THE NINTH MONTH, POEM FOR CAITLIN (I MAKE THIS IN A WARRING ABSENCE), LAMENT, LOVE IN THE ASYLUM, BALLAD OF THE LONG-LEGGED BAIT, IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART, BEFORE I KNOCKED, BEFORE WE MOTHERNAKED FALL, THE SUN BURNS THE MORNING, MY HERO BARES HIS NERVES, HERE LIES THE BEASTS OF MAN, WHEN I WOKE THE TOWN SPOKE, VISION AND PRAYER, A WINTER’S TALE or the acrostic prologue to his collected poems – are all linked, in one way or another, either with Laugharne, the Taf estuary, or the farms that lie just beyond the hills on the other side of the river.
Some developed over many years, perhaps beginning with a half-formed idea in Swansea or during family holidays in Llansteffan and later at Fern Hill or Blaen Cwm, the family owned-cottage at Llangain where Thomas did much of his early writing, but the imagery, the repeated use of certain words linked with the river, the sea and the rhythmic pattern of the seasons, link them all to this area (and if you would like to check this out, study the CONCORDANCE TO THE COLLECTED POEMS OF DYLAN THOMAS by Robert Williams, where Thomas’s repeated use of similar words & imagery becomes clear).
Confident in his landscape and skills, Dylan Thomas faced the big issues that bother us all – the origins & purpose of Life – and looked at them through a personal prism.
In the autobiographical short stories and FERN HILL, he captures the patterns of childhood. In his birthday poems he gathers together the strands of his own life, especially in POEM IN OCTOBER, which is firmly rooted in the footpath through the trees on Sir John’s Hill and in LAMENT and, more particularly DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, written when his father was dying, we find him contemplating death.
This prism through which he sees it all is as elusive as The Holy Grail. Visitors arrive expectantly; searching for it, never quite sure what they will find, for Thomas left few explanations.
As its custodians, we wouldn’t tell you what it is, even if we could put it into words. You will have to find it for yourself, nurtured by the seasons, moulded by our landscape, ingrained in us all.
And if you do, be content. His insight may stay with you for the rest of your life.
George Tremlett
February 2008.
